Revisiting Quorum by Antonio Puig (1982)

My Quorum story is a unique one. I last owned a bottle of Quorum in 2011. I got through 75% of it and tossed it. It wasn't that I didn't like it; I really enjoyed it. The problem was the citrus. I don't know what the 2000s formula of Quorum was comprised of, but it smelled great, except for the citrus note. That older version used a grapefruit note, which I thought was an odd choice, because if I accidentally over-applied it, the sweetness stuck out of the burley tobacco and piney woods like a sore thumb. It smelled awful. And the more the fragrance aged in bottle, the more pronounced that note became, to the point where I didn't even need to over-apply it to have the wearing experience ruined. 

For that reason, I hadn't returned to this stuff, until now. To my pleasant surprise, Quorum has been reformulated. And like Halston 1-12, it has been recalibrated with mostly natural materials. The ingredients list on the box cites patchouli as the foundational material, which makes perfect sense when you think about it. Quorum smells like a dark, sweaty man whose presence is redolent of cigar smoke and dried herbal grasses, its accords drifting effortlessly across the room as though it were nothing. The multifaceted nature of the composition could be achieved with a slew of lab chems, but why bother when one good natural will do? Patchouli is so complex and dynamic that overloading the formula with it and making it the first compound material is a no-brainer. Layer on top of it a healthy dose of bergamot oil—bergamot oil—and a kiss of orange oil in lieu of fake grapefruit, and the rest of the scent, which also includes some real jasmine and ylang oils, can manage. Clove, treemoss, and green synthetics help flesh out the drydown and add even more dimension. Quorum now smells even better than it did 15 years ago.

When I say even better, I mean amazingly better. This is Quorum living its best life. Every nuance smells natural and identifiable now. I get the fizzy juice of the citrus, the brawny spiced leather of the patchouli, the tobacco with its funky shadow lingering into the far drydown 7 hours later, along with all manner of subtle evergreen resins and garrigue. The atomizer matches the cap color, which is also different from my first bottle, and a nod to how deep vintage bottles were made. The only catch is sillage: Quorum is no longer a bonafide "powerhouse," and the abundance of naturals has made it a touch more polite than it once was, but as I said, it can still cross a large space and smack someone else in the schnoz, so use responsibly. I'm happy to say I approve, and look forward to keeping bottle #2 until there's nothing left to spray. 

Lacoste Original EDP: The Rise of Fashionably "Mid" Culture & The New Wave of Mid-Normative Chic

Smells the Way Ella Langley Sounds

It's tempting to say that we're experiencing the "enshittification" of everything, from movies to fashion to music and yes, perfume, but I'm not so blackpilled. Are Christopher Nolan movies the new avant-garde? No, unless you consider a 3-hour movie in which you can't hear the dialogue groundbreaking. Is country music making a comeback? Yes, but Ella Langley is the only real dyed-in-the-wool country singer on the charts today, so her 15 weeks on the Billboard 200 are kinda lonely. Has perfume become universally generic, infiltrated by the same three woody amber materials and sweet synthetic bubblegum effects? Without argument, but every perfume is its own case study in why that has happened. I can say the same for every pop song and movie since 2020. 

The pandemic is to blame, wholesale, for why perfumes are so gut-wrenchingly loud and synthetic (and tenacious) these days. Many, including many industry people, experienced severe losses of taste and smell, including their ability to sense some of the loudest and most chemical things. Those who would get nauseous from the smell of the janitor's floor stripper now pass without noticing a corrosive acid in the air. I don't have hard stats, but a 2021 mass eye/ear NHIS-based study noted that about 4% of Americans have lost their sense of smell, with a commensurate number reporting permanent loss of taste. This isn't a massive number, but it's also not insignificant. Imagine if someone walked into LVMH headquarters and announced that the customer base for perfume had unequivocally shrunk by 4% overnight. Tough pill to swallow.

But nothing is absolute, and even a 95% reduction in smell leaves a small percentage to sense something. Enter perfume: if it's loud enough, thick enough, and enduring enough, traces of it may penetrate the damaged nasal linings of Covid victims. Thus, perfumers are given briefs that are engineered to overcome the new normal of involuntarily insensitive noses. I can only imagine that Lacoste Original EDP, a 2024 release by Anne Flipo and Tanguy Guesnet for Inter Parfums, is the realization of one such brief. It is a study of Amber Xtreme in the context of the classic (now discontinued) unisex EDT from 1984, simply called "Lacoste." The result is a little disorienting, but once you give it a go and consider the situation in its entirety, it makes sense.

