Oud Café

Oud Café chases Kayali's Oudgasm Café Oud 19, the coffee entry in the cult oud collection. It opens with a rich cappuccino-coffee note, dark and faintly bitter, brightened by bergamot and mandarin - the freshly-brewed top the original is named for. The heart adds a soft floral lift of geranium and rose to keep the coffee from turning one-note. The drydown is its cosy heart: creamy oud rounded with white musk, sweet vanilla and earthy patchouli, intimate and a little alluring. Where the Kayali is an Eau de Parfum Intense that can run eight to ten hours with a deep coffee-and-oud drydown, this dupe keeps the coffee-oud story but reads sweeter and flatter, trimming the bitter dark-roast depth and the original's tenacity, settling closer to the skin sooner. It remains a cosy, sophisticated coffee-oud gourmand - warm, sweet and a touch mysterious - that suits cooler-weather evenings, an affordable budget stand-in for the Kayali.