3/17/24

Are Green Fragrances Making a Long-Awaited Comeback?

In the Hammock by Hans Thoma, 1876

Recently on his YouTube channel, Varanis Ridari spoke about what he perceives to be a possible resurgence in commercial interest in green fragrances, mostly in the designer realm. He cites the releases of fragrances like Hermès H24, Coach Green, and Parfum de Marly's Greenley as examples, and mentions that while none of these are exactly a return to the twentieth century mode of bitter woody-green masculines, they wander directly into green territory while also semi-pandering to the obnoxiously saccharine sensibilities of the contemporary buyer. He refers to a span of roughly the last five years as the time frame for this, and comments on the desirability of "green" as an olfactory theme. Like me, he frequently wonders why it has taken so long for mainstream brands to cut the crap and cough up a few emeralds, but hey, at least some houses are trying. 

I would tend to agree with him that this phenomenon is happening, although I would add that green fragrances will not make a comeback until the public has reckoned with what it means to wear a properly "green" perfume. It's nice that brands like Ralph Lauren are dipping their toes into things like Polo Cologne Intense, but there are a few things that must be understood for it to really work. Green fragrances aren't meant to be friendly and inviting. They aren't aimed at air-headed ditzes who wear their grandma's vanilla extract when their favorite drugstore frag runs out. Green fragrances are meditative. They are neither serious nor sunny; green fragrances are aloof. Picture yourself wearing a sweet gourmand. Where are you? Waiting in line at a movie theater concession stand, or at a carnival gorging yourself on cotton candy and fried dough. 

Now picture yourself wearing a cool green chypre. Where are you now? The sugar rush is over. The "hip" crowd is nowhere to be found. You are sitting alone in a wildly-blooming garden, surrounded by reeds and flowers, the trickle of a stream flowing nearby. Such is the feeling when wearing Jacomo's Silences, or Geoffrey Beene's Grey Flannel. There are fronds of tall grasses whipping around you in Creed's Green Valley, and a ski lodge villa of rustic pines dumping mentholated snow on your head in Acqua di Selva. These fragrances evoke a calming sense of nature, of serenity, of propriety. There are no marshmallow ambers or salted melons, but there is plenty of quiet. The man in a green fragrance is one of few words, but when he says something, he means it. 

The American customer is rarely able to deal. "Hmm, this smells like dessert. I like this. This one? Yikes, this one is bug spray. No thanks!" And so the green fragrance dies, while the sugared chemical amber gets twenty flankers. Givenchy tried to win Western hearts and minds in the nineties with Insensé, and failed miserably for the sin of offering men a little something called good taste. But to offer something never works in macroscopic heavy-handedness. It takes a gradual orchestration of social mores to recalibrate the undiscerning mind into accepting something that was once intimidating. I believe that there should be market penetration of the idea of what it means to be "green." A couple of retro-reboot toilet waters here. A plucky cut-grass aftershave there. A few colognes in twenty-seven ounce bottles that harken back to the citrus chypre ideas of the eighteenth century, and perhaps a Millennial beard balm that smells like cut pine. Steady as it goes, and after a couple years, a trend. Not a war won, but many battles. 

Now, that trend may indeed be forming, as V. Ridari pointed out. But so far it seems rather clunky and half-hearted. It's also going unnoticed, which perversely protects it from being instantaneously nuked by the corporate gods of Mount LVMH. I recently tried an Adidas fragrance (review pending) called CHRG for Him, an under-the-radar "sport" scent that cost me less than the price of a new bottle of Old Spice. It was many things, but to my surprise it was green! Unabashedly, unmistakably green, with more than a nod to the herbal aromatics of the sixties and seventies. That such a mass-market sport-oriented fragrance should adopt such a mature theme was both pleasantly surprising and utterly mystifying. How did this get past the gates? Why didn't some Millennial jackass axe the whole concept before it could even get modded into consideration? How did it get as far as a store shelf, where someone like me - ostensibly the average joe - could pick it up on a whim? The casual ease with which I was able to accidentally blind buy a green cheapie that smells good and doesn't devolve into ethyl maltol madness is stupifying. Eight years ago I would not have been able to do that, not if I tried. 

