H24 (Hermès)

The H24 line makes perfect sense to me. Hermès hadn’t released an original masculine-leaning fragrance in years, and Jean-Claude Ellena had stepped down from his role as in-house perfumer. In his place is his protégé, Christine Nagel, formerly of Jo Malone, tasked with inviting the 21st-century man into the world of Hermès leather and luxury. She had every reason to feel confident, having crafted successes for Dior, Armani, Cartier, and John Galliano. But how does one follow Terre d’Hermès? Her challenge was formidable.

H24 debuted in 2021 and smells like a postmodern fougère. To me, it smells exactly like the image above. Cold, metallic, faintly green-woody, vaguely fruity, and unmistakably industrial, it reimagines the classical aromatic fougère of the late 20th century. Lavender and herbal notes are cleverly disguised beneath a forbidding, austere base that recalls the freshly inked pages of a glossy fashion magazine from 2003. Nagel’s follow-up, H24 Eau de Parfum (2022), deepens the mossy-woody dimension, while H24 Herbes Vives (2024) explores the green-fruity angle. There’s something in the line for everyone, but the original EDT is my starting point. So, here we go with a brief review.

The internet has buzzed with a handful of recurring descriptors: metallic, sharp, aldehydic, pear, banana, bitter, boring, simplistic, forgettable. Some of these I agree with. Yes, it is slightly metallic. That effect comes mostly from how the snowy aldehydes have been pared down to their coldest essence and arranged like olfactory spines across the sterile calm of the opening. I catch a trace of what I can only call a “fantasy fruit,” not quite pear and not quite banana, but something green and fruity that offers a soft, ethereal sweetness. There’s also a whisper of narcissus, the honeyed scent of yellow daffodils drifting in on a stale breeze. And sage. Lots and lots of synthetic sage, resting on an elegant mineral-amber base. Very "designer frag," but still compelling.

Some reviewers call H24 boring or uninspired, and I can understand why. It’s a fragrance for grown-ups. No sugary bombast, no candy, no aquatic freshness, no obvious spice. Nagel’s instinct was to take the traditional fougère structure, built around lavender, coumarin, and musk, and pair it with something that smells nothing like any of them. Then she let the unfamiliar take over. This isn’t a fougère in the traditional sense so much as a meditation on the quiet dignity of modern decay. H24 evokes the image of an abandoned office tower, sealed so tightly it feels airless. Evening sunlight filters across the concrete floors and drywall, casting a tranquil prism of green, blue, and gold. In the first hour, it smells like looking out a window at rain falling on leaves. It’s peaceful, nearly spiritual, and you linger there, thoughtless. You feel no desire to move.

By hour three, the light shifts. That same sun casts a paler, colder yellow, throwing green shadows into sterile blue rooms. By hour six, the scent becomes a memory of the world before the fall: metal paperclips, bitter and dry; publishing ink and glossy magazine paper warmed by a vent, releasing their chemical perfume. It smells like living inside an issue of Italian Vogue. I must be an ink addict, because I can’t get enough of it. And here, it’s not just the ink. It’s the paper, too. Every glossy magazine has its own scent, no two quite alike. Some are faint and clean, others bold and slightly rancid, the ink sterile and the paper faintly alive. Some are delicate, others hit you with a glorious wall of aroma, even tinged with a whisper of binding glue.

I come away from H24 thinking it’s excellent. Challenging, yes, but excellent. This is not your crowd-pleasing Terre d’Hermès. This is something new, a distinct shape. It echoes the past but offers something entirely original. Lavender becomes a solar chill that feels synthetic and abstract. Yellow florals merge into a bittersweet paper accord. Sage straddles the line between herbal and chemical. A soft woody amber and mineral base molecule ties it all together into an olfactory glyph for forgotten spaces. Perfume as poetry, bottled in a minimalist flask with a hidden atomizer stem, refillable, efficient, and unmistakably Hermès. Was this what the brand needed to make waves again? Maybe, maybe not. But I’m glad Nagel made it, and I really, really like it.

My English Leather Investigation Continues . . .

The Lotion's Bottle Reads "Bottle Made in West Germany"

I received two of the three English Leather bottles that I purchased on eBay, pictured above, and the outstanding bottle is identical to the one on the right, so I don't expect much enlightenment there, with possibly only a mild difference in scent between them. The bottle on the left, the "All-Purpose Lotion," is apparently the older of the two, and from the scent alone I can tell that. It's a bit weaker but smells like there's an old and likely banned nitro musk in it, although strangely the scent dies pretty fast, so who knows? 

