Correction — I got this one wrong the first time

Pulled my original review of this. It was a first impression dressed up as a review, and the central claim in it was wrong: I had this filed as a Dior Homme Intense relative. It isn't. It isn't really close.

What it actually does — opens tart, a dry non-sweet fruit over sharp leather. If anything it's closer to Ombré Leather territory than to Dior Homme Intense, which is a comparison I keep hearing. Around the hour mark it turns camphorous, slightly medicinal, and notably not powdery, which I'd put down to violet leaf and maybe some spike-lavender-type lavender. That stretch is excellent and it's the reason I kept coming back to the vial.

Then it goes woody and it's clearly synthetic. Ambroxan is doing real work, with some kind of super amber stacked on top of it — I'm not going to guess which one. There is iris down there somewhere if I go hunting for it, but it reads more like powder being used to take the edge off that base than like the point of the composition, and it doesn't quite pull it off.

Which brings me to the name, and this is really why I deleted the first review. A name primes you. You spray it, you go looking for the word on the bottle, and if you want to find it badly enough you will. Creed has done this before — the standing complaint about Wild Vetiver is that it isn't really a vetiver fragrance, and that complaint is fair. Iris Debonair is the same move. The name is telling you what to look for rather than describing what's in the bottle.

I scrub it off around hour three or four. Too prickly and screechy by then.

I like this fragrance. Just not all of it. It just isn't an iris fragrance.