Creed Broke People's Brains. I love it.

Perfume criticism is the bastard child of critical writing, although it has all the same smatterings of expository rumination and philosophical sermonizing as other, more popular forms. One of the things that struck me about the fragrance community when I first joined it is its collectively derogatory stance on the house of Creed. I thought it was inarguably strange that so many esteemed writers felt it was necessary to harp on what was Creed's relatively benign form of advertising: attributing perfumes to famous dead people. It was as if the act of citing a long-deceased queen as being a wearer of something like Jasmine Imperatrice Eugenie was a crime against humanity. How dare they besmirch the dead with such lies? And how dare Olivier suggest the perfumery began in 1760, when it clearly got its start in the 1970s? This cannot stand!

The truth is that it is wrong to lie about such things, but it's also wrong to question them to no end. When answers are available, our civic duty is to dig them up and hold them aloft for all to see. In the case of Creed, much digging was done, and several answers were found and revealed to the world. We now know that Olivier isn't really much of a perfumer. We know that Erwin isn't, either. And we know that Olivier didn't want to continue his family's tradition of tailoring clothing for the wealthy, and instead wished to invest in fine fragrance, which formally launched his career sometime in the early seventies. All of this has come to light, thanks in part to Gabe Oppenheim's The Ghost Perfumer: Creed, Lies, & the Scent of the Century, and in larger part to years of fanatical hand-wringing on social media and perfume threads. People have submitted photographs of Creeds from the seventies and eighties, and have gone to great lengths to figure out the family's "royal warrants," so in terms of its veracity, the brand now stands corrected. 

These are the ends to which Creed has been questioned, and there are precious few others outstanding. We still don't know who authored some of the earliest Creeds, and a number of the discontinued "Grey Cap" EDTs. We still don't know how much involvement Olivier really had in the development of the Millésime range, aside from his being an expert evaluator. Nobody has any clue about whether Olivier fairly paid his perfumers, and Oppenheim's logical inconsistencies and clear misreading of some of those facts puts his account in question. And when it comes to the brand itself, there is only so far back one can go before the haziness of time obscures every detail, at which point it is only right to say, "I don't know." Did Creed really start in the seventies? I don't know. Did Creed tailor fragrances for deceased kings and queens, as they seem to today? I don't know. Where did Royal English Leather come from? I don't know. How has Olivier managed to steer the ship so easily through the fraught waters of the contemporary beauty industry, to the tune of $3.7 billion? I don't know. Is he some kind of genius? I should know, but I don't. 

If openly admitting to having no firm knowledge of Creed's provenance in perfumery beyond the 1970s is our heuristic for understanding the Creed that exists today, it could easily be argued by critics that Creed wants it that way. After all, the less we know, the murkier the picture is, the easier it will be for the company to continue fibbing and exaggerating to further its financial gains. But in the absence of evidence that Creed's fragrance legacy preceded the Nixon-Ford administration, should I consider that evidence of absence? That Creed was never a part of the rich tapestry of perfumery that was being woven through the twentieth century? My biggest problem with this is, and has always been, their eau de toilette line. The "Grey Caps," as they're nicknamed by aficionados, seemed to spring out of nowhere. How did Royal Scottish Lavender come into being, if not by some old dusty recipe that Creed had tucked in the family album somewhere? What about Baie de Genièvre? Ambre Cannelle? Angelique Encens? 

And how exactly did Olivier kickstart the brand with so many gorgeous compositions? When has that ever happened to anything other than a house with a long legacy and plenty of practice? Olivier is being given more credit by his critics than they realize when they attribute his entire oeuvre to commercial malpractice and stolen valor. They're essentially saying that the man was brilliant enough to compile perfumers from the tops of their classes, and get them to formulate one beautiful olfactory piece after another, using only the highest quality materials, and all before niche perfumery was even a twinkle in the public's eye. You have to remember that the EDTs were all pre-nineties, and all very expensive, right out of the gate. Who was going to buy them if they didn't have the brand recognition and cache of their more formidable competitors, the Chanels, and Guerlains, and Diors? In what world does a guy with strictly a tailoring background just say, "I'm going to start a perfume business, and the first ten perfumes are all going to be minor masterpieces," and after he successfully realizes this goal, uses them to fund the company's growth through the following five decades? 