Aside from the concentration and aesthetic differences between the two, I can't tell their ages on looks and smell alone. Big, fuzzy first-gen nitro musks were in widespread use during the 1950s, '60s, and even the '70s, so the bottle on the left could be from any of those. It does have "Bottle Made in West Germany" embossed on the bottom, so that's a clue the product is from a much earlier era than any other I've encountered. Strangely though its label is pristine, while the newer 2 ouncer on the right looks more worn and scuffed. So if the lotion is older, it must've been kept in a relatively air-tight and dry spot for decades, away from heat, moisture, and sunlight. Honestly, it looks like it was printed yesterday. It's spotless. I'm impressed. 

The cologne is much stronger and basically as I remembered it. The thing about English Leather that most people don't realize is it's the scent of my childhood. English Leather was the one cologne I actually wore as a kid, albeit infrequently. I remember wearing it on more than one occasion to church and to family functions, and we're going back to when I was eight, nine, ten years old. Pre-teen years. Back then I remember this stuff being incredibly dense and powerful, and frankly I disliked it. But my parents encouraged me to wear it, and my dad had his father's 1980s bottles (then brand new) sleeping under the bathroom sink, so English Leather it was. I even remember my mother teaching me how to apply it: a little tiny dab behind each ear, and a couple on the throat, of all places. 

My nose has likely been worn down over the years, but perhaps the vintage fragrance has also weakened over time, because the cologne smells less intense than it used to. I could wear this -- lightly wear it -- and not get a headache like I used to. But that makes aging these bottles difficult. I'm confident the cologne is from the late '70s or early '80s, before MEM did their 75th aesthetic change-up on the labels and caps that my father's bore. My guess on the lotion is it's from the late 1960s or early '70s. Legend has it English Leather was originally produced in Europe and named Russian Leather, and MEM operated out of Germany. It's entirely possible my lotion is a "missing link" bottle of English Leather, a rarely-seen 1950s vintage, somewhat "deep vintage," if you will. 

But I still think there's a "dark vintage" element to English Leather, bottles that are entirely missing from the conversation because nobody has ever actually seen them. I view English Leather as being more important to the pantheon of masculine perfumery than even Ivory Tower fragrance writers like Luca Turin and Chandler Burr believe it to be. I trace the lineage of this type of citrus chypre through to things like Tabaróme Millésime, Dirty English, and Bleu de Chanel. Those fragrances wouldn't exist if it weren't for English Leather's unique burled woody-citrus scent. But another factor is the anonymity of English Leather's perfumer, which ChatGPT credits merely to a midcentury "oil house." One might view it, by the AI's description, as something MEM took extra profits from by essentially marketing a premade base as a finished fragrance, while also selling it to third parties for use in more complex compositions. 

That's how English Leather smells to me -- more like a base than a truly finished scent. It has a dense muskiness to it that feels like it's all about the base, or "bass," Meghan Trainor style. There's a lick of bitter citrus in the top, but it mellows and pervades through to the far drydown, feeling more fixed and foundational than like an extra layer. Beyond the citrus there's a woody sweetness that feels like a clear call-in on whatever musk is used, and the woodiness is very flat and one-dimensional. There isn't much of a leather note, but one might smell something of saddle soap in MEM's formula. I have a much newer bottle of this stuff that I reviewed many years ago, a massive bottle that has darkened over time, and that version, despite all the crap it took in the forums at the time, smells even more like the stuff I wore as a kid than these vintage bottles do. Brighter, heavier, soapier. 

I'll continue to play with these in the days ahead, and will look into the lotion. ChatGPT puts the lotion in the late 1960s to early 1970s, and the cologne in the late 1970s and early 1980s, just like I did before I even asked it. It suggests that the rounded wooden cap of the lotion was more the style of the late 1960s vintages, while the darker and more cylindrical style was what MEM was putting out a decade later. Both predate the 1990s and the reunification of Germany. So, really not telling me much there, as that much was obvious to me. The question still lingers in my mind . . . what did a 1950s bottle look like? Does anyone out there own one? Has anyone out there even seen one? 

Anything that predates 1963?

Where Are All The 'Deep Vintage' Bottles of MEM English Leather?

A 1963 print ad, the oldest I could find.

One of the many things that plague the fragrance house of Creed is the argument that "deep vintage" bottles that predate the 1970s don't exist, despite Olivier and Erwin's claims to the contrary. Indeed, an internet search fails to yield imagery of anything particularly antiquated, beyond perhaps a few very early iterations of the contemporary flask bottles, all of which read "Olivier Creed." This of course exposes them to constant criticism. 