I once wore the original Lacoste fragrance, and my thoughts were simple: it was a basic sporty-green nouveau chypre sort of thing, with bergamot, lavender, galbanum, some piney/resinous nuances, and a heap of oakmoss paired with a popular minty musk that was popular in the 1970s, the type found in Jōvan Musk for Men, but dialed back against the moss. It was not animalic. It was fresh, very green, and weirdly basic and nondescript. It smelled great, but forgettable. It lacked distinction. You could spray it on, and you'd smell good for five hours at a low hum, but nobody would compliment you. Lacoste was essentially a continuation of deodorant soap by other means. 

This revival of Lacoste "Original" in EDP concentration is basically the same outcome, but modernized. I get a synthetic grapefruit citrus accord on top, rapidly mixing with intense violet materials that smell sharp and bittersweet for thirty minutes, very harshly. These eventually pare back to a resinous pink peppery accord that smells only incidentally green, with some nuances of pine resin, galbanum, and olibanum, and also a hint of elemi adding sparkly texture. For three hours, this accord both intensifies and expands, growing in measure both stronger and more diffuse. By the 4 hour mark, the fragrance smells closest to the 1984 fragrance, but the Amber Xtreme and Ambroxan carry this organic, soapy-green blob in a way that robs it of its subtlety and naturalness. 

Yet, despite that, it all smells good. It struck me while wearing it that Lacoste Original EDP is merely one click away from something like Creed's Wild Vetiver. The quality of the materials is pretty much the same. The composition is equally dense, almost candle-like, and the woody amber godzillas upholding its resinous structure possess a potency and vibrancy usually only found in pricy niche. Why are people embracing this style across all corners of the perfume industry? I think a reaction to Covid-nose is one factor, but I also think that people want their perfumes to feel solid and immovable, and ironically that sentiment in very "New Wave"—think back to the powerhouses, both feminine and masculine, of the 1980s. People then wanted what people now have. Loudness. Brashness. Back then it was animalic musks and intense neon florals. 

Today it's nuclear-grade woody ambers and bubblegum sweetness. All of these fragrances, many of the new Creeds included, smell very, well, mid. There's nothing special or particularly interesting about them, but most of them smell inarguably good, the same way a new box of Crayons smells good. The fragrance industry has found what some corners of Hollywood and Nashville have also uncovered: a sure thing in the form of a key accord that then gets grafted in not-so-subtle iterations into virtually every mainstream release. For movies, it's the CGI landscapes. For music, it's the 4/4 time signature from a pretty girl. For perfume, it's the sweetened woody amber. 

We live in crazy times, geopolitically and domestically, so getting a handle on normalcy demands a bit of boring compromise that it seems many are willing to accept. Such is the case here; Lacoste offers us a perfume that smells just as citrusy and vaguely green as the true original from 1984 did, but instead of using the then-clichéd tropes of grassy coumarin, cheap galbanum, oakmoss, and sanitized musk, we're instead treated to the now-clichéd motifs of fake grapefruit, weapons-grade pink pepper, nondescript green resins, and woody ambers from a B movie. The formula is different, but the outcome is the same. This is, for better or worse, a comforting thought. 

Remarkable People (Etat Libre d'Orange)

I smell nods to Edmond Roudnitska's style in Remarkable People, Cécile Matton's 2015 creation for ELdO. I think it's the curry and champagne notes. The curry is slightly sweaty and smells more like cumin, which Roudnitska favored in several of his older creations, including Femme and Eau de Roche. Matton preceded Remarkable People five years earlier with a scent for the same brand called Josephine Baker, in which the same two notes are paired. (Josephine Baker was the first edit of this scent and was an exclusive European Sephora release that was discontinued to make way for Remarkable People.) Structurally, it is all but the same perfume with merely a different name. One might deduce that she has an interest in creating a signature accord, a type of commercially viable unisex freshness built around unconventional spicy notes, and here she succeeds. Remarkable People is coherent, smoothly blended, and subtle in a way only a deft nose can manage. It's a pleasantly understated fresh-spicy composition that works well for me, albeit with at least one major fault, which I'll get to.