When it comes to market penetration, I have some ideas. American men need to reacquaint themselves with florals. Back in the Victorian and Edwardian days, it was commonplace for a man to splash himself with a gussied rose water after a shave, something with a little more staying power than actual rose water, but light enough (distinguished enough) to serve as an inoffensive cologne. Add a little deer musk and perhaps a dollop of rectified birch tar, and that same cologne could become a proper toilet water, full of crisp lavender and rose and orange blossom, yet anchored to masculine archetypes via a generous whelp of animalics. But those days are long over, and the intervening 150 years has seen the same man lose himself to flab. Sure, the A*Men counterculture and Aventus Revolution were interesting, but where did they lead us? A few hundred clones and wannabes, few of which truly survived, and little else. 

We need the toilet water to make a comeback. Men need lilac waters, and violet colognes, and lavender aftershaves. There needs to be a flower garden in the men's department at Macy's. I want to go to my local barber supplier and find at least three new lilac waters, all bottled in glass, with artistic labels and attractive colors, and they should migrate to Walgreens and Rite Aid. Clubman USA should be incentivized to compete by retooling their range, reintroducing glass bottles, and making their lilac water a competitor again. If more men are using rose waters and lilac waters after a shave, that will trickle upward to the designer realm, and from there into niche. Why are things like 4711 and Royal Violets by Augustin Reyes obsolete? Yes, they're cheap, but they should be spurring competition, not slinking behind rows of air fresheners in the sale aisle. 

From the wetshaver world, men might graduate to something like Grey Flannel on a Creed budget. We might see Chanel release an intensely green bouquet, after Insensé. We might see YSL release a bergamot/cistus labdanum/oakmoss chypre in a jade bottle. We might get a taste of Paco Rabanne returning to the days when it could define an entire genre, i.e., the aromatic fougère. Little designer brands like Adidas might actually get recognition for releasing something like CHRG for Him, instead of the tide of crappy cheapies in every rack store from New York to New Delhi crowding it out. I think it's encouraging that brands like Hermès and Coach are toying with green ideas, and I wouldn't discourage them. But I also think that piddling around with herbal and verdant woody notes isn't going to be enough the second time around. The perfume world will need to build a return to green fragrances from the ground up, which will take time, trial-and-error, and acres of failure before a profit is turned. Small steps will lead to bigger ones. We gents can vote with our wallets, and perhaps green fragrances will one day live again. 

3/14/24

Creation Thé Vert (Ted Lapidus)


The date for this one looks wrong to me; the frag sites say it was released in 2008, but by that point the IFRA (International Fragrance Association) had already banned a gazillion materials, and had severely restricted the use of Evernia prunastri, otherwise known as oakmoss. Creation Thé Vert contains oakmoss. But I guess brands can choose to adhere to IFRA guidelines, as Pinaud Clubman is like fifty percent oakmoss, and still found everywhere. As far as they're concerned, the IFRA can shove it.

Another thing that doesn't jive is the style. A green tea fragrance? In 2008? And it's part of the antiquated Creation line by Ted Lapidus, which means it's a direct descendent of something released in 1984. The box style and color scheme, the bottle with its wavy lines in the glass, common to all Creations, and even the weirdly built-in atomizer (mine is broken beyond repair), all of it looks late nineties to me. We're talking a time when folks were making noise about Y2K and getting into Bible codes. "Spa-like" and "zen-like" were phrases applied to everything, from foods, to beverages, to fragrances, and Thé Vert feels pretty "zen," with a delightful accord of green apple, spearmint, and, you guessed it, oakmoss! It doesn't get any more approachable or sedate than that.

The real reason I don't believe the stated release date is that Thé Vert smells too good for 2008. It goes on rather chemically and nondescript, with that muted green dankness that nearly every brand fobs off as "green tea," but after twenty minutes some interesting stuff happens. For one thing, the fragrance gets stronger. Seriously stronger, which is the opposite of what 2000s freshies do. For another, the green apple and mint begin to dance and shine, with a distinct sparkle and shimmer that only excellent perfumes made with above-average materials have. Lastly, the mossy base is smooth and satisfying, the perfect ending to something that feels timeless yet classic. 

