Fleurissimo (Creed, 2005 Batch), and An Open Question: Is This Creed a Blatant Christian Dior Clone?

Its box has 2005 stamped on the
Little back batch rectangle

First I want to review Fleurissimo, and then I'll get into some other stuff. This is the first proper Creed fragrance review I've done since Aventus Cologne, but that's a "new" Creed (2019); the last time I critiqued one of the brand's "originals" was my 2014 review of Windsor, which I totally panned. Let's talk about an older Creed that I do like, and then get into why the fragrance is such a bizarre mystery. I'll leave comments open to anyone who wants to chip in on Fragrantica. You can PM me and let me know your thoughts. 

Fleurissimo is one of Creed's more scrutinized classics. I say that because Olivier Creed has stated that it was released in 1956, which ties it to the whole Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco narrative (one of the few Creed stories that even I summarily dismiss as utter bullshit), yet after Gabe Oppenheim's awkward little exposé on the house, Basenotes and Parfumo quietly changed the release date to 1972. I vaguely recall reading something a long time ago about it being released to the public in 1972, following the conclusion of its sixteen-year stint as a bespoke fragrance, but I'd have to dig up the receipts on that. I still haven't read Oppenheim's book, so I'll suspend judgment there as well. I've known Fleurissimo since 2015, when I gifted the body lotion to my mom. It was wonderful; creamy, floral, a little green, which also describes the EDP. 

Fleurissimo opens with a lick of bergamot, one of only two non-floral notes in its composition. The citrus is tempered by something mildly warmer and sweeter, which I suppose could be a bit of orange zest for balance, but hard to say. The 2005 vintage has a hint of an indolic whirl bridging its citrus to its heart structure of white florals. It only lasts for thirty seconds (perhaps longer when it was new), and I like that it lends the perfume some quirk. Then its core floral ensemble appears, and I must confess a lack of familiarity with the various exotic white floral essences that your big-city florist takes for granted, so it's hard for me to authoritatively say exactly which blooms are represented here. To me it resembles hyacinth and lily-of-the-valley, but many people say it's tuberose, which I haven't smelled in real life (I live in Connecticut and tuberose isn't popular here). 

The fragrance is typical of classical Creeds in that it doesn't attempt an abstract, not-found-in-nature effect, and instead renders its notes quite literally and directly, merely presenting them together. If Creed were a crappier brand, this wouldn't work so well, but of course Fleurissimo smells like money. Its citrus is a freshly-sliced piece of fruit; its florals are literally growing on my skin; its simple ambergris base shimmers with a bitter and vaguely marine sparkle that only natural ambergris has. I take pleasure in finding a robust clutch of warm rose notes tucked under the white florals, and they actually lend the bouquet a richness and heft it would otherwise lack, as its fresher and sweeter notes are often used in antiseptic/functional applications, like scented toilet paper. The perfumer for Fleurissimo folded the florals over each other, letting some smell distinct and others play supporting roles, with all coalescing into one brilliant bouquet.

Overall, Fleurissomo is a light, natural smelling, and cheerful floral, fairly simple in construct, fairly stupendous in execution, and unfairly mired in Creed's stuff. Let's talk about Creed's stuff. I want to point out that there is surprisingly little written about this perfume online, outside of Basenotes and Fragrantica. Almost no surviving fragrance blogs have written about it. There is very little information to read, outside of the limited scope of Creed's own marketing and the copycat pieces echoing it. The only notable detail is the change in release date, and here's where the stuff is -- oh, the stuff! I find myself wondering about Creed's critics, just a little bit, especially when it comes to Fleurissimo. How is it that none of them have ever accused Creed of cloning Diorissimo, Edmond Roudnitska's 1956 lily-of-the-valley magnum opus for midcentury Christian Dior? 

I mean, the clue is right there in the two names: Fleurissimo/Diorissimo. Maybe I'm off on that one, as I have yet to experience Diorissimo, so I'll withhold an opinion until I smell whichever iteration of that fragrance I can get my nose on. I've been wanting to pick up a bottle for several years now, and just never got around to it. But the dates: Diorissimo was released in 1956, and Olivier claimed that Fleurissimo was also released that year, which is now disputed. As I said, I'm not sure where 1972 came from, and I'm unaware of Olivier or Erwin ever directly mentioning it. Their perfume is unattainably both fresh and modern, yet paradoxically rustic, with its own softly vintage vibe. It smells very fifties. It's also impeccably structured, with distinct phases, clear notes, and superlative materials, a standard maintained by the brand until the BlackRock sale. Everyone calls Olivier a liar, yet Fleurissimo is perhaps the greatest example of what I call "The Grey Cap Mystery," as it falls squarely into the brand's unlikely and mysterious era of "first releases." 

Who is the perfumer for Fleurissimo? How did Olivier commission something as poised, restrained, and perfectly representative of his brand's dual antique/modern olfactory aesthetic, and do it without pissing someone off enough to blow his cover? Did he use Pierre Bourdon? Was the hook for the young perfumer a limitless brief that sought to imitate the greatest perfume of his father's tenure at Dior? Was the allure compounded by the fact that he had learned everything he knew from Dior's best perfumer? If those were the circumstances, how could he possibly resist? 

There's one little problem with this: the result of Bourdon's labor would most certainly not have been Fleurissimo. Roudnitska's formula for Diorissimo reputedly contained a smidgen of Calone 1951 (watermelon ketone), which put it forty years ahead of its time, and which Pierre Bourdon definitely knew about. Bourdon built his career on using novel synthetics, and was a student of Roudnitska's, yet Fleurissimo contains no Calone. We're to believe that the young Bourdon resisted the temptation to build on his teacher's method when Olivier asked him to copy Diorissimo with price as no object? This puts him and Olivier uncharacteristically behind the curve, especially considering that the latter could have claimed credit for pioneering the use of Calone. It doesn't wash.  