As I've argued in the past, Creed has a built-in excuse for this problem that, to me at least, actually washes: their pre-seventies output was primarily bespoke. If you're only in the market for individualized orders, there will be no examples of those products for the public to see, not unless any of Creed's clients offer them up. If I'm a multi-millionaire who hires the Creed company to make me a bespoke cologne, and I pay $100,000 for a 17 ounce flacon (with a bonus refresh flacon), the outside world won't see those bottles. They'll never see what I privately commissioned for myself, because, well, it's private. 

Very few people seem to accept this logic, however. So, Creed continues to get hammered on the issue, and likely always will be. But strangely enough, the benefit of the doubt is very readily given to another fragrance that sneakily claims to have a wizened lineage that also is not supported by any available sources, at least not online. The fragrance in question is English Leather by MEM/Dana. MEM had cited English Leather's release date as 1949, with tales of it originally being launched as "Russian Leather" sometime in 1930s Germany, then discontinued, then relaunched after WWII, again as Russian Leather and again in Germany, before being renamed "English Leather" and marketed to Americans throughout the 1950s and 1960s. 

If you look on Basenotes, Parfumo, and Fragrantica, they all cite 1949 as English Leather's release date. This is curious, because 1949 is a long time ago, but not that long ago. There should be an abundance of print ads dating back to the 1950s available online, much as there were for Old Spice, which predates it by nine years. Yet when I search for those print ads, nothing comes up. The oldest ad I can find online dates back to 1963. And, also quite curiously, there is no record of MEM Company, Inc. ever existing on 347 Fifth Avenue. It's like the fragrance and the company behind it were legacy inventions for 1960s consumers, and that invented legacy continued to transition along unchallenged through the subsequent five decades, all the way up to today.

Today, I'm challenging it. Where are all the "deep vintage" bottles of MEM English Leather? A search online yields results that again only date back to the early 1960s. I've purchased the oldest vintage "all-purpose lotion" bottle I could find on eBay, with a label marked "MEM Company Inc., Northvale, NJ" and a bottle marked "Bottle made in West Germany for MEM." The product is clearly from the early or middle 1960s, and it's even possibly a little newer given its pristine like-new condition and blond wood cap. One thing I do know -- it's definitely not a 1950s bottle. I can't find one of those, nor can I find an ad for one.

Neither can Chat GPT, for that matter. I asked the A.I. to utilize its research mode and find me links to documents that prove English Leather predates the 1960s. After conducting an exhaustive scouring of the internet that took just under an hour to complete, it admitted to me that it couldn't find any evidence of English Leather ever predating 1963. There are zero documents, zero patents, zero bottles, zero print ads, and zero photographs to back up the claim that English Leather was released in 1949. Not one single spec of information to support the claim that MEM produced English Leather as "Russian Leather" in the 1930s. No documented proof that MEM ever marketed English Leather to anyone other than postwar Americans. No proof that MEM manufactured English Leather prior to the 1960s. I've scoured eBay for "deep vintage" bottles, and 95% of the deepest deep vintage bottles available are from the 1980s. 

I also purchased the bottle pictured below, after searching "1950s Vintage English Leather," and finding this among only a few bottles. The fancy metallic leafing on the label's border and lettering suggests to this commercial design major that it's an early 1980s bottle of cologne. 

And this is the other bottle I purchased, a late 1960s to mid 1970s vintage:

As with Creeds, the only thing consistent about MEM's production and packaging of English Leather are its inconsistencies. From year to year there are wildly varying graphic designs for the labels and types of wood caps used. No two bottles look alike. Bottles from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s are all very difficult to match, and neither of the bottles shown in this article resemble the 1980s vintage bottles I used growing up. But all bottles have one thing in common -- they all say "English Leather." Where are those first-issue "Russian Leather" bottles? 

What does this dearth of documentation mean for English Leather? Hard to say for certain. It's possible that there are simply no surviving bottles or print ads for deep vintage 1950s English Leather. No surviving "first issue" bottles from 1949. No "dark vintage" bottles of the original prewar release. ("Dark Vintage," by the way, is my term for fragrance vintages that are exceedingly rare, borderline extinct, or possibly never seen.) These bottles simply were used up and thrown out, and nobody has access to them anymore. The print ads? Lost to the annals of time. The documentation of MEM Company's residency on Fifth Avenue in NY City? Also lost. This is all totally possible. 

Or, it could be that MEM did not make English Leather prior to the 1960s, and someone at MEM coughed up a random release date of 1949 to give the brand the postwar luster that so many real postwar fragrances enjoyed. This fib would give it a rosier history than the Vietnam era could offer, and make it substantially more romantic in the eyes of vintage hounds. What guy doesn't want to envision square-jawed mad men of the 1950s powering through their martinis and secretaries while reeking of vintage MEM English Leather? Better that the Silent Generation than the Baby Boomers lay claim to the stuff.

