Beauty Care: Rania J. Ambre Loup Perfume Review

Rania J. Ambre Loup Eau de Parfum starts with richer, boozier vanilla with warm spices that quickly shifts and subdues to spiced woods, a little smoky leather, and rich vanilla, but the latter ends up almost muddled and soft given it was still within the first half hour of wear. Reviews from when this scent was first release suggest a very different perfume, both in terms of structure but in terms of intensity and depth.

I can’t personally attest to what it originally smelled like compared to what my current bottle smelled like, but given how different this smelled on a good friend who recommended this AND seeing some reviews over the last two years from customers who have had similar issues… this one seems a likely victim of reformulation for the worse. It used to be known for its intensity and depth, rich in labdanum, but it is an incredibly weak scent. What I experienced seemed like a whisper of its former self compared to prior reviews!

Here are the notes:

top notes: cloves, spices
heart notes: Balsam Peru essential oil, labdanum absolute, vanilla absolute
base notes: agarwood/oud, gaiac wood, cedar wood

It opened with warm, rich, boozy vanilla with a dash of warming spices, like clove, that quickly shifted into a soft, leather and vanilla duo with subtle, blended spices. Five minutes after the initial application, there was a soft, smoky element that was chilly, more like vetiver but ended up lukewarm against the labdanum and vanilla and a curl of sweet tobacco.

Ambre Loup darkened after settling on my skin for 15 minutes; it was boozy vanilla, spiced, resinous woods, and smoky leather, though everything was woven so tightly together that it was particularly difficult to separate out different notes, which was exacerbated by the weakness in the perfume itself, regardless of spraying more than normal to try and write a review for it.

Over the next hour and a half, the perfume softened, smoothed out, and became more like spiced vanilla over warm woods. It did not transform much from that point, though the drydown was a barely-there skin scent with spiced vanilla and a hint of woodiness.

Application

I started with a bottle, and I tested this a dozen times over a couple of months; I tried different places to spray, different numbers of spray, but it was always the same – incredibly short-wearing before it became a skin scent with little sillage and projection. For the review itself, I used three sprays applied to the underside and topside of my wrist area on my left arm. I used an unscented moisturizer prior to applying the scent as this is also my swatching arm (aka, incredibly parched at any given moment) as I found scent did not hold well here otherwise.

Longevity

It lasted for five hours until it was a skin-scent and about eight hours before it was quite difficult to detect on my skin. The sillage and projection were moderate with the sillage dropping faster than the projection within the first hour of wear.

Personal Thoughts

I purchased a bottle based on a friend’s recommendation, and I have tried this several times using more and more sprays to try and get to the type of scent that original reviews lauded over. I am going to attempt to find an original bottle to compare, because this version seemed so sad in comparison!