Good luck finding a bottle -- the merchant on eBay who sells them for under fifteen bucks sent me a busted bottle with over an ounce of fluid missing. The rest are all going for over forty dollars. But hope springs eternal, and this perfume is worth taking a chance on. Get it while you still can, as it's been discontinued for quite a while now. 

3/12/24

Infinity Cassis & Fig (Aubusson)

This one is a complete mystery. I happened across it at a rack store and picked it up for next to nothing, and it didn't even have a box. I only bought it because it's by Aubusson, which is actually a pretty good (and very obscure) perfume house, plus blackcurrant and fig are two highly-preferred notes, so that didn't hurt either. 

Adding to the mystery is that there is literally nothing - and I mean nothing - about this perfume online. Google 'Parfums Abusson Cassis & Fig,' and there's zip. What comes up in an image search is perhaps some evidence that this fragrance was bought by Aubusson from another anonymous company that labeled it a little differently (picture below):


Whatever the case may be, this isn't a very good fragrance. I do get blackcurrant and fig from it, and those notes are rendered fairly well, once the pissy-ammonia aspect of cassis steps back. For me, fig tends to dominate in a composition, so that note rapidly overtakes almost everything else, and it's just okay (I've smelled a lot better). I think the two star players would have shined brighter if they'd been allowed to just "be" in this fragrance, but instead there's a chemical green note that sullies everything, smelling at once harsh and hollow. It's almost like a bitter leaf accord, but done on the cheap. 

Credit where it's due; at no point does this stuff devolve into crass sweetness or beige (off-white?) musk, nor does it rely on the overly-familiar lavender/citrus cheap fougère ensemble found in many unimaginative offerings since 1972. It's an attempt at marketing honesty in a profoundly lovely bottle that unfortunately doesn't quite forgive the bare-bones budget. If the green notes had been worked on a little more, and if maybe another three dollars had been pitched into the formula cost, we might've had something worthwhile here. As it stands, I think I'll be gifting my bottle - I could see someone with a different sensitivity to fig finding beauty where I found a headache. 

3/10/24

Replica Lazy Sunday Morning (Maison Margiela)



Lazy Sunday Morning advertises itself as being the smell of clean morning sheets and the fresh weekend air drifting on a warm breeze. I smell sweet orange blossom and a sort of transparent laundry musk, rather simple and direct. This fragrance opens with a crisp, silky feel, the first Margiela perfume to smell expensive out of the gate. Jazz Club and By the Fireplace were nice, but too linear for my liking, so I had high hopes for Lazy Sunday Morning. I wanted it to really perform (it lasts twelve hours).

It turns out that LSM is also incredibly linear, yet somehow I don't mind. Its transparent orange blossom is so pleasant and cheerful that I actually don't want it to change. There's also a quiet backing note of lily of the valley, which softens and greens-up the floral lilt just a little. I wore it out on a rainy day, and its freshness seemed to bring sunshine to the dank grayness around me. Orange blossom is an interesting note in that regard, a floral kiss of sweetness rounded off by a whisper of indole, with a ghost of orange zest loitering in the wings. As a fan of florals, I tend to gravitate towards anything that captures at least one flower's essence with some panache, and Lazy Sunday Morning succeeds. 

Is it full-bottle worthy? Eh, maybe, but I'm not sure I see myself buying any of the Margielas, at least not yet. While it smells good and it's definitely well made, it's another victim of its price-point. I don't see myself dropping the bucks for something I could get for less, and there's no doubt I could find another comparable orange blossom scent for half the price. Plus there are ethnic grocery stores in all the big cities that sell orange blossom water for about eight bucks, and I still have to do my shopping for the week. 