It opens with a citrus-infused champagne beigeness that is both bright and oddly warm, feeling the way carbonated wine tastes after it's been left out a little too long. Cardamom essential oil adds much-needed body and a bit of green woodiness, while spiced jasmine and Mane's trademarked Lorenox dominate the drydown, lending a soft, delicately textured synthetic woodiness to the base. The floral component wafts up to me throughout the wear, which lasts about eight hours, and the sillage is limited to intimate encounters, rarely straying more than three inches beyond my shirt collar. Despite that, I appreciate the way the curry, reading as cumin, adds a subliminal skin tone where an otherwise sterile scent would be. This quietly animalic nuance elevates the experience just enough for me not only to notice Remarkable People, but to genuinely like it. It's not super remarkable, nor is it something that will stick in the memory for ages, but when it's on me, I can settle into it. I also like that it suddenly had me pondering Roudnitska. There's something to be said for a contemporary perfume that conjures memories of a master perfumer's works.

The big problem with Remarkable People is the question of its target audience. Who is this actually for? ELdO is a pricey niche brand that commands premium prices in the luxury perfume space, and this fragrance is no exception. But why would wealthy suburbanites or urban tastemakers gravitate toward something so soft and simple? This kind of colorless freshness was once popular on a much larger scale in the 1990s with fragrances like Chanel's Allure and Dior's Dune, but Remarkable People lacks their heft and bone structure. It comes across as limpid, timid, and a touch watery. I'm all for plunking down big bucks for something well made and olfactorily compelling, but I doubt that Remarkable People clears that bar. It could simply be a case of faulty concentration. The current formula feels more like a fortified cologne than a true eau de toilette, so perhaps modifying the dilution ratio of the fragrance compound would do the trick. All in all, it's a good effort with the potential for greatness, and one that the brand would be well served to revisit at least one more time—and this time, with feeling.

Old Spice Obscure Ocean (Procter & Gamble)

With virtually no fanfare, Procter & Gamble quietly released three new eau de colognes in what it has loosely referred to as its "Signature" range, naming them Forbidden Woods, Midnight Moon, and Obscure Ocean, which is the one I have.

The psychology here is difficult to figure out. With Old Spice enthusiasts openly yearning for P&G to reissue lost treasures like the original formula milk-glass Old Spice and its sleek 1980s flanker, Night Spice, the question of why they chose to create three entirely new fragrances is a fair one. Forbidden Woods is supposed to be some kind of spiced amber oud, while Midnight Moon appears to be a candied gourmand. For me, that's a double no thanks. Obscure Ocean, however, piqued my interest, chiefly because P&G, for all its faults, has never released a conventional aquatic. Old Spice Fresh Scent smells like a harsh marine storm, overloaded with minerals and cold, stony notes that are impossible to identify, while Pure Sport is like a teenager's deodorant turned up to eleven. Neither fragrance is particularly wearable, yet I cannot help liking them for their quirky originality.

I view Obscure Ocean as a possible market experiment on P&G's part. It is plausible that someone in management took a close look at eBay and realized the brand could release a few "premium" fragrances in attractive packaging, place them on the shelves of Target and Walmart with almost no marketing, then discontinue them after 12 to 18 months, knowing the aftermarket would generate enough buzz to steer customers back toward the older drugstore line that remains in continuous production. I can see the future fragcomm commentary now: "Obscure Ocean? The name is strangely appropriate. It was one of those one-off premium fragrances that lasted eight or nine months before retailers stopped ordering it, then spent another three or four months clearing out the remaining stock. Almost nobody knows what it smells like because almost nobody knew it existed. Now eBay sellers are asking $100 a bottle, which is oddly making it far more desirable than when it sold for a quarter of that price."

How does it smell? Frankly, a bit cheap, but not bad. Spending $50 on it is unwise unless you're a collector like me. I actually think the packaging is beautiful, with a subtly textured illustration of old seafaring adventures pressed into the background behind a bold sky-blue band bearing the fragrance's name and Old Spice in gold lettering at the top. The box even includes the classic milk-glass ship graphic on the outer opening flap. They also printed a batch code on it, which is, of course, completely meaningless, but still fun. The bottle has a plastic cap, though it is at least finished in chrome gold, and the glass bears the familiar ship in matching gold. This is a strong nod to the Shulton tradition, the first time in two decades that I have seen P&G reach back to those roots for an entire product line. I fully expected the fragrance itself to be as pedestrian as anything else released over the past year, but I was pleasantly surprised by what I got instead.

