The Trump Anomaly: How Olivier Creed Accidentally Harnessed the Unfortunate Power of "Orange Man Bad"

"Donald, this smells familiar."

This weekend I was on Reddit. I know, I know. What was I thinking? There was a thread on Creed titled "Creed company's origin? How are they getting away with a fake story" -- and I had to pitch in my two cents. I know, I know, I know. What was I thinking? It's not bad enough that Reddit is populated with ignorant trolls that ceaselessly babble about stuff they know nothing about; they occasionally venture into interesting territory, and turf up just enough nonsense to lure the likes of me right on in. And boy, was I in. 

The gist of the thread was that Olivier and Erwin Creed are liars who have conned the world, ala Gabe Oppenheim's The Ghost Perfumer. Nothing new there, folks. I've already hashed and rehashed my opinion on that. But just to choke it up again, and I'll be as succinct as possible here, it's not all that bizarre for Creed to do that. Did they stretch the truth on multiple occasions? Did they exaggerate their pedigree to make their brand more appealing? Did they "con" the world with dubious claims about royal appointments and a three hundred year legacy? Maybe. Sure, maybe they did. 

But let's be honest here, people. We know what the Creeds were doing. It all made sense. They have an old family that does date back several generations, and their forefathers were in the fashion biz. They were in the "riding habits" biz. Eighteenth century leather makers like the Creeds were in a sophisticated business, one which entailed the production of leather goods, but which also required such goods to be palatable to the public, and in the 1700s, that meant making the leather smell like something other than disgusting raw animal hide. Gee, I wonder what would make dead skin smell good?

Aside from that, James Henry Creed and all the Creed tailors of that bygone era were busy making saddles and boots and gloves and jackets, and probably also made saddle soap, powders to condition and scent the gloves, little olfactory trinkets to scent the boots and jackets and get rid of the nasty. Every high-end leather maker since the dawn of time has done that. Every tailor dealing in "sports" equipment dating back to Caesar has done it. Can we stop pretending we don't know this?

This gets me back to the Reddit thread. On this thread were numerous young men who were all about pretending they don't know everything I've just said. It was all about how the Creeds are liars, con men, they have "no evidence" of perfuming anything prior to 1970, how do they get away with the lies, the lying liars that lie? 

One guy commented: 

"If you want a company with REAL history just go with Guerlain."

Another guy said,

"They claim to have made fragrances for the likes of Winston Churchill and such, but there is no proof. Compare that to Guerlain who has an extremely well documented history. Creed = lies lol." 

 And yet another said:

"My take is Creed is probably 50 or so years old and the rest is marketing to convince you that bottle of perfume that cost $10 to produce is worth $500."

This was followed by a response from another user:

"Not true. There are actual receipts etc from the 1800s for tailored goods and royal warrants. The original store in Paris has the actual warrant from Napoleon framed in the store. There is history to the Creed brand but not just for making perfumes. Doesn't matter if they embellish things a little, every company does for marketing reasons."

This prompted a response from the other guy:

"Can you provide a link to a verifiable document? Up until as recently as 2 years ago no documents could be verified anywhere. There seems to be a long history of no documentation, including a total absence of warrants. If they have proof in their shop it seems reasonable the rumor would have ended."

This led to me saying:

"My friend, you clearly don't know what you're talking about. You want to see Creed's royal warrant? Just look at any one of their Private Collection boxes. Their warrant with royal signature is printed on the back of every one of them. I get it's fun to criticize Creed. But you've just embarrassed yourself.

This got a windy response that ended with the sentence:

"If you have something objective to add, let's see it." 

I posted this photo: 

 

It has the royal warrant clearly displayed. The guy had claimed that he owns Private Collection fragrances and that none of his boxes have the warrant on them, but when I posted this picture he shut up right quick and I haven't heard from him again. Conversation over, as it should be. (Pretty clear the only lie on the line was the one about owning Private Collection Creeds, as evidenced by how easy it was to shut this guy down.)

This got me thinking about how people grapple with what I call the Creed Conundrum. I’ve written about this before: there’s something about Creed that seems to cloud rational thought. Call it Creed Derangement Syndrome: an obsessive need to heckle the brand, accusing it of fabricating its entire history. The prevailing narrative? Olivier Creed conjured the whole legacy out of thin air, hired modern perfumers to craft the scents, and let the truth be collateral damage. And if I don’t buy into that outrage, well, then clearly, I must be a gullible fool, a perfect mark for this suave charlatan and his so-called phony empire. How could I be so naive? What’s wrong with me?

This is the same dynamic I see with Donald Trump. For example, he steps up to a microphone in front of a crowd and says something like, "I love Mexicans and Mexico, they’re wonderful people. But they’re not sending us their best. The people crossing the border are drug dealers and rapists." Okay, it’s a bit uncomfortable, I’ll admit. The phrase "I love Mexicans" is meant to soften the impact, but I have to carefully unpack what Trump is actually saying: he believes that many illegal border crossers are young men with bad intentions, no viable way to earn a living in the U.S., and likely to engage in more criminal behavior while here. Laken Riley’s family would probably agree with him on the issues of drug dealers, killers, and rapists.

I then sit back in my chair, and think, "Well, he didn't say that very well. And he's not as clear as he could be. He's trying to say that Mexico and Mexicans are generally likable -- lovable, even. He likes them. But the border problem is the worst of Mexico mixed in with some of the others, and it's those baddies that we need to focus on, because if we're just letting them into the country, no questions asked, we've got trouble."

Then I turn on the news. 

The chyron: . . . TRUMP SAYS MEXICANS ARE DRUG DEALERS AND RAPISTS . . . 

And I sigh. That's not what Trump said. It's on tape. I know what he said. Why are you gaslighting me on what he said? It's the border. We've been having issues down there for decades. They've been getting much worse in the last twenty years. He's addressing that. He's making his case. I don't particularly like how clumsily he's making it, but he's making it, and I get it. Why are you pretending you don't get it, mainstream news people? 