3/9/24

Checking in on Pinaud's Lilac Vegetal After Three Years in Glass


Back in 2021 I decanted my supply of E.D. Pinaud's Lilac Vegetal into the glass bottle shown above. I got it for five dollars at Home Goods, took it to my crib, spent ten minutes washing it out in the sink, and let it dry out completely before decanting. My goal was to see if I could eliminate the plasticky off-notes in LV, as decanting in glass works wonders for Clubman, and in early 2022 I revisited it. 

I found that the plastic odor (the result of off-gassing, a common issue with cheap plastics) had reduced, but had not entirely disappeared, and realized that LV was far more resistant to "mellowing" than the 1940s Clubman, which only takes a month or two to lose its plastic "ick." I decided to stow the bottle and let it sit longer. I figured the product was worth waiting for, and if it took a few years to truly smooth out, so be it. I have something like fifteen aftershaves in my rotation, plus a full, NOS (unopened before my ownership) vintage glass bottle of LV from sometime before the Nixon administration, so there was no rush. Lilac Water is the sort of thing that collects dust quite well.

The other day I decided to give it a whirl. Popped the cork, splashed some in hand, and applied it liberally over face and body. The result? Noticeable improvement. Its formerly aggressive stewed-cabbage top notes now smell powdery and very close to vintage, while the "pissy" musk is drier and not nearly as pissy as it once was. It now reads as a properly funky Victorian floral, sans plastic. With light application, a powdery element, which is even more prominent in the vintage formula, seems to be the main feature, and the musk is deeper yet less noticeable. Go heavy and the muskiness rapidly gets overbearing. It's like going from a gentle safety razor to Lizzy Borden-with-axe; there is no middle ground with this stuff. You need to go easy, it gives you no choice. 

The vintage stuff has a bit of what smells like sassafras in the powdery notes, particularly in the first five minutes, and the floral note is muted in the drydown. The current formula smells dissimilar to its predecessor when stored in plastic, but changes into something much closer to it after three years in glass. It's basically a hint of medicinal powder, a burst of lilac sweetness, and a synthetic deer musk accord that smells overtly animalic at the wrong dose, and simply like a sweet powdered musk in the correct one. I am sure that Lilac Vegetal is the only true surviving representation of Victorian cologne, and it galls me that Pinaud sells everything in crappy plastic these days, but I guess there's no sense in banging that drum over and over again. It is what it is. 

My suggestion to serious wetshavers who want to experience LV in its "pristine" form is to decant into clean glass, let sit for no less than two years, and meanwhile use other stuff. Come back to it when it's ready, and you'll be in for a treat. Lilac Vegetal is a pleasant and easily wearable springtime aftershave/cologne that works best when used lightly, and in glass it smells softer, drier, and rather like it never touched plastic. 

3/3/24

Moss+ (Commodity)

There is an easy way to know what kinds of fragrances niche brands should offer, and very few of them are in on the secret, but the art directors at Commodity most certainly are. What you might not know about perfume is that there is nothing original anymore. Anyone who tells you otherwise isn't telling the truth. With that knowledge intact, what would be a sure-fire hit that doesn't feel like direct plagiarism, but totally is? What would move the most units annually for a reason most buyers can't articulate, but know is true? 

If you take any mass-market hit from the last sixty years and give it a tune-up with superior materials, it will sell. It's that simple. Just ask Creed. Their entire success story is about how the brand took designer and mass-market classics, and simply remade them with more expensive stuff. Moss+ is that kind of scent. I sprayed it on myself for the first time, took one sniff, and grinned. It smelled of wonderful things, muted citrus, watery herbs, clean patchouli, delicate white florals, crisp greens. If the way its notes are assembled were original, or trying to be original, I probably wouldn't like it. But I like it because it does something else. It adheres to an archetypical formula, one which millions of men are exhaustively familiar with. Moss+ is a remake of Brut. 

There are several noticeable differences. I detect no anise, and there is lavender, but it is far quieter than Brut's. The white floral arrangement of Brut is also dialed back, with the greener accents dialed up. In lieu of coumarin there is an Iso E Super-driven woody amber, which achieves a similarly dry/sweet woodiness, but isn't nearly as rich. There is no vanilla in Moss+, which I think might have been an interesting note to tinker with here, and maybe they did in a mod and rejected it. Commodity's scent reads as a leaner modernized update to the classic wetshaver fougère, and if I didn't already own too many fragrances, I'd buy a full bottle, and maybe even a backup. Excellent stuff. 

