Azzaro Chrome Intense by Azzaro

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An ultra-industrial pigsty, I believe it’s one of the most synthetic colognes I’ve ever smelled.

I loved it, had to buy a bottle, and at the rate it lasts, I’ll finish it before summer ends because the longevity is quite poor. I like the original Chrome a lot; this is a mad version that recalls the first but with its own personality. I suppose the normal move when updating the original formula would have been, given the current market, to add ambroxan and make a sugary fruit Invictus. Fortunately for me, they released a marine air freshener in the form of a cologne. I admit this is indefensible unless you like the smell of floor cleaners or toilet air fresheners. I love that sweet, artificial, fake Calone scent, and that is exactly what is here: a mop soaked in detergent presented in a perfume bottle. I understand perfectly why some people feel like vomiting, and truly, this thing is a blue abomination. A delicious blue abomination. Upon spraying, you get a gale-force wind of bottle Calone, just like those one-euro air fresheners sold in Chinese shops, with no nuances whatsoever, the cheapest Calone you’ve ever smelled. I float in a cloud. Beneath those poor-quality cleaning molecules rise threads of something indefinable and horrendous that I love, a sweetness between herbal and ozonic, mineral, sulphurous, sweet, gaseous, intolerably musky and insidious, with an aggression to your nose similar to pouring alcohol on a wound; I suppose it’s the mixture of the worst mate ever created and green notes that were on sale, because truly this is a byproduct I haven’t seen another like. I’m still drooling. There’s a moment when I catch a hint of something like green tea, certain airs of fake wood, undefined bergamot with memories of 90s Adidas deodorant. When it dries, it loses the airy, anaesthetic sweetness and settles down into a 90s marine paste exactly like Acqua di Giò, losing the streams of fizzy drink that you’d die if you drank them. I would never recommend it to anyone because there’s no way to sell this unless you flirt with perfuming yourself with the Pato toilet cleaner or a bucket of mop water with detergent. Zara perfumes beside it have the quality of an Amouage, I promise you. I’m not much of a fan of the guilty pleasure concept because I like to enjoy what I like without theorising or justifying, but this openly presents itself as a proper guilty pleasure.

• Longevity
• Summer
• Green
• Ozonic