The Most Wanted Eau de Parfum Intense (Azzaro)

This is a perfume that does not warrant any long exposition in a review; the fragrance is as generic and by-the-numbers postmodern as it gets. I like it a little more than The Most Wanted Parfum, but only by a hair, and while I enjoyed Quentin Bisch and Nicolas Beaulieu's original parfum concentration, I had hoped that Azzaro would eschew the twenty-first century tendency toward unfocused mish-mash. In this case, the brand offers customers a more conventional ambery oriental with less ginger-citrus and more powdery-sweet lavender, which eventually coalesces into a toffee-liquer accord resting on amberwood, Ambroxan, and a few detergent musks for volume. 

Many have bemoaned the death of what fragheads call "generalist" fragrances, which are one-size-fits-all releases that cover all bases of occasion, season, and seduction, without veering too far in any one direction. An example is Polo Green (1978), which feels formal and yet works in casual settings, fresh but also rich and woody, bright enough for summer and deep enough for winter, and abstract enough to attract either sex. The Polo Greens of the world have faded from the zeitgeist, and in their place are what I dub "specialist" fragrances. Where once I could reach for a Polo Green or an Allure Homme or a Dolce & Gabbana Pour Homme, and wouldn't have to worry about where I was going, what I was doing, or who I was doing it with, now I must select a specific fragrance for a specific milieu of life, be it work, play, dinner at a restaurant, dinner at a bar, an evening at a nightclub, a day at the beach, a few hours at the library, a run to the corner store, sexual encounter with my partner, etc. You get the idea -- there's a perfume for each. 

Why this has occurred is beyond me. What made the market stratify? Is there more money in it? Azzaro's The Most Wanted Eau de Parfum Intense comes in a black box and bottle, with an image of "night time" darkness, bordering on gloom. There's a bit of a Batman vibe. The scent's smoothness, its approachability, its loudness, and its sweetness all imply it is a clubbing fragrance. Yet perfumers Bisch and Michel Girard have perhaps accidentally created something that feels rather "generalist" to me. I find the cardamom and lavender top notes to be standard "guy stuff" in the nineties mold; the toffee-like heart is sweet but only invitingly so and not overbearing; the amberwood base is as standard all-seasons as it gets, feeling lush in heat and dry in the cold. If you're looking for a basic and inoffensive work scent that will come home ready for dinner and a movie, look no further. 

My '70s Vintage Pinaud Eau de Quinine: The Hair Tonic of Actor John Wayne (Well, Not Exactly My Bottle, but a Bottle Exactly Like It)

John Wayne's Toiletry Travel Kit, Electric Razor Fetish Intact. (Click to Enlarge)

My Near-Identical Bottle of The Duke's Tonic.

Guys that Used Quinine. Bunch of Damned Colonizers!

Let's talk about cancel culture for a moment. (This is usually where people get up off their campfire log and say they're going to bed early.) When it comes to the actor John Wayne, who died in 1979, cancel culture actually has its moment; if you're going to cancel anyone from that era, he's not a bad pick. In several interviews that he gave later in his career, he openly criticized people of color, saying (and I'm paraphrasing) that until they change their culture, "white supremacy" should remain the status quo. He actually used that phrase unambiguously, so there's no mincing his words. 

It's an ugly sentiment, something nobody should express, and certainly not publicly, least of all an influential actor with millions of fans. He also said (and again, I'm paraphrasing) that there was nothing wrong with how America was colonized, and that the native peoples were just as awful as the European settlers, and should have "shared" the land without being so ornery about the whole getting pushed-out and murdered thing. Again, not great stuff from Wayne there. Totally can see why someone in 2024 would take a hard pass on engaging with any of his material, or his historical legacy. Few wore their political ideas on their sleeve as openly as he did, and it's impossible to not take umbrage at his remarks. 

With that said, there is an important caveat, and one the cancelers will dislike: Wayne was a product of his time, and you can't judge people of the past by the moral standards of the present. It's tempting, naturally. Who doesn't want to condemn Thomas Jefferson for his ownership of hundreds of slaves? What possible objection could there be to erasing the legacy of George Washington, who refused to publicly condemn slaveholders years after he stopped imprisoning African people for his own benefit? Why wouldn't you want to cold-cock a beer-drinking John Wayne fan if you know that he idolizes a bigot, a wealthy and "privileged" colonizer who said that African Americans are inferior to whites? 

But two things can be true at once; Wayne can have toxic opinions, and also hail from a bygone America. John Wayne began his adult life a century ago; he was born 117 years ago and graduated high school in 1925. He grew up in a time when crystal radio sets were wowsers technology. He came of age during the Great Depression. When he was making his bones, our great-grandfathers were just getting themselves together and figuring out their lives. And guess what? If you emerged from the twenties and thirties, you had vile tribal beliefs about ethnicity and race, and your firsthand everyday experiences with institutionalized segregation ingrained and normalized all of them. 

I bring this up because I find myself able to set aside my disapproval of Wayne, the man, and appreciate that he had good taste in toiletries. There is no getting around the now-proven fact that John Wayne had good taste in personal care products, as evidenced by the discovery of a travel kit owned by The Duke, which led to a sale of the whole lot by Heritage Auctions in 2016. HA states, "These items were originally sold in the Heritage Auctions (Los Angeles) auction titled 'The Personal Property of John Wayne,' sale 7045, October 6-7, 2011, Lot 44521, final price realized was $1792.50; included is the original COA (Certificate of Authenticity) from Ethan Wayne, John Wayne's youngest son." 

I assume they were resold via Heritage to the current owner, who is apparently "actively responding to (though not necessarily routinely accepting) offers," whatever that means. For $3,750 or more, JW's toothbrush is yours. Apparently he used both Lilac Vegetal and Eau de Quinine, the mark of a true Pinaud fan, which is rather surprising -- celebrities are usually associated with fancy-pants fare like Acqua di Parma, Creed, Christian LaCroix, etc. When you think "wealthy," you think niche. Even for a guy like Wayne, who was getting his nuts bounced around on Morgans long before any of us were born, the assumption is that he used expensive toiletries, as befitting a millionaire. 

Yet this was markedly not the case; Wayne's bags contained hum-drum items like Johnson's baby powder, Pepsodent toothpaste, a comb with "A personal gift from Cary Grant" on it, and the Pinaud items. I do take issue with the Pepsodent, however. It doesn't really look like a true vintage tube from the seventies, or at least it seems a touch newer than it should, but I could be wrong. The rest all looks legit, although I have to ask, what on earth was Wayne doing with Cary Grant's comb? Of all the actors, he's the last one I'd associate with John Wayne (Grant never appeared in a Western). 

Does this change Pinaud's cachet? Does it go from lowly drugstore aftershave to Hollywood royalty because we now know that John Wayne preferred it? Lilac Vegetal is widely derided as smelling like cat piss, and suffers the "Veg" moniker on countless forums, yet we learn that it enjoyed the esteem of the most macho man of the silver screen. Does this change your impression of it? Will people think twice before they wrinkle their noses and say it smells like feline water? And what about Eau de Quinine? My bottle looks a touch older than The Duke's, perhaps by five or more years, judging by how the volume is printed on the bottom, and the natural browning of the label on mine, versus the fairly bright label on Wayne's. His is probably late seventies (newish when he died), while mine looks like it might be mid-sixties, maybe early seventies. 

Unlike Lilac Vegetal, which smells quite different in vintage form compared to the current stuff, my vintage Eau de Quinine smells identical to my new bottle. There is absolutely zero difference in the scent, other than the vintage smelling a hair stronger, with slightly better projection and longevity. Same rosewood and smooshed cherries smell, same strange, vaguely antiseptic drydown, and I notice a bit more tackiness on skin with vintage that I do with the new version. This feels like it could hold hair, albeit weakly, while the current stuff couldn't hold the down on a baby's butt. I truly believe that Eau de Quinine is overlooked as Pinaud's oldest surviving product; by all measures, a quinine-based product is a thing of the early-to-mid-nineteenth century, and only survived into the Edwardian era thanks to the extensive colonization of South American and African territories. 

The anachronistic nature of Eau de Quinine makes it a novelty nowadays, and it is now associated with world-famous cinema gunslinger John Wayne. It doubles as a cologne, and in vintage form, more so than current, it actually performs like a solid fragrance, with enough tenacity to at least make it to lunchtime. I'm never sure what the "feel" of this fragrance is, because it's so old-school, so not of this snowflakey post-woke world, and it has more functional than fashionable connotations, what with malaria and all. Malaria, that disease mosquitos spread like peanut butter across third-world countries. You've heard of it, right? Anyway, forget the cat piss, cheap aftershave, and the like; JW was worth $6.5 million when he croaked, and if Lilac Vegetal and Eau de Quinine were good enough for him, they're just fine for me, colonialism be damned. 

Cow (Zoologist)

Society is abuzz with talk of putting things out to pasture, so I thought it would be a good time to review Cow by Zoologist. This one is by Nathalie Feisthauer, author of Aramis Havana (1994), Vent Vert by Balmain (the 1999 formula), and Must de Cartier pour Homme (2000). She made her name on those, and has since put out respectable things for various houses, some of which are pretty obscure. Valeur Absolue? A-chromiq? July of St Barth? Uh-huh. Okay. Can I just take a moment to say that the number of recondite niche brands is beginning to get scary. Either perfume development is way easier than I think, or folks are just pitching overpriced crap in expensive bottles. The veritable galaxy cluster of new and obscure niche brands has become udderly impossible to navigate, pun intended. Zoologist looks like Guy Laroche in comparison to much of what's out there. 

Cow is Feisthauer in a bucolic mood, a likable entry in the brand catalog that smells more approachable and comfortable than anything else in Victor Wong's stable. Juicy green apple top note. Smooth and unsweetened vanilla/milk accord. A rustle of sage. A whisper of green grass. Eventually, a mellow floral tone, soft and well-balanced against the resilient milky notes, which are so anodyne and soothing that I think I could wear this to bed. True to its name, Cow conjures imagery of rolling green fields speckled with bovines, some lounging in tall grasses, eternally chewing and chewing. Of course, anyone with any experience in agriculture knows that the true smell of cows is cow shit; I spent years in Ireland trying to get the stench out of my nose, and I never got used to it. Green Irish Tweed is a wonderful fantasy -- if only the reality came anywhere close to it! 

But back to Cow: Look, I'm going to level with you here. I like it, but I don't think it's worth the money Zoologist asks for it -- not even close. Its green apple is nice, and it lasts a while, penetrating two hours into the early drydown before diffusing into other constituents, but if I want green apple, or any apple, I have designer frags for pennies on the dollar that get the job done just as well. Donna Karan has a thing or two to say about cheap but realistic apple. The chem Feisthauer used is perhaps a bit livelier, but negligibly so. Creation Thé Vert by Ted Lapidus puts another very similar spin on this structure of fruity-green and milky, although in Creation the milkiness is textural, and not a rendition of lactones. I will commend the perfumer for mating green to milky-vanillic, always a winning combo in my book, and I reach for Caron pour un Homme when I want it at its apotheosis. Although back in 2011, there was this pleasant little thing by Bath & Body Works called Country Chic that hit the mark as well (about $40, if memory serves). 

Soleil Blanc (Tom Ford)

This is one of those "suntan lotion" perfumes. It supposedly contains Egyptian jasmine, benzoin, cardamom, Tahitian gardenia, ylang-ylang, coconut milk, monoï, sandalwood, bleh, bleh, whatever. Fragrances like this one conjure the question: what do you get if you put Coppertone through GCMS analysis? Do you get constituent parts of that globally-recognized accord of white florals and woody-musks? If so, what do you do with it?

Remake it with luxury-grade materials, that's what. And that's exactly what Nathalie Gracia-Cetto did, spinning from the dried vinyl of this played-out theme yet another fancy-pants beach scent. I'll be honest, I actually like how it smells, with its lilting citrus-fizz top note and the endearingly gentle florals that follow, and I'd be remiss to call it anything but an olfactory success. Its coconut never gets overbearing, its musk never too sweet, and Soleil Blanc winds up smelling like quite a sexy little summer spritz. 

Sometimes the person makes the perfume, and I really think Ford's concept begs for the skin of a beautiful woman lounging on a yacht somewhere on the Mediterranean. It holds the potential to jump from a pier of UV skin protection into a lagoon of skin flicks. But on its own, on my person, having worn it for a day and refreshed it on my wrist, I'm utterly and unremittingly bored by it, and see no reason to drop my dollar here. 

These eBay Sellers SUCK!

What a Rip-off!

Ebay is both a blessing and a curse for a fraghead. I use it almost exclusively for my purchases (Fragrancenet and Amazon for the rest), and I've always had good luck with it, but that's because I'm lucky. It's not uncommon for people to get scammed by shifty bats, and this article is intended to highlight the ways a Creed buyer can get ripped off.

Let's start by taking a look at the picture above. This is a listing by a merchant who enjoys the company of a cadre of like-minded assholes that I call the "Red-Liners." Many Creeds are packaged in opaque bottles that obscure their content levels, which makes it tough to know how much product you're getting by a photo alone. This prompts merchants to Photoshop red fluid level lines over the bottles, which is itself no bad thing. My problem isn't with the line; I object to the price. It isn't commensurate with the amount of fragrance being sold, and it almost never is. In the picture is a bottle of Silver Mountain Water that is down a full ounce, as indicated by the red line, yet the merchant prices it at $245, which is $25 more than Fragrancenet is asking for full bottles of the same size. This one has no box or cap, and the price is way, way too high -- it should be no more than $180. 

Then there's this listing, for a bottle that ostensibly includes a box, but no cap. The bottle is legit, and the box probably is too, but here's the problem: the atomizer is aftermarket. Not just the nozzle, either, but the entire atomizer unit, from the crimping on the neck all the way to the nozzle itself. No generation of Creed atomizer ever looked like this, and it's clear that someone removed the original atomizer, refilled the bottle with something other than SMW, and then attached this crappy unit on there, hoping that it looks close enough to the old firehose sprayers of yesteryear. This guy wanted a typical eBay Creed price for this thing, and it's clearly been tampered with. The kicker -- the bugger sold it! 

Above we have what I like to call a "Flashlight Bully." Instead of using the red line, he opts for the flashlight approach, shining it from behind the bottle to make the fluid level visible. Again, I have no problem with people doing this, and actually prefer this approach to the red lines, because at least I can actually see with my own eyes how much juice is being sold, which removes a layer of doubt. The price isn't super offensive, although I feel it's about ten bucks too high. My issue is with how this product is listed and described -- the seller cites the condition as "brand-new" and "unused," yet there's clearly about twelve mls missing. In the description, "Approximately 97/100 ml remaining." Uh, no. That's not three ml, and the item has obviously seen some real use. Nice try.

In these three screenshots we see a listing by "Sketchy Bottle Guy." These guys always post super janky-looking bottles with bizarre deformities that the seller never attempts to explain. The top photo shows a Green Irish Tweed with a strange white area on the upper neck, which looks rather like someone tore the black finish off the glass while trying to pry the atomizer off. The next picture shows what we're meant to think is the same bottle with the atomizer sprayer removed to reveal the white plastic ring characteristic of genuine Creeds, but there's one problem: it isn't the same bottle, which is obvious because this one has no white area by the neck and collar. Clearly a visual misdirection. The last photo shows the bottom of the bottle, and maybe I'm being nit-picky here, but the stamping of "Made in France" looks a bit strange. That's neither here nor there given that the previous two pictures show a fragrance with enough red flags to attract every bull in Pamplona. 

Here we have a listing by a "Fake Boxer." These guys have a little cottage industry going where they crank out these full-production fakes, with graphic print boxes that Creed has never made, with awkward-fitting plastic caps that Creed would never use, and with bottles covered in cheap acrylic that cracks by the lettering, a feature that no genuine four-ouncer ever had (let us be thankful for the little things). But for their trouble, these jerks expect buyers to fork over $400+, mostly because they peddle the supposedly "vintage" 120 ml bottle size, which eBay has automatically deemed worthy of pricing north of $450. They tend to target SMW, Aventus, and Viking the most, so if you see these fragrances with weird graphics on their boxes, or some sort of box "sleeve," run, don't walk. 

And last but not least, we have a listing by "Coffret Guy," the eBay merchant who wants you to believe that at some point Creed made 1 oz mini-me bottles of its three hottest masculines and sold them together in a little gift set. While the box is admittedly well made, Creed never produced anything of this sort, and it's as fake as a porn star's bosom. Close scrutiny of the bottles reveals that they're merely clumsily-made chromos in a humorously diminutive size, meant to represent "travel Creeds," and again, Creed offers 50 ml bottles for a reason: they travel. The 30 ml size has always been an entirely different bottle design, not a smaller version of the 120 ml size. 

Other things I often see: listings asking full retail for bottles that are seven hundred years old, or close to it. This is perhaps forgivable with something like Bois du Portugal or a well-kept GIT, but steer well clear of buying deep vintage Millesime Imperial, Silver Mountain Water, and Green Valley. They age like milk, and spending anything more than $50 on 120 mls is highway robbery. I guess I could see spending a little extra for an older 120 ml bottle of vintage "Imperial Millesime" in gilt gold, just for the cool bottle, but I wouldn't pay any more than $100 for it. 

Also be wary of the larger size decanters, the 8 oz or even 17 oz flacons, as they were never factory sealed, and it's no difficult thing to simply take an empty one and fill it with whatever. This brings me to the reason you never want to use counterfeit perfume: you simply don't know what you're spraying on yourself. It could be cheap but harmless cologne, or it could be battery acid. You have no way of knowing. If you're in the market for a genuine Creed, or any expensive niche frag, and you want to buy off eBay, know what you're after. Study the product. Familiarize yourself with the little manufacturing quirks, the things a company always does, sometimes does, and never does. Read everything, look carefully at every picture, and ask for more. If they decline to send more, pass. 

There are the "One-Pic Guys," those who list a Creed with one lone picture of the actual bottle, and nothing else -- no atomizer pics, no lot code pics, no box/packaging pics. They annoy me. Some of the bottles are probably legit, but why not post a thorough rundown of the product? Multiple pictures means business; one picture means funny business. And in closing I'll mention the "Stock Photo Guys," the eBay merchants who list all of their Creeds with company web images from twenty years ago, or generic Photoshopped (often blown-out) images, without showing buyers the actual bottles that will be sent upon purchase. 

Steer well clear. Buyer beware! 

I Finally Read Gabe Oppenheim's Book. Here Are My Thoughts . . .

First, a quick explanation for why it took me so long to finally read The Ghost Perfumer: Creed, Lies, & The Scent of the Century. I'm a busy man. Last year I received a work promotion, and when I'm not working, I'm wearing perfumes and publishing reviews on From Pyrgos. Oh, and also putting energy into my relationship, and ensuring I find some time to dip in and check on my family. Finding five or six hours to sit down and read a book is extraordinarily difficult. But I was lucky to have a bit of spare time this week, and figured I was overdue to read Gabe Oppenheim's 2021 book, so I went cover-to-cover with it yesterday. Here are my thoughts. 

I'll start with the good stuff first, and go from there. The good stuff: my favorite thing about this book are the circumstances under which it was written. Oppenheim was exclusively a sports writer prior to delving into the topic of perfumery, and from his own telling in interviews and in the book itself, it sounds like the pandemic helped to make his project possible. Being trapped indoors for months on end spurred him to explore the addictive world of fine fragrance, and it paid off. I appreciate that he ventured beyond his comfort zone and attempted to penetrate the inner workings of the perfume industry, and I'm also impressed that he could develop a rapport with high-profile people like Raymond Chaillan, Jean-Christophe Herault, Laurice Rahmé, and not least of all, Pierre Bourdon. 

I like how the book pinpoints a specific crack in Olivier Creed's meticulous façade, which might be evidence that he falsified his family's entire perfume legacy. Oppenheim casually details how Bourdon lost to Edouard Fléchier an early eighties brief for L'Oréal's Courrèges in Blue. Bourdon's rejected submission was then "bought" by Olivier Creed, and became Fleurs de Bulgarie. This is notable because Fleurs de Bulgarie is one of Creed's supposedly historical perfumes, cited by the brand as having been originally created in 1845 as a bespoke for Queen Victoria, "under whose reign Creed served as an official supplier to the royal court." It is a clear case of an overlooked formula that our notorious perfume swindler sneakily appropriated and claimed had been made by one of his forefathers, when in fact it is as modern as a microwave oven. 

Unfortunately, that's about all the good stuff I could find here. The rest was, well, underwhelming, to say the least. I'll get the petty stuff out of the way: on a grammatical level, the book is horribly written. It reads like a first draft that has been given a cursory once-over. Oppenheim's prose is rife with spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors, including several ridiculous hypotactic sentences. Take this one, for example:

"And if he confused the two accounts, so that members of the latter were often held to the severe standards he helped set in the former, well, that was to both the great fortune and detriment of his little boy, who'd come to understand young just what was considered an artistic contribution worthy of Dior's imprimatur -- and all the brilliant work that, for any number of reasons never shared, either with the boy regarding his homework or perfumer-aspirants their trials, was not." (chapter 4, page 42, Kindle edition)

He also has an unruly habit of deviating from an interesting subject, sometimes mid-paragraph, to an uninteresting one, and I often found myself wondering if I'd purchased the wrong book. In the final third of his narrative, he goes from talking about Olivier Creed (interesting), to talking about everyone else in the industry (uninteresting), from Coco Chanel, to Estee Lauder, to Roja Dove, to Pierre Montale, where he goes into unnecessarily elaborate detail about the many hidden legal problems that plagued the Montale brand. None of this was interesting, because it had nothing to do with Olivier Creed, or Pierre Bourdon. Obviously a book about perfume will digress to elucidate the milieu of the main players, but Oppenheim's concludes with his big meeting with Bourdon, and his lengthy Montale digression was so close to those final pages that I feared it was camouflage, or perhaps filler, for something anticlimactic.  

My fears were well-founded; Oppenheim's day with Bourdon was uneventful, and he failed to illustrate any deep conversations that were shared with the master perfumer. Instead, he merely describes Bourdon's castle and interior design aesthetic, his paintings, his wife's fashion choices, a near-miss with orange juice and a fancy rug, and an emotional moment in the backyard after Bourdon awkwardly asks the author if he's Jewish. This is conveyed as a bonding moment, which might have resonated, except that earlier the young American had tried to brown nose his elder host, and received the coldest of snubs. Bourdon simply shrugged and turned away from Oppenheim to engage with Givaudan perfumer Shyamala Maisondieu, whom he no doubt was far more interested in. To me, this indicated an end to Bourdon's interest in conversing further. There is no formal interview with him, no direct questions and answers regarding his storied career, no firsthand accounts of his relationship with Olivier Creed, which I feel would have been quite stirring. 

Oppenheim peppers throughout the book what useful information Bourdon offered him, but suggests it was acquired via email correspondences with Kathy, the Frenchman's half-British wife. The whole crux of the narrative is that Pierre, son of Rene Bourdon, the general manager of product development at Christian Dior, desperately wanted to follow in daddy's footsteps, but he was disapproving and hard to love. Young Pierre then ventured into the industry under the tutelage of the legendary Edmond Roudnitska, and proceeded to pursue his vocation at the esteemed "oil house," Roure. For some unknown reason, Oppenheim describes the budding perfumer's sexual escapades in borderline-lurid detail, including an unnecessarily vivid depiction of when he lost his virginity. I sensed that this was the author's way of signaling to the reader that Pierre had trusted him and confided in him, but it comes across as pointless and a bit underhanded. 

The story follows the arch of Pierre's career, his separation and eventual divorce from his first wife, his time in New York and New Jersey, and the moments leading up to his creation of Dolce Vita with Maurice Roger. Oppenheim interprets Bourdon's path as an agonized estrangement, both from his wife and Roure, and it is repeatedly suggested that he would have been better off had he remained with both. It is also implied in elliptical language that Bourdon's ego is fragile, and that the many frustrations of his failed briefs, particularly the eight rejections of his formula for Cool Water, followed him into retirement. The problem I had with all of this is that it seemed to come entirely from Oppenheim, not Bourdon. While the history lessons were interesting enough, and the Bourdon narratives were consistently amplified, their provenance was suspect. 

I found the way in which Oppenheim tied Bourdon's trajectory to Olivier Creed's to be even less satisfying. A major problem the author had here was that nobody in the Creed family would speak with him. Olivier and Erwin both spurned requests for interviews, and there were descriptions of uncomfortable exchanges with folks in their close orbit. The company briefly flirted with a direct interaction on behalf of Oppenheim's book, only to abruptly withdraw without explanation. This left the author to speculate that the nature of his project would conflict with a far less controversial self-promotional coffee table book the business had in the works. I found this to be pathetic, because the reason was far simpler, and worse, it was dead obvious: Creed knew Oppenheim had already framed their enterprise as fraudulent. Why on Earth would they ever engage with him? 

This fact, which seems to have eluded the author, speaks to the folly of harboring forgone conclusions at the outset of a "journalism" project. Oppenheim put the cart before the horse here. Before he had written a single word, his view was that the Creeds had been spinning a complex web of lies about themselves, and his ensuing correspondences with industry insiders were attempts to validate it. Clearly, word got around. Worse still, instead of finding his "smoking gun," he uncovers some dead-ends that are incompatible with his hypothesis, which he admits are baffling. I could literally smell the cognitive dissonance wafting up from the pages as I read about these facts, and it smelled pretty foul. I had to inhabit Oppenheim's mentality to fully comprehend where he thought he could go here, and it turned out there were almost no avenues of enlightenment available to him.  

Bourdon and Creed intersect with Olivier pilfering each failed brief that the budding perfumer finds himself burdened with, starting with the formula for Courrèges in Blue (Fleurs de Bulgarie), then moving on to Lancôme's Sagamore (Green Irish Tweed), Erolfa (Bourdon can't remember what that one was originally for), Imperial Millesime (unclear if that was ever for anyone but Olivier), L'Eau d'Issey Miyake Pour Homme (Silver Mountain Water), and more. Oppenheim describes Olivier as a parasitic playboy with an ungodly amount of charm and charisma, the likes of which could seduce even the most stalwart perfumer, a man who simply walks into a lab uninvited and begins smelling mods without permission. He was drawn to Bourdon when Christian Dior held his Kouros release party next door to his shop, and attached himself to the unfortunate Frenchman from that moment onward. The con-man had his mark.  

This is what we're meant to believe. Oppenheim injects this air into his writing, a beleaguered sense of extreme cynicism that permeates every sentence about Olivier Creed. As I read through the timeline of Creed's heist, I found myself thinking that none of it was news, except for Fleurs de Bulgarie. It was never a question that Green Irish Tweed, Imperial Millesime (later changed to Millesime Imperial), Silver Mountain Water, and Original Santal were all Bourdon's creations. Of course they were; the man created Cool Water and Joop! Homme, for Christ's sakes! Bourdon's name was already attached to the rest. I kept waiting to read some deep insight, some probing backstory to the machinations of each perfume, and there was none. The entire gist was simply that Pierre was underpaid for his labor, and Olivier Creed had shrewdly made out. Again, not news. 

