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.