Fleurissimo isn't an inaugural fragrance. It has none of the hallmarks of a twentieth-century debut (a gazillion notes crammed into ponderous accords, concentration too loud, feeble naturals stop-gapped with aldehydes and synthetics), and instead feels like a masterwork by someone who had been doing Fleurissimos for quite a while. Olivier commissioned it, smelled it, and was like, okay, I wanted Diorissimo, but this is tuberose decked-out with muguet, rose, hyacinth, and a little lilac. It's too good. I can't say no. It's my Diorissimo clone, but I can't call it that, and I want customers who like it to make the subliminal connection. If only I could integrate 'fleur' into the name . . . 

He did all of this in 1972, when his brand was a complete unknown. Fleurissimo was one of his debut perfumes, with no perfume heritage to draw from. Fleurissimo. One of Olivier's first releases. Beautiful, disciplined, near-flawless. 

Do you see how impossible that is? 

It doesn't add up. With Creed, nothing ever does. 

Dodo Jackfruit Edition (Zoologist)

One of the things you learn about perfumery when you become a bonafide enthusiast is that note pyramids are usually bullshit. There are notes stated and notes smelled, and usually they don't jive. I tend to look for pyramid notes that a five year-old can smell to see if I can detect them first, and worry about the weirder stuff later. I have no idea what jackfruit smells like, and I don't really care, as there's also lavender and turmeric listed in the literature. What matters to me is that I find a Zoologist scent that is versatile and well-made (Cockatiel is a little too special for that). Where is this brand's daily driver fragrance, the one to enjoy without overthinking, the "dumb reach?" 

There are three versions of Zoologist's Dodo -- the original from 2019 (a controversial scent), the reissue of 2020, and the Jackfruit Edition -- and I'm left wondering why Victor Wong can't just stick to the original fragrance. Imagine if every brand did this; Xerjoff comes out with "Mefisto 2024 Edition" and ditches the original, leaving Mefisto fans to wonder what they should think now of Mefisto, and of Xerjoff. Creed says, "Say goodbye to 2010 Aventus and hello to 'Aventus Maple Edition,'" and you can anticipate outrage among Aventus fans. So how is it that Zoologist can habitually nudge its fragrances into the bin and replace them with new editions? Is there no loyalty to any of these perfumes? Anyway, I sense that Jackfruit Edition is not a replacement, but a mere flanker to the replacement, which has also been discontinued by the way, so I guess it's better than nothing. If there are any fans of the original Dodo, or Dodo 2020, or Bat, or Panda, or Cardinal, or Dragonfly, you're screwed. But at least you have Dodo Jackfruit Edition.

This latest iteration smells the most like a potential "signature" masculine. It opens with a fizzy tropical fruit sweetness, blended closely with an aldehydic green material evocative of galbanum, but brighter and more sheer. This rapidly gives way to a turmeric note mated to a pleasant lavender that smells plush and a bit doughy, and eventually everything slides into a smooth hum of lavender, tonka, and orris. Yves Cassar is the man behind it all, he of Tom Ford for Men fame, and you can feel the touch of a man who knows what men like, as Jackfruit Edition is no less than a proper modern aromatic fougère that wears luxuriously but comfortably. Points to Cassar for integrating turmeric into an otherwise familiar structure and proving that sometimes you really can trust the pyramid. 

Understanding Arabian Market Creeds, and the Countless Paranoia-Inducing Inconsistencies in Creed's Packaging

Western Creed on Left; Eastern Creed on Right, with Gold Delete Box

I've always wanted an Arabian market Creed, and I finally bought one. What's so special about the Creeds sold to the Saudis, you ask? Well, not a whole lot, actually. They're still the same old fragrances; it isn't like Green Irish Tweed in Dubai smells like glittering angel spunk or anything. There is an old rumor floating around on Basenotes or Fragrantica that Creed made their Middle Eastern fragrances a touch stronger to better withstand the punishing desert heat, but I believe that's a myth. I'm not after higher concentration, although that would certainly be nice. What I've always liked about the Arabian Creeds is the gold delete on their boxes, i.e., no gold leaf trim around the fragrance name-frame or on the Welsh crest above it. The box itself is uniformly white, and to my knowledge this was how all Creeds looked in that region. 

Here's the funny thing about that: many people have questioned this version of the box and asked if they'd bought a fake when they received it. It elicited a consistently suspicious reaction, mostly from young men who of course stupidly dropped hundreds of dollars on a perfume without researching it first. Those of us who actually read about Creed and obsess over every tidbit of information we can glean from the brand always knew that the Saudi and Far Eastern markets got the gold-delete boxes, while the rest of the world had the gold leaf version. I couldn't tell you the reason for this; I suspect the broader international market had developed a more demanding taste for the brand than Europe or America had, and thus Creed cut down on the slightly pricier detail of adding gold leaf to their boxes to maintain profit margins while still quasi-mass-producing their fragrances. More boxes needed? Make them a little cheaper. Makes sense to me. 

But of course Creed never really addresses its packaging discrepancies, which leaves buyers wondering. The bottles of Fleurissimo pictured above are from different eras, with the newer Western bottle on the left boasting beautiful gold trim on its box and an English-language leaflet, and the Arabian bottle on the right, the bottle I recently purchased, with an even more beautiful gold delete box and Arabic-language leaflet. My bottle is vintage, dating back to 2005, and interestingly it lacks the 1760 embossing under the Welsh crest, while also having a paler green velour name-frame compared to the Western version. When you go back to 2005, you start to creep into a vintage territory with Creed where the packaging details get hazy and harder to understand. I can see how if someone received the Arabian bottle, they would immediately wonder if they'd been conned with a fake. It's a semi-racist knee-jerk response that Westerners have when they see something that they expected would be thoroughly Anglicized is instead bedecked with what looks like a cheaper box and literature printed in a foreign language. 