3/2/24

Paper (Commodity)


Commodity releases its perfumes in sets of three (don't even ask), placing their "expressive" fragrances between the "personal" on one side and the "bold" on the other. Super-duper trite, if you ask me. I interpret "expressive" as referring to a perfume for those who prefer not to have mathematical signs mingling in their wardrobes. You're not taking sides; you're simply expressing yourself by wearing a regular, not-too-soft, not-too-loud fragrance. Commodity's Paper is intriguing because, well, paper usually smells pretty good, and creating a perfume inspired by it seems like a noble quest. Having spent my college years flipping through reams of inventive paper samples that were made to win the wallets of graphics firms in the bygone era of printing, I am quite familiar with it.

Paper is meant to be one of those spartan minimalist fragrances, boasting a simple woody profile of Iso E Super, cedarwood, and sandalwood. And yes, for the first four hours, it's pretty much Iso E Super all the way, that "buzzy" sheer aromatic effect of some kind of fantasy carpenter's shop, where the sawdust smells as warm and inviting as a fatherly hug. Eventually it gets a touch sweeter, a little foresty, and the cedar picks up a bit, but it only takes you through lunch. By the six hour mark the sweetness has bloomed into a distinctly amaranthine glow, like a halo of sandalwood surrounding your space. This is all very nice, very nice indeed. Even if you know nothing about perfume, Paper will give you the Cliffs Notes and enlighten you on the fly. Hard to argue with something so efficient. 

While I appreciate the understated beauty of it, Paper does have one problem. If you know nothing or little about perfume, it might smell like one of the nicest things you've ever encountered. But if you're like me, and you've been around the block a few times, Paper feels academic. This basic woody amber is popular in perfumery because it works so well, but everyone in the industry knows it works well. It is therefore unavoidably banal in such a bare-bones form, an accord imitated the world over. Commodity is offering the same svelte engine that has driven every department store masculine since 1976 (Z-14), and hoping you're new in town. Spend a day at Neiman Marcus and get back to me. 

3/1/24

Revisiting Jōvan's Ginseng NRG: Is It a Masterpiece, or a Cheap Gimmick?

Vintage N⬝R⬝G 
In 1975, Jōvan released its masculine and feminine Ginseng fragrances, which seemed to endure for the remainder of the decade before their eventual discontinuation. Jōvan is one of those weird drugstore brands that I often think could have been the stuff of greatness, if only it had held on to its best products. I mean that seriously. Grass Oil. Frankincense & Myrrh. Ginseng. Fresh Patchouli. Does any of this sound like crap to you? I guess it could have been, but a brand grows by offering quality to buyers. And Jōvan has grown, which is significantly better than just "surviving." Every few years it has something new to offer, and Coty has cradled Barry Shipp and Murray Moscona's now-fifty year-old baby with love (no awful reformulations, cheesy seventies image intact). 

Jōvan released Ginseng N⬝R⬝G in 1998, and I've often wondered if it was a reissue of the original masculine Ginseng fragrance, repackaged for the GNC health-nut nineties. This fragrance snuck onto KMart and Walmart shelves, and I was endlessly curious about it, always stopping to sample it. I thought it was hilarious, and a little clever, that Jōvan packaged it in miniscule 1.6 oz bottles that seemed crafted to resemble the similarly-diminutive herbal/caffeinated energy shots that were becoming all the rage. I also thought it was an interesting perfumery concept; no other company was dabbling with ginseng, and Jōvan used "ginseng extract" in the formula, so buyers knew they were serious, or as serious as a tongue-in-cheek brand like Jōvan could possibly get. This was a ginseng fragrance, souped-up for Millennials who were too young to remember the original. 

