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| 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.