Chipmunk (Zoologist)

I often hang a Little Trees air freshener in my car called "True North," and after a long workday, I find its crisp, snowy, slightly piney aroma soothing. It’s one of the longer-lasting Little Trees scents and smells more authentically pine-like than the classic green tree, which always reminds me of a rubber Halloween mask. Whenever I catch a whiff of "True North," I wonder if it’s cold, foresty aromas in general that calm me. It’s hard to say. Push pine notes too far and you end up with something like Stirling Soap’s Evergreen Forest, which can be downright jarring.

Pia Long’s 2021 fragrance for Zoologist, Chipmunk, leans more into hazelnuts but carries a few other notes that give me a "True North" vibe in the best possible way. For starters, the fragrance’s note list is one of the most accurate I’ve ever seen. Not sure about the quince, but I definitely detect a crystal-clear accord of pink pepper, mandarin orange, cardamom, and nutmeg at the top. This quickly settles into a grassy chamomile-hazelnut heart, layered over fir balsam, oak, and what they call "earthy notes"—really just synthetic oakmoss with a drop or two of natural patchouli oil.

The weakest link in matching the pyramid to the notes list is the base, which cites amyris, cedar, benzoin, vetiver, opoponax, guaiacwood, and "animal notes." Honestly, I mostly get the benzoin and opoponax, with maybe a soft touch of animalic musk, nothing like the assertive stuff found in other Zoologist creations. The overall effect is earthy, piney, and nutty-woody, with cold air swirling over warm campfires and hazelnut toast being passed around. It feels painterly, like something out of a Pieter Bruegel the Elder scene. On the strip, the terpenic notes sing out more. Chipmunk is one of Zoologist’s better fragrances, and it’s perfect for a crisp fall day looking ahead to winter. 

Tommy, Reformulated (Hilfiger)

In the late nineties, this was my summer fragrance, a staple I packed for family trips to our holiday home in Ireland. Wearing it felt like a tether to the buzzing New York Metropolitan area I’d left behind, which, to an eighteen-year-old, seemed important. Back then, the formula was crafted by Lauder's Aramis division for Tommy Hilfiger, but by the 2000s, fragrance trends shifted from ambery-sweet masculines to herbal-aquatics and blue-bottled ozonics, and somewhere between my college years and the shifting tides of scent trends, my beloved Tommy was adopted by a secondhand owner. “SA Beaute” in Europe makes it now. So imagine my trepidation when I spotted a bottle at a local rack store for twenty clams—a steal, considering it used to set me back at least forty-five. The new box design felt ominous, and I braced myself for disappointment.

From the first spritz, I was appalled. The opening was a prickly, alcohol-laden assault of synthetic chemicals and paper-thin citrus accords, mostly grapefruit and lemon aldehydes, and for a moment, I thought Tommy was dead, a faint ghost of its former self. But at the fifteen-minute mark, a small miracle occurred. Out of the haze, Old Glory began to emerge, almost as I remembered it. The familiar richness of cardamom, lavender, sage, tonka, sweet apple, and musky-woody undertones appeared, with a plush ambery base under it all. It was warm, modern, comfortable, nearly the Tommy I knew. Still, something had changed. Since its 1994 debut, much has happened in the world of fragrance, and several scents have pilfered the DNA of Alberto Morillas's composition. Montale’s Fougères Marines (2007) took Tommy’s basic structure, added extra fruit syrup, and threw in salty ambergris for that desert heat appeal. As I wear this new version of Tommy, I can’t help but wonder if it’s borrowing from Fougères Marines as a clone of its own clone, so to speak. There’s a noticeable marine quality now, with a salty Ambroxan note that wasn’t present in the original. This aspect supplants the thick and shimmery apple-musk beauty of the Aramis formula, and lends the fragrance a more aquatic edge. 

Another curious shift is in how the reformulation handles its greener aromatics; it leans into a Drakkar Noir-like vibe, with a hit of dihydromyrcenol and none of the nuclear Calone and ethyl-maltol-driven sweetness it used to have. This dialing down of the fruity sugar rush gives the heart of the fragrance a subtle throwback to the eighties, something I never associated with the original’s heady nineties redolence. Hilfiger once hyped the scent’s “apple pie” note, and while I definitely got that from the vintage version, the reformulation feels both thinner and more balanced—cardamom, spearmint, and lavender now frame the apple in a woodier, less cushy, and much less edible way. So, while I'm happy that the cheap top eventually mellows and allows some of the richness of the scent I once loved to shine through, it’s hard not to miss the magic of the original.