Xerjoff Neo

Let us clear something up before we go any further: there is no Xerjoff fragrance called simply Neo. If you landed here after typing those four letters into a search bar, you were almost certainly looking for Xerjoff NeoRio, the 2025 release from the house's Blends collection, made in collaboration with Duran Duran and composed by Alberto Morillas. A handful of retailers file it as Xerjoff Neo Rio. Same flacon, same juice, same syrupy, resinous, faintly dangerous amber. This review covers that fragrance. It arrives at a moment when the fragrance world is deep in its love affair with the 1980s. Gourmand ambers dominate the niche shelves, vintage synth-pop is back on the mood boards, and the New Romantic aesthetic, all silk, shadow and gold lamplight, has been quietly reabsorbed into luxury culture. Xerjoff, a house that has always understood that perfume is as much object as olfactory experience, leaned all the way into that current. The result is a parfum that smells less like a tribute act and more like an after-party: boozy, sticky, balsamic, and very much awake at 1am. So what does it actually smell like? Picture candied figs dropped into dark rum, dusted with saffron, then laid to rest on a bed of patchouli, Peru balsam and tonka bean. It is sweet, but it is not naive sweetness. There is a metallic shimmer in the accord list, a warm-spicy edge, a resinous gravity that keeps the whole thing from floating away. It is a fragrance for cold air and low light, and it wears like a statement rather than a whisper.