Falling for Strangelove NY - Fall Into Stars review

Fall Into Stars by Strangelove NY

Within the fragrance community, there are many who shun the notion of signature scents - a single perfume which defines you, your style or your personality - and that is perfectly reasonable.

Why choose just one, when the options seem endless, with different brands, houses, perfume types, interpretations, styles, strengths, DNAs, notes, accords, ingredients, compositions. We know what we like. But how do we know what we don’t like, if we haven’t smelled EVERYTHING?! And so the journey begins. We search and search. There must be an end. There must be THE one. We live in hope. We spend, spend, spend. 

And then I found her. The perfume to end my search. 

My journey started with Terre D’Hermes and I quickly became obsessed with vetiver fragrances; so stylish, reserved, grown up. I traversed through the world of olfactive ingredients encountering similar obsessions with sandalwood, ambergris, orris, tobacco and later, oud wood. 

Having explored some of the more entry level options in the oud genre, and found they all had that familiar Givaudan accord of sythetic oud, I became fixated on watching YouTube videos of how oud is produced and it turns out I had horribly misjudged how absolutely incredible and valuable this particular material is. It’s fair to say there isn’t a huge amount of real oud in most high street oud perfumes and I became focused on exploring juice containing actual agarwood. I wanted  the real deal. 

A path that led me to Strangelove

Strangelove NYC is a brand founded on the principle of creating fragrances using authentic, high quality, sustainable ouds harvested from Aquilaria malaccensis plantations. Every Strangelove perfume includes two types of oud, combined with other precious natural ingredients. The brand refers to their products as ‘natural sprays’, so don’t expect lots of synthetic notes here. 

With Fall Into Stars, Strangelove NYC appears to have created a fragrance composed in the shape of the pentagram stars that decorate the box and cap. Each tip of the five-pointed star seemingly represents a different yet interconnected ingredient that Christophe Laudamiel blends masterfully in celebration of the central character, oud. 

Fall into stars opens with a big, heady cloud of vanilla. It’s a vanilla so balsamic (the best kind) that one wonders if it’s really just a medicinal type of oud in the composition. No, it’s vanilla, and it is blended so beautifully that it’s impossible to perceive where the oud ends and the vanilla begins. 

The second point of the star, the palisander rosewood snuggles with the oud, making the two appear almost as one. These two woods make excellent ligneous bedfellows, with the rosewood adding a sultry, debonair darkness to the agar wood’s more wild nature. 

The jonquil in fallintostars is derived from the French daffodil, or "cream narcissus" (real jonquil (rush daffodil) is rarely used in perfumery today). The brand describes the ingredient as a honeyed jonquil nectar. To me it appears as a glistening, sweet, yellow amber note, perfectly melding with the oud to add a sweeter dimension and making the perfume, as a whole, more approachable. 

Pink pepper, fourth, adds a quiet, uplifting spice to the composition and labdanum, the perfume's fifth provides the oud with a stylish, leathery facet upon drydown.  

I am a visual person and while I love to break fragrances down and explore how they’re put together, I have a preference for communicating how they make me feel or what pictures, stories and people they bring to mind. It is my opinion that the best fragrances are evocative, transportive. They lead you somewhere. Crash you through time and space. Drop you into memories. Fall into stars. 

This is one such perfume. To smell it instantly conjures a dark, deep velvet sky of midnight blue, stretching for miles high above a dune-filled desert, with a canopy of a billion beautiful, twinkling stars glinting and glowing in the night.

Sillage 

This is a huge room filler. On testing, just one spray travelled from upstairs to downstairs. It’s not particularly noticeable in the first person. But Commodity would call this one expressive, fo sho. 

Longevity

Eau de Parfum is written on the box, however the brands website claims their perfumes to be extrait strength. As such, the longevity on skin is good, and on clothing it is excellent. 

Packaging

The box is a hard, glossy card box, with a beautiful design and some rather poetic words to read. But the real beauty is in the presentation of the bottle. Thick glass with square shoulders, always a favourite. Sitting atop is a gold plated, patterned cap with a few very subtle stars included. It is easily my most treasured bottle. 

I never thought I would spend so much on a small bottle of fragrant water. But I have well and truly disappeared down the rabbit hole of oud perfumery, which is extremely expensive. Isn’t it lucky I’ve found the one!!? 

In a nutshell, she is like a beautiful, dark, brooding powerful amber vanilla laced with pure oud oil. 

It’s certainly not a crowd pleaser, but for those of us who crave an authentic, amber oud, this one is close to perfect.

I’ve fallen head over heels for this perfume. Maybe it was destiny, written in the stars.