La Petite Robe Noire Black Perfecto EDP (Guerlain)

This is a short review because there's really only one thing I can say about Black Perfecto that doesn't bear much in descriptive excess. I think you know where I'm going with this. For everyone out there who likes Creed's original 2008 Love in Black (LiB), but can't afford it, well, here's your fragrance. Guerlain's 2017 release in the seemingly endless La Petite Robe Noire (LPRN) line is very affordable these days at roughly $45 per 50 mL bottle, and it is 99.9% Love in Black. And, like '08 LiB, it's discontinued. 

The only difference between the Creed and the Guerlain is in the choice of fruit. Love in Black contains a somewhat abstract blackcurrant and cranberry accord that doesn't quite elucidate either fruit. Guerlain opts for a black cherry accord that smells perhaps a tick sweeter and a few ticks clearer, but which basically does the same thing. The rest? Virtually identical to LiB. I mean, these two are really, really close to each other. But the kicker is that Black Perfecto actually smells more natural, and thus feels a bit more luxe, and I can't believe I'm writing this, but I actually prefer it. 

The niche for this scent profile is hard to pin down. Guerlain's PR pushes Black Perfecto as the LPRN line's "rock chick" flanker, with supposedly clear accents of leather. I don't really get any leather. Instead, I get violet, iris—a ton of iris—and that dry, powdery, gothic gloaming of wilted roses and cedar chests. A haunted mansion somewhere in the hills, with a gorgeous widow forever grieving, still wearing the funeral dress from when her beloved died 140 years ago. Her dress, her hair, and her breath, all reek. 

But her perfume? To die for.

La Petite Robe Noire Eau de Parfum Absolue (Guerlain)

At the age of 44, I've finally developed a full appreciation for Guerlain. It took a while. For many years there, I wasn't convinced of the supposed quality behind their perfumes and was perhaps a bit blinded by the outrageous quality of 2000s vintage Creeds. We can't expect people to spend ungodly amounts of time macerating micro-batches, nor can we demand that they spend insane amounts of money on unnecessarily premium materials to make said micro-batches, so a little maturing on my part was in order.

I came around to the La Petite Robe Noire (LPRN) line when I realized that my bottle of Love in Black (LiB) was running low and I didn't feel like coughing up $140 for another one. If you're familiar with LiB, you know that it's a gloriously synthetic concoction of cheap-smelling violet ionones and all the sweet musks required to achieve an intense violet/iris accord, and that this unmitigated trashiness is the appeal. It's so cartoonishly "goth" and dark in its brooding floral sweetness that it works perfectly on a guy. No Guerlains promise that exact vibe . . . but a few come pretty close. La Petite Robe Noire Eau de Parfum Absolue, released in 2023, is one such Guerlain. (There's another that actually comes even closer to LiB, but that one is for a future review.)

LPRN EDP Absolue is "rich college chick" juice. She's 20 years old. She's working toward her psych major. Gorgeous, not because of any inherent qualities, but because rich people can afford to be genetically choosy. And she bathes in LPRN fragrances. The EDP Absolue is just her latest love, and she gushes about it to all her girlfriends and wears it to class religiously. But here's the thing: this fragrance is complex and really well made. Like LiB, it uses the Biolandes orris extract to render its slightly bready iris accord. But unlike LiB, it elicits a wide array of comments from people around the wearer, ranging from "a nice fruity smell" to "smells like pancakes and syrup."

I even had someone tell me it smells like Axe body spray. This speaks to the loudness of the fragrance more than to any deficits it may have. While I wouldn't call it "top tier" Guerlain, Absolue inhabits the Made-for-American-Girls category of dumb-reach fruity-florals that influencers can correctly characterize as "elevated." Yes, it's just another casual mall juice, something best worn for weekend errands. Yet Guerlain manages to infuse it with a level of material quality and blending that puts it in femme Creed territory. You'll get the same mileage out of this as you'd get out of Love in Black. It opens with bright, juicy cherry. Smells stunning. Laced through the juiciness is violet, which balances the tanginess with some floral sharpness. I also get the orris and a pleasant pink rose that doesn't smack you over the head. It slides like fine silk along steampunk sugared-cherry curves, a floral texture more than a living bloom.

There's a freshness that lifts the composition into another hemisphere, and that freshness is black tea. It's a touch tannic and smoky, even a little aquatic, in a freshwater way. There are subtle hints of licorice and not-so-subtle hints of marzipan, but then the heliotropin takes over, and a slightly leathery cherry-almond heliotrope accord carries the fragrance through the rest of the day. While not quite as pitch-black as Love in Black, Absolue feels sophisticated and sexually moody, sort of the way an indie French film from the '90s starring Juliette Binoche feels. Men can manage this fragrance thanks to its eerie aloofness, but wear with caution—this stuff fills large rooms.

Spectre Wraith Eau de Parfum (French Avenue)

A shot . . . of Espresso

Luca Turin once bluntly said, "Coffee fragrances don't work." This was after a year or two of waxing poetic about several fairly expensive coffee fragrances. It left me wondering if he'd been overly enthusiastic about the advent of coffee perfumes, only to realize with some chagrin that most of them smelled outré, chemical, unwearable. Thierry Mugler's A*Men was the world's first and only mainstream coffee frag, a mid-nineties attempt at saturnine gourmand accords that today reads as a bit harsh and crude, but back then was exotic and undeniably artistic. Its saving grace was an intentionally chemical interlude between its minty-bright opening accord and mocha-bean patchouli base, which manifested as a "tar" note of indescribably macabre weirdness. 

French Avenue, which is really just the label name for a company called Fragrance World Perfumes, operates out of the United Arab Emirates and has a small niche line of "clone" fragrances under the Spectre moniker. These include Spectre and Spectre Ghost (both 2023). While Spectre gets some cult love for its rendition of Matière Première's Falcon Leather, and Spectre Ghost gets oodles of heart emoji for being a damned close chromo of Ani, Nishane's brown study in wet oils, Spectre Wraith (2024) straddles the midline in popularity, garnering faithful adherents on one side, and dismissive regrets on the other. Ostensibly a copy of By Kilian's Black Phantom, Wraith aims to be a sultry coffee-based gourmand. I will say that its bottling presentation is one of the most creative I've ever seen. Wraith's matte black bottle, "shot" by a bullet that retained its casing, is striking. 

The fragrance matches. Wraith opens with a semisweet cherry cordial accord, rather like one of those pricy dark chocolates with the even darker fruit filling, and in those first five minutes, Wraith smells quite mesmerizing. It's like Wayne Szalinski shrunk me down to the size of an ant, took a bite from just such a choco-cherry confection, and dropped a glob of it on my head. It surrounds me in a rich haze of mellow sweetness, and I have to admit, it's pretty amazing. If it stopped there, I'd say it's merely a unique but linear crowdpleaser, but it doesn't stop there. The whole things morphs into an esoteric niche frag of black coffee with buttercream, and smells like a smoother and more refined version of A*Men's tar. This is something that will appeal to a relatively small subset of fragrance aficionados, and it should—it's abstruse but beautifully made, and perfect for cold autumn and winter evenings. This coffee fragrance does work. 

Drakkar Intense (Guy Laroche)

Jason Dean: "I knew this stuff would be
Too intense for her." Heather Chandler:
"In-tense. Grow Up." 

Drakkar Intense is not a flanker of Drakkar Noir. I repeat: Drakkar Intense is NOT a flanker of Drakkar Noir. It is better thought of as a pseudo-modernization of the original Drakkar from 1972. "Pseudo" because, well, read on. I've never actually smelled the original Drakkar, so no flexing here. But a comparison of the pryamids suggests a closer kinship to that first Laroche masculine, and what I smell recalls the '70s more than the '80s. L'Oréal isn't aiming for the youngsters with this stuff, that's for sure.

They're also not aiming for the average guy, either. The opening blast is upscale '70s barbershop. European barbershop, if you will, and specifically Parisian. Scratchy greens, indistinct in identity, but sharp, and cool in effect. Certainly some lavender and rosemary, juniper and citrus, very tart and bitter, but the cacophony settles into a certain type of muddled, somewhat coumarinic sweetness that vintage fanatics who are familiar with old-school masculines will immediately recognize. It's sort of floral, sort of hay-like, and rather akin to the romanticized idea of a sunset in the countryside, if you could bottle it. Think forgotten gems like MEM's Racquet Club, and even Monsieur Rochas. Intense boasts the same coumarin wallop, but not a contemporary woody-amberassault "tonka" that smells like candy. Any sweetness is from patchouli, and it's a little spicy from carnation, of all things. I also get some beta-ionone for woodiness, tobacco-adjacent depth, and a modern analog of macrocylic musks for the human skin feel. And again, being real: I really like it. It's anachronistic, but good, a literal blast from the past.

Gentle wisps of vanilla and amber add warmth and roundness to the base, and Drakkar Intense smells like a drugstore fragrance from 1972, which is early enough in the decade that it borrows heavily from drugstore fragrances of the 1960s. Many reviewers have claimed that this fragrance is "boozy" and "sweet," but it reads more woody and only incidentally sweet, like the crudely-blended naturals and synthetics just happen to have approachable personalities. It bears virtually no resemblance to Drakkar Noir and has precious little dihydromyrcenol, if any. I see myself curled up in a papasan, smoking shake while reading Portnoy's Complaint with the Stones in the background . . . 

Club de Nuit Élite (Armaf)

Armaf is making its move. The brand made its bones in 2015 with its first serious Creed clone, Club de Nuit Intense for men, an unabashed chromo of Aventus, and it hasn't looked back since. With varying degrees of success, it has offered the general public viable and in some cases superior alternatives to vintage formula Creeds. Club de Nuit Sillage (2020) is one such case of a better alternative, smelling rich and dimensional in a way F-batch Silver Mountain Water never did. Unlike other brands, Armaf doesn't just mindlessly cash-grab to take advantage of the unique circumstances in the superhot fragrance industry that dictate the dubious legality of outright copying another entity's commercial product. They put effort into making their copies more desirable than their templates. 

L'Oréal's first Creed release is Iris Debonair, and already the fragrance has positive buzz. This is a good sign. The big fear was that Creed's quality would take an irrevocable hit, and the magic would disappear. The truth is, their quality took some modicum of a hit when Kering Beauté took over back in October of 2023, and Absolu Aventus hit shelves. Sure, Absolu was a success and received favorably, but dig a little deeper into the feedback online, and you find that many weren't entirely sold. Even those who bought bottles and backup bottles acquiesced to the possibility that its lack of real ambergris tincture and top-dollar naturals was a problem, price factored in. 

The BlackRock era signalled that this change was coming, with the 2021 release of Wind Flowers, the first and last Creed released in a Chanel-style bottle with artificial coloring in the liquid (weird to see, as Olivier Creed still had a significant hand in production), along with Viking Cologne and the Aventus oil. But Kering really shifted the output and was aggressive in its approach, releasing 13 fragrances in the span of 3 years, starting with Absolu, and including gamechangers like Carmina and Oud Zarian, the former of which was the start of a new stylistic approach for Creed in the form of an herbal rose-jam floral. After Carmina, this novel rose accord appeared in several feminines, including Fragraria, Eladaria, and Kering's final release in March of this year, Wild Vetiver. 

To me, Wild Vetiver was an interesting release. Before I get into a summation of my personal opinion on the fragrance, I'll highlight how it was received more broadly: Creed Facebook groups and fragrance forums saw men everywhere expressing excitement that they were finally releasing a new vetiver, as Creed has always released pleasing vetivers, starting with Vétiver '48, and including the unicorn Bayrhum-Vetiver, Original Vetiver, and Vetiver Geranium. The anticipation was that Wild Vetiver would adopt the somewhat less natural post-buyout Creed style, but still smell green and fresh and utterly fantastic. 

You could hear the bottom fall out when it landed. At first, guys were in denial, saying they loved it, and it was their new favorite. But the enthusiasm faded quickly, and I started reading comments like, "I like this, don't get me wrong, but I like it better on my wife." Carmina's signature rose had returned yet again, this time having already been through the "dewy" pink peony Eladaria filter, and ensconcing it in oddly sugar-dusted green-grassy accords. Despite the name, there was only the faintest whisper of any actual vetiver at the 6-hour mark of the far drydown. By June, many guys were posting stuff like, "I like and appreciate Wild Vetiver, but it isn't for me." The fragrance that was anticipated to be a new masculine vetiver turned out to be a sweet(ish) feminine rose garden with woody flourishes to appeal to the "unisex" market that Kering was determined to corner. 

