Perhaps the "Alt-Right" has a point after all; it's frightening to think that political correctness has neutered Italian bravado into the stuff of pallid white florals. Yet when I smell Bamboo EDT, a pallid white floral is pretty much the long and short of it. Yes, it's well balanced. Yes, yes, yes, I know, I know, it's well made, I get that. Every synthetic analog of fruit and floral is modestly rendered against a wan, woody, chemical background, all fogged up with white musk. It's a fragrance that smells pleasantly uninteresting on a woman when you're both crunching the company numbers, but which suddenly becomes intoxicating after hours, when fragrance is the only thing she has on. But that's not really a convincing argument for it. A great frag deserves higher praise.
The truth is that beautiful women don't need great perfumes. And by "beautiful women," I mean whatever women you're into. (Beauty is subjective, and honestly, I'm not being "PC" when I say that.) When a man digs a girl, the last thing he's worried about is the pedigree of her fragrance. She could be wearing her husband's Brut, and if a guy thinks she's sexy, he'll assume she's wearing "girl stuff," and his hormones will just block out the rest as they zero in on the score. Men aren't sophisticated when it comes to sex. We're not complex machines when it comes to spreading our genes. Our brains go into autopilot, our senses search out pheromonal stimuli - the invisible, musky smells secreted through skin, hair, mucous membranes - and our "conscious" noses, always eager to identify burnt toast and spoiled milk, take the night off.
Still, it would be nice to return to the days when women wore foghorn frags to dampen the essences of their competitors. Loud perfumes, often commissioned (without irony) by men, played into women's unending interest in the other women around them. Whether to arouse innocent, friendly small talk between office girls on a luncheon, or catty disapproval, with backhanded comments whispered snidely behind unsuspectig backs, feminine "powerhouse" fragrances like Paris, Poison, Chanel No 5, and Gucci's own Rush were patterned for sapphic and tribalistic mores. Women wore perfumes so loud and garish that sharing an elevator with them meant you stopped on whatever floor had the Tylenol. And even though I knew they weren't wearing them for me, I thought their olfactory egotism was charming.
Bamboo EDT just reminds me of everything we've lost.