Trump addresses the Charlottesville fiasco with the Confederate statues, and says that in the debate about whether the historical aspect of those statues should be preserved, there are "Very fine people on both sides." The mainstream media and the Democrat party interpret that as, "Donald Trump says white supremacists are very fine people." 

Again, not what he said. 

In 2024, much of these gaslighting messaging tactics have been debunked on X, Elon Musk's platform after his Twitter buyout, and the majority of Americans now have a revised opinion on exactly what Donald Trump stands for, which explains how a majority of voters put him back in office, including about 50% of hispanic voters (mostly men). Now, whether or not that was a good thing is up for very deep debate, and there is a strong case to be made that Trump should not serve another term, and should perhaps serve jail time instead. That case is convoluted, hard to understand, impossible to identify with. I don't get it. Neither do 75 million Americans. But, there is another 75 million who do get it, and to them it's very real. I can live with that. I can work with that. I can respect it.

I bring this up because the same thing happens with Olivier Creed. Olivier does an interview and says to Le Figaro in 2013, "When I entered with my creations exclusively in a provincial perfume store like Le Soleil d'Or, in Lille, in 1963, it was a real challenge against the big brands." Gabe Oppenheim translates this to: "Perfumery was a brand new business for us, so I chose to soft-launch it in the sticks." 

That's not what Olivier said.

He clearly said that he positioned himself in a provincial commercial setting because he was up against the likes of Chanel and Dior. He's stating that when you take your perfumes from the land of bespoke and into the designer market, you have an uphill battle on your hands. What Olivier is implicitly saying is that when your perfumes have to speak for themselves because you don't have a rich financial backer to foot the bill, and your own money is at stake, wealthy as you may already be, it's still a major uphill battle. For comparison, look at how Pierre Montale made out. He was also a "perfumer to the royals" in the Middle East. Despite that, he still needed a rich financier to fund his launch of the Montale brand. Without that, and despite all of his private clientele, he wouldn't have gotten his own perfume business off the ground. 

Olivier has honesty on his side there, the same sort of honesty that Donald Trump kinda-sorta has when he kinda-sorta just is himself and says exactly what he thinks, at least in the moment he thinks it. But here's the thing about Olivier Creed, the thing that Trump doesn't have: he's got mystery on his side. Yes, there are things about Olivier and the Creed dynasty that are not known to the public. He has kept it that way for a reason. Mystery about him and his family gives him cover. 

This cover creates a vacuum of information and knowledge, which gets filled with speculation. But like with Trump, the speculation is touted as fact. "Creed's perfume business only dates back to the seventies." "Creed lies about the perfume part, but the tailoring business was real." "There is no verifiable proof that Creed created perfumes prior to 1970." All of these ideas swirl around in the bleakness that Creed's mystery has cast on the yearning public, those fragrance-obsessed guys who spend all of their time seeking out and buying the most obscure niche crap they can find. 

The claim that the perfumery end of the Creed family business started with Olivier is tempting to believe. There are a slew of factual arrows that point in that direction, and many are mentioned in Oppenheim's book. Indeed, Creed did show up at Le Soleil d'Or in nineteen sixty-something with a couple of perfumes that had no clear provenance, and he was, by his own account, looking to sell. He claimed to be a perfumer. He continued to offer perfumes to the shop, and as Oppenheim's book elucidates, those perfumes actually moved units. Oppenheim acted like the number of perfumes that sold was meager, but I was impressed by it. Twelve-hundred bottles sold in 1970? That's a hundred sold every month. That's about three bottles per day. For a small family brand with no designer clout, that's amazing. 

My problem with all of this is that it doesn't track. Just as the slings and arrows fired at Donald Trump fail to land, the same degree of skepticism thrown at Olivier Creed misses the mark and hits something else entirely. Oppenheim fails to deliver the goods on my questions about where Olivier got the "Creed Water" formula of real ambergris and musk from, or how he came up with his impressive list of briefs for the Grey Cap lineup. You can say a guy pulled briefs out of his butt, conned a few perfumers into making them, and touted them as heirlooms . . . but he pulled this off with Fleurissimo, Orange Spice, Épicea, Baie de Genièvre, Bois de Cèdrat, Citrus Bigarade, Sélection Verte, Bayrhum Vétiver, Herbe Marine, Ambre Cannelle, Angélique Encens, Aubépine Acacia, Bois de Santal, Santal Impérial, Chèvrefeuille, Animalis Pimenta, Bois de Rhodes, Cyprès-Musc, Ylang Jonquilles, Royal Scottish Lavender, Cuir Imperial, Verveine Narcisse, Vétiver, Fleur de Thé Rose Bulgare, Irisia, "Vintage" Tabaróme, Royal English Leather, and Zeste Mandarine Pamplemousse?

Sorry, Gabe, but no. 

There is a huge chunk of information missing here. Most of these perfumes aren't color-by-numbers pieces; they are weirdly sophisticated and speak to the sort of Old Money wealth that only aristocratic Europeans enjoy. You can't fake that. You, Mister Oppenheim, have failed to shed light on most of this.

The skeptics sling everything they can at this, and miss every time. The word they like to use that gives away their bad aim? 

"Proof."

They want "proof" that Creed is responsible for creating perfumes prior to 1963. What they ought to be asking for is "proof" of who is responsible for the lion's share of perfumes that predate Green Irish Tweed, and fundamentally question whether the perfumers who have laid claim to some of them, like Pierre Bourdon did with Fleurs de Bulgarie, were acting on brand-new from-thin-air briefs, or adapting archaic, time-worn formulas that needed overhauls to be brought to commercial market. Almost nobody is asking about that.