I view Wild Vetiver as frustrating on two fronts. The first: it smells like a greener rehash of Eladaria. The Carmina rose was spliced with a bit of Eladaria's pink peony and enlivened with peppery citrus, then made a little dense with "modern amber" in the mid, which to me was rather uncomfortably akin to what a Yankee Candle does when it wants to smell "outdoorsy." For a closer reference, consider the myriad designer offerings of the last ten years that attempt "green" while hewing to some form of nuclear woody amber for girth and longevity. This works fine in a $50 fragrance like Lacoste's reissued Original, which plays the same tune at a much more forgivable price-point, but when you're tacking another zero on the tag, one expects a little more. Wild Vetiver signalled to me that Creed's new approach is to take many very strong and expensive-smelling synthetics and arrange them into perfumes anyone else could make if they could afford to use that many strong and expensive-smelling synthetics. It's no longer about artistry. It's material sophistry. 

The second: Wild Vetiver is a green fragrance, yes, but Creed created one of those in 1999 that outdid all other green fragrances of the past 40 years, and it was called Green Valley. Fans held out hope that Kering would reissue it under a new name, but Wild Vetiver is not that reissue. It's cope on my part, of course. I could lose my delusion, let go of the past, and accept the present. But I'm bitter. Green Valley was a masterpiece. It was better than Green Irish Tweed. Better by miles than Aventus. Even better than Original Vetiver, although in terms of vibe, OV is closest. I can understand not reissuing Green Valley as itself, simply by virtue of not having two fragrances with "green" in the name, but give it a new AI-generated name, L'Oréal, and pretend you created it. I don't care if you strip out 90% of the naturals, remove the ambergris base (already a given), and paste in the new nuclear post-Covid synthetics. Go ahead, do it. I'll still love you for bringing Green Valley back from the dead. The foibles of the past decade would be forgotten. 

But, so far, nobody has done that. Kering's farewell shot was Wild Vetiver, and I had smelled Carmina's rose in a few iterations, so encountering it in Wild Vetiver didn't thrill me. With that said, I recognize something now that Armaf also spotted, probably years ago: it's easier than ever to clone a Creed these days. When you don't have layers of natural tinctures and real ambergris to contend with, the challenge changes completely. At this point, Armaf can utilize the newer multi-tier GC/LC-MS and chemical analysis AI to dissect the exact Creed formula. When a new one is comprised, they can do a bang-up job of buying the same materials for their carbon copy and release it at a tenth of the price. Gone are the days when Creed would source small-farm oils for things like petitgrain, neroli, juniper berry. Now it's just any designer-grade natural oil of modest quality, utterly attainable by the likes of Armaf. And they show up in Club de Nuit Élite's ingredients list, which cites several naturals, including May rose and juniper oils. 

Armaf also included the Carmina rose, virtually identical to the flower in Carmina. Here, one should understand the truth: Kering derived this rose from Armaf. Club de Nuit Intense for women contains that exact rose, and it was released several years before Carmina. Creed added its accents of lavender oil and orange marmalade, which I guess was to disguise this familiar accord and make it Creed's own, and Armaf has since adopted hints of those and tucked them into the May rose found in Élite. I will say that the main difference between Wild Vetiver and Élite, to my nose, is that the rose in the latter does not possess the peony angle of the rose in the former. Élite hews closer to Carmina than to Eladaria. Armaf's fragrance opens with a piquant citrus in the same vein as Wild Vetiver, but perhaps a touch greener and less spicy, which I think is a plus. The lack of heavy-handed pepper tones down the Yankee Candle association. The citrus is soft and fresh, and the first five minutes of Élite are pleasantly green and masculine in feel. Many have commented on there being a green tea note, but I smell a nondescript grassiness with pert juniper and vetiver accents even in the top, and don't really sense any tea. 

The rose accord steps forward fairly quickly, and while it isn't shy, it also isn't as central as in Wild Vetiver, and manages to share the olfactory space with subtle wafts of grassy tones, black currant, a pleasant geranium leaf that gives a little eucalyptus nuance, a bit of piney juniper berry, and Armaf's signature black ambergris reconstruction, which I appreciate for its technical precision beyond just slapping Ambroxan into the mix. The marine quality is only slightly more pronounced in Élite than it is in Wild Vetiver, but Armaf still remained true to the Creed's sugar-dusted woody amber. I say "dusted" because this isn't a dessert-cart amber, nor was it one in the Creed. It's just a bit of a sweetness to complement the woody, patchouli-adjacent intensity of modern amber molecules. I also feel some mineralic nuances, and just as I did with Wild Vetiver, I feel like Élite is expressing the idea of tasting a sweet after a picnic lunch in a field of vetiver and wild roses. Again, vetiver ripples in a breeze behind that very attractive rose.

And here is where Armaf is making the right moves: Élite does something better than the Creed it emulates by employing a true wild rose note, alongside the aforementioned darker rose. If you're familiar with wild roses, Rosa rugosa, you know that they possess a distinctly lemony freshness that undergirds the more typical rosy richness. Their citrusy quality coalesces with the floral sugars into something uniquely green and fresh, and it blends with the leaves and stem of the plant to make sniffing it a profound religious experience. If you want to smell it in all its glory, try Zoologist's Dragonfly Edition 2021, which is a deep meditation on wild roses. I'm familiar with them because my partner's father grows them in his garden in Maine. The flower is also found in Armaf's Club de Nuit Élite, and my goodness, what an upgrade. Why Kering didn't use this same rose in Wild Vetiver is beyond me, because if they had, my opinion of it would've been different. Instead, I find it here in a $60 fragrance, and for once, Armaf has not only outdone Creed in general execution, but outsmarted them in their choice of notes. Those who like Wild Vetiver might like it less after smelling Élite. 

