Maitre Parfumeur et Gantier Ambre Precieux

I’m a friend of good amber fragrances (“good” is obviously subjective, but I’ll explain more below). I find many amber scents too sweet and vanillic but I easily have a half dozen ambery fragrances I adore and don’t fall anywhere near the sweet/vanilla spectrum. It strikes me as odd that I’ve never reviewed MPG’s Ambre Precieux (MPG AP) since I find it to be one of the absolute best amber fragrances ever created.

The intriguing part about amber is that it’s not a single note but an accord usually created by a thousand different variations of benzoin, labdanum, styrax, vanilla, opopponax, ambergris, myrrh, various herbs, woods and oriental spices. When I come across uninteresting, flat or super-sweet vanilla type amber scents it just seems cheap, unimaginative and sad to me. These sweet vanilla ambers are the ones I think give the whole genre a bad reputation.

MPG Ambre Precieux, from a quick glance across various blogs and BN, MUA reviews, seems to garner diverse opinions. While most seem to love it, many of the adjectives used to describe it are a little weird to me. Take “powdery” for instance. MGP AP isn’t powdery to me in the least. I suppose powdery is one of those descriptive words that mean entirely different things to whomever uses it. MPG AP might be classified as powdery if your definition of the word is smooth, balanced and silky, like the texture of powder instead of the smell of baby powder. MPG AP’s smoothness is so perfectly balanced that in this regard it reminds me of Amouage Lyric. I don’t mean it smells like Lyric but there’s an ultimate smoothness and perfectly balanced quality in both Lyric and AP.

MPG Ambre Precieux reminds me a bit of Diptyque Eau Lente and Diptyque L’eau Trois mostly due to the herbaceous resins and myrrh. MPG AP isn’t edgy like Annick Goutal Ambre Fetiche (which I love but have to be in the mood to wear), instead it purrs softly, but tenaciously, in a contented and satisfied manner. I’d classify MPG AP as a woody-herbaceous amber with just a tiny dollop of sweetness. So often it seems like many perfume aficionados are looking for the next most innovative, unique, edgy or strange juxtaposition of notes when searching for a new fragrance. I find myself, more often, looking for this type of fragrance, one where I find the quality superior and the overall scent isn’t weird but perfectly balanced and smooth. It might be mistaken as simplistic but I have a hunch that this sort of effortless perfection is the most difficult to create.

Notes: lavender, myrhh, amber, tolu balsam, resin, vanilla, nutmeg and peru balsam.