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| Oh 4 oz. bottles, how I miss you! |
I have two things coming in the mail this week: a full bottle of Armaf's Club de Nuit Sillage, and a 2.5 ml spray sample of Creed's Silver Mountain Water from Lucky Scent. It's pretty obvious why those two things are simultaneously traveling my way. But there's a major problem with making the comparison that might not be obvious to fragrance community newbies, and I'm going to pre-game my review of Sillage by getting into that here.
Silver Mountain Water was released alongside Millésime Impérial in 1995, and both perfumes were emblematic of the times, smelling fresh, fruity, sweet, green, and musky. You had to be alive and sentient in the nineties to really understand what this means. When I'm in department stores, I see twenty-one year-olds shopping for Le Male or one of its flankers, and I think about how far down the food chain that perfume has sunk. My best friend used to wear it, and he bought it just after it was released in 1995. From 1996 to around high school graduation, I existed (part-time) in a haze of Le Male. The stuff was fresh, sweet, powdery, yes. It was also nuclear. Nuclear.
I had a professor in high school who wore Chanel Allure Homme upon its release in 1999. This prompted me to buy a bottle that year, and in the years shortly after. Allure Homme is an ambery synthetic wonder, now muted with a crisp woodiness. But in 1999, it preceded my teacher two minutes before he entered the room. You still smelled it ten minutes after he left. Allure Homme wasn't a perfume; it was a presence. And so were many perfumes of that decade, as the styles of the eighties had changed dramatically, but their volume had not changed at all.
This brings me to Silver Mountain Water. It turns out that it's 2023, and the nineties have been dead for 24 years now. The last time I smelled SMW was in 2011, two years before what I've read were the best batches of that particular Creed, and a year after I smelled it the first time. I've worn it twice, both from carded boutique samples, and both times I found it to be incredibly difficult to smell. My perception of it stopped short at sharp citrus and a vague sweet fruitiness, with a sheer musk tingling just under the surface. There was a difference between the first sample and the second, however. These were parsed under duress, but I could make them out.
Sample one smelled mineralic, a little stony, a bit green (the tea note), and inky, thanks to a bitter blackcurrant that was sweetened with a dusting of musk. All hard to make out, like trying to glean information from an overexposed photograph, but all there. The second sample was clearly a batch variation, and SMW is really the only Creed where batch variations were dead obvious. It wasn't as stony, wasn't as green, and was basically just a fresh pink-berry fizz atop a white musk. Harder to make out, with even less information for my nose, and it lasted maybe thirty minutes before disappearing completely.
My experience with SMW is limited to batches dating from 2009 to 2012. This is a problem if I'm going to accurately assess Club de Nuit Sillage as a clone of SMW. Why, you ask? Because the word on the street for the last three years is that Sillage is a clone of vintage nineties SMW. A version of SMW I have never, ever smelled. Also, a version I never will smell, due to its unavailability. There are probably many nineties and early 2000s bottles of SMW floating around in collections out there, and perhaps even a few left on the grey market, but good luck getting your nose on any of them.
All I can do is imagine that the main difference between the SMW samples I've smelled and nineties SMW is the intensity of its notes, and its overall strength. If my memory of nineties perfumes is anything to go by, deep vintage SMW may have been significantly stronger than what we've all been smelling lately.
There are some reviewers who say that Armaf cloned 2013 batches of SMW, and that this was the last great year for the fragrance before the corporate buyout of Creed. This may also be true, but it's a little hard to care when every other guy is pointing to a different deep vintage for their comparison. I can't really isolate a particular year when I make my own comparison. All I can do is acknowledge that Armaf has cloned an earlier vintage, probably pre-2010, and I have to take that on faith. Having never smelled the older Creed batches, I can't possibly know how close Sillage comes to any of them.
But this is precisely why I have a sample of current SMW coming. I remember the older samples. I remember what that particular vintage smelled like, although unfortunately my ability to truly discern all the details of SMW has always been challenged. I'm hoping that I can do three comparisons here, one between the new sample and Sillage, another from memory between the new and older samples, and yet another from memory between Sillage and the older samples. This triangulation is the best I can do when assessing Sillage, and how much SMW has changed in the past decade (pre-to-post buyout).
When I say "comparisons," I mean comparisons on a few levels. First, I want to know how close they are in quality, i.e., are the materials in Sillage adequate enough to successfully mimic something at Creed's level, despite not having access to Creed's captives? Discerning this requires a fresh sample, and hopefully Creed is still using top-tier chems. Next, I want to know how close they are in composition. Lastly, I'll be curious to see how Sillage performs relative to its template, which has now become notorious for abysmal longevity. Some say Sillage is "beast-mode," and others say it isn't. We'll see.
In closing, the problem with Silver Mountain Water vs. Sillage reviews is that SMW is no longer SMW, according to many reviewers. They call it "formula drift." It's what happens to older fragrances that have been reformulated numerous times; those lucky enough to do direct comparisons between new and old versions find completely different perfumes that share the same name. Post-buyout SMW is widely reported to be so pathetic in longevity that it isn't worth buying anymore. There are people saying that Sillage smells more like SMW than SMW does. My new sample of SMW will shed light on that for me, and hopefully for you as well.
It's possible that Sillage will smell like one of the Creed samples I've put my nose on, and maybe by a stroke of luck it'll smell very close to the current sample. But it's a distinct possibility that it will smell nothing like any version of SMW that I've experienced, which doesn't mean it isn't a perfect clone of the original perfume. I'll say that again: It's entirely possible that Club de Nuit Sillage is a perfect clone of a lost Creed, and that Armaf made it because it's been lost. Let that sink in.