The narrative that Olivier Creed simply waltzed into labs and stole formulas is more entertaining, even though it doesn't really make sense when you consider the scope of the lineup mentioned above.

If I had a leather riding goods and tailoring firm in the 1700s, my focus would be on the functional accoutrements to leather. This was a time when perfume barely existed. I would create products like saddle soap and homespun perfumes designed to make the hide smell tolerable. The formulas I developed would be proprietary to my leather goods firm. If they proved successful in their duties over the course of a century, I might parlay one or two of them into actual fine fragrance at some point in the nineteenth century. 

These perfumes would be little stocking stuffers offered to faithful clients in tiny bottles of an ounce or less. They might even gain some steam in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when the leather goods end of things has closed shop, and the tailoring has picked up. By the middle of the twentieth century, I might have some period-specific pieces on offer like Orange Spice and Fleurissimo. These might migrate from the 1950s to the 1960s, into the hands of a young Olivier Creed, who might eventually decide to "amp up" the perfume piece and make it everything. 

None of this is hard to believe. None of it requires proof.

Orange Spice, by the way, is an example of a perfume that I think adds to the Creed mystery. Pierre Bourdon is not the nose behind it, despite its resemblance to Kouros. If he were, the formula would have been mentioned in Oppenheim's book, and it wasn't. (Varanis Ridari has the scoop there.) I smelled the comparison to Kouros in my bottle, but I also smelled a strong comparison to another fragrance from the 1950s called Max Factor Signature for Men. Same musky orange and wood notes. Slight hint of ambergris and nitromusk in the base. The two fragrances clearly hail, at least in spirit, from the same era. That goes a ways in backing up Creed's claim that Orange Spice is from 1950. 

That might sound trite, but the truth is less glamorous than the narrative we've been spoonfed by the skepticcs. Again, anything is possible, but if Creed faked the provenance of Orange Spice, well then, man, did he nail it. Total bullseye. He managed to get a perfumer to make up something that smells quite literally like some obscure fragrance from the 1950s, which happens to also be in my collection. 

The Reddit user is right to say that Guerlain has real history to prove they made perfumes. Creed isn't Guerlain. Guerlain is a behemoth of nineteenth and early twentieth century perfume; Creed is a footnote. When Pierre-François Pascal Guerlain was gunning for a spot in the Eau de Cologne Hall of Fame, Creed was merely doing private little ditties for wealthy clientele. Privately-commissioned fragrance. This is what Olivier Creed and his son, Erwin, have claimed their family dealt in for hundreds of years.

There would be zero proof of any privately-commissioned perfumes. They would not come in mass-produced bottles. They would probably be delivered in little apothecary bottles. And they would not have advertising or a paper trail of any kind, beyond whatever perishable receipts of the tax year might require. 

None of this is hard to believe. None of it requires proof.

These formulas, probably a bit hackneyed and unscientific, unsophisticated even, would eventually need to be made in earnest by trained perfumers, if they were to survive at all. Cue the 1970s. Cue Olivier's quest to hire professionals on the low-down and make things properly. Suddenly Fleurissimo exists in a mass-produced flacon with a label and anyone with money can buy it.

None of this is hard to believe. And the proof is in the perfumes.

Why must we go all Trump Derangement Syndrome on Creed every single time the subject of their historical bonafides comes up? Must we keep pretending that Creed's claims about making perfume are preposterous? The part about making the perfumes, I mean. If you want to poke holes in all the claims about serving perfume to royals, have at it. But making the perfumes. Really? We can't believe that some Creed sometime before 1963 came up with a few perfumes? Even if they were purely functional perfumes used to soak leather hides and give them a signature smell? Scented gloves for ladies? Scented habits for riding? The stuff that people actually used back then, as opposed to the luxury stuff of today that people don't need to use? 

Is it the fake tan thing? If Olivier's tan was real, and not orange, would he be more credible? Or still in the doghouse like Trump? Has Olivier, in being a successful businessman with a knack for exaggerating his accomplishments, harnessed the unfortunate power of "Orange Man Bad?" 

The moral of this article is the following: Stop expecting proof of things that never required proof prior to you coming along and demanding it. If a family made bespoke perfumes for wealthy Europeans dating back hundreds of years, those Europeans would have had titles and nobility. That's how Europeans with money rolled back then. If you had money, it was likely inherited. And it was disposable, and even then, it was used for frivolities like fancy riding habits with citrus and floral scents. Such personal bespoke projects would not survive in any way to yield "proof" of their existence centuries later. They would simply melt into the annals of time. If this is what the Creed family did, then the only proof they need is the warrant printed on the box. Read it, and shut up already. 

Replica Sailing Day (Maison Margiela)

Briny aquatics thrive when they embrace their salt-soaked nature without being softened by fruit or generic crowd-pleasing notes. Maison Margiela’s Sailing Day, launched in 2017, attempts an intriguing balance but falls oddly short. It’s loaded with the essentials: sea salt, seaweed, minerals, aldehydes, and Amboxide, yet lurking beneath the surface is an unexpected sweetness, a soapiness verging on dish detergent. Ajax in my high-end fragrance? Who authorized this?

The scent opens with a sharp burst of frosty aldehydes, anchored by an intense saline note reminiscent of opening a jar of Himalayan pink salt and inhaling deeply. Yet somehow, this bracing saltiness is layered with a bubble bath-like sweetness, as if Sailing Day were more suited to a toy yacht in a soapy tub. A faint trail of white florals and a timid hint of pineapple-citrus runs through it all, but nothing takes center stage. Ultimately, Sailing Day is a steady, linear composition, smelling good but landing somewhere between commonplace and, well, “meh.”