Last week I joined a vintage Creed enthusiasts group on Facebook, and had a brief chat with one of its founding members about counterfeits. He's been in the game even longer than I have, and told me that when it comes to feminine Creeds, you're almost guaranteed to receive the real deal, even on eBay. He said the exception to this is the recently-released Carmina, which he stated was Creed's real "Aventus for women," (as opposed to the actual Aventus for Her). I told him I had no idea it was that popular, but apparently Carmina is making a splash. I think BlackRock had decided to focus more on the female buyer, which actually makes sense for Creed. I mentioned to him that Love in White and Floralie are also faked, with the former being fairly obvious and the latter more insidious. He pointed out that it would be utterly futile to try to counterfeit Love in Black, given its inimitable bottle, and that virtually all of the clear-glass feminines were virgin territory for fakers, which I must admit sounds right. When was the last time anyone was conned with a dupe of Fleurissimo? Of Jasmin Impératrice Eugénie? Of Fantasia de Fleurs? How many threads have women or their boyfriends posted asking if their bottle of Vanisia or Fleurs de Bulgarie or Tubéreuse Indiana was real? 

The truth is that Creed is two brands split by gender marketing: the "male" Creeds, which are the heralded fragrances of high quality, and the "female" Creeds, which are viewed as if they belong to another brand altogether. The "femme" Millesimes are independent of the rest of the line. Varanis Ridari and I have both made the mistake of claiming that Original Santal was the last of the Millesimes; Love in Black is stamped as a Millesime, and was released three years later, which potentially makes it the last. I overlooked this little fact because like many enthusiasts I tend to forget about the femme line, which seems ridiculous because it is. The feminine fragrances are mostly considered "second-tier" by enthusiasts, although I am not one who shares this view. Fleur de Thé Rose Bulgare is an incredibly gorgeous tea rose fragrance, rather like Tea Rose done on a limitless budget, and with natural ambergris added. I have a review of Fleurissimo pending (provided my bottle hasn't become "eau de bowling shoe"), but remember it as a delicate and creamy white floral with hints of banana-like ylang for extra sweetness, thoroughly beautiful, and hopefully as much in vintage form. Love in Black is a somber but gorgeous perfume, with all the Creed quality there to feel, and Spring Flower is equally magnificent. None of these feminine releases rate as inferior to me. I should do better. 

So I purchased my vintage Fleurissimo with confidence that it is real. But I also marvel at the potential for a less experienced buyer to feel afraid; the packaging is so different! Consider the many variances in Creed packaging, and then ask yourself how anyone knows what the fuck they're buying. There's the Western gold-gilt packaging, and if you go back ten years or so, you have the velour name-frames, the Welsh crest, the 1760 emboss, the gold lettering on the bottom front of the boxes, the lettering on the top, the lettering on the back, the logo-embossed background print on the boxes, the lot number stickers, the velour and flat labeling on the bottles, the atomizers (three generations to consider), the "white ring" under the nozzles (probably the only constant feature), and the question of what are commonalities with fakes. If you can say anything about Creed with 100% confidence, it is that the brand is consistent about its inconsistencies. 

Go back to the mid 2000s and earlier, and things get even weirder. You have the red stamping of various royal crests on the boxes, which look like someone literally hand-stamped them on, which they probably did. You have things like the "sailboat version" of Erolfa, with its pretty little boat painting in the name-frame. You have boxes that have the Creed logo embossed everywhere, and boxes that don't (see below). You have bottles with different cap colors, and some frags that went from opaque to clear caps. You have feminine bottles shaped like masculine bottles. You have different iterations of the "royalty list" on the top of the box, the back of the box, and different versions of the lettering on the bottom front of the box. You have some Creeds that had their names printed right on the glass, and those same Creeds eventually adopted the velvet/velour label. You get into the Arabian market, and you see discrepancies between packaging features there versus here. Because Creed never explained the gold delete feature, one can only speculate, as I have, but regardless of reasoning, it looks badass. Not really sure why I like it so much, but I do. Must be my formal training in graphic design (a BFA in graphic design). For some reason it looks like it makes sense on an Arabian box. Saudi Arabian Royal Water, pictured below, looks beautiful with its silver delete box. 

I imagine dozens of wealthy oil sheiks in Dubai plowing through bottle after bottle of their favorite Creeds, maybe even throwing them around to guests at parties like candy, and Creed struggling to keep up with the demand. Olivier tells his packaging manager, "Get rid of the leafing on all but the lettering, it will speed up box production and keep costs down." He adds, "And lose the full-panel embossing of the company logo on the maculine/unisex boxes." Voila, the Arabian Creed. Clearly the demand was no less for the feminine Creeds, even the more obscure ones like Tubéreuse Indiana.

Or perhaps it isn't so clear. Perhaps Creed simply wanted an easy way to visually differentiate the Eastern market Creeds from their European market counterparts, and so used this simple and cost-effective way to do so. Perhaps it was something that Olivier felt was an apt allusion to an oil sheik's white keffiyeh, which would be a fittingly semi-racist European view. Whatever the case may be, I strongly suspect most of the gold delete boxes have been retired by BlackRock, and Kering will maintain the status quo. 

Add to all of this the imperfections in Creed boxes and bottles, especially the feminine Creeds, with things like bottles with and without bowties, bottles with and without clear corner contouring, bottles with faded lettering, bottles with weirdly marked lot numbers, bottles with faded 'Paris, France' embossing on the glass, and bottles with no laser-etched numbers. The one constant with all Creeds is the clean white ring around the atomizer stem, probably the easiest marker to seek for determining authenticity. 

Everything else is a variable that might or might not be of help.

Seahorse (Zoologist)

Julien Rasquinet, the man behind Creed's Acqua Originale range, was tapped for this one, and I approached it with all the trepidation imaginable after smelling Zoologist's Squid, otherwise known as Victor Wong's idea of an aquatic. The pyramid for Seahorse is a bit more conventional: cardamom, fennel, and ambrette on top, clary sage and white florals in the mid, and a woody base of vetiver, rounded off with "algae absolute" and ambergris. How bad could it be? 

