Freaky Ace

006 - Freaky Ace is built on the same skeleton as Tom Ford's Fucking Fabulous: clary sage and lavender open with the same soothing-herbal freshness, before bitter almond, vanilla and orris take over the heart, echoing the original's famous creamy-almond-leather pairing. The base of leather, tonka bean, patchouli, woody notes and amber lands close to Tom Ford's cashmeran-and-vanilla drydown, if noticeably less dense. Fucking Fabulous is a genuinely polarising fragrance - loved for its bold, almost gourmand-leather intensity and criticised by others as unwearable past the second hour - and Freaky Ace inherits the shape of that character without the maximalist volume. The almond and leather are both present and identifiable, but pulled back rather than pushed forward, which makes this a more office-friendly, lower-risk version of a fragrance whose whole reputation is built on being anything but restrained. Performance sits at a modest few hours before fading to a soft leather-vanilla skin scent, well short of the ten-plus hours some reviewers report for the Tom Ford original. Worth trying for the almond-leather pairing alone, but it won't satisfy anyone chasing the designer's full confrontational intensity.