Obscure Ocean is, for all intents and purposes, a Dior Sauvage EDT clone. It's not a 1:1 copy, nor is it trying to be. The semi-sweet salted melon and citrus opening is distinctive, supported by a strong linalool "lavender" effect that guides the fresh, fruity, and ozonic top notes into a Sauvage-like salty Ambroxan accord, along with what smells like a touch of Cedramber draped over a very 2000s suede-style base. I suspect it contains something akin to IFF's Suederal LT, dressed up with a surprisingly restrained hint of Calone and whatever that extra salty material happens to be. It smells competent, and I readily admit that it smells good, albeit slightly dated. The entire structure of Obscure Ocean, however, is paint-by-numbers woody aquatic, the sort of fragrance that, in 20 years, will probably be dispensed from perfume vending machines in Yokohama train stations to budget travelers who forgot to pack deodorant. It smells like the textbook definition of Western "guy fresh," viewed through the restrained lens of a 1990s Asian designer fragrance. It is not high quality, but it is interesting enough to justify its existence.

I suspect, however, that the fragrance itself is not really the point of Obscure Ocean, or of its two siblings. Once Obscure Ocean disappears from store shelves, the very name "Obscure" will appeal to collectors, and the unusual attention it attracts on eBay and other secondhand marketplaces will drive prices and hype high enough to strengthen the broader Old Spice brand. If that happens, it will give P&G executives one more reason not to release the fragrances that longtime fans actually want, in keeping with their true (and truly unfortunate) tradition.

Lalique pour Homme "Lion" EDP (Lalique)

When I ponder a brand like Lalique, I consider the bottles before their contents. How could I not? As a student of art history, I am well aware of René Lalique’s historically significant jewelry and glasswork. He was arguably the most versatile glass artist of the first half of the 20th century (he died in 1945), and his contributions included inkwells, hood ornaments, and the design and manufacture of luxury perfume bottles for fragrance industry giants like François Coty (Chypre), Mary Dunhill (Flowers of Devonshire), and Jacques Guerlain (Bouquet de Faunes), among many others.

It is with pleasure that I hold Lalique pour Homme, the original “Lion” EDP version from 1997, in hand. It is a marvel of vertical, squared-off Art Deco geometry with an Art Nouveau flourish in the form of a lion’s head rendered in reverse relief. Every detail of this bottle design is well conceived, from the gentle curves of its sides to its metal shoulders and cog-shaped cap, which is also bizarrely reminiscent of classical Greek dentil molding. It is possibly the most beautiful bottle in my sizable collection, and I tip my hat to the Lalique Group for honoring their legacy with this degree of artful packaging. Well done.

The perfume within is by Maurice Roucel, who by 1997 had tinkered conservatively at the periphery of the male fragrance market with the understated Eros Homme (1990) for Tristano Onofri and the equally low-key R (1995) for Révillon. It is no surprise to me, then, that Lalique pour Homme is a barbershop dream of a woody-oriental fougère, with a subtle, streamlined design of its own: soft, bittersweet grapefruit, lavender, rosemary, sandalwood, sugarless vanilla in the vein of Caron pour Un Homme, a microdrop of patchouli, and a powdery mossy musk. There is no oakmoss or treemoss listed on the box, but I do detect something powdery and oakmoss-adjacent in the base accord, which I will return to in a moment.

It reads as perfectly simple, and its material quality is high enough for me to parse each note clearly. It reminds me of Clubman Classic Vanilla aftershave, and by extension, Caron Le Troisième Homme, minus the jasmine. Roucel’s scent is frequently likened to Creed Bois du Portugal (1987), and I think its dusty lavender and sour sandalwood are responsible for that particular comparison. I can agree, but the two aforementioned fragrances outweigh the Creed comparison for me. Maurice Roucel is incredibly talented, and he managed to capture a 1970s or ’80s gentleman’s cologne vibe on a budget without sacrificing quality. His creation smells crisp and fresh, yet sturdily masculine, with dry herbs and woods. It is an olfactory statement: “I am a true gentleman.”