At some point in the 2000s, Coty discontinued it, only to reissue it a few years later with slightly different packaging. Gone was the holographic box and the 1.6 oz bottle size (only the 1 oz size remained). Gone was the framed label on the bottle, now made smaller and plainer, with only the name of the fragrance in holograph. The new look was obviously a budget cut, but the fragrance smelled exactly as it used to, so it didn't worry me. What does Ginseng N⬝R⬝G smell like? I reviewed it a few years ago, and mentioned that it reminds me of chlorinated swimming pools, that stinging feeling when you get water up your nose at the local YMCA. A more generous interpretation would be that it's a pleasant nineties "freshie" with notably nineties accords of green tea, violet leaf, fig leaf, tonka, woody amber, and musk. Oh, and ginseng, definitely ginseng. 

Ginseng N⬝R⬝G manages to do something interesting, however. The central accord of bitter-woody ginseng against a soft backdrop of pallid florals and musks plays like a harp from olfactory heaven when you catch it just right. The fragrance is surprisingly strong, which may account for why it's in such small bottles, yet the green notes, usually the sharp-vegetal piece of any bucolic fragrance theme, are invariably sweet and smooth, while the typically genteel ensemble of "buzzy" woods are the aggressors. The tea note is nuclear strength, yet also floral and sappy in its bombast, and the somewhat dank woodiness of ginseng seems a background player. At first sniff you would think it's just "cheap," but give it time and things start to seem a bit off-kilter. Why is the fig blended so tightly? Normally fig leaps out at me and becomes the only thing I can smell, but here it vanishes into the abstract paperings of nectarous greens. 

Likewise, drugstore musks are usually "fuzzy" things that overtake whatever finesse a cheap frag might offer and change it into a monotone blah. Ginseng N⬝R⬝G's musk is fuzzy all the way through, yet its pyramid of complex materials never really loses ground. The tea, citrus, leafy florals, and ginseng are quite coherent throughout the ten hour lifespan of the drydown, poking through the musky fog to remind me of who's calling the shots. I don't subscribe to the religion of reformulations, or attend the church of batch variations, so my view on how consistent the ginseng extract is in Ginseng N⬝R⬝G on a year-to-year basis is as neutral as it gets. But forfeiting an ecumenical stance doesn't eradicate the need to know more, and I'm dying to know who put this fragrance together, what their motivation was, and how something so weirdly dated and passé could survive the decades with nary a missing note. Who is the untapped genius behind this budget marvel? 

One could view the "Panax ginseng extract" as a gimmick, but it's really not. Let's face it, a perfume that advertises itself as containing a material should contain the actual material, and this one does. Not only that, but the fragrance doesn't resemble anything else on the market, then and now. I don't sniff Ginseng N⬝R⬝G and say, "Okay, another Cool Water," or "Yep, there's Acqua di Gio." No other fresh Millennial sneaker juice comes to mind when I smell this stuff. It's like I'm experiencing a fragrance in a cultural vacuum; there are no obvious comparatives, and thus the impossible was inexplicably achieved. 

2/26/24

Nineteen-Eighties Old Spice is Not Like Other Old Spice.


I recently picked this up for two dollars from a lady who must've had it in her house for forty years, and to my surprise it smells (and feels) like new! Old Spice Conditioning After Shave, which is a runny balm, smells exactly like the liquid aftershave, but in the eighties formula, which was a touch brighter and spicier than previous versions. Of the 4.25 fl. oz. size, there is maybe 3.75 ounces remaining. This particular bottle dates from 1985, and is product id 3709. The product was introduced in 1984, and discontinued in 1987.


I say "discontinued" even though the product of Old Spice Conditioning After Shave ostensibly lived on until at least 1991, as mentioned on oldspicecollectibles.com. I have a bottle from the 1988-1991 era, which is dark blue with a flip-up cap, but the fragrance is completely different and in no way resembles Old Spice (it smells more like Icy Hot). The sticker on the front says, "New! Improved!" Yes, new fragrance, which smells like crap. Of course, the fact that it's thirty-five years old doesn't help, except the even older after shave smells just fine. So, not sure what that's about. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

I'm usually put off by old aftershaves. To me, the thought of using something on my face that expired decades ago is disgusting. My Mendoza Line for shave products is early 2000s, maybe late nineties. But mid-eighties? Here's the thing, though: eighties Old Spice is not like other Old Spice. I don't know what they did to the formula during that period, but it smelled fresher and crisper than previous iterations. I figured my nose and fingers don't lie. If the stuff smells and feels weird to the touch, forget it. Amazingly it smelled fresh (but vintage) and felt great, a non-greasy lotion that leaves minimal tack for only a minute after use, which then vanishes (they put alcohol in the pre-1988 version). 