And then there's the last thing, which is that Wild Vetiver doesn't do much with vetiver. Yes, you can sense some vetiver in the base, and it shows up around hour 6, like I said earlier. But in Élite, there are subtle flickers of vetiver all throughout the fragrance evolution. Élite isn't a vetiver bomb either, but it doesn't claim to be a vetiver fragrance anyway, so it doesn't matter. That it uses far more vetiver than its template says something about the level of intelligence employed in the perfume's creation. I'm no lover of vetiver, so I'm perfectly happy to have it play a low-key supporting role, surrounded by other things, and Armaf's fragrance allows it to exist with clarity without completely dominating. Very nice. As "meh" as I was with Wild Vetiver, I find myself liking Club de Nuit Élite quite a bit more. For one thing, it smells like a Kering Creed, and at no point does it smell like a Club de Nuit fragrance from the 2010s. The quality here is amazing. And for another, Élite simply smells better than Wild Vetiver, using the same high-end synthetics to achieve a smarter and dare I say greener fragrance. Two thumbs up for this stuff, and well done, Armaf. 

Is Deep Vintage Aspen Worth It?

Brand-new is left; Early '90s is right

My memory of what is now "deep vintage" Quintessence Aspen cologne spray is weirdly perfunctory. I'm referring to what I recall of it back in the 1990s. I didn't wear it then, but my best friend did. I just remember sleeping over and seeing the little green bottle on his dresser. This was before his Le Mâle days (he wore the hell out of that, and everyone in Connecticut knew it), when we were in middle school. We're talking 1993, and probably until freshman year of high school in 1996. 

Back then, men's cologne was potent. There was no hiding in evanescent citrus colognes or slapping on thirty-minute Old Spice aftershave. The 1990s was a decade of excess, much like the decade that preceded it, except instead of burly, cigar-box, patchouli-laden musk bombs, guys spritzed "fresh" powerhouses, which was literally Cool Water, Tommy, ck One, and yes, even drugstore darling Aspen. Dihyromyrcenol was huge, and Drakkar Noir enjoyed its peak years between 1989 and 1995, with every other dad and soccer coach bathing in the stuff (Drakkar Noir, by the way, was more popular than any other masculine fragrance, including Cool Water). 

Aspen was the logical entry point for budding cologne enthusiasts on a teenager's budget, an unassuming little freshie that cribbed directly from Cool Water and Drakkar Noir to offer a mintier, woodier, and drier take on this particular aromatic fougère theme. It inhabits a sort of halfway point between the sea-spray sparkle of the Davidoff and the smoky juniper of Laroche's fragrance, taking the green apple from Bourdon's composition and mating it to Wargnye's wry amber, while losing any overt aquatic tones and arguably nodding to Green Irish Tweed in its heavy-handed use of grapey orange blossom in lieu of iris. Aspen didn't last very long—maybe four or five sprays could get you four hours, three at a low hum—but 60 milliliters went for $7.89 at my local Wilcox drugstore, so it was hard to beat.

You can still get Aspen today for around $8, right this minute, if you hop on sites like Jomashop and eBay. It's dirt cheap in big box stores like Walmart and Target. It's branded by Coty now, with a somewhat hazy corporate distribution history that spans Barry Shipp and Bernard Mitchell's reacquisition of Jōvan, to their creation of Quintessence in 1988 (they were basically Jōvan by a different name), to their sale of Quintessence to Benckiser in 1991, to the eventual landing place of Coty (also bought by Benckiser) owning Aspen's formula. Some careful digging into the corporate filings suggest that IFF might have been the house responsible for Aspen's compounding oil, and even deeper digging links Aspen to Carlos Benaïm, who at the time was IFF's lead perfumer. 

Even deeper digging still (we're practically in China) points to the possibility that a Benaïm underling at the time named Franc Schiet may have actually been the one to author the final formula, but I can't confirm this. What I do know is that IFF was Shipp and Mitchell's oil house of choice in their Jōvan Musk days, so it would stand to reason that they'd return to familiar ground upon re-establishing themselves. I also understand that by 1988, Carlos Benaïm was corporate-exec tier, and not likely to stoop to making a drugstore budget formula for old Jōvan alums. This is why the Schiet angle makes sense. Franc Schiet had very little to his name at that time, and yet he was beginning to prove himself as more than capable, so the notion that IFF threw the Aspen brief at him makes sense. 

But I digress; Aspen of 1990 is a different animal to the Aspen of 2026. Not wildly different, mind you, but different nonetheless. To my nose, the chief difference is in concentration. Deep vintage Quintessence Aspen is at least twice as strong as the current stuff. I can get four hours of noticeable fragrance from my Quintessence bottle. With the same number of sprays, I might get 120 minutes out of the current Aspen, if humidity and dewpoint are just right. If I go a little heavy with Quintessence Aspen, I can easily get a full work day out of it, and I don't need to go nuts with the atomizer. Put the stuff on fabric and it survives. There's something to be said for a fragrance at this price point performing admirably. While it still isn't anywhere near designer-level sturdiness, it's at least a cut above your plastic-bottled Old Spice and Brut in performance. 

Another big difference is in brightness and depth. Quintessence Aspen opens with a livelier, brighter, crisper accord of what smells like a remarkable blend of lavender, wintergreen mint, eucalyptus, geraniol, lemon oil, and lemon aldehyde. The wintergreen note fuses to the eucalyptus to form a uniquely sour vibe that verges on unpleasant without ever actually tipping over. What saves everything is the rapid entry of sweetened Granny Smith apple, a mellow but incredibly clear element that both grounds and focuses the fragrance's opening stage. As the bitter aromatics, including the lavender, begin to recede, the apple gets stronger, now joined by that grapey orange blossom I mentioned earlier. With it are soapy green notes that weave themselves out of what's left of the citrus to peripherally resemble nuances of pine sap and cedar. A fuzzy drugstore-grade amber plays the coumarin chord to keep Aspen in the fougère lane, and this all settles onto a white musk drydown, smelling very MTV-in-your-pajamas, but with your hot female neighbor who wants to make out.  

Quintessence formula Aspen is, in a word, casually suave. Almost too casually, if you ask me. You'd be forgiven for smelling this stuff in 1990 and asking yourself (if you're a middle management dad on an upward-trajectory salary), "Is it me, or does this smell too close to Cool Water?" Even the square-shouldered bottle with the jewel-cut siding looks dangerously close to commercial plagiarism. Good thing they changed the color scheme! But wait—you smell it, looking at the weirdly blank bottle with the poplar leaf and nothing else, no name for the scent, no nothing, and say out loud, "I like it!" You feel you can project yourself onto that green glass, a successful guy who really can't afford to constantly re-up his Cool Water, but certainly can afford to re-up (and re-up, and re-up) this nameless beauty. What's the price again? Hell. Sold. 

