SOTD: Curly’s Ryziger Gentleman’s Code

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So I blind bought Curly’s new Ryziger fragrance the Gentleman’s Code, and I’ve been wearing it all afternoon. TLDR it’s nice, but it’s way too sweet for my taste and it’s not blowing me away.

First of all, the presentation is both nice and a bit cheesy at the same time. The picture on the box and logo on the bottle are a bit goofy to me, but the bottle is a very nice solid feeling polished glass, the cap is heavy with strong magnetic closure, and the atomizer is pretty darn good.

But what we really care about is the smell. This is strong, sweet stuff. At the open I get a wave of sweetness - a little fruity orange, some warm cardamom and vanillic tonka, but carried on a sweet mushroom cloud of weapons-grade ambroxan. It’s not a complex scent, like, at all… it’s relatively well blended in the sense that it’s hard to pick out individual notes, but umm maybe there just aren’t many. The orange fades in about 30 minutes and I’m left with a candy sweet Tonka vanilla with a hint of lavender and some ambery warmth that I assume is at least one of the two ambroxans used. My overall impression is this is a super easy to wear, super safe but not super complex blue. This stuff lasts for a long while… 4+ hours in and it didn’t change much or quiet down. At hour 6, it’s finally quieting down a little (but it’s still projecting…) and settling into a very nice tonka vanilla amber drydown. While this doesn’t smell like anything else I’ve encountered, it also doesn’t stand out as unique if that makes sense.

This stuff is beastly. I had heard it was strong so I just did a few quick puffs (like, fractional sprays) on my arms, a puff to the back of the neck and a puff to the chest - maybe the equivalent of 4 full sprays. I feel like I’m sitting in a massive scent bubble and projecting like crazy - I went to the optician to pick up some new specs and I was worried I was going to choke them out. I’ll post an update below with more info on longevity but this is trending to “eternal”.

So do I like it? Yeeeah, for the most part. This is a *lot* sweeter than I would like, and given the lack of complexity, I feel it’s more youthful than I was expecting. This would be a great clubbing scent. With light sprays this could also be a good general versatile scent for the office or around town, but man it’s really sweet. I don’t actually find it to be especially masculine, either. In some ways it’s reminding me of like an extra sweet Prada Paradigm on ambroxan steroids - sweet, safe, nice. I would have preferred more edge: maybe some tangy moss or vetiver, more of a citrus pop, more aromatics, etc.

Actually, I just had a scent memory of a particular kind of lollipop I had as a kid (the “Astro pop”, a glyceriney generically flavored sweet rainbow colored rocket shaped lollipop) that this is reminding me of. Yeah the whole “this is what the Wolf of Wall Street/ Dorian Gray/ George Clooney would wear” is a bunch of bs - I don’t think they want to smell like a lollipop. This might be catnip for the ladies, but it’s not what I was expecting.

While I’m happy to support Curly, I think… I’ll be looking to offload some or all of this. Until then, it’s nice enough to keep in my rotation and use on dates.

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