Megamare Isn’t An Aquatic. It’s An Environment.
Orto Parisi Megamare Review
Basic Information
• House: Orto Parisi Orto Parisi
• Perfumer: Alessandro Gualtieri
• Release Year: 2019
• Concentration: Parfum
• Genre: Marine Atmospheric / Mineral Fresh
• Bottle Size Reviewed: 50ml
Official Notes
Top
• Bergamot
• Lemon
Heart
• Seaweed
• Calone
• Hedione
Base
• Ambroxan
• Cedar
• Musk
Performance on my skin
• Extremely strong projection
• Extremely long lasting
• Easy to go nose blind to
• Leaves a huge scent cloud around the wearer
Best Seasons
• Fall
• Spring
• Summer days(not too hot)/nights
Best Settings
• Outdoors
• Daytime
• Nighttime
• Coastal weather
• Casual or dressed up
• Situations where you actually want attention and presence
Gender Lean
• Masculine leaning unisex
• Mostly masculine to my nose because there’s almost no sweetness to it
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Megamare was a blind buy for me and honestly I had no clue what to expect. My first reaction was confusion mixed with fascination because it smelled dark blue somehow. Cold. Huge. Strange. But still fresh at the same time. I had never really smelled a fragrance play with that contradiction before.
Most fresh fragrances feel bright, energetic, clean, or uplifting. Megamare feels heavy. Not heavy in a sweet amber or oud way, but heavy like weather and pressure building in the air before a storm near the ocean.
This does not smell like a tropical aquatic, shower gel fragrance, or your typical “blue fragrance.” It smells much more environmental than that. To me, Megamare smells like standing out on a pier during a cold rainy fall day near the shoreline. The tide is starting to go down a little, seaweed is getting exposed in the waves, and everything around you is wet from the rain and ocean air. You have a waxed canvas jacket on over a wool sweater and you can smell the damp wool underneath mixed with cold salt air and wind coming off the water.
There’s also this wet wood smell underneath everything that keeps reminding me of soaked wooden beams on an old pier or boardwalk, which makes perfect sense once you realize there’s cedar in the composition. That cedar note quietly keeps the fragrance grounded and stops it from becoming just salt and ambroxan. It smells like weathered wood absorbing ocean air and rain.
Even visually the fragrance feels cold to me. Dark navy water. Gray skies. Seafoam green. Wet wood. Oxidized metal. It smells exactly like that color palette.
And somehow it smells both natural and synthetic at the same time. There’s no way something projects this hard without heavy synthetic materials involved, but despite that, it still creates really realistic textures in the air. Wet fabric. Salt. Cold wind. Dampness. Minerals.
What surprised me most about Megamare was how much attention it gets. This is probably the strongest fresh fragrance I’ve ever smelled and it absolutely projects like crazy, but what surprised me was how positive the reactions were. I wore it on a Saturday recently and got three compliments in one day from completely different people: a cashier, a friend, and a waitress. The waitress actually came back a few minutes later specifically to tell me I smelled really good. She was young and attractive too, which honestly surprised me considering how unusual this fragrance is.
That made me realize something important about Megamare. People are not reacting to this because it smells traditionally “pleasant.” They react to the aura it creates.
The musk, ambroxan, seaweed, mineral notes, and cedar all combine into something that’s honestly hard to explain. It creates presence more than emotion. Most fragrances are designed to smell good up close. Megamare feels like it was designed to shape the air around you. From farther away it almost smells better than it does directly on skin, which is why I think it works so well socially despite sounding so aggressive on paper.
Structurally, Megamare is more linear than a lot of fragrances in my collection, but not in a bad way. Its identity stays consistent the entire time. It never really transforms into something else. The musk and ambroxan stay present almost all the way through alongside this cold marine mineral feeling that’s hard to fully pin down. What changes more is the texture and atmosphere than the actual scent profile itself.
The fragrance smooths out over time while still remaining incredibly strong. It keeps radiating outward for hours and it’s extremely easy to go nose blind to it. I’ve had situations where I could barely smell it anymore myself while people around me still said it was projecting hard. One time somebody told me it still smelled great while we were sitting together in a car, which honestly says a lot because enclosed spaces are probably where this fragrance becomes the most dangerous.
And that really is the biggest warning I would give people with Megamare: control your sprays. Seriously. In open air this fragrance feels amazing. In tight indoor environments or cars with poor airflow, it can absolutely become overwhelming if you overspray. Younger guys especially are probably going to be tempted to go too heavy because the performance is so addictive.
But when applied properly, this thing is magic.
It can absolutely work during the daytime too, especially outdoors or in cooler weather, because underneath all the darkness there’s still a fresh marine structure holding everything together. It just needs more restraint than most daytime fragrances. It can work casually or dressed up because it doesn’t rely on sweetness, powder, or traditional “formal fragrance” tricks. It just smells cold, mysterious, masculine, and elemental. There’s something about it that makes people curious. It feels emotionally distant while still somehow pulling people in and making them want to know more.
That’s hard to pull off.
Megamare feels less like a fragrance built around emotion and more like one built around presence. It smells elemental. Wind. Salt. Water. Wet wood. Fabric. Minerals. Cold air.
Most fresh fragrances try to smell refreshing.
Megamare tries to smell immense.
And somehow it actually does.