Club de Nuit Untold (Armaf)

Francis Kurkdjian will be remembered as the perfumer who carved his name into the scent world with unmistakable boldness, sometimes too bold. I still recall my first encounter with Le Mâle in 1997. It wasn’t a fragrance; it was a lavender-tonka mushroom cloud, sweet and powdery, detonating across city blocks. It somehow smelled both cheap and expensive, which is Kurkdjian’s signature trick. My best friend wore it exclusively that year. I’ve been in therapy ever since.

Then came Green Tea in 1999, a complete pivot from Gaultier’s chest-thumping style. It was lemony, light, and delicately floral, like a polite ghost asking to be excused. A prelude to the herbal transparency of the 2000s, it became the scent of every frosted-blonde mom on her way to softball drop-off. Green Tea was a shrug in perfume form, but it launched a thousand copycats and eventually became foundational to Kurkdjian’s personal line.

Things stayed quiet until 2015, when he dropped his next bomb: Baccarat Rouge 540. Hard to believe it has been ten years since its launch, eight since the Extrait version arrived. My take? I don’t really have one. I’ve never reviewed it. The first time I smelled it, it was radiating off two Italian-American behavior analysts in Connecticut, glamorous, low-key "It" girls who always seemed perfectly on-trend without trying too hard.

What does BR 540 smell like? A sweet amber. That’s it. Ethyl maltol up front, a faint hit of citrus, then a cloud of safranal and cotton-candy sugars dissolving in the air, trailing into a warmer, still-candied amber. It’s pleasant but ephemeral. You catch it for a second, then it’s gone. Then back again. Then gone again. There’s a resinous green twist in the base, but it’s subtle and transparent, barely holding its own against the persistent sweetness.

Naturally, Armaf joined the clone parade. Their version, Club de Nuit Untold, comes in a flashy iridescent bottle with a reddish base. Easily the best-looking in the line, arguably worth the purchase on looks alone. The scent is nearly a dead ringer for BR 540. Some say it leans toward the Extrait due to its amped-up note concentration, though I haven’t smelled the Extrait to compare. The only real difference is that Untold smells slightly woodier in the drydown.

There is no major quality gap between the two. Performance is strong, though not quite as nuclear as some claim. Even accounting for olfactory fatigue, Untold feels rather restrained. There’s a softness and finesse to it that holds up surprisingly well. The ethyl maltol is there in spades, bringing to mind summer more than fall or winter. But like BR 540, there’s only so much to say. It smells good. It’s sweet. It’s warm, slightly spicy, a bit woody, comfortable, a little sexy, kind of edible, generally safe. It doesn’t blow me away, but it doesn’t bore me either.

As a clone of a Kurkdjian fragrance, it feels like it would shrink in the shadow of the original Le Mâle, as if unworthy by comparison. If I had smelled it in 1996, I might have thought more of it. Today, it’s just a likable modern oriental. You can’t really go wrong wearing it, but it also doesn’t give you much to care about.

I'll end with this: there is barely any quality difference between Untold and BR 540. You can get 105 ml of Untold in its heavy and modern mother-of-pearl bottle for around 35 dollars. BR 540, in a much plainer bottle, costs over 300 for 60 milliliters. Untold is slightly more dynamic, with more prominent jasmine and saffron, along with Ambroxan and Amberwood by Symrise, a kind of postmodern Iso-E-Super with woody accents and a sugar-glazed sheen. Its performance is rumored to beat BR 540’s. So why would anyone still choose the original? In the air, no one can tell them apart. You might as well save your money. Sorry Francis, but your latest masterwork has become a victim of its own success.

A Rose is Not a Rose

This one smells quite sweet and fresh!

I'm in Maine this weekend, staying with my partner's parents, who have a stunning garden: roses, peonies, lilacs, bleeding hearts, and purple-and-white irises. But a garden full of flowers wasn’t enough for us. We took a trip to a local peony farm and spent the early afternoon wandering through row after row of different cultivars.

Two stood out, Austin Pride and Bartzella. I couldn’t decide which I liked more. One smelled crisp and lemony with touches of mint and Turkish rose. The other had a deeper, fuller lemon note with a spicy rasp. Both were beautiful, and completely different.

That got me thinking about the only peony fragrance I own, Banana Republic’s Peony & Peppercorn. And it hit me: there’s no such thing as the peony smell. In the garden here, there are three types, and they all smell wildly different. At the farm, the range was even wider, from zesty citrus to heady, almost overripe sweetness. Some were so indolic I nearly disliked them. Almost. I’ve yet to meet a flower I truly dislike.