I love this fragrance. I have read reviews where authors contextualize it as “a dying breed” and “the last of its style,” with yet more comparisons to classics like Patou pour Homme, Cardin pour Monsieur, and Arden Sandalwood, but I am not so sure. Yes, the staid earthiness of the traditionally French lavender-sandalwood-oakmoss fougère speaks to that fading lineage, but Roucel cleverly added a very dry and ephemerally powdery orris note, like a pale gemstone in the center of an otherwise austere landscape of clean lines and muted tones. It hints at the makeup-powder iris fragrances that would follow.

The orris-laden Deauville by Michel Germain, released two years later, smells like a logical next step after Lalique pour Homme, as does the ambery and conservative Allure Homme, also released in 1999. Eventually, this desiccated and diffusive woody-floral style reached its apotheosis nearly ten years later in Dior Homme (2005). So it is not contradictory to view Lalique pour Homme as an old-school fragrance that also foreshadowed things to come.

Ultimately, it is simply a pleasurable barbershop fougère for me, something I will pair with Clubman aftershave on facial hair management days, when Brut feels a little too gauche or Azzaro feels too aggressive and macho. Lalique pour Homme is the guy who makes the girls grin by wearing a sport jacket to lunch, and who still has a landline phone in his apartment because his mom is hopelessly cellphone illiterate.

He is, in a word, charming.

Revisiting Lalique's Original Encre Noire

Summer Fields of Vetiver

Encre Noire is often referred to as a "modern" vetiver, and few can get through a sentence about it without mentioning Iso E Super, so let's just get that out of the way first: there's quite a bit of Iso E Super in Encre Noire. There, I said it. Let's move on.

Released in 2006 in a semi-opaque black cube bottle inspired by René Lalique's own 1913 "Biches" inkwell design, the perfume was created by Nathalie Lorson, an experienced professional in her second decade of high-profile designer output. It was a sensation almost immediately; the public embraced the glassmaker's "black ink" as if it were something avant-garde, innovative, or oddball, and its sales were brisk, with every fragrance community personality and blogger having their say. 

Oddly, few dwelled in any detail on Lorson herself, whose history includes her 1994 debut collaboration with Sophia Grojsman on Bvlgari pour Femme. After that, her portfolio gets a little hazy (rumors abound that she worked on something called Wish for Chopard, released in 1997), with her next confirmed fragrances, Dolce & Gabbana pour Femme, Boucheron Jaipur Saphir, and Chopard Casran, all appearing in 1999. Lorson has publicly mentioned that she loves working with vetiver, and yet had no known vetiver perfume to her name until Encre Noire, which I find interesting. While others may consider her contribution to the pantheon of vetiver perfumes to be austere and even a bit severe, I think it's a truly great vetiver fragrance that sits comfortably among its 20th-century predecessors in the genre, most notably the original Guerlain Vetiver from 1959. 

Spray Guerlain Vetiver on one wrist, and Encre Noire on the other, and it hits me: Encre Noire is merely an updated version of Jean-Paul Guerlain's first solo fragrance creation, and in my opinion, an improvement. Guerlain opened his composition with a dry bergamot and coriander accord that was puckeringly bitter-green and pungent; Lorson capitalized on vetiver's natural grapefruit facet, a result of nootkatone, a sesquiterpene ketone that occurs in both the citrus fruit and vetiver root, and used it to amplify vetiver's natural freshness in Encre Noire. Guerlain Vetiver only dwells on citrus for five minutes, after which it segues via tobacco into the main attraction, i.e., unadulterated vetiver, reputedly of the Bourbon variety. Encre Noire bridges its grapefruit fizz to a heart of both Haitian and Bourbon vetivers with what smells like a drop of natural cypress oil, although the effect is fleeting, at least to my nose. I'm sensitive to vetiver, and so even a suggestion of it overtakes my olfactory receptors and shoves me directly into its dense green thicket. 

Encre Noire's vetiver heart, just like Guerlain's, smells uncompromisingly of vetiver, vetiver, and more vetiver. I find that vetiver develops a sour quality with onion-like off notes, and I experience it here. I think the worst example of this is found in Route du Vétiver by Maître Parfumeur et Gantier. There, the onion quality is so pungent, and the vetiver extracts are so natural and concentrated, that it resembles the stink of sweaty, stuck-on-a-bus-for-three-days-in-Rome body odor vetiver, which is to say, not my absolute favorite kind. Fortunately, and unlike both Guerlain and MPG, Lorson's vetiver is fresher, brighter, airier. The root is there, but it's not covered in dirt and left in a wet clay pot. Instead, it's garnished with accents of citrus and evergreen, and the whole crisp affair is only passingly sweaty, which I can abide. The subtle but effective fixatives of base Cashmeran and Iso E Super disencumber the vetiver oils of their natural shortcomings, leaving a pristine, simple, and balanced fragrance that wafts pleasantly for hours at a very low hum that is unlikely to offend, even if overapplied. Encre Noire is, in a word, gorgeous. 

