For someone who loves Angel so much, I have very little of the original EdP. Mugler throws samples and minis at you when you buy stuff, so I have some, but all my full bottles are of flankers: La Rose, Étoile des Rêves, Angel Muse, the 2019 EdT (which is more different than Angel EdP than Angel Muse is). I realized that there was a hole in my collection where the Angel that started it all needed to be. I shopped around a little bit, and then didn't buy it. I bought a bottle of the extrait instead. Oops. Maybe another time.
My bottle is from the Mugler Show release in 2010. I don't know what aspects of this perfume are as designed and which are because of how it's aged. Wet, the Angel fruit is winelike. This feels intentional, it's very elegant. This formula is also more chocolate-forward. It's a dry chocolate, both in the sense that it's more cocoa powdery than bar chocolate and in the sense that the composition is not especially sweet. The carnival idea behind classic Angel has been discarded entirely for a tasting sampler of rare chocolates arranged on a black wood serving board.
Most of the Angel varieties offer something that makes me want to run into them and live forever, but the extrait is a standout. It's so refined and lovely. I want to be with the people the chocolate was set out for and look out over the world from where they are. I can tell that they're high up.
The tenacity of the extrait is surprisingly not super long. I think it's because it's a splash rather than a spray. It's hard to apply it as liberally as the EdP atomizer would without spilling it, so I apply it conservatively and reapply when it's faded too much (three-ish hours). The bottle is one of the prettiest Mugler has ever done, and that's really saying something. I love having it on my altar.
I wonder why there's no extrait in the current product lineup at the Mugler website? They've done one enough times that you can get it reasonably easily and cheaply from resellers, but it has a different statement to make than the EdP and EdT, and deserves a permanent spot in the lineup like them. Of course, if I had my way, ALL the Angel variants would have a permanent spot. Even Eau Croisière 1.
The illustration has nothing to do with Angel Extrait. It was just what I felt like drawing at the time.