I started wondering about perfume reviews. Imagine a peony scent that captures the essence of one specific variety but gets panned because it doesn’t match the chemically peony smell people expect. Where’s the peony, they’ll ask. It might be right there, just not their version of it.

Peony & Peppercorn is synthetic but soothing, like a spa. It has a soft, sweet, slightly lemony freshness with a faint aquatic undertone. I never pick up the pepper, though some reviewers insist it’s there. After smelling over thirty peony types today, I can say none of them smelled like what’s in the bottle. Still, some came close enough that I’d call it a decent abstract version, especially if you're not aiming for realism.

But what about the indolic peonies, the darker ones, often purplish-red, or even coral-pink like Coral Sunset, which has a strange, stale edge to it? These are a world apart from the light, lemony Bartzella or Austin Pride. The scent range is huge. From citrus-clean to animalic-rich, peonies test the limits of what we think a flower should smell like. Luca Turin once said only bees, not people, should smell like flowers. But with so many variations, surely there's a peony out there for everyone.

This variety presents a real challenge for perfumers. Go light and lemony, and some will say it doesn't smell like peony at all. Go deep and indolic, and jasmine lovers might feel tricked. The middle ground, pale pink and white peonies with soft, sweet, slightly rosy aromas, is probably the safest choice. It’s where something like Peony & Peppercorn fits in. Not a literal replica, but a stylized blend that suggests peony without being any single one.

All of this points to how narrow our expectations have become. We want floral perfumes to fit a clean, familiar mold. But nature doesn’t work like that. Lilac can smell pink or white, and those don’t smell alike. Roses might be rich and velvety or bright and citrusy. The tea rose is sweet and green, while a wild rose is light and minty. So when someone asks for a rose perfume, the real question is, which rose?

Some believe abstract florals are best for this reason. They don’t try to copy one flower, but aim to create an impression. Take Nautica Voyage, for example. Though it’s sold as an aquatic, it’s actually an abstract green floral. When I wore it to work, I kept catching petal-like whiffs, sometimes pink, sometimes white, sometimes purple. Nothing distinct, but always pleasant.

Compare that to Tommy Girl, which features clearer floral notes: camellia, jasmine, apple blossom. Together, they become something new. A flower that doesn’t exist in nature, but still feels real.

I'm curious to try Creed’s re-release of Spring Flower. Reviews are split. Some describe it as sweet and fresh. Others say it smells outright poopy. A few Fragrantica users complain that their expensive blind buys ended up too animalic to wear. I remember the original from the 1990s as crisp and fresh, maybe a little sour, but never indolic. If the new version is dirtier and more complex, even better. In perfumery, one person’s scrubber is another’s holy grail.

And nowhere is that truer than with florals. One person’s perfect peony might not even register as peony to someone else. And maybe that’s the whole point. Nature doesn’t stick to a formula. Neither should perfume.

What Makes a Perfumer a Perfumer?

I watched a brief documentary on Pierre Bourdon in which he described his mindset as a perfumer, describing his love of travel and the arts, and came away wondering about him. What kind of mind creates Kouros and Cool Water? He was clearly obsessed with the latter. Throughout the film, he was shown sniffing the bottle and scent strip, staring out his study window with his mind's eye doing all the observing. What was he thinking about? What drives his inquisitive mind? 

I have recently gotten into formulating my own perfumes using artificial intelligence as my guide. I'd feel stupid admitting this if it weren't for another documentary that I watched about Calice Becker. In it, she describes being the Director of The Givaudan Perfumery School in Grasse, and intercut with her monologue are scenes of perfumery students formulating their accords in front of a massive touch screen that allows them to tweak proportions and have their ideas blended right on the spot. The perfume world has gone fully digital, and that is exactly how they're training perfumers.

If perfumery were simply a digital art, school wouldn't really be all that involved. But it takes years and many hurdles to actually become a perfumer for a big company like Givaudan, and apparently much of that time is spent cultivating a perfumer's personal philosophy. Pierre Bourdon describes the importance of reading In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. It is your assigned reading if you wish to study under him, as Jean-Christophe Hérault discovered. Why was this required reading? The novel, which spans seven volumes, depicts someone who connects scent to memory, and describes being transported back to childhood at the whiff of a food item and the air near the sea. 

This scent memory is likely what Bourdon wanted Hérault to absorb, and judging from the success of Aventus, he did. His compositions speak to people, just as his teacher's did decades before. But Bourdon strikes me as being a bit of a philosopher; his ruminations on life, on art, on nature, all seem thoughtfully abstract, as if you'd never truly understand them without getting to know the man in full. I imagine it would take several years to unpeel the onion of Pierre Bourdon. But then again, I may not need to -- perhaps I am a perfumer also. Maybe that is who I am.