Not bad at all, actually. There's a briefly generic quality to Seahorse that is immediately apparent at first spray, which screams 2000s DRUGSTORE AQUATIC at the top of its lungs, and I'm nonplussed during that stage. My brain immediately goes to, "What the fuck, another one of these overpriced designer frags put out by a niche label!" The salty ozonic "fresh" chems are all there and accounted for, smelling marine-like and sour with just a hint of nondescript sweetness to tame the wild surf. I might as well just go to Burlington and grab any blue bottle issued between 2001 and 2012, and save myself money. If you're into fragrances, you've smelled this before. Many, many, many times before. Even though it smells okay, you don't want to spend more than twenty bucks for it. It's sneaker juice incarnate. You're at Orange Julius flirting with a random girl before going to see a movie. You're twenty-two years old again. 

Five minutes into the drydown, all the bad nostalgia disappears, and my nose perks up. There's something else going on here; something different in the ensuing accords, something very good. Fennel, clary sage, and neroli, with powdery-clean notes, and then, two hours later, a mineralic-green effect that dances with all the common designer chems of the opening, lending Seahorse extra dimension, extra life. The base is a quiet amber, and longevity sucks (five hours), but honestly? Not bad, not bad at all. 

Cockatiel (Zoologist)

I find the backstory to Cockatiel interesting: Perfumer Sven Pritzkoleit formulated it years ago for his own perfume brand, SP Parfums, and named it Powder and Dust. His business shut down, but he sold the Powder and Dust formula to Zoologist so it could live on. It won the 2019 Arts and Olfaction award in the Artisan category, a clue to its excellence. I wore it for a day, and let me tell you, they were right. It's a good one. No, scratch that. It's better than "good." Cockatiel is great. Full stop. 

I had my doubts. The note pyramid is a strange hybrid of unusual and uninteresting: a top of champagne, raspberry, rhubarb; a mid of mimosa, "powdery notes," Cashmeran; a base of guiac, patchouli, vanilla, musk. Oh, and cockatiel absolute, distilled from the finest hand-picked cockatiels (that's in the fine print). I jest; the company makes a point of mentioning that all notes are synthetic, and the perfume does not use animal anything to make it smell great. And great it smells, opening with a crystalline accord of fine white wine with a hint of berry tartness and a subtle bitter-greenness that emerges as a vague impression of raw rhubarb. This is followed soon after by the fluffiest, gentlest, sweetest mimosa/acacia on the commercial market. It's soft and powdery, a little woody, and so breathtakingly expansive and dimensional that it quite literally hugs the air around me. Incredible. 

Seven hours later, at a low hum, this sweet yellow floral accord remains as it was, then gets sweeter still, as hints of vanilla tinge the outer edges of its powdery dream. I'm not one who often succumbs to sentimental jelly reviews, but here Prtizkoleit crafted something so beautifully affecting that words escape me. Cockatiel smells like a departure from the Zoologist brand because it wasn't a Zoologist creation to begin with. Thus, I view the fragrance as more of a reflection of Pritzkoleit's genius than of Victor Wong's curation; any niche executive worth his salt would jump on the opportunity to acquire an Arts and Olfaction winner and call it their own. With that said, kudos to Zoologist and to Wong for keeping this masterpiece in production. Cockatiel is full-bottle worthy.

Revisiting Creed's Love in Black: The "Fakest" & Strangest Creed of All

My 2017 bottle of Love in Black. It's a tester,
And I happened to have a cap. This bottle
Is what Creed calls "Artisanal Quality."

When you think Creed, you think three-dimensional and multifaceted perfumes, stuff that lives in the air and moves around you in stages until the glorious show concludes in a haze of ambergris. But Love in Black? This one moves differently from the rest; Olivier went rogue and defied his own brand identity with the sequel to Love in White. Widely known as the "synthetic" femme Creed, Love in Black is a somewhat spooky case. 

There are a few things about this fragrance that strike me. Let's start with the fact that whenever a Creed's reputation is less than stellar, people are happy to attribute the formula to Olivier and/or Erwin. When it's a megahit like GIT or Aventus, suddenly the names Bourdon and Herault get tossed around. Love in Black was panned in the 2008 edition of Perfumes: The Guide, as was Love in White, and since then critics have leapt onto the bandwagon of poo-pooing the "Love Ins" at every opportunity. Thus this is one of the least popular Creeds in the range, and perhaps the most controversial one. 

Another interesting thing is how it smells. Creed claims there are notes of violet leaves, cranberry, and raspberry on top, followed by rose, "violet accord," orris butter, and jasmine in the mid, and cedarwood, musk, and "leathery notes" in the base. This is pure marketing in my opinion. What I smell is the same blackberry chem that's in L'Artisan's Mûre et Musc and Ted Lapidus's Creation de Minuit, a smooth, dry, slightly floral material that feels rather like the fruit, but not quite. In typical Creed fashion, Olivier went way overboard with the dosage, and padded it with ketones, ionones, irones, and a few drops of vanilla and natural cedar oil finessed with a little cashmeran and white musk. But essentially at its core it smells like Frambinone®, i.e., raspberry ketone, which explains why Creed covers its ass, at least on an intellectual level, and claims there's a raspberry note in the pyramid.  

Bear in mind, people operate on the assumption that the original note pyramid is THE note pyramid for LiB, and memory serves that this included something like blackcurrant, wildflowers, and violet on top, iris and rose in mid, and cedar in the base. For the best blackcurrant, get a bottle of Afnan's Supremacy in Heaven, $24 on eBay. Here's the thing about Afnan's scent: if we're being perfectly honest here, Supremacy in Heaven smells better than Silver Mountain Water (and Club de Nuit Sillage, by proxy), but because it's a "cheapie" and a "clone," we're not allowed to say that. Supremacy in Heaven currently ranks in the top five of the most beautiful fragrances in my collection, and it's above my Creeds, by virtue of its having the juiciest and most natural rendition of blackcurrant tucked in its otherwise postmodern composition. That note in no way resembles any part of Love in Black. Likewise, my bottle of Silver Mountain Water has a subtle blackcurrant note that smells a tiny bit green and pissy, and again, it's just not in LiB, or if it is, I simply can't detect it, and it's probably a mere accent to something else. 