I view aquatics like this one as the go-to for people who are still unaware of their options. Having sniffed my way through a hundred or more variants in the aquatic genre, I know what truly shines in this category. Yet for many, Sailing Day may simply register as an inoffensive “luxury” spin on a “fresh” and “sexy” locker room scent. And perhaps that’s all Maison Margiela aimed to achieve. For the less discerning, it does the job well enough, and in that spirit, I give it a reluctant nod of approval. (Get Sel Marin instead.)

Obsession for Men -- Oops! I Mean, Musk Deer (Zoologist)

This 2020 creation from Zoologist, crafted by Pascal Gaurin, senior perfumer at IFF, immediately transported me back to the 1990s. Now, for those of you who’ve been following my writing for some time, I’m aware that my frequent nostalgic musings about this era might be a bit much. But I stand by it: the 1980s and 1990s were a golden age of cultural innovation, and I often find myself yearning for the heady days when fashion, music, and fragrance had a particular magic. One standout from that time was Calvin Klein's Obsession for Men, a balsamic oriental fragrance rich with resins and spices that exuded a "grown-up" sophistication without veering into stuffy territory. Though the fragrance has been reworked over the years, its essence remains intact, albeit a few notes lighter than I remember. (For this reason, I haven't purchased a new bottle.) 

Obsession wasn’t merely a fragrance; it was an olfactory phenomenon, a marketing blitz that was impossible to ignore. From every magazine cover to every television ad, Kate Moss, scantily clad, if at all, stared provocatively back at me, stirring up all the hormonal chaos of a teenage boy. The scent, an "adult" oriental, was paired with imagery of waifish women caught between raw sensuality and a hint of rebellion. It was an audacious marketing strategy, but undeniably effective, selling a dream of dangerous allure. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Obsession was just a little bit aspirational, like even those who wore it might have done better with something just a touch more refined. But there was no such version until now.

Pascal Gaurin answered the likely implicit call of creative director Victor Wong to reimagine Obsession, and the result is Musk Deer, a fragrance that takes the foundations of Klein’s iconic oriental and elevates them with the finest materials available. Gaurin, having crafted eleven fragrances for Calvin Klein, clearly knows Obsession inside and out. He has, in essence, "Creedified" it, giving us a scent that is both familiar and refreshingly new. Musk Deer is a stunning, crisp oriental that channels the rich amber and animalic-floral notes of the original, while introducing a new complexity through layers of cedar, labdanum, patchouli, and a delicate touch of natural Laos oud. At the heart of this composition is a luminous Sambac jasmine absolute, which infuses the fragrance with a velvety, almost intoxicating sensuality. It's a cheap-in-a-fun-way smell done with an unlimited budget. 

Among the entire Zoologist collection, this fragrance feels the most wearable to me. In fact, it’s the one I’m seriously considering purchasing. Obsession has always held a special place in my heart, and I’ve long hoped for something that could take its core concept and refine it. With Musk Deer, I’ve finally found that dream realized. Much like the original Obsession, this fragrance evokes a strangely alluring fantasy: a vision of youthful, ethereal women existing in a quiet, almost surreal world of sterile, colorless advertisements, where the only thing that matters is how good they smell. Spray on Musk Deer, and it’s the 1990s once again. Only this time, I’m ready for the ride.

Replica When the Rain Stops (Maison Margiela)

"When the Rain Stops is supposedly inspired by Dublin in 1967. I wasn't alive yet in 1967, but I do remember, somewhat acutely and unwillingly, what Dublin smelled like in the early 80s. It wasn't like this. There's a distinct lack of diesel fumes, smog, deep fried breakfast foods and old men in wet wool."

This Fragrantica review made me chuckle because it's so true. Dublin did smell like that back in the day. I have memories of the city in 1991, about seven years before the Celtic Tiger transformed the country and eroded much of Ireland’s old-world charm. Back then, it felt like a scene out of an indie film, full of smoky pubs, police on horseback, and the occasional attractive woman striding along cobblestone streets, braless under her knit sweater. Perhaps not the most ideal setting for a young boy, but it had its moments. And yes, the earthy stink of farmers in wool suits was everywhere.

Replica When the Rain Stops doesn’t capture any semblance of Dublin, but it does smell like a blend of one part Neutrogena's Rainbath and three parts early-90s aquatic musk, a slightly gummy freshness, but without the usual overdoses of dihydromyrcenol and Calone 1951. It’s clean and sexy in its way, though not particularly original. If I’m being blunt, it could easily pass for a fabric softener. The powdery fougère undertone of the Rainbath angle adds an unusual snowy softness, further emphasized by the surprising potency of this fragrance. Just one spray lasts a solid nine hours.

The masculine opening of pink pepper and cardamom lends WtRS a spicy, aftershave-like feel, faintly reminiscent of Hai Karate or Pinaud Clubman. But soon, pale florals—mostly lily of the valley and Hedione HC—take over, shifting the fragrance toward a watery herbal vibe, supported by the faintest hint of powder. There’s a touch of Kenzo Pour Homme in how this develops, but the resemblance doesn’t linger. In the end, I like this fragrance and would use it occasionally if I owned a bottle. But for the price they're asking? No way.

Is Brut the Ship of Theseus?

The Paradox of the Ship of Theseus is an age-old dilemma: can an object that has had every one of its parts systematically replaced over the years still be considered the same as it was in its original form? Can an object remain essentially unchanged despite efforts at preservation to remedy its decaying components, or is it preferable to simply reconstitute the object from the decaying pieces themselves?

This question lies at the heart of the Ship of Theseus, which boasted thirty oars and was celebrated by the Greeks as worthy of preservation. After many years, every plank, every oar, every board, warp, and mast had been replaced with ostensibly identical new parts. The vessel was granted a hero's memorial, yet philosophers debated whether this act preserved the ship or merely replaced it. Was the pristine vessel purportedly used by Theseus still truly his ship after 150 years of plucking and replacing, or had it transformed into something entirely different?

