Montale Parfums Paris - Intense Café EDP

Intense Café is an oriental vanilla fragrance that released in 2013.  A number of my friends in the fragrance community have spoken highly of this fragrance and, being a coffee fiend (both the note and the beverage) I wanted to try it.  I ordered a sample from Luckyscent and…

I don’t even know where to begin with this.  It’s rare that I draw a complete blank when writing a review.  I should say here that I tested this fragrance for four days in a row.  And I am lost.  What I mean here is that I was anticipating a glorious coffee fragrance.  What I experienced on each of my trials was not a coffee fragrance in any way.

When I take in the very opening of Intense Café, I get a strong, bitter, somewhat spicy or medicinal floral.  It is not identifiable as a specific flower.  The floral intensity softens after about an hour and in comes a rose.  The rose is mixed with a resinous, musk.  It feels like a thicket filled with rose bushes.  There is also a sweetness here that reads as a sugared vanilla bean.  I get no creaminess that would have been akin to a cream added to coffee.

Intense Café wears on me for roughly 9 hours with intense moving to moderate projection.

Notes:

Top note - floral notes

Middle notes – coffee, rose

Base notes - amber, vanilla, white musk

Perfumer: Pierre Montale

Photo Credit: Neiman Marcus