Van Cleef & Arpels Pour Homme was recently discontinued, and predictably the many unicorn breeders on eBay had a field day with it. The picture above is just one example of what a seller is currently asking for a 50 ml bottle (that's right, the 1.7 ounce itty-bitty bottle). You should feel privileged to spend three hundred dollars on a relatively obscure bitter-rose chypre from 1978, because Captain Random Price in his grungy grey market janitor's closet stock room says so.
Should you, though? Let's break down what it means to buy a bottle of VC&A PH. Then let's consider whether it's unique enough, well made enough, relevant enough, and desirable enough to warrant spending cheese on it. Usually I would consider vintage and discontinued eBay fragrances a rip-off if they're priced beyond an inflation-adjusted amount, but VC&A's signature masculine is just oddball enough to make me stop for a moment and consider it in context. It isn't your usual forty year-old moth-baller.
Is it unique enough? This is the easiest question to answer: Yes. Having smelled six hundred fragrances, I can say without any exaggeration that I have never encountered anything that smells like VC&A PH. There is an asterisk to this, however, for there's a common drugstore bar soap that does smell like it - Dial Gold. That presents a problem for anyone looking to high-roll a clever buyer. When I put my nose on VC&A PH for the first time, back about nine years ago, my very first thought was this is exactly and very weirdly like Dial Gold antibacterial soap!
There are two ways to think about VC&A PH. You can buy into the internet mythologies people have built up around it - it's a gothic rose, it's a "powerhouse," it's testosterone in a bottle - and all of these notions lend it immense popularity among connoisseurs of fine fragrance. But you could also get your nose on a bar of Dial Gold and compare them both, and decide it's just a soapy chypre with vague floral flourishes. Over the years I've found myself leaning more and more to the latter sentiment. Still, aside from the bar soap comparison, it's strange that no other proper perfume even comes close to the scent profile. Its brusquely bitter juniper berry and uncured tobacco medley should be replicated a dozen times over in the pantheon of late seventies masculines, yet most travel a significantly different path. VC&A PH travels alone.
Is it well made? This one's a little bit tougher. The easier way to state the answer is to discreetly point out that the fragrance is congruous, balanced, and totally wearable. You won't find yourself sitting down to lunch and regretting that you reached for it. There's no time spent wishing this note were toned down, or that note were more successful, or wondering what in god's name that note is. Sure, you'll probably experience the rose crisis that everyone eventually goes through with VC&A PH. As in, where the hell's the rose? Everyone keeps going on about it, yet I struggle to smell it in the composition. There's some floral notes, yes, but it's hard to say what they are, exactly. I often think it's carnation. Then I'll waffle and think, okay, yes, there it is: the rose. Roses or not, the fragrance doesn't smell like a near miss. It smells quite good.
But it also smells very, very soapy, and herein lies another set of divergent paths to take in one's understanding of this stuff. Anything that smells overwhelmingly soapy is going to smell cheap. The trick is to smell luxuriously cheap. Luxurious is Irish Spring shower gel. That fizzy burst of crisp evergreen and mossy earth with a lick of sweetness, and all coming to life in water. Cheap is Dial Gold soap. Take a wild guess where the danger zone is for Van Cleef & Arpels. The problem with the fragrance is it attempts a soapy formula that also smells perpetually dry. Smart soapy masculines inject the illusion of moisture into their drydowns to better animate their complexities, and breathe life into notes that might otherwise be unrealized. Think Sung Homme and Z-14. But VC&A made the crucial mistake of keeping their chypre bone dry, which parches the fidelity of its constituents, keeping it overly blended, a little too tight, and not as luxurious as it should be. This is why it frequently disappoints me.
Add to that its reliance on mid-shelf designer-grade materials, and the issue is compounded. The fragrance doesn't smell natural enough, nor is it lucid enough at any stage to warrant Creed prices. And that brings me to the next question - is VC&A PH relevant enough? Is this a fragrance that every collector MUST have? The answer is decidedly no. Its uniqueness is a double-edged sword; the astute collector may value its rare character, but might also interpret its one-off nature as something not apt to inspire imitation. Where things like Drakkar Noir, Polo, Le Male, and 1 Million have each carved out their legions of clones, many of them disguised as original designer releases competing for marketshare, VC&A isn't setting the world on fire. Both of their signature masculines have been discontinued. Many of their ancillary releases have been minor hits, or have gone unnoticed. This isn't the world's most relevant brand.
All of this brings us to that final daunting question: Is VC&A PH desirable enough? Would you default on the month's heating bill for a bottle? Would you defer a car payment for it? Cash out on those political science textbooks and risk failing a course? At what point do people decide a fragrance isn't worth it? Or harder yet, when do they decide it never was? I think the answer lies in parsing the answers of all the previous queries. It's unique as a fine fragrance, but stick your nose in the soap aisle at Walmart and you'll find something for $1.79 that smells as close as possible to an exact match. It's competently made, but perhaps there were a few key miscalculations made in the design of its formula. Nineteen seventy-eight was forty-four years ago, and the glitzy jewelers image of VC&A has since lost its shine, at least as far as the perfume brand is concerned. Thus the desirability of this fragrance is limited to the achingly curious, or the die-hard fan, and neither party would be wise to spend more than $120 for a bottle - a large bottle. Sentimental value isn't as volatile as grey market prices. Its fixed nature means even the most devoted and ardent admirers would be stymied by a $300 tag.
So where does that position this one in the wild west world of internet auctioneering? VC&A PH is eclipsed in both beauty and versatility by its younger brother, Tsar. I blew through my bottle of final-formula Tsar. It was, quite literally, the smell of an emerald. Thick, lush, green, kinetic, a perfume of shimmering woody and floral proportions that bloomed into a veritable garden party on my skin, Tsar was far and away the better of the two legacy perfumes by this house, and frankly I'd consider spending two hundred for it. (Three hundred isn't happening.) You can lead a unicorn to water, but it can't drink because its horn has a nasty habit of getting in the way.