What I'm getting at is, Olivier wanted a perfume that smelled weird and modern, and he needed to make it himself, which was a bitch for him because he isn't a trained perfumer. His is a talented evaluator, so in a funny way it served him well to noodle around in the lab, smell whatever experiment he'd cooked up, and then decide if he would call it a Creed. (Time is money, and he probably wanted to compete with Guerlain's Insolence EDT, first released in 2006, and do it in a way that wasn't dead obvious, so he made himself a brief based on that scent profile and had at it.) If we look at the Creeds that are attributed to Olivier without argument, they include relatively simple things like Tabarome Millesime and the original Erolfa, which were conjoined parts of ginger EO and light woods in the former and salty Calone with a bit of pinewood in the latter. Olivier's thumbprint is found on things that are linear and simple, and Love in Black is notable for being fairly linear and deceptively simple, but time plays tricks with this one; its drydown arch is looong. 

Spray Love in Black in the morning, and the "plastic doll head" stew of intense aldehydes, frambinone, irones, and ionones rushes the senses. The aldehydes burn off quickly, the sweetness of the ionones tapers off as well (they vanish and reappear throughout the day, as ionones are wont to do), and the combination of raspberry ketone, rose ketone, and slightly powdery irones persist at a moderate hum as one thick "blackberryish" note for fully nine hours. At the twelve hour mark the whole thing has wheedled down to a very light rose and thin cedar, though it's far more discernible on fabric than skin. It smells like Olivier took one central accord, front-loaded it with ionones and aldehydes, backstopped it with a hint of rosy-cedary stuff, and called it Love in Black. What's interesting about this is he resisted his usual urge to spare no expense and make every material insanely luxurious for the sake of saying so. What's also interesting about this is the result smells intentionally fake, as if fakeness is its virtue. What accounts for this odd departure? 

There is so little written about this fragrance that I'm left with pure speculation. My best guess is that Olivier took a good hard look at the feminine Creed range, and the house as a whole, and asked himself what had been forgotten. The answer was there were two perfumes missing, a "Wedding Perfume," and "Slut Juice." In his Creed way, he conceptualized Love in White as representative of the sort of perfume a wealthy girl would want to wear on her wedding day, because it says "love" and "white" in the title, and it's the same price as her bridesmaid's dress. Likewise, Love in Black's name is suggestive of a dark inversion of a wedding day, which by my calculus would be a lust-fueled night with someone who charges by the hour. I'm fairly certain Olivier was the nose for LiW, and I agree with The Guide; Love in White is the worst Creed I've smelled. He's certainly the one behind its counterpart, as Love in Black is no less weird, yet it's more successful, more unisex. Olivier's idea of a vamp potion is something that smells overtly plasticky and synthetic, yet also murky, muddled, and dark enough to suit its name. 

In this sphere, he opted to jettison his usual approach of interspersing smatterings of naturals with top-grade synthetics, and instead went for volume, i.e., synthetics, and as much of them as he could manage. There's still a bit of the old Creed magic here; in the earlier stages the grandiloquent sweep of floral materials smells a bit fluttery and delicate, at least in snatches, with clear wafts of violet sweetness, slightly "grapey" iris, and dusky rose, the blossomy qualities conjuring up imagery of real flowers. Occasionally in the mid there are driftings of orris and some hard-to-pin-down woodiness, which I guess is the cedar peeking through? And, like I mentioned before, the far, far drydown yields a very slight but also very natural smelling cedar EO vibe. But overall Love in Black is a blatantly synthetic affair, its character defined not by its nuances, but by the overarching reach of its "perfumey" nature. Prostitutes don't wear natural and dimensional things, they bathe in billowy come-hither stuff that projects across the street and endures through the night. 

What do I think of it? It's been over a decade since I experienced Love in Black. It smells as I remember it, except back then I didn't quite know what I was smelling. I also didn't have as much under my belt, my experience limited to roughly 150 perfumes. My 2012 review touches on the brightness of its accords and the almost neon glow of the sweeter floral notes, and the weirdly eighteenth century bawdiness of the olfactory concept in play. Today, I largely agree with myself; LiB is still Big and Bold and all things capital letters, with a girl swinging in an oil painting from 17(something, you pick the year) and classical French forms distorted into a perfume bloat of pop art. I do remember the fragrance being a bit sweeter than what I'm wearing as I write this, but with Creed's endless "batch variations" and strangely shifting formulas (they're too uneven to be considered reformulations), it's probably a result of smelling a bottle from a year or two after initial release versus nine years after. I didn't check the batch code on the tester from 2012, so who knows? Maybe it was from 2008. I remember spraying myself with it in a Blue Mercury down in Fairfield, under the disapproving and weirded-out watch of a snobby cashier standing four feet away with her finger on 9-11 speed-dial.

She probably thought I was some sexually confused guy going after the feminine Creeds, and more concerning to her was the knowledge that I wasn't going to buy a damn thing. In fairness to myself, I asked her questions about a couple of the Creeds on the meticulously-arranged tester shelf, and attempted to engage her in fragrance-related small talk, but she was ridiculously rude about it and barely said anything to me, so even if I had intended to purchase, I probably wouldn't have. Blue Mercury no longer carries Creed, a sign they failed to move enough units and Olivier opted out of using them as a distributer. The truth about Blue Mercury is it's a pretentious company that tries to win over one percenters, but instead draws a middle class crowd of women between the ages of twenty-five and forty. 