This riddle invites contemplation of whether an object is defined by its material composition or if its identity transcends the materials that constitute it. Is the preserved assembly of planks and boards the true ship of Theseus, or is it the ship constructed by a bored dockworker using all the original parts, even if it appears altogether different?

I often find myself pondering this question in relation to Brut. Of all the fragrances in my collection, Brut inhabits a strange, eerie realm reminiscent of this timeless Greek paradox. Launched in 1964 as a classic fougère with a nitromusk base, Brut has undergone countless efforts at "preservation" due to changing ownership, reformulations, and evolving standards in perfumery. In 2024, sixty years after its debut, and now manufactured by High Ridge Brands, one might encounter Brut on grocery store shelves and wonder: is this really Brut?

The dilemma arises from Brut’s myriad iterations, applications, concentrations, and bottlings, surviving only by the skin of its teeth into the twenty-first century as an anachronistic homage to its era. When a young man discovers a green plastic bottle today, he might question whether this fragrance resembles the original. If he is a pessimist, he may assume it does not. Should he buy and wear it, can he genuinely feel as though he is donning Brut? What else could it be if not the product advertised on the label?

This conundrum extends to the fragrance community at large, where reformulations are ubiquitous across nearly every fragrance older than a couple of years. Even “newer” fragrances, still commercially popular, are likely to undergo minor tweaks and adjustments driven by the availability of materials and fluctuating prices. Consider Creed's Silver Mountain Water, a fragrance celebrating its thirtieth anniversary next year. Despite the passage of decades and two changes of ownership since 2020, the white bottle with a silver cap still contains something called Silver Mountain Water. However, the dense, mineralic ambergris of the original has vanished, replaced by an intensely inky version that might better serve as a flanker to its 1995 predecessor than a true representation of itself.

Fragrances evolve, yet their names and overall packaging typically remain unchanged. This invites a critical examination of older fragrances: Are you what you claim to be? After the natural oakmoss has been eliminated, after the notes that flourished in the sixties and seventies have been diminished—first slightly, then more conspicuously—are you still Brut? After the synthetics have been replaced with kinder, gentler chemicals, after the cancer-causing nitromusk molecules have been excised and substituted with other potentially harmful musk compounds, are you still Brut? The bottle bears the name "Brut," yet the scent I experience cannot possibly resemble what a man inhaled upon unscrewing the cap in 1964!

The Ship of Theseus Paradox profoundly impacts perfumery and presents a pressing question for those who cherish vintage scents and seek their analogs in the contemporary market. If we accept that constitution does not equal identity, it becomes easier to view a fragrance that claims to be a certain scent as authentically that scent, despite undergoing extensive refurbishment. 

By adopting the "Continued Identity Theory," we might consider Brut to be itself, as long as the changes it endures unfold over an extended period and do not occur all at once. Imagine if Brut had been obliterated by Fabergé shortly after its release, entirely wiped from the market with every bottle bought back and destroyed. Then, in 2024, another entity produces a powdery scent and labels it "Brut." In this case, we would recognize that this new Brut is not the old Brut but something entirely different. Conversely, the Brut that has undergone minor adjustments over six decades—enough that no original part remains—still retains its identity as Brut. It remains close enough to the original to be considered the original, still the same perfume.

My solution to the Ship of Theseus Paradox is straightforward: Brut is Brut if I accept that it is. My acceptance of the current iteration allows High Ridge Brands to successfully market it to me. Helen of Troy had so thoroughly altered Brut that the formula available between 2015 and 2021 was utterly unrecognizable to me, and thus I did not consider it a fragrance at all. I did not buy it, I did not wear it, I did not respect it. Brut was effectively discontinued, despite never leaving store shelves.

High Ridge Brands successfully restored the fragrance I recognized, delivering an impressive rendition of its original formula. Consequently, I regarded Brut as "back," even though it had technically never gone anywhere. Then HRB reformulated its reformulation, slightly diminishing the fragrance's quality, yet it still surpassed the subpar version that Helen of Troy had marketed. For now, Brut endures.

Book (Commodity)

Palo santo is an unusual material. While it has an appealing scent, its pure form doesn’t strike me as something that would work in a personal fragrance. Sandalwood, cedarwood, and even oud have qualities that seem harmonious with human skin, but palo santo has this odd dill-pickle edge that dominates my olfactory experience, making it difficult to picture as a wearable scent. Commodity, however, changed my perspective.

Book is a fragrance containing a palo santo note that feels approachable, and I think it smells fantastic. Interestingly, Commodity doesn’t list palo santo in its note pyramid, and for the first few hours, you might not detect it. By the third or fourth hour, though, it subtly emerges, supporting the drier, “fresh” aromatics that came before. Book strives to recreate the experience of turning a dusty page. It’s a conceptual fragrance that evokes the scent of inky, well-loved paper, and I believe it succeeds. Book smells beautiful.

Yet, it raises the question: would I want to smell like an old, dusty book? This is where the niche factor enters: fragrances like this appeal only to a small subset of aficionados who yearn for the ambiance of an antique bookshop, surrounded by shelves of calfskin and vellum. Notes almost feel irrelevant here; Book simply smells like a book. Anyone who loves books enough to want to wear their scent will find joy in it.

Harvest Mouse (Zoologist)

The oriental category of fragrances ("oriental" meaning "of the East" in classical perfumery terms and not a slur, contrary to the idiocy of the language police) has never been my favorite. If you've been reading me long enough, you know that I tend to wear them the least, generally avoid buying them, and despite all that has happened since the 1930s, Old Spice is still my favorite oriental scent, and the most worn. So I approached Harvest Mouse fully expecting to feel about it as I do about all expensive fragrances in its price bracket: impressed, but not enough to buy or wear. 