I didn't need Gabe Oppenheim to rehash old news, information that Luca Turin had revealed years earlier in various online writings and comments. Plus, there are major gaps in his timeline, just as there were for Turin. Nobody has ever touched on the briefs for Bois du Portugal, Neroli Sauvage, Green Valley, or Tabarome Millesime, which seems convenient. Despite all talk to the contrary, there are still some compositions that the fragrance community attributes to Olivier, usually the less successful ones, and Tabarome Millesime has always been one of them. (It makes me want that Millesime more.) 

What I did need was an explanation for how Olivier managed to assemble his original "grey cap" line of eau de toilettes. This is where the real money is for any book that purports to analyze Olivier's rectitude. Where did Royal English Leather come from? Vetiver 1948? Royal Scottish Lavender? Epicea? These fragrances all predate the "Bourdon Breakthrough" of 1985's Green Irish Tweed, and were all far more traditional in style. Oppenheim delves into Olivier's "origin story," and his mysterious appearance as a twenty year-old on the doorstep of Soleil d'Or, a little commercial shop in Lille, in 1963. Employees there recount how the young man was his own brand ambassador, with a fully-formed range of products that he claimed were "my creations," implying that he was the perfumer. Oppenheim wonders how this was possible, given that Creed has since explained that the compositions were his father's, and were formulated in the fifties.

At this point, which is fairly early in the book, my eyebrows were raised. I was reading Oppenheim's narrative, and said to myself, "Okay, not exactly convincing me that Olivier is the liar you've made him out to be." The author states, with an air of incredulity:

"The Soleil d'Or further makes the case quite accidentally for Creed's backdating, for a distortion of time no less imaginative than H.G. Wells's. Again, page 41, on these first three Olivier-presented scents:

'They anticipate everything that will characterize his future creations: originality, classicism, simplicity, a mark of real good taste.' 

If true, and the fragrances bear Olivier's own imprint, their formulation can't possibly have predated his adulthood or birth."  (chapter 3, page 39, Kindle edition)

Why not? There is no answer. The only masculine grey cap Oppenheim explains is Acier Aluminium, but Creed has always said that Acier Aluminium was released in 1973, so who cares? We get a variation of the perfume heist story, this time with Bernard Ellena, Jean-Claude Ellena's brother, again claiming Olivier would appear in his lab uninvited and smell everything. But Ellena makes it sound like Olivier was allowed to do this, and that it was less an invasion of privacy and more a mutually agreed-upon arrangement.

The weirdest part of the book is the chapter about Aventus, which is yet another heist narrative, with Jean-Christophe Herault the mark. Here the logic is warped; Herault is Bourdon's protégé, who knew the older perfumer at a stage of his career when he was fixated on pineapple notes. Once again, Olivier waltzes in, and at this point I wondered why Bourdon hadn't warned Herault of the predatory rich man's scheme. If Olivier was such an ungrateful leech, why wouldn't Herault just tell him, "thanks, but no thanks," and move on? But no, the cycle repeats itself, different only in that this time Olivier allows the young perfumer to publicly take credit for his work. Aventus was such a success, and Olivier had his eye on the exit ramp, so he figured, what the heck? Let the artist get his due. Seems pretty fair to me, and it helped launch Herault's career. 

To sum up, the book is entertaining, but it suffers from countless plot holes. The exact origin of the grey caps is never explained. Fleurissimo and the rest of the feminine Creeds, with the exception of Bourdon's Spring Flower and Fleurs de Bulgarie, are excluded from the narrative entirely. (I consider Fleurissimo and the feminines that predate the nineties, like Irisia, Tubereuse Indiana, Vanisia, and Fantasia de Fleurs, to be grey caps also.) Oppenheim's main contentions about Creed's veracity are occasionally warranted, but often exist in an evidence-free vacuum of self-serving speculation. His account of Pierre Bourdon is stilted, cluttered with unnecessary subjective interpretations and interjections, and surprisingly dull. One never gets a sense that the author got to know the master perfumer, and without that, what else can a book like this offer? I might have enjoyed the read more if I'd felt the story was organic, self-forming, its author learning along with me, but instead it was merely a belief in search of validation.