Vetiver will never be a "love" for me, as it isn't my favorite note by any brand or in any incarnation, but I accept Lorson's 2006 update to the traditional, straightforward vetiver genre, something that had, rather amusingly, gone extinct by that point in time. Guerlain Vetiver had always been the main reference for the material, and while I think it remains a very good fragrance, it smells of its time. Encre Noire, on the other hand, nods to that classic format while nudging the inherently dated olfactory profile of vetiver a few feet closer to the future. I like that Lorson did not try to reinvent the wheel here; she took advantage of vetiver's numerous facets and used a few key synthetics and naturals to highlight them and give them their time as her perfume develops. She extended the grapefruit/nootkatone facet on top, enhanced vetiver's woodiness with Cashmeran and Iso E Super in the base, and tickled the transitions with nuances reminiscent of green cypress needles, and to quote The Brownsville Herald, "That's all she wrote." 

Grape Raspberry Eau de Parfum Spray (Al-Rehab)

Smelling Al-Rehab's Grape Raspberry fragrance is like experiencing my own version of Stephen King's The Langoliers. I've accidentally stepped through a time rip into a past that sits empty and devoid of life, with every molecule of this past world lingering in a forgotten state. It's November 12th, 1988. The week of my first flu. I spent the whole day in bed, and at 4:30 pm, mom entered my room with a big bottle of Dimetapp Elixir, which she duly unscrewed and administered to me via tablespoon. Just as memory recalls, a bottle of Dimetapp Elixir is there on my nightstand, and the spoon rests beside it. Except mom and the child version of me are nowhere to be found. Feeling nostalgic, I unscrew the Elixir and pour it into the spoon, marveling at how closely it resembles alien blood. As I bring it up to my lips, I catch a whiff of its radioactivity: fakey-fake "Great Grape Taste."  

Grape Raspberry EDP spray is that exact flavor in fragrance form. Every sniff gives Dimetapp. There's no sense in trying to parse "notes" with it. There are none. It's just artificial grape with an acrid sugary aftertaste, diabolically potent and difficult to stomach. And yet I'm strangely drawn to it. It smells like my childhood, specifically the ailment-ridden part of it (I wasn't often sick, but when I was, I was sick sick). Perfumers usually overlook that sort of thing in favor of happier recollections. The impulse is to attempt romantic or adventurous angles, with all sorts of gourmand, fresh, dusky accords meant to evoke happy summers at the beach, or huddling under a baseball dugout during a rainstorm with someone who wears a totally normal cologne. But what about being a sick kid and ingesting a bizarre purple pancake syrup for a low dose of phenylpropanolamine (PPA)? Which, by the way, is now restricted due to young women developing hemorrhagic strokes from a much higher dose of PPA in diet pills. Good times!

I'm not sure if the rest of the world also used Dimetapp Elixir, or if it's uniquely American, but my guess would be there are massive swaths of Europe that would be horrified by both the texture and flavor of it. Likewise, the scent of Al-Rehab's Grape Raspberry is the stuff of nightmares, a dense, syrupy-sweet onslaught of synthesized methyl anthranilate, petroleum-based chemical byproducts of synthesized methyl anthranilate, and refined white cane sugar in a concentration high enough to kill a man. Jacques Bogart's Silver Scent eschews this level of crude bombast by allowing the orange blossoms from which its methyl anthranilate is derived to peek through and lighten its load; don't expect that level of care here. Al-Rehab has always been a garbagey brand that isn't worth the $5, but with this fragrance they've out-niched the topmost echelon of esoteric niche and given me, perhaps the sole inhabitant of this niche, exactly what I needed. 

Bogart (Jacques Bogart)

The house of Jacques Bogart was established by Jacques Konckier in 1975, many years before its acquisition of Balenciaga in 1986, and Ted Lapidus in 1998. Konckier's stated vision for the brand was "I create only for men." Bogart's 1975 eponymous debut had been, until recently, their flagship scent; it is apparently discontinued. Jacques Bogart has always been a European concern, with its main distribution channels snaking through the central and eastern regions of the old continent and across the Middle East, only appearing in the USA via the secondary grey and eBay market. Bogart, dubbed "Signature" after the pen-and-ink graphic on its box, is often likened to another major European export of the time, Paco Rabanne pour Homme (1973), but I think it's a little more accurate to view it as the European progenitor to a popular American mainstay of that groovy era, Halston 1-12, which was released the following year. 

Halston 1-12's resemblance to Bogart is obvious from first spray, as they share a similarly bombastic opening accord of desiccated citrus, green galbanum, lavender, pine needles, and mastic resin, but Bogart's notes are filtered through more than just the soapy linalool of Roy Halston's scent. Max Gavarry and Vincent Marcello's collaboration on 1-12 was a unification of Marcello's mastery of the agrestic chypre (Lauder's Private Collection) with Gavarry's unique take on lavender and vetiver (Puig's Estivalia), which resulted in an erstwhile barn burner of a chypre-fougère hybrid. Their other Halston chypre, Z-14, was an early "clubber" (Studio 54) frag, while 1-12 competed with "mature" colognes like Royal Pub, Kanøn Man, and Grey Flannel to win over the Republican Wall Street types who quietly bankrolled these brands and demanded something in return. 

Perfumer Maurice Maurin nodded to this conservative segment of American fragrance culture with an aromatic fougère body on a rawhide leather chassis. The distinguishing feature of Bogart is a finessed accord of phenylacetic acid (dank sweetness), Atlas cedar oil (fetid woods), and trace isobutyl quinoline for an unassertive animalic base under otherwise clean greens. Bogart is like a cool breeze through a wilderness in late summer, after the funk of high heat has dissipated, with traces of deer and beaver gently lingering on its trail. Some reviewers mention the inclusion of dimetol, but Maurin may have also tinkered with trace amounts of dihydromyrcenol, which is perhaps why many link Bogart to Paco Rabanne pour Homme. Combined with dimetol, DHM creates the same nuanced herbal freshness found in Acteur, Maurin's 1989 brief submission for Azzaro. Bogart is unusual for the brand in that it is the only Bogart frag that lacks bombast; it smells demurely green, leathery, and dry, and recedes instead of reaching out. Patchouli and oakmoss complete its far drydown, with cedar-centered woods growing only slightly funkier, and I appreciate the somber woody-green aura of this stuff.

That said, I actually prefer many of Bogart's contemporaries over it, and find its staid personality a little too reserved for my liking. If you were to ask me which is better, Bogart "Signature" or One Man Show (1981), I'd have to point to the latter. It's cruder, yes, but it's also crisper, grassier, muskier, and all around more distinctive and, frankly, more fun. Still, Bogart "Signature" is a worthy olfactory callback to an era when men in suits and ties commuted by train to New York City for twelve-hour workdays, indulged in expensive martini lunches with their attractive female secretaries, then boarded the seven o'clock express home to their wives and young children in Groton.

Silver Scent (Jacques Bogart)

Grapes, Gum, Orange Blossom, Bacchus

I've done my best to ascertain why they named it "Silver" Scent, but I've come up empty. I'd like to say that it was their "silver" anniversary, but 2006 is not 25 years after 1975, so that doesn't wash. There's nothing silvery about the smell of Silver Scent, so its name and the story behind it remains an impenetrable mystery.

Methyl anthranilate is a naturally occurring chemical in Concord grapes, and I love how grapes smell. Additionally, MA is found in oranges and neroli, two things that also smell great, so finding it in such singular abundance in a fragrance is interesting. When I was a small child, I was briefly obsessed with a pearlescent black plastic necklace that my grandmother gave me to play with. I'll never forget one particular summer afternoon of fidgeting with the beads and marveling at how their colors shifted depending on their angle relative to the sunlight. Silver Scent is the olfactory incarnation of that necklace. It's a blast of black grape soda in the first fifteen minutes, followed by the neon of an expensive grape-flavored bubblegum from the 1990s. But then, an hour in, it shifts to subtle nuances of Joop! Homme, a distinct shimmer of off-white orange blossoms that add a retro floral glow. Bend down to tie my shoe, and it's purple candy again. 

