We have a strange and unusual perfume for you this week. It’s not niche in the classical sense, but it’s an interesting and very wearable take on a ‘pop’ fragrance, it’s 6781 by Moods of Norway (MoN).

I’m calling this a pop fragrance because it has a sweet, fun and – dare I say it – almost disposable feel about it. It feels like pop culture in a perfume.

MoN are a Norwegian clothing store who have been around since 2003. You find them up and down the country on the high streets of the larger towns. MoN are pretty high end though, think Anthropologie for the Hipster Youth rather than H and M. (As an aside they used to have a t-shirt with a tractor on that said ‘Party like the old folks’ which I coveted wildly.) They have a small range of fragrances, three in this line plus a masculine and a feminine stand alone. We haven’t reviewed a fragrance of this type before here, but this one is such a lot of fun that we couldn’t resist.

6781 is supposedly inspired by a stroll on the streets of Stryn where the company was conceived. Stryn is a small town on a fjord in beautiful Norway, the equivalent of somewhere like Cleethorpes or Skegness one imagines. I can’t testify to the veracity of the claim that this fragrance smells like Stryn, but I can tell you that it certainly doesn’t smell like Skegness!

Top notes

The perfume opens with a bright, bold and sunny burst of coconut and ozone. It smells like salty sea air and sun tan lotion mixing together on a warm day. It’s not particularly juicy but it has a quality to it which is both uplifting and soothing. It’s a summery, happy fragrance and wearing it makes me excited for holidays, but the long summer holidays you got when you were a child, when the sun shone constantly and you were always sticky from eating ice lollies and playing about in the grass. I think the word I am looking for is carefree. That’s what this smells like.

The potentially overwhelming coconut is held in check by the salty sea note at this stage and the two things combined make for an interesting mix which, if I am honest, it feels like I haven’t experienced elsewhere (if you have a recommendation for another perfume that does these notes well together then please do let us know).

Heart notes

The heart notes of this perfume are more problematic. A very thick and overly sweet mango note comes in next. Quite frankly it smells like the memory I have of the taste of Um-Bongo (Apologies to our international readers who won’t know what that is: basically it was a sickly sweet multi-fruit drink kinds in the 1980s and 1990s had, before Sunny-Delight came along).

The heart has none of the juiciness of the pineapple that appears on the scent notes, instead it’s heavy and smells synthetic which is a tiny bit disappointing after a strong opening. Thankfully, the middle doesn’t seem to last very long at all.

Base notes

If the top notes are good, the heart notes are disappointing, then the base notes are a bit of a triumph. The sickly and synthetic fruits die down to leave a gorgeous coconut scent which smells not at all synthetic. I like it because it doesn’t have a lot of the sweetness or even creaminess that you sometimes get with coconut scents, instead this smells like it has been roasted. It’s dry, slightly bark-like, husky and all the more lovely because of that.

The base also unfolds with notes of clean skin and a gentle, creamy musk. It makes my skin smell like the best version of itself possible.

In terms of technical perfection, this perfume feels like a really mixed bag, but it’s a whole lot of fun and I really enjoy wearing it. It’s a teenage summer romance in a bottle, it’s kicking over sandcastles and wearing battered old trainers, it’s seaside souvenirs and ice cream cones. It isn’t the most chic or sophisticated thing that you’ll ever smell but it definitely has a place on my perfume shelf, and you can bet your bottom krone that wearing this you would meet far fewer people who smelled the same than if you opted for a more-expensive and just-about-as-sophisticated bottle of Angel or Light Blue.

The other stuff

MoN’s marketing is absolutely fantastic; they use the words ‘hibbedy dibbedy’ on their website, for example. That said, the packaging, bottle design and branding of this all feel a bit flat and less joyous. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of it at all, I’d just like to see more of their very obvious and very cool sense of humour coming through in the packaging as well.

Considering this is EdC (eau de cologne – which has the lowest concentration of fragrance, below eau de toilette and eau de parfum) it wears really well and actually lasts all day, which is impressive. It lingers longer than many EdTs I’ve tried so don’t be put off by that alone!

This is a very summery scent which falls towards the more female end of the stereotypes for perfumes.

You can buy 6781 direct from the MoN website, or in store should you be lucky enough to find yourself hanging out in the most awesome country in the world (possibly). It’s priced at 61 euros for 100ml.

I should also point out that this image is of Trondheim not Stryn. Sorry about that.