As it turns out, I'm not even impressed. This 2023 fragrance is by Luca Maffei of Houbigant and Jacques Fath fame, and my expectation was it would smell like something that belongs in the Pineward range, only better. Well, I was half right. It belongs in the Pineward range, only it isn't any better, and might even be a little worse. It starts out promisingly enough, with a pleasant burst of warm citrus (bergamot studded with cloves), sweetened a bit by a floral orange blossom and chamomile that eventually gets sweeter and more vanillic, to the point of feeling strident. I think it's the novel accord of "Beer Extract CO₂" that ruins it. It smells biting and sharp, malty-sour but also sweet, and it evokes the feeling you have after having one too many. I give it points for uniqueness, though. 

The base, which arrives about five hours in, is a more balanced and enjoyable ensemble of woody notes, namely cedar, some light balsamic accents, the tonka-like plushness of hay absolute, and the aforementioned vanilla, which has lost the disturbing angles and now simply smells smooth and edible. If you are not like I am, and you absolutely love woody-fresh oriental fragrances, I think Harvest Mouse will appeal, but for those of you who already have anything like a Pineward or Bogart or vintage Lagerfeld fragrance in your collection, you probably won't need anything here. 

Fragrantica Advertises Trump's New Fragrance, Members Lose Their Sh!t

While I can certainly understand why the average Joe on the street might hesitate to say a good word about Donald Trump, I find endless humor in the outrage machine that Trump generates online. Recently, the 45th President released his latest self-aggrandizing marketing gimmick, this time in the form of another fragrance, called Fight Fight Fight, which has a photo of him with upraised fist emblazoned on its otherwise unremarkable square bottle. As you may have guessed, this didn't go down well on Fragrantica. 

My take on Donald Trump and the fragrance community is this: we wouldn't have to worry about Trump if the West weren't so badly calibrated that it gave rise to the fragrance community in the first place. Let's face it folks, we're part of the problem. We spend all day, every day obsessing over very expensive perfumes that most lower and middle class people could never in a million years afford, and most Americans wouldn't buy. As upward mobility has decreased in my country, the 1% have lined their pockets and studded their wardrobes with the latest from Malle, Parfums de Marly, Creed, Guerlain, and Chanel. Designer price brackets have all but disappeared in the last eight years, with ranges that were once tagged between $75 and $95 now in the $125 to $175 range, and any "exclusive" offerings bumped sixty to a hundred dollars over that. 

This isn't strange to us because we're desensitized to it. We see it and read about it every day. We live it. Most Americans are struggling to afford diapers and children's clothing and rent. The last thing they're thinking of buying is the 2025 release of Guerlain's Muguet. Creed's new Kering offerings, Centaurus and Delphinus. Malle's Acne Studios. Chanel's Allure Homme Sport Superleggera. Parfums de Marly's Palatine. It isn't that hard working people don't want them; they simply can't have them. 

These privileged fragrance reviewers flaunt wardrobes that cost more than a new Toyota Corolla, then turn around and virtue signal when Elena Knezevic writes about Fight Fight Fight, as if the usual hand-wringing will change anything. It's 2024, people. We've been living with Trump in the sociopolitical culture for nearly a decade now. Enough already. He was President once. Was it the greatest four years in America's history? Hell no. Covid took care of that. But was he Orange Hitler? Was he Orange Mussolini? Were there citizens being lined up behind the outhouses and shot because they weren't wearing Trump Sneakers? I ask this with the utmost sincerity: how much longer must we pretend that Donald Trump is the antichrist? 

Just look at some of the comments under Elena's article, starting with "Trixie Salamander": 

"How the hell do I delete my account? 

Then there's "SaulGoo":

"When someone's shooting at you and there are innocent people standing behind you, you stay down if you're the target. Why? Because as long as the person firing sees you, they'll keep shooting. Standing up again to pump his tiny fist for what he KNEW would be a great photo op, was an opportunity for new merch GALORE." 

Or perhaps we should listen to "istvan.budda.779":

"Who is the perfumer? And 200 dollars, even Chanel doesn't charge this much and Chanel is well known for being a greedy company." 

And last but not least, my favorite comment by "FiaM":

"Is it time to count the balloons yet?" 

My responses to each in kind: Trixie, you don't have an account. Nice try, though. SaulGoo, to quote Janosz from Ghostbusters II: "Everything you are doing is bad. I want you to know this." To istvan.budda.779: sorry about your Chanel fail, your consolation prize is a $325 bottle of Comète. And to FiaM: don't count them before they pop, sweetie. Trump Derangement Syndrome is clearly a problem for all of you. The sad thing is, it makes you look stupid, because it makes you say stupid things that nobody really believes, or even takes seriously. Eighty million Americans support Trump. I'd wager the majority of them don't have Fragrantica accounts. Time to look in a mirror.

I don't know if these complainers are Americans, real people, or just sophisticated AI bots planted by the Chinese government, but whatever they are, they're not winning, and they still haven't realized it. Their endlessly whiny and logic-free complaints about one man, a man who cut every American's taxes and protected the border as well as he could, is exactly why he's up in the polls. It's 2016 all over again. 

If people want to make the energy monster go away, they should stop spewing their aggrieved energy at him. It's the strained pearl-clutching and the endless whinging that strengthens the case against them and for him. They never learn. 

Replica Autumn Vibes (Maison Margiela)

It seems the "wood" note of the twenties is palo santo, making oud feel like a relic of the last decade—well, not quite, but it often comes across that way. This week alone, I’ve encountered two niche fragrances featuring palo santo, neither of which officially acknowledge it. One of them, Autumn Vibes, released in 2021, is a charming woody-spicy blend with autumnal accents that wraps the wearer in a warm, cozy aura for nearly eight hours. It’s pleasant enough, and actually smells expensive.