The lack of clarity there, coupled with the lack of credibility to the alternative view (that Creed is little more than a fragrant house of cards), has embedded itself in the subconscious of the fragrance community, and it irks them in their sleep. For example, take a look at the blogger "Kafkaesque," and his 2013 review of Aventus, in which he writes: 

"I think it's an extremely pleasant, elegant, refined fragrance that is also linear, simple, mundane, ultimately unexciting, and not worth the cost." 

These are the words of a broken brain. If a perfume is "extremely pleasant," and "extremely elegant," and "extremely refined," then it is, by that definition, very much worth the cost. It can't be those things, and also "linear," and "simple," and "mundane." Sorry, but no. It does not compute. His assertion is self-contradictory, and cancels itself out. Aventus can be the first three things, or it can be the last five things, but it can't be all eight of those things. The writer is clearly hedging here, but it's the worst kind of hedge, the one where he's afraid to say that he doesn't really understand something, and so he blames it for his own shortcomings, and damns it with faint praise. Aventus is a game-changer perfume that every brand since 2010 has chased after, but it's "unexciting, and not worth the cost." 

He isn't alone. When you peruse popular blogs, you find that their writers intentionally leave Creed out, or do the bare minimum acknowledgment of it. It's still en vogue to say that Creeds "don't last," even though saying that about a Creed is akin to taping a card that says "My nose doesn't work" to your forehead (Creeds are generally quite strong after proper maceration). It's the "Trumpification" of a brand, with Creed being the dreaded Orange Man, and no journalist worth his salt can be caught dead typing a positive word about it. Creed is the unlikable and obnoxious red-headed step child of the niche industry, and if you want to be taken seriously, make sure you shit all over the brand as much and as often as you possibly can without being overtly unlikable and obnoxious yourself. 

Am I suggesting that it's wrong to criticize Creed? Of course not. My point here today is to say that it's wrong to criticize Creed to no end, and it has been established that the end point of all knowledge, and all possibility of gleaning further knowledge, is Zeste Mandarine Pamplemousse. This first eau de toilette was packaged in vintage aftershave-style bottles that I used to see on eBay back in the 2000s, when Olivier was still trying to put his personal stamp on the brand, with the blue "Olivier Creed" label slapped on the front. Naysayers will point to Guerlain's royal offerings, and how they're inventoried in their historical glory at the Osmotheque in France, as if somehow Guerlain's path should have intersected with Creed's at some point, and we should be finding the exact same evidence there, when in fact we're not. The much simpler theory, that Creed perfumes from the early twentieth century and beyond were likely just private bespoke affairs, is never part of their lexicon, and for good reason - it makes too much sense. 

Armaf is Breaking People's Brains. I love it.

Armaf is doing very interesting things lately. I could get into the "how" of it, but the answer is simple: money. The UAE is an oil-rich country where the money is so abundant that it flows into stupid things, like cheap perfume. Thus, something like Club de Nuit Sillage, which costs ten dollars an ounce, can prompt Westerners to elide their thinking about genuinely exorbitant stuff with drugstore Arabian fare. 

This leads to members of Fragrantica deluding themselves into thinking that there are "batch variations" and significant reformulations of Armaf frags. Let me get this out of the way: there are neither. Every brand has batches, but 99% of them are merely quality control numbers, with no discernible difference in smell. Creed is an outlier in that they intentionally varied fragrance compositions from batch to batch, which led to perennial speculation on the supposed differences in character and quality from year to year, especially for the big sellers like Aventus and Millésime Impérial. 

