The house of Creed is known for taking the commercial perfumes that have found resonance with the public and "upgrading" them using higher quality materials in similar but more elegant compositions. They are not unique in doing this, as Nicholas Nilsson makes clear with Alfiryn, the only blatantly feminine perfume in his line. Pineward's website states, "Deep white florals grounded in creamy massoia and sandalwood, vibrant enfleurage gives this inverted floral perfume a softly textured halo." I find this description strange but rather accurate, although I can't help but smirk at the suggestion that the painstaking and commercially unviable technique of enfleurage (the use of odorless fats to extract floral essences) was used to create Alfiryn. Why? Because it smells like an upscale copy of Wind Song by Prince Matchabelli.
Wind Song dates to 1953, and it smells like the logical next stop after Chanel No. 5 (1921) and Tabu (1932). It's a smooth, lactonic woody-floral, its scent a mimicry of its bottle in studding a crown of carnation with jewels of Damask rose, jasmine, and lilac. It smells mostly of a clovey carnation brushed with a buttery lactone that is deeper and woodier than the milky peach lactone in Mitsouko, rounded off with the warmth of rose and jasmine, and tinged with cool lilac for a nuanced green finish. This describes Alfiryn to the letter, with the only difference being that Pineward's scent smells a bit richer, stronger, and warmer than its airier drugstore predecessor. Alfiryn's use of massoia lactone is evident in the balmy-coconut smoothness undergirding its florals, and there is perhaps a dollop of peachy Nectaryl in the top notes, lending a bit of sunshine to the duskier affair thereafter.
Eventually a clovey carnation reconstruction dominates, and I smell the same three florals in the periphery: rose, jasmine, lilac. To my nose, the rose and lilac are noticeably larger in Alfiryn than in Wind Song, ten carats to Matchabelli's two, but they assume the same roles as supporting acts. So, do I like this fragrance? Although Alfiryn lacks originality, it succeeds in taking a classical floral perfume and giving it the "niche treatment" of better materials at higher concentration. I'm inclined to like it, but it gives me pause. Its only faults are that it's a little too dead-on, and I would argue that because it's so strikingly similar, the people who would spend $135 on a one-ounce bottle would do better to spend $10 on twice as much of Wind Song. Nilsson made Alfiryn richer and stronger than its template, but I think he took it in the wrong direction; this stuffy room-filler was begging to be lightened and modernized instead.