Yet again, Maison Margiela's Replica series has me questioning how closely a fragrance can mimic a room candle before crossing a line. This one opens with an aromatic burst of cardamom and pepper, which takes on a duskier tone within five minutes thanks to coriander and nutmeg. This gourmand-like opening lasts a solid fifteen minutes, its savory tones almost edible. Then, a smoky palo santo note emerges, remarkably free of the pickle-like nuance I often associate with it, yet it dominates the pyramid, leaving little room for the other elements to shine. I might be particularly sensitive to it, but the base of cedar, labdanum, incense, and a faint juniper halo does little to restore balance.

That said, Autumn Vibes is undeniably a pleasant woody scent, just a step away from being a room fragrance. It also carries a certain autumnal sexiness, with a smoothness that hints at a mature, well-constructed scent. I can picture men in their forties and fifties wearing this to bars with their wives on Friday or Saturday nights, adding a touch of sophistication to October festivities. For that kind of vibe, though, I’d prefer something with more texture (and no palo santo), like Oud Mosaic, or even Red for Men.

This Fragrance Did Not Slip Out Of 'Cool' and Into 'Old-Fogey'

An Original 1988 Cool Water Print Ad

Lately, I’ve noticed a trend among YouTubers, posting about Davidoff’s Cool Water, the original 1988 release, and to be blunt, I’m not impressed. It grates on me to see so many in their twenties and thirties deem it “Old School” and “Mature.” The prevailing sentiment is that this landmark release, Davidoff’s third perfume, has become outdated and cheap, reduced to a meaningless “shower fresh” relic. The implication? No one finds it relevant anymore. Apparently, Cool Water is no longer wanted by the young.

There’s something bizarre about watching a YouTuber standing in his bedroom, pontificating on how his older brother used to wear Cool Water to death, and how he vaguely appreciates it for that reason alone, while also proclaiming it inferior to Cool Water Intense. That’s where it becomes surreal. Standing there in a baseball cap and a little bro goatee, shrugging away on camera, while dismissing the single most significant perfume in the history of masculine perfumery—no competition, no close second, full stop. To simply say, “Yeah, I mean, it’s okay. I like it, but I don’t wear it,” is truly surreal.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that everyone should love or like Cool Water. There are plenty of people who loathe the stuff, and that’s fine by me. Tell me you hate Cool Water, that you’d never dream of wearing it, and I’d shrug right along with you. I’m not all that enamored with Dior’s Fahrenheit myself, and that fragrance inhabits the same legendary neighborhood as Cool Water. If my cool indifference to Fahrenheit ruffled a fan or two, I’d completely understand. Tastes differ; life thrives on contrast.

But what really gets under my skin is when people treat Cool Water like some mere footnote in the annals of fragrance, a scent that may have been cool once but that real FragBros outgrow. They then feel entitled to go on camera and wax lyrical about how trivial it is compared to modern competitors like Sauvage or Luna Rossa. These guys sound like self-proclaimed car buffs scoffing at the Ford Model T for not being an Acura TLX. In the case of Cool Water, a more fitting analogy might be swapping out the Model T for a Buick Grand National and whining that it’s no Tesla.

You don’t hold up a bottle of Cool Water and say, “This just smells played out now,” and expect that to slide. No, Cool Water is anything but played out. It single-handedly redirected the trajectory of the entire perfume industry, and it did so when the trajectory was so deeply entrenched that no one imagined it could change. Cool Water is the work of a perfumer who submitted a rough draft to an obscure niche house, which then made it their masculine flagship, which is now hailed as a masterpiece in its own right. Cool Water is the refined realization of that original masterpiece, the ultimate manifestation of Pierre Bourdon’s vision, the scent that, even today, he still ponders and savors. It is the perfect aromatic fougère. It is the only truly "modern" fougère in my collection. 

Now, I’m not blind to reality. Times change, and older fragrances inevitably get labeled as just that: old. I can even admit that Green Irish Tweed, once the scent of cutting-edge modernity, now carries a whiff of the eighties. And yes, Cool Water has its ties to the shopping mall. I live in the real world; I understand. I have my own associations, remembering friends and family wearing it, myself as a teenager not quite grasping its appeal. It took me years to come around.

But as 2024 draws to a close, I can look at Cool Water and recognize that true greatness doesn’t fade with time. Its pristine design endures. Cool Water’s brilliance sparkles undimmed, a glimmering abalone in a sea of limpets.

Hummingbird (Zoologist)

Shelley Waddington of En Voyage Perfumes is the nose behind this 2015 creation. To date, only Squid rivals it as the Zoologist fragrance that required a full body scrub—and a shirt hurled straight into the washing machine. Here's the twist: I actually like it. This is a niche reimagining of Joop! Homme, that iconic Bourdon fragrance with the pink juice and purple box. As such, it fascinates me, answering a question I didn’t know I had: what would Joop! smell like, all dressed up in luxe materials and compositionally refined?

The answer is Hummingbird. Joop! Homme is intensely floral, but in a particular way—super sweet, heavy, yet somehow evocative of delicate petals. That buoyant sweetness, I realized, comes primarily from lilac, mimosa, and heliotrope, all crammed together into an unfocused 8-bit version of a spring bouquet. In Hummingbird, those notes are far more distinct, with greater textural finesse. Every flower stands out, yet works harmoniously to create that unmistakable magenta sweetness. The lilac is especially bright and clear, nestled with rose, a honeysuckle reconstruction, a few grams of heliotropin, mimosa that actually smells alive, and warm ylang-ylang, all cushioned atop a thermonuclear musk accord powerful enough to rival national defense systems.

As lovely as it smells, like Joop!, it’s simply too strong. So strong that neither my girlfriend nor I could tolerate it for long. The moment we got home, I jumped in the shower. Even after a vigorous scrub with Irish Spring, the fragrance clung to my skin. I’m convinced it has a half-life of eleven thousand years after just a tiny spritz on clothing—and half that on skin. If you love sweet florals and don’t mind that the rest of the block might have mixed feelings, go for it. Otherwise, for the love of all things, proceed with caution.

