The taste is too bitter for my liking, and that much caffeine will just keep me up all night, no matter what time of day I drink it. But the smell of an actual cup of coffee? And perfect for personal fragrance.
Perfumers include coffee notes in fragrance by using gourmand accords made from roasted coffee beans, espresso extracts, or aromatic molecules that mimic those smells. If you read through the scent notes on your favorite coffee cologne, you might notice something called “Coffee CO2 extract”—that’s a concentrated aromatic and bioactive oil created by passing supercritical carbon dioxide through roasted coffee beans. But coffee notes don’t always smell the same.
Roasted coffee beans or espresso can smell dark and dry with a slightly bitter and earthy quality, whereas sweeter coffee notes like mocha and latte scents can be warm, milky, and rich. It also, of course, depends on what other notes are mixed in, from woody and earthy scents to sweet, gourmand ones. To give you an idea of the range, we rounded up the best coffee-scented colognes out there.
You’ll see plenty of pricey bottles on this list. We will get cerebral about perfume—men’s and women’s is a dumb distinction for scent. We will try to push you toward something interesting.
But before all that, we have to pay respects. You might call Polo Red, first released in 2013, a garden-variety mall fragrance, something catering to the everyman. For us, considering the price point, it’s a modern classic.
Polo Red is a bit more interesting than your typical guy fragrance. It blends fresh, fruity notes of grapefruit, lemon, and cranberry with warm, rich notes of redwood, amber, and coffee. Add in earthy sage and woods and you get a really interesting combination that goes from bright and airy to deep and sensual thanks to the base notes of coffee, which blend beautifully with the warm woods and amber.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