The truth about Love in Black is that it ironically misses its mark. Olivier may have been aiming at promiscuous and cheap, but instead he wrangled together something that smells strangely modern, unisex, and expensively cheap. People write that it smells like "wet cement," "plastic doll parts," "bready iris," "hairspray," "dirty leather." I think it smells like an insane amount of raspberry ketone, modulated to resemble blackberry and purple flowers by other means. The note pyramid is a sham, entirely a construct of the power of persuasion, as if telling the gullible public what they should smell will distract even the most astute noses away from the bare truth, and lend the perfume a dimensionality it doesn't have. I don't get a ton of violet from it, although there is the vaguest suggestion of a violet note (unadorned ionones don't really qualify). I also don't get a ton of iris, although there are both iris and orris detectable. The rose is barely there, but tucked in with everything else. I think it smells interesting, but also bizarre, and if we're being real here, it smells more than a little "goth" and scary. When I smell this, I think of grey mists floating past crumbling crypts in a dark wood. I envision brambled thickets of blackberry bushes encroaching on bouquets of dead flowers strewn over mossy stones. 

"Love in Black" can have another, more chaste connotation, i.e., mourning a deceased loved one while wearing all black. The nearly colorless iris, the dry rose, the almost fetid sense of powdery sweetness hovering in a ghostly fog, all are evocative of a summer evening spent in a cemetery. 

Love in Black is the whisper of disembodied voices, a flicker of green eyes from the shadows that prove to be fireflies if you aren't running after their first blink. Yeah, it has some bright notes, but the composition is somber and leaden, and the overall feel is of something that is no longer human. Love in Black stands out as being the strangest Creed of all, a Creed that doesn't feel like a celebration of fortune and wealth, or of nature and clarity. It instead feels intentionally turbid, a gloomy fragrance that dwells in a realm where all is misunderstood. People misunderstand the perfume, and the perfume wants them to. If I could sum up what Love in Black is, I would say it's the perfume equivalent of the 1973 Jean Rollin film, "La Rose de Fer." She's a gorgeous girl, possessed. Her flowers are unnatural and rusted through. It's the only Creed you should wear with caution. 

Nightingale (Zoologist)

Luca Turin's fawning review of this fragrance has me utterly baffled. He acts like it's a difficult structure to figure out, saying he had to spray it on several strips to fully understand how perfumer Tomoo Inaba managed this 2016 release. Victor Wong hired a "self-taught" perfumer, so there's that. Turin considers it a technical marvel of a floral, giving it high marks (that part I get). Oddly enough, this one couldn't be easier for me. I recognized what was happening fifteen seconds after first applying it, and my opinion hasn't changed since, notable only insofar as it's the first Zoologist fragrance that seems clear-cut to me (I had an "Ah-Ha!" moment). That isn't saying much; I'm not sure what this brand is trying for. But I'll keep wearing Zoologist frags until I figure it out. 

Put simply, Nightingale is a revamping of Guerlain's Mitsouko, a blatant throwback chypre in which peach lactone is cleverly substituted with the dry and shaded sweetness of plum blossom. Tomoo cushions his muted florals between starched bergamot on top and a woody labdanum and oakmoss below. Where Mitsouko is about moss, Nightingale leans on resins, with rich sandalwood and incense lending accents of fire and a puff of smoke, and just a smidgen of synthetic oud to round out. I get a fleeting impression of bready iris, which vanishes in the first few seconds of wear, and an unusual, borderline unpleasant Ivory soap effect an hour into the drydown. There's also an uneven feeling to the florals eight hours in (this stuff has nuclear longevity), making it not quite as pristine as Turin makes it sound, at least to me. Some of the balance between soapy-sweet floral and dry/bitter chypre just feels a little . . . off. Still, it smells classical and wearable. 

In the bigger picture, I'm not sure I understand Turin when it comes to his idea of "technical" greatness. Nightingale doesn't even smell all that original. The composition merely relies on clever note switcheroos, swapping out Mitsouko's Frenchiness with Tomoo's orientalism. There's a pleasant little bouquet of violet and rose mated closely to bergamot, which is interesting, and here the perfumer is to be commended for resisting the urge to sweeten everything, as the fragrance remains old-school in feel. But frankly I find Nightingale a bit boring, in a different way from Tiger, which was simply too one-note vetiver. Here the dullness is in familiarity, and the nagging feeling that if I wanted to do this, and do it just a little better, I could wear Mitsouko and call it a day.

Tiger (Zoologist)

Conceptual perfumery is probably the most ambitious and creative kind, which also makes it the riskiest. Zoologist is a house that excels at risk-taking, with a range devoted to the cognitive construct of animals, their habitats, and their behaviors. Tiger, released in 2023 by perfumer Cristiano Canali, is one of the more conceptual fragrances in the line; it eschews any direct "animalism" associated with its namesake cat, and instead adumbrates the grassy-woody environs of predator and prey, an interesting exercise.

It is indeed more of a vague sketch than a refined picture, and I find myself enjoying one half far more than the other. Throughout each wearing of Tiger, I kept reminding myself to shelve my bias against vetiver, but the struggle is real. The fragrance opens with a clever and inarguably successful interplay of kumquat, carrot seed (sweet woodiness), and saffron (spiced woodiness). The fruit note is playful and transparent, while the rest smells dry and demure, and this accord of conjoined polarities is brightly modern yet classically poised. The saffron takes center stage in the first hour, and its delicate intricacies are relaxing and hold attention. Well conceived, and very nice. 

Then the vetiver sneaks in, as all vetivers do, and relaxation shifts to annoyance. It's an impenetrable wall of Haitian vetiver, super dry, nutty-earthy, very smoky and dark. Oh, and incredibly boring. The smoky earthiness holds in linear fashion for no less than eight hours, by which point I want to scrub and move on to something more cheerful. I've been told that Cristiano and Victor Wong consulted at length on how to make Tiger work, and hit several roadblocks along the way. Had I been there, I would've suggested omitting the vetiver entirely and focusing more on the woodier and greener aspects of saffron. But hey, the finished product is catnip for vetiver lovers, so I'll butt out. 

The Semi-Retired Fragrance-Blogger's Life: Why Shopping for a Creed is so Difficult in 2024

The fragrance world has changed since 2008, which is the year I got into this game, and I've been left behind. Back then there were far fewer niche brands, and Creed was nearing its apex of creativity and popularity as it approached its game-changing and mental-illness triggering watershed fragrance, Aventus. 

Even before Aventus, Creed was king. The competition (Guerlain, Chanel, L'Artisan Parfumeur, Amouage, Maître Parfumeur et Gantier, Bond No. 9) were all weirdly inferior, or maybe it was that Creed was very bizarrely superior. Olivier Creed's formula for success (or for 'Aventus,' as back in 2010 the company claimed the perfume's name was the Esperanto word for 'success') was unlikely on paper and even unlikelier in practice: take pedestrian designer formulas and reinterpret them using the world's highest quality synthetics and a smattering of insanely expensive naturals, and do it at maximum cost across the board, damn the torpedoes. Nobody else in the industry was brave enough to do that, but Olivier did it, and it worked out very well for him and his family. It made him a billionaire, and it made millions of devotees eternally faithful to the brand. 

I happen to be one of them. I'll never forget that first bottle, Original Vetiver, and how special it was. It turned many a dull drive to school or work into a religious experience, its blissful scent of green grasses waving in a glittering haze of natural ginger and ambergris. From there I moved on to Green Irish Tweed and Green Valley, with a couple of "grey cap" EDTs thrown in for good measure. The GIT was vintage and bowled me over with its insanely smooth and rich sandalwood basenote. I bought my mom a bottle of Asian Green Tea for Christmas several years back, and she actually didn't care for it all that much, which I both understood and wondered about. AGT was beautiful but very simple, a vegetal green top note that was somewhat dry and tea-like, overtly natural, yet hard to identify, followed by a soft semisweet floral accord on an attenuated version of Creed's famous ambergris base. I also got mom a bottle of Fleurissimo body lotion, which smelled incredible, and which she did like. I even turned my brother and his partner on to Creed, and they've been interested in the brand ever since. 

Here's the thing, though: my passion for Creed dates me. Creed is no longer perfume royalty. Its sale to Kering marks what is possibly a true downslide for the brand. But even before Kering, Creed was beginning to lose its luster with the buying public. Aventus was a massive megahit, but it was followed a year later with Royal Oud (I had no interest and was not alone), two years later with Millésime 1849 (not buying into the Harrods Exclusive hype), five years later with Royal Mayfair (not even remotely interested, and Creed's first bomb), seven years later with Viking (Creed's second bomb), and every year after that some sort of flanker or post-sale reissue. Carmina and Queen of Silk come across as cheap even without putting my nose on them, and it has become increasingly clear with each new release that the brand is "up-cycling" designer ideas into the Creed price-point without actually offering the qualities of superior composition and materials necessary to maintain the chromolithographic approach of Creed's legacy. 

This makes shopping for Creed exceedingly difficult in 2024. Creeds no longer contain their famous ambergris bases. They no longer contain the scads of natural materials that they once did, and even the synthetics are getting priced down a notch or two. Kering has no interest in taking the creative risks that Olivier took, and are instead targeting women with cheap "originals" and men with more Aventus nonsense (Absolu is a marketing abomination). Yes, the 2000s are officially over. The "Millesime Era" of GIT to Original Santal, a twenty-year timespan, is now fading away in the rearview mirror. We don't get Paco Rabanne's XS reinterpreted into Himalaya, or the vulgar bawdiness of Love in Black & White. We don't get the understated charm of what may be Olivier's only real perfumery creation, Tabarome Millésime, or the crowd-pleasing vacation fun of Virgin Island Water. What we get now are buyout Creeds, and they're not doing all that well in the market of public opinion. Kering might've been better served to purchase Bond instead.  

When I sit down at the computer to peruse my options with Creed, they're immensely limited now. By no fault of Kering's, the wonderful "grey cap" Creeds that were billed as EDTs (they had Millésime strength) are all long gone. Weirdly creative one-off limited releases like Feuilles Vertes and Rosalie are also gone for good, unless Kering gets religion. And the classics like Himalaya, Neroli Sauvage, Erolfa, Original Vetiver & Santal, and Millésime Impérial are all much riskier purchases now that the ambergris is history and the budget is compromised. I recently purchased a 50 ml bottle of Silver Mountain Water, a new "F batch" Kering bottle (probably BlackRock formulated, as it's likely that Kering hasn't sunk its teeth in yet), and I'm satisfied with it, and smell little to no difference between it and what SMW was twelve years ago. I imagine I'd feel the same way about Green Irish Tweed and Aventus, although I do not own them.

But my reason for not feeling bilked by my SMW is interesting in its own right. What few will mention when discussing SMW is that it was always one of the more overtly synthetic Creeds in their range. Armaf's Club de Nuit Sillage is currently superior to SMW, but that's because Armaf went vintage -- deep vintage -- with the version of SMW they cloned. They took it back to the late nineties and early aughts with Sillage, as evidenced by its intensely buzzy tea and blackcurrant, its streamlined and tucked-away "ink" note, and its massive synthetic ambergris base, which is so Ambroxan-heavy that at times during the far drydown the fragrance smells a little like sour breath. People say Sillage is 2013 SMW, but I smelled that vintage, and frankly it wasn't all that different from my new SMW. Silver Mountain Water remains a safe buy from Kering Creed in my opinion, simply because it is as light and delicate and "inky" as I remember it, and at no point does it smell all that natural, which is exactly as I remember it always being. 

