Imitation Woman smells like a person choking on passion fruit (actually ylang ylang, cassis, and licorice), passing out, and micturating in the process. Blasted out with an aldehydey rush that has you involuntarily raising your eyebrows and jerking your head back in surprise (Duncan’s eyes practically popped out when he smelled it), this is one of 2018’s most uncompromising releases.
The name, too. Obviously, it goes without saying that in fact, as is always the case with Amouage, there is simply an Amouage for women and one for men (the latter just smelled like a passable woody iris to me), but as you find yourself chuckling at the name you just know that the creative director, Christopher Chong is doing it deliberately, provocatively, just because he loves the ring of the words.
An ‘imitation woman’?
What IS that exactly ?
The Black Narcissus 
Priceless illustration!
Aquaria, winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race this year, beautiful as a boy and ( when he gets it right ) as a drag queen.
I literally do want to know what an ‘imitation’ vs a ‘real’ woman is though. I honestly don’t know.
It sounds awful, which is a pity as the bottle is gorgeous.
It has been described as vomit on the office floor after someone consuming too much licorice.
What I like about it is the fact that at least it is trying something different. I find it odd but also passionate.
This one was really challenging to smell. I second the vomit smell, but not so much on an office floor. You know sometimes when you get in a cab in the morning and you can smell that someone had clearly been out and been sick all over the pleather seat? To me, Imitation Woman smells like that lingering smell + the disinfectant used to clean it up.
THAT terrible?!
Hilarious.
I quite like the aldehydic purpleness of it in a way
Well the Amouage website babbles about „New York City‘s subculture of the 1970s“ and „era of audacious freedom“. That coming from an Omani product where homosexuality is obviously forbidden, and in neighbouring Saudi Arabia by death penalty, it is all a bit of a cynical joke.
„Imitation“ is gay? Drag? Trans*? Perv?
Whatever, I doubt it will sell in the Middle East, as one wonders who in Jeddah or Sharjah would like to answer the question of what one is smelling of with Imitation Woman …
Exactly. The name is somehow offensive and yet very appealingly camp at the same time. an ‘imitation woman’ could be so many things….any female who conforms to all that she is expected to, for example, all the makeup, clothes, mannerisms, in many ways, she is an ‘imitation woman’ (not that I profess to know what a Woman precisely is, any more than I do a Man. I do kind of agree with the idea that to a large extent, it is all Drag.
If the intent is to say that drag queens are some kind of shallow imitation, I do think the whole concept could verge on offensive. I put this on Facebook initially and got no reactions, so I suspect that people thought I was taking some ‘unorthodox’ stance (god I am honestly in a Kafka like leftwing ghetto you know with all my friends – it can be terrifying. There is only ONE way to think about anything and I hate that). I purposefully left this open to debate. The name IS funny (because it is SO BAD IT IS GOOD); but the specifics, I left unanswered.
Perhaps they have run out of adjectives. Maybe they should have just called it Imitation Perfume.
!!
I’d like to know your take on it. To be honest, of a batch of samples I receive, it was the one that made me really take notice. That, in itself, is something these days. I can imagine it being quite a head turner on the right person!
I will have to sample it.
There are so many (sexual) human behavioural cubicles nowadays, that I almost get out of breath mentioning them in one sentence!
The more the merrier? Not to me! I get a little suffocated with all the defining properties and the offendable categories!!
Imitation Woman sounds quite an intentional and interesting drag on an inexhaustible theme.
I can’t stand licorice nasal or oral, so it’s a no go for me. Illustration spot on!
Where have all the flowers gone???
I couldn’t agree with you more about the exhaustment of all the gender categories now. People are OBSESSED with having the EXACT self-defining moniker, up to sentences long. I understand the motives, but think it is a little pathological after a while. Just be yourself without a label. I suppose, just for the hell of it, I would be: