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| In the Hammock by Hans Thoma, 1876 |
Recently on his YouTube channel, Varanis Ridari spoke about what he perceives to be a possible resurgence in commercial interest in green fragrances, mostly in the designer realm. He cites the releases of fragrances like Hermès H24, Coach Green, and Parfum de Marly's Greenley as examples, and mentions that while none of these are exactly a return to the twentieth century mode of bitter woody-green masculines, they wander directly into green territory while also semi-pandering to the obnoxiously saccharine sensibilities of the contemporary buyer. He refers to a span of roughly the last five years as the time frame for this, and comments on the desirability of "green" as an olfactory theme. Like me, he frequently wonders why it has taken so long for mainstream brands to cut the crap and cough up a few emeralds, but hey, at least some houses are trying.
I would tend to agree with him that this phenomenon is happening, although I would add that green fragrances will not make a comeback until the public has reckoned with what it means to wear a properly "green" perfume. It's nice that brands like Ralph Lauren are dipping their toes into things like Polo Cologne Intense, but there are a few things that must be understood for it to really work. Green fragrances aren't meant to be friendly and inviting. They aren't aimed at air-headed ditzes who wear their grandma's vanilla extract when their favorite drugstore frag runs out. Green fragrances are meditative. They are neither serious nor sunny; green fragrances are aloof. Picture yourself wearing a sweet gourmand. Where are you? Waiting in line at a movie theater concession stand, or at a carnival gorging yourself on cotton candy and fried dough.
Now picture yourself wearing a cool green chypre. Where are you now? The sugar rush is over. The "hip" crowd is nowhere to be found. You are sitting alone in a wildly-blooming garden, surrounded by reeds and flowers, the trickle of a stream flowing nearby. Such is the feeling when wearing Jacomo's Silences, or Geoffrey Beene's Grey Flannel. There are fronds of tall grasses whipping around you in Creed's Green Valley, and a ski lodge villa of rustic pines dumping mentholated snow on your head in Acqua di Selva. These fragrances evoke a calming sense of nature, of serenity, of propriety. There are no marshmallow ambers or salted melons, but there is plenty of quiet. The man in a green fragrance is one of few words, but when he says something, he means it.
The American customer is rarely able to deal. "Hmm, this smells like dessert. I like this. This one? Yikes, this one is bug spray. No thanks!" And so the green fragrance dies, while the sugared chemical amber gets twenty flankers. Givenchy tried to win Western hearts and minds in the nineties with Insensé, and failed miserably for the sin of offering men a little something called good taste. But to offer something never works in macroscopic heavy-handedness. It takes a gradual orchestration of social mores to recalibrate the undiscerning mind into accepting something that was once intimidating. I believe that there should be market penetration of the idea of what it means to be "green." A couple of retro-reboot toilet waters here. A plucky cut-grass aftershave there. A few colognes in twenty-seven ounce bottles that harken back to the citrus chypre ideas of the eighteenth century, and perhaps a Millennial beard balm that smells like cut pine. Steady as it goes, and after a couple years, a trend. Not a war won, but many battles.
Now, that trend may indeed be forming, as V. Ridari pointed out. But so far it seems rather clunky and half-hearted. It's also going unnoticed, which perversely protects it from being instantaneously nuked by the corporate gods of Mount LVMH. I recently tried an Adidas fragrance (review pending) called CHRG for Him, an under-the-radar "sport" scent that cost me less than the price of a new bottle of Old Spice. It was many things, but to my surprise it was green! Unabashedly, unmistakably green, with more than a nod to the herbal aromatics of the sixties and seventies. That such a mass-market sport-oriented fragrance should adopt such a mature theme was both pleasantly surprising and utterly mystifying. How did this get past the gates? Why didn't some Millennial jackass axe the whole concept before it could even get modded into consideration? How did it get as far as a store shelf, where someone like me - ostensibly the average joe - could pick it up on a whim? The casual ease with which I was able to accidentally blind buy a green cheapie that smells good and doesn't devolve into ethyl maltol madness is stupifying. Eight years ago I would not have been able to do that, not if I tried.
When it comes to market penetration, I have some ideas. American men need to reacquaint themselves with florals. Back in the Victorian and Edwardian days, it was commonplace for a man to splash himself with a gussied rose water after a shave, something with a little more staying power than actual rose water, but light enough (distinguished enough) to serve as an inoffensive cologne. Add a little deer musk and perhaps a dollop of rectified birch tar, and that same cologne could become a proper toilet water, full of crisp lavender and rose and orange blossom, yet anchored to masculine archetypes via a generous whelp of animalics. But those days are long over, and the intervening 150 years has seen the same man lose himself to flab. Sure, the A*Men counterculture and Aventus Revolution were interesting, but where did they lead us? A few hundred clones and wannabes, few of which truly survived, and little else.
We need the toilet water to make a comeback. Men need lilac waters, and violet colognes, and lavender aftershaves. There needs to be a flower garden in the men's department at Macy's. I want to go to my local barber supplier and find at least three new lilac waters, all bottled in glass, with artistic labels and attractive colors, and they should migrate to Walgreens and Rite Aid. Clubman USA should be incentivized to compete by retooling their range, reintroducing glass bottles, and making their lilac water a competitor again. If more men are using rose waters and lilac waters after a shave, that will trickle upward to the designer realm, and from there into niche. Why are things like 4711 and Royal Violets by Augustin Reyes obsolete? Yes, they're cheap, but they should be spurring competition, not slinking behind rows of air fresheners in the sale aisle.
From the wetshaver world, men might graduate to something like Grey Flannel on a Creed budget. We might see Chanel release an intensely green bouquet, after Insensé. We might see YSL release a bergamot/cistus labdanum/oakmoss chypre in a jade bottle. We might get a taste of Paco Rabanne returning to the days when it could define an entire genre, i.e., the aromatic fougère. Little designer brands like Adidas might actually get recognition for releasing something like CHRG for Him, instead of the tide of crappy cheapies in every rack store from New York to New Delhi crowding it out. I think it's encouraging that brands like Hermès and Coach are toying with green ideas, and I wouldn't discourage them. But I also think that piddling around with herbal and verdant woody notes isn't going to be enough the second time around. The perfume world will need to build a return to green fragrances from the ground up, which will take time, trial-and-error, and acres of failure before a profit is turned. Small steps will lead to bigger ones. We gents can vote with our wallets, and perhaps green fragrances will one day live again.