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.