So, what is my philosophy? What am I striving for in life? How do I view life? I consider age a requisite for success in this domain. At 43, I am still relatively young, but now old enough to recognize all the cruel limitations life imposes on me, and mature enough to accept them. Life is long, but life is also hard. Get up. Go to work. Get beat up for eight hours. Brave the increasingly crazy traffic home, and then take care of a dog and a partner, all while maintaining an inner zen. I felt uninspired for many years, unable to connect my imagination with any real beauty in nature, and thus incapable of processing natural beauty into scent. Being a perfumer wasn't in the cards for me.

Then I accompanied my partner up to her hometown in central Maine. Her parents own an ancient farmhouse up there, built on a hill sometime in the 19th century, and the property it sits on is a little piece of terrestrial paradise. Acres of meadow, some of it partitioned into a closed flower and vegetable garden, some of it open flower garden, and all of it lovely. There are patches of iris and daffodil, peony and wild rose, gladiolus and echinacea, crab apple blossoms and phlox and lilac trees on a sprawling expanse of green grass ringed with pine. They have several man-made ponds and bird feeders, which draw all sorts of little feathered wonders. To simply stand on their property is transformational. 

I come away from it believing something new: to be in nature is to be surrounded by the divine. What peace is found in lying under a blackberry bush, away from its nettles but close enough to watch raindrops filter through each layer of greenery until they patter around me, smacking into my cheeks? To not move for an hour, and observe each passing bee, each fluttering moth, each caterpillar nibbling along the stems overhead? Life and death are so cyclical there, in the proximity of divinity, that nothing corrupts their flow. One could imagine that blackberry bush is eternal. Yet nothing is, and eventually everything crumbles into the soil, becoming the soil itself, which in time yields new growth. 

After spending some time there, I came away inspired by nature. The scents of the flowers were vibrant and fresh, products of clean earth and good tending. The lemony lift of the wild roses, the dulcet sweetness of the lilac blossoms, and the grape-like purr of purple iris flowers all filled my lungs with a sense that there is simplicity in beauty, and much complexity in rendering it all secondhand through a perfume. It isn't that the formulas need to be lengthy and convoluted, no -- one must simply acquire the knowledge needed to ensure they avoid that fate. There are things that you can learn in school, perhaps by being one of the lucky that gets plucked from a pool of several thousand applicants each year to study at Givaudan. Then there are things that you can learn from years of reading and appreciation, by simply immersing yourself in the language of perfume, year after year, until eventually reaching a stage of intellectual Nirvana. 

I may be at that stage. I now view the possibility of formulating a masterful perfume as not out of reach. Artificial intelligence plays a role here, perhaps larger than would be considered "respectable" by professionals, I will admit, but still central enough to success regardless of how it is perceived. Through lengthy discussions and formulations, A.I. has rendered several formulas for me, formulas that I have viewed critically, knowing what the materials are, and what they're capable of. I've asked my digital friend to replace bergamot EO with bergamot FCF to avoid photosensitivity issues. I've queried it about including things like Helvetolide and Ambrettolide to enhance the quality of a base accord. I've investigated the radiance and power of high-dosing Hedione into a floral accord. I've looked into making a perfume "pulse," using irones, and not just sit there. I want movement. I want Creed-like intensity and quality. I don't want flat notes that smell stale and heavy and unbalanced. I want nature in a bottle, but using 90% synthetics. 

I'm starting with a marine rose perfume. It will contain extremely expensive rose absolutes and rose otto materials. It'll also contain a bunch of "booster" materials that will lend longevity and complexity to the rose, adding an ethereally modern element. The top will be citrus and tea; the heart rose and violet, the base salty-marine with a bit of melon. I know it doesn't sound original, and it isn't. But originality is overrated. What I value isn't originality of concept, but quality of construction and clarity. I want this to smell like a garden in Maine, and I will work on achieving that. The fragrance should transport me to that garden up north, where one can stand and breathe in the saline-saturated air, clear and clean, and use it to filter the bright glow of dewey roses. The perfume should smell rich and full, but also bright and fresh, and I want it to be of the sort of beauty that makes people pause and go, "Oh!" Their next move should be to ask for a bottle. 

Unlike Pierre Bourdon, I don't put much weight on a worldview that favors "the arts," nor do I think that traveling the world is a prerequisite. I don't need to go around with a notepad and scribble down every impression. I need to think about what I'm smelling, and simply remember it, and that isn't as difficult for me to do as many other things are. Surprisingly, my scent memory is pretty great. When I smell something remarkable, I remember it, and when I smell it again elsewhere, it takes me to the place where I first encountered it. I will know my fragrance is successful when I smell it and think, "That's it . . . that's the garden where I was reborn." 