And here's the thing: when you wear Quintessence Aspen, you've won. Sure, it's a cheap cologne. But it doesn't really smell cheap. The opening accord isn't a flat jumbled mess of notes that take a minute to resolve. No, that opening is rich and clear, and potent enough in the first half hour to wake you up and then some. For the price of a deli sandwich, you've got yourself a fragrance comparable to the way more expensive Cool Waters and Drakkar Noirs. (Nobody knows Green Irish Tweed exists, so that never enters the conversation.) Aside from a mild longevity issue, this Green Lantern can arguably replace your Christmas present 125 mL Davidoff, and nobody's the wiser. There's value here, with the word meaning more than just "I saved a bunch of money." 

But what does that all mean in 2026? Well, as much as I love this style of classic 1980s DHM-fueled New Wave fougère, I can't escape something that the Eau d'Ericas and Gents Scents of the world are keen to remind me of: this stuff smells dated. If you asked me in 2005 if it smelled dated, when I was fresh out of college (I should've graduated in 2004, sue me) and eager to wear anything, I would've laughed and said of course not. And I wouldn't have been wrong. The Cool Water scent profile, which was by degrees related to the Drakkar Noir scent profile, still possessed a modicum of street cred in 2005. Sure, there were several other things making waves at that point, and Gucci Envy was still fresh in everyone's minds, but if you wore Cool Water, you were cool. 

Ask me today, and it's a different story. I fully concede that yes, this type of fresh fougère smells very '90s at this point, and if it's your signature, people will assume you're either stuck in the past or old enough that it doesn't matter. I can't escape that any iteration of Cool Water or Aspen smells like a throwback. Yet they still manufacture and distribute both through mainline commercial channels, and anyone can still buy a bottle of either of these fragrances and wear it like it's the latest thing. What has Coty done to Aspen? Not much, actually. The biggest knock I can make on Coty's Aspen is the very thing I like in Quintessence's. It's the opening accord. Coty has neutered it. There are still some fizzy pops of lavender, wintergreen, and lemon, but the eucalyptus effect is completely gone, which suggests that several synthetics and naturals have been removed. It doesn't feel as bright, or as deep, or as natural as the deep vintage does. 

It's also notably weaker. While the top notes aren't as good, I will mention that after five minutes those would be gone no matter which version you wear, and what comes after in Coty is 97% the same as the original formula. Same big green apple. Same vague, soapy-green piney thing. Same warm amber. Same grapey orange blossom, and same inexpensive white musk. It's all there, and it's all the same. It's also somewhat weaker. You need to spray the hell out of it to get it past four hours. It's do-able. It's just not desirable. Where Quintessence Aspen felt like a formidable James Bond scent, Coty Aspen feels more like a weekend errands thing that you spray on after a quick shower and forget about the minute you step outside. In light of its bygone style, this might be a plus. 

This then falls to the question of, who are you? If you're like me, and you absolutely must have this style of classic fresh man-juice in your wardrobe, and you truly love the scent profile, then deep vintage Aspen is totally worth it, and you won't regret hunting down a bottle. I was very lucky. I found a 60 mL bottle that was brand-new and unsprayed. I had to really prime the atomizer to get those first drops out, and when I did, I could tell the bottle had been well stored for 36 years. This sort of discovery thrills me.

I will go a step further, even, and point out that if you only just appreciate this style of fragrance, then to find a sizable Quintessence bottle for less than $30 is worth it. You don't have to wear it much or obsess over it to be advantaged by having it. It smells great. Why not own it? If you wear it to graduation ceremonies or family dinners, you'll smell classy without smelling stuffy. Nobody will dislike your scent. 

But if you're just a young guy who is curious about this type of fragrance and doesn't have more than $15 to spend on cologne, Coty's version is more than good enough. Despite some downgrading of the opening accord and a slightly weaker concentration, Coty's Aspen is still very much Aspen, particularly in its heart and base. To buy and wear it is to buy and wear the legacy of this stuff. It still smells great, it still performs in normal conditions, and you'll still smell classy without smelling stuffy. Even if you're an older millennial like me, creeping into your mid 40s, and you're not in any way into old-school stuff, you'd be fine if the one place you strayed off your beaten path of Gaultier and Rabanne designers was Coty's Aspen. You'd like it well enough, you'd wear it once or twice a year, and you'd enjoy having the green bottle on your dresser (with "ASPEN" conspicuously printed in big letters under the poplar leaf), so no need for deep vintage, or even early Coty vintage. 

It means nothing to you, so why bother? More for me. 

Is Deep Vintage Cool Water Worth It?

Brand-new is left; Early '90s is right

Of all the fragrances in my regrettably ever-growing collection, Davidoff's Cool Water is the most widely misunderstood. 

Let me explain.

Those who actually enjoy and read about perfume make the inevitable comparison between Cool Water and its predecessor, Creed's Green Irish Tweed, as "Fragrance A" and "Fragrance B." In other words, two entirely different fragrances from very different brands that just happened to have been authored by the same perfumer. This is understandable, but a flawed view.

Consider this: a perfumer on the rise has an idea based on Pierre Wargnye's 1982 masterpiece, Drakkar Noir. It's 1985, and Drakkar's generous use of dihydromyrcenol and Dimetol is a New Wave revolution for the nose; everyone, from Giorgio Beverly Hills, to Givenchy, to Francesco Smalto, to even Alain Delon's celebuscent brand, is trying to build off its framework to cash in on the sales momentum of Guy Laroche's surprising flanker hit. The perfumer knows that roughly 10% of Drakkar's formula is comprised of DHM, and figures he can take the dry, smoky, deceivingly complex juniper-patchouli idea and rework it into something bigger and fresher. He calls his idea "A New Freshness."  

He tinkers with, toys with, and eventually pitches to Lancôme what he feels is a fairly well-conceived version of his vision, but sees it rejected. When an obscure niche brand's emissary appears and offers to use it, he decides it's better that somebody enjoys it, rather than nobody, and basically gives it away for a relatively small fee. That emissary is the late Olivier Creed, and the fragrance is GIT. It's a modest success for Creed. GIT becomes their bestseller, and it propels the brand through the decade. The perfumer is pleased (and likely surprised) by this, but he isn't entirely satisfied with the composition. While GIT is certainly groundbreaking, it suffers from two issues. The first is that Creed, despite its growing popularity, remains invisible to the mainstream high street buyer, and what the brand considers its resounding success is what behemoth designers would consider a paltry failure. Put simply, the fragrance is finding a small and devoted audience, but it's truly a tiny niche, and Bourdon's idea is yet undiscovered by the general public. 

