Thierry Mugler is releasing another A*Men flanker this summer, hilariously called "Pure Wood," which immediately brings morning boners to mind. When you take a look on the Mugler web site, you find a grim countdown clock ticking off the seconds until the release time. When there's all zeros across the board, bottles of Pure Wood will spring from the Earth and fall from splitting tree trunks into everyone's yard. It's coming, folks. Pure Woodiness. Get ready.
The thing I like most about this fragrance concept is the bottle. Mugler encases most of its A*Men fragrances in matte rubber, usually dark grey or brown, and they're kind of a pain to use because the atomizer isn't touch sensitive, and requires extra downward force to disperse a decent spray. Some guys make it a point to cut the rubber off the bottle for that reason, but the wood-textured case on Pure Wood, framing an amber star, looks pretty cool to me. I own the original A*Men and a little bit of B*Men, both of which I like, and I've also spent some time with the reissue of Pure Malt, also very nice. Mugler has made a fan out of me. I'll be checking in on the Final Countdown in the coming weeks. When you consider it though, "Pure Wood" promises little more than A*Men's already woody coffee/patchouli structure embellished with designer-grade "woods" aroma chemicals, which will probably amount to your standard masculine woody amber. Given that it's an already woody scent within a wood-themed flanker, and the hundredth A*Men flanker, it's doubly redundant. If that's even possible.
It's come to the point where Mugler's A*Men flankers are feeling tired, and are even sounding a bit strained off the tongue (say "Pure Wood" out loud and try not to crack up). I sense that they should begin to rethink their line. Releasing flanker after flanker gets tiresome for consumers. The day does come for even the most die-hard A*Men fan where an original fragrance is more desirable than another iteration of an 18 year-old scent, especially when most of those iterations serve only to remind of how superior the first is.