Giorgio Armani Code

Giorgio Armani Code is sold out right now; the last price was ৳255 for 1.5 ml. Join the restock list on this page. We do not sell full bottles; a decant lets you wear it for weeks before buying one.

Almost nothing carries over except the name. Code is the warm one: lemon and bergamot into star anise, olive blossom and guaiac wood, finishing on leather, tonka and tobacco. Code Parfum strips all of that out and builds on bergamot and bergamot leaf over orris butter, iris aldehyde and clary sage with tonka and cedar underneath, which makes it cool, powdery and iris-led. Code is the date-night classic; Code Parfum is the quiet, modern reinterpretation.

The sweetness comes forward and the citrus does not last. Lemon and bergamot are candied rather than sharp here, and they thin within minutes on hot skin, which leaves the star anise and olive blossom exposed sooner than intended. Tonka and tobacco in the base then warm and thicken through the afternoon. Leather and guaiac wood are the only dry counterweight, and this is an after-dark fragrance in this climate, worn once rather than layered.

The base does not, and oakmoss is why. A wearer tracking the batches on Basenotes reports no real difference between the 2004 Black Code and bottles from 2005 to 2011, but a slight increase in wood and amber afterwards, with guaiac wood taking over as IFRA restrictions cut the oakmoss out. That matches the note list on this page, which carries guaiac wood and no oakmoss at all. The lemon, star anise and tobacco that define the rest of it are unaffected.