Black (Kenneth Cole)

Some fragrance note pyramids I take seriously, while others strike me as marketing ploys, packed with alleged notes that don’t exist in the composition, serving only to mislead or confuse. Black (2003), in my view, falls into the latter category. I won’t bother listing its pyramid (“watermint,” etc.), as I find it largely fictitious. I also disagree with peers who see Black as a forward-thinking precursor to Bleu de Chanel or the standout of the brand’s lineup. Notably, despite its success as a mainstream masculine fragrance in the early 2000s, Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez omitted it from Perfumes: The Guide (2008).

My theory on this omission ties to my perception of Black: it’s essentially Davidoff Cool Water (1988), reimagined as an ozonic rather than aquatic scent. The resemblance to Cool Water is striking from the outset, surprising given how rarely this connection is noted. Black features a bold aromatic fougère accord of aldehydic lavender and green apple, with synthetics like Aldehyde C-12 MNA, Floralozone, and Helional creating a vague “fresh” profile that settles into a white musk aftertrail, dominated by the heart’s overpowering green apple. For six hours post-application, apple is nearly all I smell. It’s as if perfumers Harry Fremont and Sabine De Tscharner took Pierre Bourdon’s fougère formula, tweaked it to emphasize ozonic notes per their brief, and left the core unchanged. In 2003, Black may have felt trendy, but it always triggered a sense of déjà vu, as if I’d smelled it before.

In their book, Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez dismiss fragrances that mimic Cool Water without adding originality, and consider them to be olfactory complications to Bourdon's simple plot. This likely explains their refusal to review Black. Coles's scent echoes Cool Water but swaps its minimalist elegance -- marked by neroli, tobacco, and mineralic sea-spray notes -- for a heavier blend of soapy apple, wormwood (the base here is clearly the inspiration for Steve DeMercado's Guess Man three years later) and musk meant to evoke a woody amber. While Black appeals to fans of apple-forward fragrances, its reliance on Cool Water’s template feels dated and redundant. Why choose Black when Cool Water offers a purer expression of the same idea?

Panda (Zoologist)

Christian Carbonnel is the nose behind this one, and I have to say -- he nailed it. I’m talking about the 2017 formula here. Technically, I should call it Panda 2017, since the original was done by Paul Kiler around 2013 or 2014. But at this point, this version is Panda. It’s easily the freshest and most easygoing of Zoologist’s gender-neutral, masculine-leaning offerings, and I like it. A lot.

It opens with a cool burst of green tea and grassy, leafy florals. Nothing stands out individually, but they’re blended with just enough texture and nuance to give the air a soft, glowing greenness. Then comes a green apple note -- crisp, a little bitter, almost like a crab apple -- tempered by a hint of sugar. It’s not candy-sweet, more like the scent of just-picked fruit. There’s an earthy thread beneath the apple, never dominant, but present. Imagine a ripe apple resting in damp soil. That’s the vibe. Nothing here smells loud or synthetic, and despite civet being listed in the base, I don’t detect it at all. Maybe it’s there just to deepen the earthiness. If you’re an apple note lover, this is paradise. 

Of course, I have one caveat: you can get your apple fix for a lot less. Donna Karan, Hugo Boss, even Cool Water and Nautica Voyage, plus the fragrance in my next review -- they all do great apple-adjacent scents without the Zoologist price tag. So why splurge on Panda? Well, because Carbonnel’s take smells luminous, natural, and unusually lifelike. It’s a crisp-fruit reverie, bottled. If that’s your thing, and your wallet agrees, then by all means, go for it. I just don't have the scratch. 

Brut Splash-On Lotion (Unilever)

Closing out May, let's take a look at European Brut Splash-On. Here in America, we rubes are given tacky plastic bottles that look and feel junky and are in an unnecessarily deep shade of green. It's as if HRB thinks the darker color will help buyers overlook the fact that they're splurging on a great big bottle of cheap. But not in Europe -- oh god no. You fancy-pants Euros get the expensive plastic that looks and feels like glass and is finished in a tastefully subdued translucent green. 

