“I remember years ago seeing an iMax movie at the Air and Space Museum in DC: it started out with a grainy black and white film of a biplane taking off, and just when you thought you were beginning to wonder why you’d shelled out twenty bucks, the screen turned to colour, widened to a huge hollow sphere and you were flying above a forest in turning-leaf colors above a Pitts S2 painted in shiny red and white. Even the sound was gorgeous. Everyone went “aaaah” and I shed 40 years of age in 10 milliseconds. After smelling several dozen pigeon-toed, rickety modern fragrances designed by depressive accountants, encountering Ubar is a similarly joyful experience. This thing is so huge, gleaming, overengineered and chock-full of counterrotating planetary gears that you feel all you can do is let it tower over you while you walk around it and kick the huge tires. Ubar is technically a floral-oriental but the flowers are 3XL in size and the Orient has been scaled accordingly. If the old Dioressence had an illegitimate child with the first Rush, it would smell like this: a huge, purple romantic rose in the manner of the lamented Nombre Noir, a ton of creamy lactones, a whale’s worth of animalic amber. Ubar joins the small club of nuclear-tipped fragrances: Poison, Giorgio, Angel, Amarige. Use it carefully, for once you spray it on there’s no going back. LT” This review originally appeared in Perfumes: The Guide Spring 2009
