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"I'll take a pack of Ultra Blues, please." |
If you're gonna go fresh, you need to know your options. There aren't many. Not if you want to go fresh, and still smell good, that is. Of course there are hundreds of freshies out there, most of them crap, but it takes a multifaceted understanding of perfume to make sense of them all. Market dynamics, the reality on the street, and the hierarchy of choices complicate things. How does one pick something shampoo-like and ubiquitous in nature, yet also truly beautiful to wear?
Ralph Lauren issued his first Polo Blue in 2002, and since then has thrown a few others at the wall, hoping something will stick. We got Blue EDP, Gold Blend, Sport, Parfum, Red, White & Blue, and Deep Blue. Ultra Blue quietly joined the club in 2018, which is a funny story. Lauren seemed a bit unsure of Ultra Blue, and for several months released it only in 1.6 oz bottles, with fairly limited distribution. I saw maybe two or three of them, and not much on the internet. I think it was being road-tested at places like Macy's and Neiman Marcus. It was as if the brand wanted to know if this formula would sell before committing to the regular 4.2 oz size. I'm not even sure you could buy them directly, or if they were just bait for sales stats on pre-season preorders.
It must have done at least okay, because by the fall of that year the bigger bottles were everywhere. Ultra Blue is the lone Polo in my collection, and I only own it because it's exactly the kind of thing that appeals to women. If you read reviews, you know the guys who like to sing the Polo Blues about blue frags. They're "boring," they're "safe," they're "not for me." Well, the joke's on them. The sad truth is that these are the fragrances that today's women want to smell on their men. They were raised around boys who wore this sort of generic stuff, their dads wore it, and the overpriced deodorant aquatics are the only things that really turn them on as adults. Believe me, every woman I've dated has insisted on my wearing the freshest thing in my wardrobe, whatever it was.
The cool thing about Ultra Blue is it's the most unisex of the Polos in this line. A woman could easily wear it without anyone even questioning it. It's in the same wheelhouse as D&G's Light Blue, which is of course a big hit with the ladies. But Ultra offers something interesting: a minimalist approach to the aquatic, with heavy emphasis on a couple of high quality synthetics. Someone suggested that original Polo Blue, with its melons and cucumbers, could be just as compelling in an austere and streamlined state. It was made quite a bit colder with the complete removal of the melons and cucumbers and woody notes, and using only lemon verbena, heaping doses of salt, and a few sprigs of fresh basil as garnish held the temperature. It would be a lot cheaper to make, but also a little harder to market. What if this level of simplicity was just too weird?
The opening smells cheap to me, as if the bareness of the pyramid is struggling to cover the scent of alcohol. This only lasts about ten seconds before the lemon saves the day, smelling brackish, but, you guessed it, fresh. There's the mineral limestone tanginess of dry sea salt, undergirded with crisp lemon verbena and a pert basil that happily peeks through the chems. It's clean yet tony and mass-appealing, and most importantly, it's well made. It takes skill to make something this basic smell good, but they pulled it off. The citrus is ghostly, floating in and out of my consciousness, taking turns with the rich accents of pure salt and delicate herbal greenness in commanding attention.
If you have the money, you'd probably rather buy something like Heeley's Sel Marin or Creed's Erolfa, both of which employ similarly direct aquatic-themed pyramids with only a handful of notes. But I'd caution you there. Sure, you'll get better top notes with those more expensive fragrances, but you won't get significantly better fragrances overall, and Ultra Blue destroys them in the longevity department. It's also more likely to appeal to your significant other, who might raise issues with the overly realistic low-tide effects found in high-concept niche. Buy all the macho musks and woody orientals that your bank account can bear, but leave at least one spot on the shelf for Saturday night.