I also think this product is much older than the eighties, and suspect it dates back to 1965, when it was called After Shave Skin Conditioner. A different name, but essentially the same product. They jockeyed that name around from that year to 1984, switching once in the mid-seventies to Old Spice Skin Conditioner, and in the late-seventies to Old Spice Aftershave Conditioner ("Aftershave" as one word). Why they changed the fragrance in the late eighties is beyond me, unless the stuff in my bottle is expired Icy Hot that someone put in there in lieu of the real product (why anyone would do that is anyone's guess). 

2/22/24

Replica By the Fireplace (Maison Margiela), and the Problem with Linearity in Niche Fragrances


Linearity is a blessing and a curse; if the fragrance smells good, it's the former, and if not, the latter. But what happens when a linear fragrance smells neither good nor bad, but just "so-so?" At what point do we decide that linearity is a driver of something other than one's subjective level of enjoyment? At what point is it automatically something undesirable? 

Replica By the Fireplace by Maison Margiela was released in 2015, which was when perfume was entering a new phase, the Era of Dior Sauvage. Enter the bazillion online chads who can't stop themselves from jabbering aimlessly about Ambroxan, because just saying and typing the word makes them feel smarter by a hundred I.Q. points. Enter the monster woody-ambers that trail the wearer by thirty yards and fill the workplace with something the locals mistake for bathroom cleaner. It was also a time when niche began to cut corners, with stuff like Ferrari's Bright Neroli legitimately competing with "high art" like Zoologist's Bat. The playing field had been leveled by the synthetic oud craze, which was revelatory in its bringing an ostensibly expensive material down to the department store level of Ralph Lauren and Perry Ellis, and thus a sizable number of niche brands began using designer-grade materials in unorthodox compositions to pass them off as worth more than a dollar per milliliter. Your nose might smell something cheap, but listen, it's a bizarre composition, okay? That means it's niche, so pay up or shut up. 

Maison Margiela, to its credit, avoided weirdness with this fragrance. Replica By the Fireplace is conceptually a staid affair, conjuring in its image and copy the comforting feel of a mug of coffee by a toasty hearth. It doesn't get any more conservative. And indeed, spray it on and you get a delicious blast of vanillic kitchen spices next to a smoky blaze, and there's even a hint of coffee atop a blanket of fluffy vanilla. The vanilla is the saving grace of this scent, which by the way lasts fully fourteen hours at full steam, so it's definitely perfume strength. The money went to the vanilla, which has a rounded and woody-floral feel, even in the far drydown. I have no problem with how it smells, but I do quibble with how RBtF performs; this is a very linear perfume. Let me state for the record that if a pricy niche perfume is aiming for linearity, the accord should be mind-numbingly novel. You don't need to up the quality of materials; Vicky Tiel's Ulysse is linear and smells amazing because its cheap accords form an attractive and unparalleled smell. I would pay eighty dollars for two ounces of Ulysse. At ten dollars, it's beyond a bargain. 

I wish I could say the same for Replica By the Fireplace, but to me it's simply too boring to warrant the cost for a full bottle. The way it smelled at six in the morning is how it smells at seven-thirty in the evening. The spicy nuance, the smoky woodiness, the lick of coffee (I get zero chestnut), and the great big vanilla musk undergirding it all is quite literally frozen in time. There is no movement. I enjoy it, but do I enjoy it for twenty-four hours? Do I want an expensive fragrance to keep beating the same three notes from my work breakfast to my midnight snack the next morning? It smells nice, and it's a comfortable fragrance, easy to wear to work or on a date. But it's boring. Vanilla isn't a challenge; perfume vanilla was established 175 years ago. Old Spice has an excellent vanilla note, especially in the Shulton formula. Any of your wetshaver aftershaves from the early twentieth century can do it just as well. You don't need to splurge on anything for good vanilla. 

