6/20/13

Emeraude Cologne Spray (Coty)



As far as I know, Emeraude is a baby name, with some gobbledy-gook about being in harmony with nature as its meaning. It's really a French expression for "green," or "emerald." I imagine the name came after the French definition, and was likely popular in early twentieth-century France. I won't go into the long story behind Emeraude because that's been done to death elsewhere, and to be honest it doesn't interest me. What does grab me is how old it is: 1921 is its birth date! With that many circles in its bark, you'd think Coty would put some effort into preserving whatever majesty earlier incarnations possessed, and keep the drugstore brand smelling at least competent enough to match their finer drugstore masculines, like Aspen and Sex Appeal for Men. But no dice - the current cologne spray smells awful.

Coty is capable of rendering cheap green notes very well, so I'm disappointed in the chemical veil of galbanum-esque noise that precedes the fragrance. The haze settles into a powdery abomination of crude white flowers and peach, with the suntanned-creamy vibe of Vanilla Fields wedded to a dry, woody-resinous base. Every note is spare and unbalanced, every accord is piercing and shrill, and a preponderance of aldehydes threatens to destroy all olfactory perception before dissection can even begin.

Coty can do much better, and should reformulate this screeching mess up to a remote semblance of what it was in the seventies and eighties (at least). Whatever it may have been, Emeraude is no more.