More pressingly to this perfumer, the composition itself isn't quite what he has in mind. While GIT takes a considerable and Drakkar-comparable dose of DHM and thrusts it into the sinuses of bank executives and Wall Street trading tycoons, it feels too simple, almost unfinished. Yes, the green apple and lemon verbena of the opening accord help to temper the spiky burst of grassy, DHM-fueled greenish-yellow noise, and yes, the intensely rich violet esters and iris irones that comprise the heart smell distinctive and quite lovely to virtually anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex, and also, yes, the base of genuine Mysore sandalwood oil and Creed's clever little blend of natural ambergris tincture and Ambroxan is insanely smooth and expensive smelling, and the perfumer should be proud of all of it. But because GIT exists, the perfumer feels he now knows what's missing. He vows to continue working on the same fragrance, not to change it—change isn't the goal of someone who makes a living by creating limitless blends to find the right one—but to improve it. He knows he can make it better. And now he knows how. 

Or, at least, he thinks he knows. He tries adding civet. Nope, that's not it. He dials up and down on various pieces of GIT, adding and subtracting various notes and synthetics, and wonders if maybe he just needs to crank the DHM up to eleven and hope for the best. So, he does. And he is hit by a seismic realization: he can make Green Irish Tweed again, only this time far more crisp and fresh, far more revolutionary, and far more complex, yet just as balanced, just as green, and just as expensive, formula-wise, by also cranking the Ambroxan, a very expensive synthetic in the 1980s, up to near-DHM levels. 

So, he out-Wargnyes Pierre Wargnye, and doubles the Drakkar-like DHM ratio in his own fragrance to a whopping 20% of the formula, and also pushes the Ambroxan to levels not seen in any mainstream release. He swaps out iris for violet and violet leaf, letting ionones do the speaking in GIT 2.0, rather than iris butter, octyn esters, and irones. He swaps out Granny Smith apple for crab apple bitterness, dialing down the sweetness. Peppermint replaces lemon verbena. Calone 1951 is microdosed in tandem with the Ambroxan overdose to add a salty, sea-breeze airiness to the traditional herbal tones of lavender, which is in turn added to help give body and weight to what would otherwise be an evanescent violet concoction that most would struggle to detect. 

Coumarin fleshes out this herbal mid, with additional notes of neroli, Valencia orange, and jasmine creating a subliminal greenness that is, to the perfumer's mind, more sophisticated than the overly simplistic two-step of octyn esters and irones in GIT 1.0. The biggest challenge is replacing that gorgeous sandalwood in the base. It can't go in, not because it's too expensive (let's remember, Ambroxan), but because it's too heavy. Luckily, Davidoff comes along, and its German execs request a follow-up to Zino, their 1986 breakthrough patchouli fougère. Being an international purveyor of fine cigarettes and cigars, the perfumer sees the perfect replacement for sandalwood in a mineralic cured tobacco note, which becomes the grounding base material.

The perfumer, of course, is Pierre Bourdon. He is the connective tissue to why GIT smells similar to Cool Water, but he's also the only perfumer in history to create a formula that overdoses two fairly rare and expensive synthetics for the general public in a mainstream release. Cool Water succeeds where GIT floundered; Davidoff, while not a Chanel-level designer, manages department store distribution on a mass production scale that reaches Europe and the Americas. Millions of bottles sell. His wish for his idea to be enjoyed by all is fulfilled. And his goal of building upon and improving the Drakkar Noir idea is satisfied not just on a material level, but on an artistic level. To Bourdon, Cool Water isn't better than Green Irish Tweed. To Bourdon, Cool Water is Green Irish Tweed. It's Green Irish Tweed in an eau de toilette concentration, i.e., lighter, fresher, and not nearly as stereotypically '80s, nor as purple and loud. It's the same idea, perfected. And upon its release, Bourdon is done with it. He can take it no further, and doesn't want to. 

I recently acquired a deep vintage bottle of Cool Water, pictured above. It's a 75 milliliter bottle, and it's beautiful to look at. It's truly an artifact of its time. The script font of both the brand logo and the fragrance name is gorgeous. The greenish-hued liquid adds depth to the blue glass of the bottle. The oversized black cap is very late '80s, feeling akin to shoulder pads or a pompadour hairstyle. The bottle dates to the early '90s, pre-1994. I'll have to take a look at the code again, because as I write this, I simply can't remember it, nor can I be bothered to push myself up to look at it again. But we're talking deep vintage, and with that in mind, I fully expected the fragrance to smell somewhat wrong.

If you were to ask me, "Bryan, is deep vintage Cool Water worth it in 2026?" I'd answer with, "It depends on what you want to get out of it." Do you want to smell better than reformulated Cool Water? That's a tricky one. There have been a few different formulas of Cool Water, and the current formula is actually Coty Prestige dialing things back to the early 2000s. The late '90s millennium formula of Cool Water has been revived, but at a cost—the concentration has been drastically reduced. The current version is semi-vintage Cool Water at eau de cologne concentration. Regular application of four or five sprays will last you maybe an hour. But being a complex blend with several reinstated hi-octane synthetics, you can "stack" the current by spraying like a maniac, anywhere from fifteen to twenty times. Doing this actually gets you to ten, maybe even twelve hours of longevity, and the amazing thing is, it smells like you're wearing O.G. Cool Water. It's truly great stuff. Shame they compensated for the increase in formula cost by watering it down, but it's better than crapping out on the materials. 

So, if the goal is to one-up the current formula with 2000s vintage, I'd say it's a maybe. But not with deep vintage. Deep vintage has gone too long. My bottle was brand new, with an unprimed atomizer, despite being over 30 years old. This is as fresh as a deep vintage can be. Its top notes still smell wrong. Almost like glass cleaner, weirdly washed out and alcohol-ridden. This passes within fifteen seconds, and the familiar apple and peppermint accord appears, and it smells beautiful and very familiar. But generally, the formula feels faded and translucent. This is a matter of taste; you may prefer this version, but I prefer the late '90s and early 2000s vintage where the brand name was in block font and the fragrance name was in cursive. That formula, which can still be found online, isn't as old, and therefore smells more potent and dynamic. 