So why splurge on this? I'm not sure. If there were at least two changeups in the fragrance's drydown arc, I could see it. Maybe the smokiness intensifies and overtakes the sweetness, only to subside again six hours later. I'm not even asking for anything new to emerge here, but I'm not really satisfied with the same-old, same-old "here's the whole tamale" approach. This isn't novel, this is a candle, or a room spray. I appreciate that it's pleasant, but if you're charging me $24 for six milliliters, it needs to be more than that: It needs to be interesting, too. I look forward to a hundred milliliters of this costing $24 at bargain-basement TJ Maxx in twenty years. 

2/19/24

Reformulating "Down"


Photo by JaneArt, 1962, modified & color-corrected by B. Ross, 2024

So, the Skin Bracer saga continues. On Badger and Blade the gents are claiming that the current version of Skin Bracer is "weaker" with "more alcohol" and "more menthol" than the version from just ten years ago. There is still speculation that it is discontinued, although some recent comments have firmed up the notion that Colgate-Palmolive are still manufacturing and distributing it. So, some relief on that front.

When it comes to reformulations, there are two ways to think of them. Let's use the above picture of the girl(s) in the water as a reference. Some men think of reformulations as taking the largest girl, stripping her of most or all color, and fuzzing her out by removing information from the image. You could start small (the girl on the bottom right) and wind up big (top left) and have a big blob of a scent that in no way resembles the beauty that once was. Most men think of reformulations like this, as the fine-tuning of their favorite fragrances being undone, until all that is left is the basic shape of what was. 

The second way to think of it is as the literal interpretation of the above image. You start with the big, beautiful image of a girl in water and you reformulate her "down" to the smallest girl. All of the notes and accords are still there, but smaller in concentration and in part, contributing less to the pyramid and the performance. Eventually you wind up with a mini version of what was once a grand fragrance, overtaken by the useless white space of excess alcohol and water. The fragrance that once lasted twelve hours and had a beautiful progression now lasts two hours, and on your ride to work you must focus like a laser to notice each little evolutionary stage, an exercise in frustration. 

This ironically tends to be how aftershaves are reformulated, while proper EDTs and colognes are subject to the first method. Aftershaves begin with less information, with their scent being at the lowest concentration (somewhere between 1% and 10% of the formula, and it varies between products), and thus the act of stripping them down even further is only possible if you attenuate everything. In the case of Skin Bracer, the starting point was likely around 10% or perhaps as much as 12%, and since 1940 it has crept down to around 3%. The bottle I bought back in 2010 or 2011 smelled like it was roughly 10%, and I would occasionally use it as a cologne, which actually worked!

The bottle I purchased much more recently did smell a bit weaker to me, and I believe a reformulation took place, but it was a reformulation "down" from what it was, not an actual changing of the scent. Colgate-Palmolive decided it wanted to spend less on formula annually, and so acted to stretch the fragrance oil across more bottles, thus reducing the amount used in each, probably by several percentage points. What the exact strength difference is would be impossible to know, but my nose senses it's significant, with the tenacity of the newer formula only lasting about ten minutes before becoming naked menthol and little else. I could never substitute Skin Bracer for an EDT now. 

So while I would cast doubt on claims that it is discontinued, I agree with the idea that SB has been tampered with. Is money the only reason, or are there others? I tend to think that products like this, which have been around forever and appeal mostly to men over sixty, are simply becoming culturally obsolete. The powdery and slightly sweet profile of this type of fragrance is pleasant to a nose of any age, but the cheap image and dated olfactory aesthetic make it a tough sell. I'd wager that women under fifty aren't super enthusiastic about it, although the crap that many women are wearing these days makes them unsuitable critics in my opinion. Skin Bracer is great, but its days are numbered.