The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Mythical Horse arrived in 2020 from The Dua Brand, a house known for translating expensive compositions into something far less painful on the wallet. The name rides a simple metaphor: a horse that flies, the kind of creature you'd build a whole legend around. Mahsam Raza composed it as an Oriental Fougère, threading cypress and violet leaf through lavender and jasmine before dropping the whole thing into a vanilla-amber base that does the heavy lifting. The brief reads clearly from the notes alone: aromatic structure up top, creamy warmth underneath, and the kind of longevity that earns its extrait de parfum label. The opening carries that crisp cypress-green snap almost immediately, sharpened by violet leaf's slightly metallic, cucumber-cool edge.
Most lavender fragrances settle into one of two lanes: the clean, soapy herbal tradition or the dense, ambery oriental treatment. This composition refuses to pick. Violet leaf and cypress drag the lavender somewhere cooler and greener than a barbershop fougère would dare, while the jasmine keeps things soft instead of sharp. Then the base steps in with vanilla and amber, and the whole thing tips warm without ever losing the aromatic backbone. It is a structural argument between two perfume families, and it never fully resolves, which is exactly why it holds attention.
The evolution
The first ten minutes belong to lavender and violet leaf, with a green-cool snap from cypress that reads almost like cold air moving through a warm room. This is the phase that gets mistaken for a standard fougère. Hold on. The jasmine arrives before the hour mark, and it doesn't sit politely beside the lavender; it weaves through, sweetening the herbs into something softer and more rounded. By the two-hour mark the amber and vanilla have taken over the base, and the lavender doesn't disappear, it just changes register. It becomes warmer, almost honeyed. Six hours in and the vanilla is the loudest voice, with lavender still audible underneath like a memory of the opening. Eight to ten hours total, and what remains on a sweater the next morning is a quiet amber-vanilla hum with a ghost of cypress. The extrait concentration earns its keep.
Cultural impact
Within fragrance communities that track inspired-by compositions, Mythical Horse is frequently compared to Parfums de Marly's Pegasus, with wearers and reviewers drawing direct parallels on longevity and aromatic structure. The comparison comes up consistently enough that anyone familiar with the original will immediately register the overlap in profile. The cypress-lavender opening and the creamy vanilla-amber drydown read as the most heavily shared territory between the two, and several reviewers have noted that Mythical Horse holds its own on performance metrics like sillage and wear time.