Deep vintage Cool Water is worth it if you're a collector, and you appreciate the reality of what Cool Water is. The deep vintage bottle represents a fragrance that is synonymous with Green Irish Tweed in a way we've never seen before in any other fragrances by the same perfumer. It smells closer to vintage Green Irish Tweed from the late '90s, which I've also owned. Deep vintage Cool Water also smells like a work of art. The art piece is in two parts, and both parts are great but slightly different, representing different stages of the artist's expression. This is unique, singular, and has not happened since. 

One thing I've noticed is the formula that preceded the current Cool Water has begun to smell like the 2000s vintage, adopting the same ashy Ambroxan and tobacco accord in the base, and a slightly unbalanced opening accord. The truth is, Cool Water doesn't keep especially well, and anything past ten years runs the risk of smelling undeniably "off" for a beat or two. The question of owning a deep vintage bottle is really this question: Who are you? If you're like me, an insane person, then it's worth owning, for all the reasons and all the evolutionary arcs and idiosyncrasies I've written about in this article. If you don't value your money as much as you value perfume, by all means, you ought to spend the $200 (I didn't pay anything near that, but I easily could have) for that deep vintage bottle with the all-script font and slightly oversized black cap.

If, however, you're just a guy like all the other guys who wear fragrance to impress girls, and your true loves are video games and football, then no, owning deep vintage Cool Water is not worth it. If you've only ever owned two or three bottles at one time, and you blow through the same signature fragrance bottle after bottle and are perfectly happy with that, like most normal, healthy people, stay clear of spending the big bucks on this Davidoff. Not worth it. Not a good use of your time. Just move on. I envy you. 

Hawas Ice (Rasasi)

The Hawas timeline is strange. The original fragrance was released in 2015, and was an instant success, ranking highly with the dudebros on the interwebs, stirring the chattering class on YouTube and Instagram, etc. I would argue that Hawas was just as popular in that space as Aventus was five years prior, generating the same kind of sexually-focused buzz, with every other guy claiming it was a "panty-dropper." Somehow I remained oblivious to it until many years later, which I don't regret. 

Apparently, Rasasi was also oblivious, because they waited eight years to release the first Hawas flanker, simply named "Ice," in 2023. Like, what? Why wait nearly a decade to follow up a smash hit? And it gets better: since Ice, Rasasi can't stop churning out Hawas flankers. Very weirdly, none of these flankers, with the exception of Ice, smell anything like the original fragrance, and nearly all of them are obvious cash grabs with no point other than to hook the Gen Z influencers into providing the brand with free advertising and millions in sales revenue. I tend to cast a forgiving eye on YouTube influencers because commercial influencing is, like it or not, a legitimate way to make a living on the platform, and if you're successful enough to have brands send you free bottles just so you can flog their wares on a monetized channel, more power to you. They certainly flogged the hell out of Hawas Ice. Nearly every influencer claims Ice is better than the original. 

It turns out, Ice is most certainly not better than the original, and in my opinion it isn't even as good. Where the original Hawas smacks my nose with its salty grape soda vibe and remains detectable all day, garnering occasional compliments, Ice just smells like a thinner version, with less grape fizz and way more salt. Under all the salt is a pallid fruitiness that rapidly (within ten minutes) fades into what smells like rubber tubing. Utterly unremarkable on skin and in the air, Hawas Ice only remains detectable to me for about four hours, at which point it fades to a very intimate skin scent. I'll again give credence to the YouTube influencers who praise Ice, and acknowledge that it's a pleasant variant of the theme, but give me its big brother over it, any day of the week. Not recommended. 

Hawas Malibu (Rasasi)

Brands, especially perfume brands, tend to do funny things. They release the same fragrance with different names in different regions. They take one specific base accord and build a dozen fragrances on it. Sometimes they market something as unisex when its packaging suggests it's anything but. And sometimes, as in the case of Hawas Malibu, they merely turn the namesake fragrance into a sleeker, improved version of its best self. Which begs the question: why not just release the improvement first?

Take Burger King, for example. A few months back, they released the "new and improved" Whopper, their signature hamburger. I only eat fast food a few times a year, so it's not like I could tell you exactly what a Whopper has always been like, but from fairly recent memory I'd say it was a large traditional hamburger with a surprising amount of fresh veggies that would get smooshed because Burger King only ever wrapped it in paper. I recall eating a Whopper once, thinking to myself: this burger is perfection, deflated. Then I tried the improved Whopper, and wow, what a difference! Not smooshed, fluffy bun, chock full of veggies, literally picture-perfect, identical to the image on Burger King's website. It tasted like a homemade grilled burger and was shockingly good.

My only thought was: why didn't they do this to begin with? Imagine the fast-food dominance Burger King could've achieved in years past if they'd been giving people a burger of this quality from day one. Well, when it comes to Rasasi and their Hawas line, my thought is similar. Now, I should point out: Hawas is the only fragrance in my collection that garnered a gushing compliment from a young woman on its first outing. See my review of Hawas for the details, but the short version is: she could smell me across a grocery store and spent five minutes trying to find me to ask what I was wearing. This speaks to the quality of Hawas and what it does. It's lethally effective at turning heads, and to be honest, I'm not entirely sure why, because to me, it's just another freshie.

Hawas Malibu, released a full ten years after the original, is an improvement on Hawas, at least in my opinion. Where the original hits you squarely in the schnoz with salinated orange blossom, fizzy citrus, sweet plum, cinnamon, and handfuls of sea salt (to the point where you feel like you got seawater up your nose), Malibu tones down that DNA and focuses on Isoraldeine 70, a methyl ionone with a plummy-sweet violet bud/orris powder. This makes the fragrance feel quite floral, but in a sueded, dry, slightly creamy way. It's also much classier than the original; Hawas 2015 was always targeted at the designer-obsessed Invictus Aqua types, but Malibu uses designer clonedom as a facade, tricking legions of YouTube influencers into touting its resemblance to Gaultier's Le Beau Le Parfum, while actually smelling like an incredible iris and violet fragrance.