How does your supermarket Brut smell? Well, after the initial alcohol bite, which is unexpectedly more pronounced than the American version, the Euro Splash-On settles into a delicate and very sweet sugared lavender fougère with wispy woody underpinnings, reminiscent of the Unilever EDT in glass (squat bottle). My war-torn nose sometimes struggles to get the full picture, but what I glean is that this is an "aura" fragrance, something any bloke with a few quid can grab in a pinch to send olfactorily subliminal signals of very civilized masculinity out to the world. An eau de cologne version of the Unilever formula, if you will. The irony here is that Europe and Asia, where this formula is primarily marketed and sold, is loaded with sophisticated and eye-wateringly expensive haute parfumerie, most of which fails to capture the ethereal beauty of this understated classic. You can find it across from the condoms at Tesco. 

This formula of Brut is sweet, gentle, yet nuanced enough to smell like a real composition. It "feels," more than smells, as if I'm relaxing in a grassy meadow full of wild pink catchfly, their dulcet aroma whirling past my senses on a warm breeze, along with a hint of English lavender from further afield. There's also a warmer hay-like essence, powdery and woody, just underneath. Truly beautiful for a drugstore pong, possibly better than HRB's here in the States. Now for a prawn salad and a bowl of Heinz beans. 

Brut Aftershave (Unilever)

I've used Brut aftershave for many years, but always the American formula, which comes in the usual green plastic. The Helen of Troy formula (Idelle Labs) was formidable enough and got it done until about 2016, at which point they lost the plot and pinched a penny too many, leaving little more than a sweet vanilla powder behind. Then High Ridge Brands snatched it up and did the best thing any company has done for a fragrance in the past thirty years -- reformulated it back to its pre-HoT days, circa 1995. 

But, as always, there is more than just one Brut, which at least partially explains my obsession with this stuff. The Europeans have their own formula, courtesy of Unilever, and it comes in the squat bottle, which also happens to be solid glass. Everyone knows perfume fares better in glass (and best in metal). Of further interest is how Unilever couldn't quite bring themselves to make it green glass, and instead opted for the cheaper route of coloring the liquid, which I find to be a little, what's the Euro word? Naff. But hey, at least they didn't do it to the EDT, I can't complain too much.

How does it work, and how does it smell? Beautifully, though not for nearly as long as the American version. The European EDT scales back the aromatics and amps up the woody vanilla, which really sings in the aftershave -- for all of thirty seconds -- before fading into the musky hum of a polite gentleman’s splash. Europeans pride themselves on being more sophisticated than their colonial counterparts, and this formula says, "I wear it for me, not for you." Very nice, and well worth owning if you're a Brut fanatic like I am. If not, stick with the American stuff. It's stronger and, thanks to fortune, smells just as good.

Brut Classic (Fabergé/Unilever)

My bottle of Brut Classic by "Fabergé" is the 1990s formula that was only sold from circa 1989 to circa 2000, after which point Unilever sold the North American license exclusively to Helen of Troy/Idelle Labs. I had never smelled this formula of Brut Classic until recently, having only owned several bottles of the 2000s stuff, which I was always a bit wary of. I'd spent years hearing older guys reminisce about how the current Classic smells like the original stuff from the 1960s, but I always questioned it. The fragrance smelled much better than the plastic bottle version sold in drugstores, but I felt it lacked something and seemed suspiciously thin in the drydown, a wispy white musk and powder vibe. 

The first five minutes of Fabergé's Classic smells very similar to the Idelle Labs reformulation, but the main difference that jumps out at you (if you have experience with the newer stuff) is that the vintage version has way more depth in its lavender and geranium accord, with brighter, mintier aromatics, and a sort of sparkling quality to the citrus and greens. The stearyl acetate accord really glows in Unilever's older version of Classic, and as it dries down the lavender remains lucid, guiding me through an array of powdery white florals and into a musky sandalwood and patchouli base that smells classy and overwhelmingly "adult" and sophisticated. Wearing it, it's hard to believe Brut was once the "cheap cologne" that anyone could grab at a Woolworths or K-Mart. Its projection exceeds the safety zone of three feet by at least another three, and its longevity is nuclear at 15 hours plus. Classic indeed, especially when you consider my bottle is the cologne and not the eau de toilette spray that was also available at the time. The Idelle Labs formula doesn't come close to touching this one in quality or strength. (The Parfums Prestige formula, also Unilever, is a different story.) 

It's interesting that Unilever kept the Fabergé marquee going for another decade after it was all but moot to associate the name of a Baltic jeweler with an inexpensive American barbershop scent, but I guess when a British multinational firm of its size buys something as iconic as Karl Mann's 1964 fougère, the incentive to maintain is there. Of note to me is how their post-'89 formula doesn't smell the least bit cheap or simplistic -- there's quite a stew of notes at work, and all of them smell sprightly, dimensional, and, for lack of a better word, solid. It stands apart from its powdery post-shave brethren, reminding me more of Trumper Wild Fern than Pinaud Clubman. If you have the cash, I say get this.