As to the conjecture about reformulations, which isn't uncommon in this community, I would point out that most of the Club de Nuit range is new and still under the radar, where these frags will likely stay for many years to come, so I can't see any benefit in reformulating them. Before you shout at me, remember that we here in the fragrance community are not representative of the larger population, which has never heard of Armaf. We're also not in Dubai, where the mentality is to increase budgets, so if anything, Armaf would hopefully improve their offerings via reformulation. 

Fragrantica user "bandofthehawk999" wrote of Sillage:

"I own the original formula (Black atomizer 2020<) and the new formula (Silver Atomizer 2021<). In short get the older batches (Black atomizer) this one actually fits all the praise and good comments below. Actually smells like SMW. Avoid the new batches 2021 onwards, they are not it. 

This prompted a few members to follow up with offhand comments about which batch they were reviewing, based apparently on the color of the atomizer, as if this is some definitive marker of a formula change, instead of its just being that Armaf listened to the criticism, voiced by several reviewers on YouTube, that the black atomizer clashes with the silver bottle. Suddenly we should all seek out bottles with black atomizers, if we really want something that approximates Silver Mountain Water by Creed. 

This is clearly crazy. But there you have it. I happen to have a bottle with the silver sprayer, and maybe my nose is broken, but my side-by-side comparison of Sillage to SMW put Sillage on top. It smells 98% exactly like the Creed, with the only differences being more muted top notes, and what is clearly a much older version of SMW in the drydown, versus the current Creed formula, which is miles away from what SMW used to be. Sillage is richer, deeper, brighter. 

Another funny phenomenon is the high number of people who claim that Armafs need to "macerate" in their bottles, preferably with the caps off, after "wasting a few sprays" to let air in, and "sitting for a few months in the dark." Now, I happen to be one of the voices that championed this reality with Creeds several years ago. A fellow blogger and several members of Basenotes criticized me when I said that Creeds start out weak and get much stronger the longer they sit, especially after air is introduced to the bottle. My observation was derided as a nonsensical fiction, and I was perpetuating it because I didn't get how stupid it is for a company to release a product that self-improves. 

Of course I was right about it all along, and in the years since then, it has become standard practice for people to openly admit to letting their Creeds macerate in-bottle after initial use. Apparently the same is now true for Armaf perfumes. I've had firsthand experience with this with my bottle of Milestone. When I first tried it, it smelled good but very strong, very floral, and it resembled Chez Bond more than Millésime Impérial. After two years of sitting in my dark basement, the fragrance has relaxed, note separation has dramatically improved, and the heart and base smell nearly identical to MI. 

Some people can handle that, and others can't. Sillage seems to need maceration less than Milestone, at least to my nose, but maybe it will improve over time. Armaf is a brand that does things differently; instead of dumping their budget into top notes and letting the rest slide, they go half-hearted on their tops and whole-hog on their bases, which is where Sillage really shines. Something tells me Armaf will release a new Club de Nuit in the next year or so, and I'm excited to see which Creed they go after next. 

Just the fact that they go after Creed at all is enough to drive many people nuts. It's funny to read review after review that slams Club de Nuit (Whatever) for being "nothing like" whatever they're cloning. With most clones, this is true, but things are very different with the Club de Nuit line. These aren't your average clone perfumes, and they absolutely are eating Creed's lunch. The money is there for it, and they're spending it wisely. 

Honeysuckle Eau de Toilette (Caswell-Massey)

Honeysuckle, like lilac and lily of the valley, is impossible to distill, which means perfumers must "reconstruct" its headspace aroma using a variety of unrelated materials. The soundest formula for honeysuckle (from Poucher's) includes things like nerol (from neroli), jasmine absolute, heliotropin, and methyl anthranilate, all of which are assembled into the honey-sweet lilt of flowers in the genus Lonicera. 

Caswell-Massey has a formidable line of soliflore EDTs in its range, and I was drawn to their Honeysuckle scent, as the last time I smelled a truly great honeysuckle perfume was in 2011, Creed's Chevrefeuille Original, which has since been vaulted. Chevrefeuille smelled of musky white florals atop a lush base of dewey greens with a hint of fennel, but some reviewers complained that it wasn't anything like real honeysuckle. I figured I'd give Caswell-Massey's a try, and to be honest, it smells like they used Poucher's formula, at least as a starting point. My nose picks up distinct twinges of neroli and jasmine, along with green-grassy methyl naphthyl ketone (orange blossom), all of which are conjoined by various aldehydes and esters into something that approximates the vividly indolic sweetness of the real thing. Spring in a bottle. 

The scent continues in linear fashion for about five or six hours, although longevity isn't stellar. Soliflores are the a capella singing of perfumery, where the olfactory identity of a single flower is expected to shine without the support of backing notes. It's difficult to judge them, because their success or failure rests on the skill of the perfumer, and I tend to think any perfumer brave enough to tackle a soliflore deserves the benefit of the doubt. Caswell-Massey's Honeysuckle is very good, perhaps a bit too close to jasmine, but still quite languid, sweet, and natural from start to finish. 

Aventus Cologne (Creed)

Creed claims that "Aventus" is an ancient word for "success," or at least that's what they're pushing nowadays. They said it was an Esperanto word, back when the fragrance was first issued in 2010, and Esperanto is a modern language, so the story has definitely changed there. Either way, the concept matches the perfume; after about an hour on skin, Aventus smells like paper money, that weirdly musty and inky odor that emanates from USDT greenbacks, an implicitly vulgar stroke of subliminal marketing genius.  

Nine years after the original release, Creed inexplicably flanked Aventus with Aventus Cologne. I say "inexplicably," because by that point everyone and their cousin had copied, cloned, and even (in Armaf's case) out-flanked their cash-cow. The last thing anyone needed was for Creed itself to put out another iteration of the pineapple king. It does bear mentioning that Aventus is built on the chassis of a proprietary Creed musk, which Olivier took to a then up-and-coming perfumer named Jean-Christophe Herault, who had just finished an eponymous composition for Canali with a prominent pineapple note. Ever the opportunist, Olivier supposedly told Herault that working for him would shift the younger man's career into overdrive, and while that promise has borne itself out, I wonder if Pierre Bourdon reached out to give junior some advice. Five years earlier, the master perfumer had crafted Thé Brun, a fruity-smoky piece for downmarket hipster brand Jean-Charles Brosseau, and while Thé Brun doesn't smell anything like Aventus, there are inklings of what Herault did in its starkly floral opening and exceedingly dry, smoky base.

Comparisons and conjecture aside, Aventus Cologne is a bit of a mystery, even for Creed. Why does this perfume exist? The same proprietary musk of the original is used again, and it yields the exact same crystalline woods effect of walking through a birch forest in late November, only this time with mandarin orange, ginger, and pink pepper instead of pineapple. I get the pepper first, the orange second, and not much of the ginger, and that top endures for a surprisingly long while. When it dissipates, I'm left with a lighter, gentler, cleaner Aventus, still the heartthrob gentleman I remember. My one quibble is that the whole experience coalesces into something undeniably cut from a department store designer cloth, like an upgraded mall fragrance, odd for a Creed. Or is it? 

Creation de Minuit (Ted Lapidus)

Leave it to Parfums Lapidus to release something in 2015 that looks and smells like it was released in 1992. Creation de Minuit ("Midnight Creation") is in fact a flanker to the original 1984 Creation, which was itself reissued and given a facelift with an entirely different formula in 2011. Looking at it now, I'm tickled that Lapidus execs opted for a convincingly dusty reboot of the original round and wavy bottle for this line, with this particular entry shrouded in black with gold trim. Then again, the original Lapidus pour Homme came in hefty marbled glass, also with gold trim, so this shouldn't surprise me. 

Creation de Minuit seems to have been pitched primarily to Spanish-speaking regions, as the only YouTube reviews that come up are in that language. I've never seen this line in America, and was surprised when it showed up on eBay. It's entirely possible it's been in North American markets for years and never broke out into the mainstream. If I had to guess, I'd say its popularity is stunted by its laser-like focus on two notes, blackberry and musk, and since there's only a minuscule niche for that (Mûre et Musc), Lapidus may find it a little hard to compete. I'm always surprised that this brand doesn't get more attention; Lapidus perfumes are well made, clearly use top-shelf designer chems, and give you an incredible bang for buck, with most under five dollars an ounce. This one flounders in near anonymity, while others get the lion's share of internet chatter. Nearly no one discusses Creation de Minuit online, yet it has an insanely well-rendered blackberry note. 

It is the most blackberry-heavy fragrance I've ever worn. The first five minutes are hyper-realistic blackberry, a tart, semi-sour, semi-sweet fruitiness, dark and velvety smooth, juicy but mouth-puckering, just like the real thing. Astonishing in something so cheap! The fruity sweetness lingers the longest, and settles on a floral musk accord, where the budget starts to show, although for at least an hour, Creation de Minuit is believably sedate and natural. I've encountered this musk before, a heady and somewhat weird sweetness, redolent of heliotrope and white flowers. It was definitely in Joop! Homme, only here it's fresher and lighter. Its freshness goes sour as the day progresses, and by evening the blackberry has vanished and left only a bare white musk on my skin. 

Lapidus was aiming high, but blackberry is a tough target to hit on a budget. This fragrance is fruity, a little sweet, and kind of fresh, but fresh in a murky nineties style, sort of like the blackcurrant note in Silver Mountain Water was surgically removed and transplanted into something with no supporting act. After the fruitiness subsides, around three hours in, Creation de Minuit simply gets vaguely floral and increasingly sour, and at no other stage does another clearly discernible note emerge. Perversely, I like it. Look, if you're someone who wakes up in the morning and says to himself, "Let's go with blackberry today," you'll likely embrace the artistry behind all the sweet and sour off-notes of a true blackberry perfume, even if some of them end up smelling a little like hairspray. 

Is Nautica Life a Bleu de Chanel Clone?

If you hop on Fragrantica and read reviews for Nautica Life (2014), you'll find that a sizable number of them compare it to Bleu de Chanel (2010). I thought this was interesting, because there are a limited number of things that get compared to BdC, despite its being a resounding success. Unlike Drakkar Noir and Cool Water, Bleu hasn't been cloned to death, with only the occasional copycat appearing over the past thirteen years. 

Nautica is one of those slightly downmarket designer brands that had one massive success (Voyage) and countless minor "meh" frags that people buy as Christmas presents for cousins and nephews. All of them are "fresh" fragrances that are either blue or blue-grey in color, and they all tend to lean in the aquatic direction. I spotted a small bottle of Life on eBay for under fifteen dollars, so I purchased it, wondering if it was indeed a sleeper clone of BdC. But frankly, I'm more interested in if it isn't a clone at all, and is merely being misrepresented as one by clueless noses on Fragrantica. It's easy to say something smells like something else, but at some point you have to show receipts. 

When I received my bottle, it was an advertisement for cheapness. The outer plastic had peeled off the box, which was dented in one corner. The cap doesn't stay on the bottle, and the bottle has a minor leak around the atomizer. It's a solid glass bottle, which in itself isn't cheap, but between the drips and the useless cap, it feels every bit like a chintzy cheapo. The juice is a very light grey-blue, almost clear, and the vaporizer stem is shrouded in a material meant to resemble sailor's rope. I actually like that little touch. I gave it a couple of spritzes, and had to prime the atomizer, which meant it was genuinely new. What hit my skin was surprising, and I had to hunker down with this scent to understand it. 