I've seen some reviews that denigrate Silver Scent as simplistic, linear, one-note. It does play one simple tune, but it plays it with an affecting innocence that lingers long enough (and loudly enough) to elicit suspicions of disingenuousness, like the chronically-caffeinated coworker who always blurts "Awwwww!" when someone gets engaged. At its core, this is a decadent fragrance, steeped in the richness of amaranthine fruits and the cheap dessert wines rendered by them. Only a person who has achieved enough in life to enjoy it could wear this and understand what it's saying, a trait typical of the most seasoned among us. Perhaps that's what they meant by "silver" after all.

78 Vintage Green (Banana Republic)

Whenever I stop at Burlington, I try to find a 75 mL bottle of 78 Vintage Green (I once saw a 5 oz bottle and passed on it, years ago), and I've had no luck. I suspect the original Icon line of Banana Republic fragrances is quietly being discontinued, as grey market stock on several of them has dried up considerably since their first appearance in 2017. 

There are a handful of 30 mL bottles floating around store shelves, however, and the other day I paid the $13 for one. (I could've purchased two, but I'm stupid.) My take on the fragrance: This stuff is nice, but weirdly redundant in my collection. Everything I'd read about it suggested it was a bright, vegetal-green hesperidic scent with a hint of fig leaf and a surprising amount of galbanum. Instead, it's a soapy and overwhelmingly synthetic rehash of Versace Versence in the first 3 hours, with a woody fig note for 2 of them that recalls Salvatore Ferragamo, before settling at the 6-hour mark on Linen Vetiver's mossy-musky base. The far drydown is identical to Linen Vetiver's. 

Worth having? Not for me. There's an astringent green tea note tucked in the opening accord of 78 Vintage Green that strongly resembles the tea in ck One Essence, but Gino Percontino's composition never quite convinces me that it's better than any of the aforementioned releases. While I'm not a huge Versence fan, Versace's scent smells more balanced. Essence is more natural. Ferragamo is more focused. And Linen Vetiver is softer and more dimensional with its warmer greens undergirding a summery floral bouquet. I simply don't need this particular Icon fragrance. A 1 oz bottle is too much. 

Pino Silvestre Black Forest (Parfums Mavive)

No release date. No promo copy. No promo, period. A perfume that was nonexistent one day, and everywhere online the next. No reviews. No conversations. No mention of it anywhere. Until now: I own a bottle of Pino Silvestre Black Forest so you don't have to, and I'm here to tell you about it.

Except there isn't a ton for me to say. Do you remember Green Generation Him ♂ with the opaque black bottle that came in a silver cylinder? Of course not. Nobody does. Parfums Mavive releases these things to five "farmacias" out in the backwoods of Italy and then discontinues them a few months later because, surprise surprise, they don't sell. GGH was released in 1998 and is a watery-herbal thing with fennel and orange blossom over a pallid derivation of ck Eternity for Men. It's an extremely rare fragrance. How rare, you ask? So rare that the bottle and packaging shown on its Parfumo page is my bottle and packaging. Literally my photo, cropped out. Nobody can find the stuff, and they're not missing much, although I do like it, and it does smell pretty good. 

Black Forest reminds me of it. Same sweet orange blossom over lavender 1990s fresh fougère underpinnings, except a denser and sweeter accord to reflect the cavity-inducing times we live in. A hint of cinnamon, a very light sprinkling of amaretto, but then minutes later, minty herbs, woods, "dark" greens that refuse to fully elucidate their intentions, or their identities. Lush coumarin, a mossy texture that smells entirely synthetic, and some musk, perhaps after the brand's own Black Musk? That one also comes in opaque black glass. Black Forest is interesting but challenging and reminds me of a Zoologist scent I can't quite place. I rarely wear Green Generation Him ♂ but I really don't foresee myself wearing this much either. It's not terrible. It's wearable, and I guess I could see maybe wearing it for kicks now and then, but Jesus. Talk about oddball. 

I imagine this will be discontinued in a few months, and prices will skyrocket on eBay in the next five years, after whatever limited production run gets exhausted from grey market sellers. Mavive's inspired-by nineties scent is better, easier, much more accessible. But what do I know? Somewhere in Naples is a guy in a Ferrari rocking Black Forest while his buxom squeeze rocks him. Let's hope he reviews it, so I'm not the first and last word.