Where it converges the most with the original Hawas is in its saltiness. This stuff is very, very salty. The initial lick of salted cocktail glass and pineapple-adjacent fruitiness rapidly segues into a brief orange & wintergreen-forward bubblegum vibe that has me fearing the worst. Fifteen minutes later, the fruitiness fades away and the minty quality tangos with the salt, letting the salt lead. They dance into a violet and iris bouquet, with a dryness and wry woodiness peeking through the buckets and buckets of salt, and for its nine-hour lifespan on skin, Malibu smells like a contempo-minimalist aquatic floral with facets of lavender, patchouli fraction, and Cashmeran for that musky smoothness in the base. I wouldn't say Malibu is particularly tropical, but it's definitely got seawater vibes. Interesting stuff.

Rasasi has released a hundred different Hawas flankers at this point, and it bears mentioning that they're overdoing it, to say the least. We don't need a new Hawas every other month. But apparently the brand is committed to this range, as they keep coming. Malibu is more wearable than the original Hawas for me, so I'm happy to take this one out for a spin on a workday, or on the weekends kicking it with my partner. I wouldn't say either Hawas is a masterpiece of any kind, but I would readily admit that they're both very nice fragrances that stand head and shoulders above most of the designers the YouTubers claim they're cloning. Malibu is unique: an old-school fem iris for Gen Z.

Jōvan Musk Oil for Men (Jōvan, 1974 Formula)

Damaged atomizer and typo on back of box: "And her" should be "And hers." 
This vintage box and bottle survived all these years because it was probably pulled
stock that was taken out of commercial circulation. 

I don't know if it's because Coty barely changed the box and bottle of Musk for Men, or if it's because Jōvan was ahead of its time with its packaging in the 1970s, but my deep vintage box of Musk Oil for Men from 1974 looks weirdly modern. Alas, the bottle is critically damaged. There's a massive, perfectly circular hole that looks factory made in the atomizer unit near the neck, so when I depress the nozzle, the fragrance sprays inside the bottle, and nothing exits the atomizer. The eBay merchant I dealt with lives in an area of Indiana that was hard hit by the recent rains and flooding, so his week-long delay in sending me the fragrance is somewhat understandable, though a post office, last I checked, doesn't care what the weather's doing.

However, he knew the atomizer was busted and half admitted it to me prior to shipping, asking if I still wanted it. (I disapprove of this sales tactic; he didn't mention any damage in the listing.) I said I did, because in my mind a deep vintage Jōvan Musk isn't really something I would wear with any regularity. The fragrance has barely changed in 53 years, and my much newer bottle of Musk for Men Signature Edition is just as shag-carpet perfume porno as this stuff is, so I'll never need to actually wear the vintage bottle itself. Collector piece only. How was I able to smell a locked-in fragrance? There's a neat little trick where a busted Jōvan atomizer stem — the part that holds the nozzle — depresses a hair too far, which, when the bottle is turned upside down, releases dribs and drabs of liquid, rapidly enough to make use of.

This deep vintage formula, released only a year after the fragrance's debut, is basically a straight-up synthesis of North Vietnamese musk deer secretion via a material called Tonquitone 0613. I smell this version of Tonquitone as the main difference from the Signature Edition, which features the updated variant, Tonquitone 1206. This is a very subtle difference, but it's noticeable. T-0613 is very warm and smooth, with no hard edges, no intense civet-like rasp or urinous sharpness. T-1206 is sharper, more overtly animalic, and just a touch trickier to pull off around polite company. I find Musk Oil smells, well, oilier. It's a softer, rounder scent, with a brighter white floral component complementing the musk and less mint than the Signature Edition, but with more musk overall — smooth as a baby's bottom. I recommend finding Musk Oil, if only to experience the original American musk profile that defined the '70s and early '80s. Mind-bending stuff? Hardly. But well made, and a lot of fun.

Jōvan White Musk for Men (Coty)

In 1992, Jōvan was still coasting on revenue generated by its landmark sponsorship of the Rolling Stones' Tattoo You Tour, with old faithfuls Musk and Musk for Men comprising the flagship line, and Jōvan Sex Appeal fleshing out the brand portfolio. Founder Barry Shipp, a former Revlon rep turned entrepreneur, had repurchased Jōvan from Beecham in 1988 and renamed it Quintessence, which led to the eventual re-enlistment of Murray Moscona to create the White Musk range. If you were alive and sentient in 1992, as I was, you remember smelling White Musk everywhere. It's one of the biggest fragrances of the decade, right up there with CK One, L'Eau d'Issey, and Acqua di Giò, yet it's almost never mentioned, as if the world has forgotten it. Let's remember it.

I should point out that the White Musk of '92 was a different animal from the White Musk of today. I first smelled it in high school, and my sensitive teenage nose was almost offended by the sheer potency of the stuff. It opened with a blast of aldehydes and sour citrus, with a sort of coriander-martini-onion off-note that flashed and was gone. Then came an intense fruit salad of apples and melons atop a salty, aqueous white musk accord that smelled deep, fuzzy, fatty — Egyptian musk, translated by Jōvan. I didn't hate it, but it was a bit intense and musky for me. I revisited it in college, and it hadn't changed much, except that by then it reminded me of the '90s. I hadn't smelled it in years since, but I'd read that subsequent reformulations were dilutions of the original, and a light went on: maybe the cleaner, cheaper formula of White Musk for Men is wearable now.

Indeed it is. The fragrance still opens with that familiar blast of soapy noise, but it's toned way, way down. No more onion off-note. There are gentle rustlings of green apple, and much less melon, with just enough sweetness to temper the apple's sourness. After a while, the recognizable Jōvan white musk accord wells up, smelling just as musky but not nearly as salty; the fuzzy texture of the white musk now resembles a baby cotton ball more than a sable rug. White Musk is there, and then it's not. Then it's there again. It has a way of receding to a suggestion of a skin scent — with anosmia accounting for the stretches in which it's barely detectable — but it pops back up out of nowhere once or twice an hour and briefly reminds me that I'm wearing something. Longevity is good — musk fragrances are composed of massive molecules that last forever, and the molecules here last no fewer than ten hours — but projection is, like, three, four inches? Listen, this stuff smells better than the entire Zoologist range, so I'm not complaining.