The top notes are sea salt, lime, ginger, and sage. All of those notes are evident in the first minute. The salt effect is very pronounced, as is the sage, with the citrus and ginger elements secondary. Ten minutes later, it dries down to a base that smells a lot like the top, but with a distinctly woodier quality, slightly spicy, and ensconced in lingering sage, ginger, and salt. The saltiness alludes to a marine dimension, while the sage and ginger form a weirdly woody undercurrent that Nautica claims is "hinoki wood," a Japanese aromatic wood. None of this smells blatantly like Bleu de Chanel, but the more it dries down, the more I can smell the comparison. Still, I think Life is its own thing. 

My sense is that the pairing of ginger and dry woody notes is what spurs people to compare Life to Bleu, which also pairs ginger and woods. But the Chanel is a rich, multifaceted masterpiece, with discernible layers of vetiver, incense, cedar, labdanum, and patchouli. It smells vibrant and fresh, while also smoky and dry, with its material quality obvious, and its profile unmistakable. If I have to search for Bleu de Chanel in something, it doesn't smell like it. While Life does have a vaguely similar mating of camphoraceous ginger and dry wood, the stars of the show are salt and sage, both of which push through the strongest. Life is also far simpler, and its gentle waftings of herbs and residual sea salt are reminders that whoever put the scent together had the sense to keep it basic. 

Would I recommend Nautica Life to a fragrance aficionado? Probably not, but if the subject of inexpensive "quasi-aquatics" of the last fifteen years came up, I would mention it. Aquatics really hit their stride in the 2000s, with Bulgari's Aqua pour Homme setting the bar for what would be fifteen years of Bulgari wannabes, nearly all in the designer market, and most for under ten dollars an ounce. Things like Guess Man and Montblanc Starwalker were standard woody-fresh masculines of the era, all alluding to the aquatic, but without going full-bore into it (they contain "watery" notes). Life, coming later in the game, carries on that tradition, with obvious non-aquatic notes of herbs and woods, tinged with sea salt and bitter citrus, which in this case smells a bit sour, but sort of works. 

Town & Country (Clive Christian)

Winston Churchill wore this? 

When I hear the name "Town & Country," I think of Chrysler's minivans, the ones with the frumpy front ends and disproportionately small-looking tires. Seeing it printed on a Clive Christian bottle sends me spiraling into cognitive dissonance. This is another niche house where the packaging looks like it was designed by a small army, mostly by committee, but at least in part by someone's gay cousin. It's flashy, colorful, gaudy, and Rococo, a combination of aesthetics that is in equal measure alluring and repulsive. 

Fifty milliliters of the stuff will set me back $450, which is a blah zone for niche nowadays, although the brand is known for asking up to and beyond $1k for some bottles, in part because, again, flashy packaging, and also due to their supposed historical pedigree (they own the Crown Perfumery Company). At its price, my expectations are for nothing short of the absolute best, a Katara Towers of scent. Town & Country opens with a pedestrian top accord of bigarade and crab apple, which bites until the fruitier elements have morphed into an exceedingly dry and aromatic clary sage. So far, so meh. 

Within twenty minutes, this sagey phase bulks up, until the full thrust of the composition's heart has emerged, a robust woody amber with slightly retro connotations, thanks to a familiar old-school musk undergirding it all. It's that apple-pie musk of the late eighties and early nineties, the sort of thing found in designer masculines of that era, except here it is smoothed out, its rougher animalic edges sanded down, with only the drier and woodier elements remaining. There's a soft mineralic quality in there also, a touch of real ambergris, just enough to add a bit of texture and shimmer. Not bad. 

Sadly, there isn't much else to this stuff. After six hours, Town & Country evolves in linear fashion into a lighter version of its woody and ambery heart, which elevates the musk and lends it a somewhat cheap feeling. Whoever composed this perfume did not want it to smell spicy or loud, but opted for a blended and discreetly stuffy vibe, and while that makes every stage feel serious and mature, it lacks distinction, and has no sense of fun. It's a very "churchy" scent, something you'd wear to a requiem mass or while fasting, i.e., not something you'd bring to a picnic. For this kind of cashola, I need to be smiling. 

