Amouage
LOVE DELIGHT

2024

PERFUMER
Pascal Gaurin

ginger
mandarin
rose water
cinnamon

heliotrope
jasmine
rose

vanilla
cocoa
rum absolute
cypriol

‘The interplay of delicate florals and irrestible treats, radiance and insouciance. Love Delight is an invite to savour every moment of indulgence. Aging: Maturation: 3 weeks | Maceration: 4 weeks’ – Amouage

This is ‘one of those’ Amouages that I don’t see landing well with most of the brand’s older fans. I personally have had no issue with a new direction and diversifying so far, but I have little excitement to offer for this Love Delight. In fact, this is my least favorite Amouage release so far.

It’s as if Amouage saw the massive success of Guidance and doubled down on the ‘mass appealing, women’s-designer-style’ DNA. Not that Guidance smells similar mind you; Love Delight is strongly vanillic and the texture is more powdery and dry. When I smelled it in store, I perceived more fruitiness on a test strip and I was mildly positive, albeit that it clearly was going to be a ‘safer’ release; those have a place. On skin the citrus and fruits are definitely there, but it’s instantly dominated by an overdose of sweetness.

Within minutes, I mostly get powdery sweetness and a nondescript fruity-floral vibe that for lack of a better reference, smells designer. It has that ‘walking into a Sephora’ essence in it prominently. It’s doesn’t open unpleasantly to me though and it wears smoothly at first, but I do find it a tad too cloying. I love sweet fragrances and I love powdery fragrances, but the combination can get too palpable. I can almost taste the vanilla and heliotrope in my mouth here and the fruits and florals don’t smell luxurious in the slightest. In particular, Love Delight starts off reminding me of something that would fit well in the Gucci Flora line or it could be a lost YSL Libre flanker and in this case, I don’t feel like it’s an ‘elevated take’, as is often the explanation people give when niche brands dive into these styles. It feels a world apart from what I was used to by Amouage, even with more mass appealing releases bridging the gap in the years prior to Love Delight.

The best part of Love Delight (and the part that surprised me the most) is the mid and the booziness. After the opening, I started smelling more and more booze and it works well with the sweetness. It’s well-dosed; not overly strong, not taking away from the ‘feminine vibe’ of the fragrance either, yet it is noticeable for a while. For perhaps 2 hours, I found it, not great, but absolutely likeable.

Where Love Delight completely falls apart for me, is in its drydown. The fruity-floral tinge fades, but the sweetness takes a turn for the worse. Someone told me the drydown smelled like Baccarat Rouge 540 and while that’s not fully the vibe to me (the Amouage feels perhaps more bare-boned and more vanillic), the sweetness eventually goes in a similar direction. I didn’t see it coming for the first 2 hours, but a dry, grating vanilla sugar with just a tinge of fruitiness left rears its head after and that’s all that I was left with for the remaining hours. I think this drydown reminds me most of the one from Kalotinis Cotton Candy, which mind you, I remarked on as ‘one of the least complicated and affordable compositions’, even for that €80 fragrance.

Now clearly, Love Delight is not up my alley, and not everything has to be geared towards me. However, this takes mainstream to a new degree for the brand and as a €365 Amouage, it’s hard not to feel cynical about it. As someone who has not shared most of the worries voiced about the direction the brand has taken after the departure of Chong as creative director, Love Delight is a release with a hype that is incomprehensible to me. Totally opposite to my experience with Guidance, which was equally not my jam, but I could see the appeal, Love Delight left me with a legitimate feeling of disappointment.