So, SMW is a safe one. Another safe one is Green Irish Tweed. Even Kering can't fuck up GIT. Creed had already messed with it, stripping much of its sandalwood and ambergris base out over the 2010s, and by 2015 it was essentially Armaf's Tres Nuit with a little less sweetness. Green Irish Tweed has always been associated with Cool Water, and after you smell GIT side-by-side with CW, it no longer smells unique. It smells good, don't get me wrong, and I've always loved it, just as I love the Davidoff, but over the years I've realized that I actually like Cool Water more, mainly because after the removal of sandalwood from the Creed, there wasn't enough of a quality difference, or perhaps I should say that Davidoff's quality was on par with Creed's, with the only difference being in concentration and some minor divergences in focus (Cool Water's current formula is even better than it was ten years ago, with a distinct neroli note mixed with green tobacco, mint, an interesting sea salt note, and a pleasant Ambroxan in its base). 

Aventus remains safe because Aventus wasn't really the ambergris bomb of its predecessors, and was more focused on aromatic woody notes that were easily attained using Main Street synthetics like Norlimbanol and Iso E Super. Aventus was designed to be sold to the highest bidder, because by 2010 the writing was on the wall for Olivier and Erwin, and thus they crafted a fragrance using a formula that would transfer either up or down the budgetary ladder with minimal changes in character, a wise decision if ever there was one. Post-sale Aventus has seen little to no reduction in online Chad enthusiasm, but then again Aventus will never lose the Chads. They're intent on pumping their 35 lb weights at the gym and then going to their cubicles wearing four-hundred dollar neckties to price-match their cologne. Sadly, I never got on board the Aventus train. While I like it and appreciate what it does (and doesn't do), it never captured my imagination. I'm not really sure why, either. It has most of the things I love in a perfume: crisp citrus brushed with lavender, crystalline apple notes, subtle and romantic rose, and dry, smoky woods in the base, which in vintage formulas was so rich and smoky and dry that it smelled exactly like paper bills to me. I envisioned Aventus as a literal representation of the smell of money. 

I've never smelled Viking, so I don't know if I'd get on board with that one or not. It was released seven years ago, and the fact that I've never put my nose on it is actually a little embarrassing. Maybe I'll get on that this year, we'll see. My problem with Viking is everything I've read about it. "Upscale Old Spice" sounds great in theory, but then I smell actual Old Spice and inevitably think, "You can't improve on this." The whole point of Old Spice is that it was a smooth, vanillic-woody, nitromusk-laden sex panther of a masculine that any man could afford and the smartest used. Cheapness is its virtue. To "Creedify" Old Spice is a fun idea, but I'm not sure it's a wise investment. Viking Cologne is perhaps even more interesting, as is Aventus Cologne, which I have put my nose on. Aventus Cologne smells inferior to Aventus in my opinion, yet it's worthy of consideration simply for being fresher and more cheerful. It also enjoys the advantage of smelling like something that never had much of an ambergris note to begin with, but the flip-side is that it smells like a Macy's special, if Macy's was still a serious store. 

When I comb through the Creed catalogue, I start out enthusiastic, and two hours later my eyes glaze over and I start to succumb to the old man sleepys. What would likely still work here? Tabarome Millésime interests me quite a bit, as I actually like ginger and wouldn't mind smelling like it, but it's a fragrance that likely benefitted from the Creed water drydown, and now that the ambergris buzz is gone, I can't imagine TM is as gratifying as it was twenty-five years ago. Same thought with Himalaya, which was often cited as smelling like the most "generic" Creed. Himalaya needed top quality materials to work, which it had, and it did. But now? If it's even ten percent cheaper, and it probably is, it's not worth springing for a full bottle, unless by some miracle someone was so sick of having it around that they chucked it on eBay for less than $120. And Neroli Sauvage, Erolfa, Bois du Portugal, Millésime Impérial, and Royal Water all benefitted from having 100% top-shelf materials and ambergris in their formulas, so to go for them now would probably be unwise, especially since Armaf has already cloned Millésime Impérial so well. 

Original Vetiver and Santal are both alluring, but I fear I'd be heartbroken if I smelled OV now, after Creed relinquished its formula to Kering profiteers, and I was never really interested in OS, simply due to the fact that my appetite for sweet oriental compositions is pretty limited. I would figure though that, of the two, OS probably fared pretty well, and would still be worth owning. There are a slew of vintage Creeds online, but which ones are still good? Creeds spoil. Give them fifteen or twenty years, and it's a fifty-fifty shot they're still wearable, which makes buying any of them blind on eBay extremely risky. You have to know the vendor and the product like the back of your hand. I just spent the last three days combing through the inventory on eBay, and was shocked by how many fakes I spotted. Surprisingly enough, many of them are selling! Spring Flower, which was recently reissued by Kering with a BlackRock formula, is a "maybe." I've smelled the original 1996 formula, and it wasn't one of the more "natural" Creeds; its sharp citrus-fruity top accord lasted surprisingly longer than I expected, and was oddly closer to the designer realm in feel. Then the floral notes emerged, and they were delicate and soft and demure, and while they did give me a three-dimensional petals-in-a-breeze feeling that was definitely Creed-like, it was such a quiet and short-lived phase that if it were missing now I might not even know it. So Spring Flower 2023 might be okay, and indeed, Daver of the Fragrance Bros (YouTube) gave it a stellar review, and given that his Creed enthusiasm matches mine, I take it into consideration. 

Niche and uber-luxe perfumes have moved on from Creed, not because they've lost their magic, but because there are simply so many other options out there now. Many of those options are less expensive, and many of them retain the bragging rights of looking and smelling like true niche. Where Creed took the shotgun approach, looking to hit what they thought was trendy in the moment, these newer brands are trying to create trends of their own, and with as many fragrances as possible. Nevertheless, I've adopted Silver Mountain Water as my new favorite, and will gladly wear its synthetic sheen of icy snow banks and pine branches in the wind, damn the torpedoes and damn your obscure niche whatever.