Aqua Media Cologne Forte (Maison Francis Kurkdjian)

I always find it interesting when people compare the same two fragrances en masse, especially when there's a huge price disparity between them. There is presently a $219 difference between Francis Kurkdjian's Green Tea (Elizabeth Arden), and his recent niche creation, Aqua Media Cologne Forte, yet when I smell the latter, I find myself thinking of the former, just as the other hundred some-odd people on Fragrantica do. 

Interestingly, AMCF has the same basic structure as Arden's cheapo, but with added herbal-green flourishes of fennel and cilantro, which distort the sleek citrus-tea profile for the first two hours of wear, and disguise all traces of Kurkdjian's 1999 hit. Yesterday my girlfriend and I were musing over it, and I mentioned that I usually enjoy when perfumes accurately replicate things found in nature, only here I resemble a guacamole bowl, which truly challenges my resolve. The cilantro note is perfectly rendered, nearly identical to sticking my nose in the real stuff, but who wants to spend their days emanating cilantro? The fennel is also pitch-perfect, albeit a bit subtler. With a hint of lime juice sloshing in the periphery, these herbs shout, "I'm a walking dip recipe!" 

Fortunately this effect only endures for the first two hours (maybe a bit less with modest application), and the citrusy green tea accord, labeled "matcha" on the official notes list, finally comes forward. The fragrance relaxes and sweetens a bit, channeling the same vague florals that are found in Arden's scent, allowing the wearer to enter a new phase of clean-green that is far less suggestive of Mexican takeout. It's a bright and sunny experience, an olfactory interpretation of dawn peering through clouds while a barista whisks a mug of Japanese brew. AMCF's tea note is far better realized than Arden's ever was, and for the remaining five hours of the day, all I smell is papery green tea, a hint of lemon-like citrus, and some floral sweetness, which is probably Hedione. It smells rather luxurious in its unremitting freshness, and I like it. 

Kurkdjian is often criticized for leaning too heavily on nondescript "fresh" and "clean" compositions, with his many Aquas being labeled "boring" and "more of the same" from critics, but I suspect that he's deliberately aiming for "boring." My guess is that he's trying to appeal to a younger audience, knowing that they'll be buying for far longer than Gen-Xers and Millennials. I think it's a wise strategy, and judging by the quality of Aqua Media Cologne Forte, I'd say his brand will remain popular for many years to come. 

Starwalker (Montblanc)

Photo by Manfred Heyde

Every so often I encounter a fragrance that everybody gets wrong. In this case it's Starwalker by Montblanc, which literally every single person on Fragrantica says "smells like Versace Man Eau Fraiche." Here's the thing: Starwalker is from 2005; the Versace was released in 2006. So VMEF smells like Starwalker. It came after Starwalker. It copied Starwalker. Starwalker came first. Jesus, people. Doesn't anybody check dates? 

Several reviewers compare Starwalker to spas and zen gardens. They claim that its one distinctive quality is a prominent bamboo top note. They say it smells very citrusy, but also "woody" and "weak." These descriptions are all a little off. First of all, what the heck does fresh bamboo smell like? Does it smell good? Does anybody know? Don't buy this based on its supposed bamboo note. That one's a grey area, especially here. 

I smell a blaring ginger and grey citrus (chemical) accord in the top, with just a hint of bergamot, so I don't know where all the bamboo is, because it's not here. And speaking of that very loud ginger note, it presages the overall loudness of the heart accord, which is basically residual ginger and cedar, a hint of fir, and Ambroxan. Yes, Ambroxan, in a fairly lithe dose, smelling something like a fictional "Sauvage Lite" with a wry attitude and blue instead of black jeans. Simple, approachable, unpretentious, a touch wishful. 

Does it smell good? I guess, but it smells bland. Perhaps one could say that a zen garden should smell bland, because how do you meditate if distracted by scent? Starwalker isn't engaging, it just smells "safe." Its fresh, camphoraceous opening is followed by a politely-assembled grey-brown drydown, an ending to a story that you slept through.