Mercedes-Benz Intense (INCC Group/Mercedes-Benz) and A Question: Should We Summarily Dismiss Fragrance SAs?

I don't want to rattle on at length about this, so I'll cut to the review and then drop in my rhetorical questions, accompanied by a personal anecdote. Mercedes-Benz is a car manufacturer. Want a luxury car of German origin? Mercedes is an option. It wouldn't be my choice, but I can see why people like them. Most are stylish, fast, comfortable, and undeniably a status symbol, at least in the U.S. Sure, their luxury cache has dwindled in the last twenty years with stuff like their A Class and C Class "Kompressor" sedans, but they still speak to the quasi-wealthy among us. 

Sadly (for Mercedes), the cars weren't enough to boost their self-image, and at some point they turned to contracting out their own signature perfume line, with a surprising number of fragrances, most of them rack store bargain-basement offerings that cut against whatever exclusive vibe the Mercedes fanclub of testosterone-kompressed men are after. It's sort of like what happened to Montblanc; go from selling $4,000 pens to $40 perfumes, and eventually you start questioning the pens more than the perfumes. If I were Mercedes, I'd scale back on the number of frags on offer, limiting it to one or two, and focus more on the cars, but what do I know? Apparently their Burlington Blitzkrieg strategy works for them, so I guess they should keep on rolling. Enter Mercedes-Benz Intense for Men. 

Released in 2013 as a follow up to the original of the same (sans Intense) name, the brief is crystal clear: Do Fahrenheit, but closer to the Aqua version, with a shot of "New Car Smell" somewhere in with the gassy violets and grassy vetiver. If you want Fahrenheit with the petrol dialed down a notch and the marine-ambergris element of its flanker tuned-up in the base, this is a no-brainer fragrance to own. It's not quite as complex in its florals, but it doesn't smell "cheap" in comparison to its template, and I think it's close enough to replace the original Dior if you're tired of shelling out a Ben per bottle. It's that good. 

Now for my anecdote, still fresh in my memory. I bought this fragrance at the mall as a birthday gift for a family member. Upon entering the perfume shop, I was greeted by a polite Indian woman around my age. I asked if she had any Dior fragrances, specifically looking for a Fahrenheit flanker. She directed me to the Dior section—no flankers in sight, just the usual suspects: Fahrenheit, Sauvage, and Dior Homme. What followed was a series of obscure fragrance recommendations, one of which claimed to be an Arabian brand but was made in New Jersey. Needless to say, it didn’t smell like Fahrenheit, or even Sauvage, for that matter. Then, she pitched me an Israeli brand claiming London heritage that bore no resemblance to anything by Dior. I really didn't feel like playing this game, so I pulled up Fragrantica on my phone, hoping it would steer me toward a better option.

This was a big mistake. She quickly got rude with me, borderline insulting. I showed her the Fahrenheit page as it loaded and asked if she knew the site, and she said, "No, why would I look at that? Yes, I see, there's Fahrenheit. So what?" I then explained that they have a feature where fragrances are compared by votes, and pointed to the first thing that showed up: Mercedes-Benz Intense. She didn't say anything at first, as if processing that I was ignoring her useless suggestions in favor of the almighty internet, and I wondered if she was going to kick me out of the store. Instead she visibly gathered herself and said, "Yes, I see Mercedes-Benz there, we have that one." She beelined across the store for it, with me in tow. She sprayed it on a strip, still looking pissed, and I took a sniff. Bingo! 

Two minutes later, I was out the door with the fragrance, and not a word passed between us. The truth is, we had both gotten under each other’s skin. In hindsight, I can see that I may have been a bit dismissive. I asked for her help, entertained a couple of suggestions, and then promptly pivoted to my own internet search. Honestly, that might have annoyed me too, had I been in her shoes. But listen, I tried to be friendly. I asked if she was familiar with the site I was using, I kindly showed her what I was doing as I navigated it, and even spared her the hassle of rummaging through countless bottles to find what I was after. What's the beef? 

It makes me wonder if we should just skip the friendly sales interactions altogether and get straight to the point: "Give me [x]." I don’t need to smell a dozen knockoff brands no one’s heard of, and frankly, I don’t care that your feelings might be hurt because I’m bypassing your advice. Your suggestions are awful. Your store is fantastic, but your role in it? Not so much. If you’re going to be that consistently bad at your job, then yes, I’ll happily and summarily dismiss you, no questions asked. Real talk.

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.

Dissecting "Blue" Fragrances That Aren't Bleu: A Meditation on Perfume Synesthesia, Part Two

This is both the second part of my meditation and a review of Tabarome Millésime. Here’s the crux of it: Tabarome Millésime is the most important Creed of the 2000s, and yet no one discusses it. Before you dismiss this claim, hear me out, and then draw your own conclusions. My argument rests on a theory that ties this Creed fragrance to one of the biggest successes of 2010—a wildly popular Chanel, recognizable by its name and its signature "blue" hue.

To be clear, I’m referring to the years 2000 to 2009. Several notable Creeds came out during that decade, including Himalaya, Original Vetiver, Santal, and Virgin Island Water. While these other scents were derivative, Tabarome Millésime was a precursor to greater things. Most intriguingly, it defies its brown label and tan-green liquid. Instead, it smells like a rough draft of Bleu de Chanel—a very rough draft, mind you, but all the essential elements are present. There’s a sweet touch of citrus, followed by ginger, sandalwood, black tea, and green tobacco leaf. Hints of vetiver and mild smokiness are nestled within, while the sandalwood, dry and pale, echoes a birch note. Strangely enough, Tabarome Millésime feels more "blue" than Bleu itself.

Its resemblance to Bleu de Chanel is both fascinating and unsettling. From what I can gather, Olivier Creed is the actual perfumer behind Tabarome Millésime—not a "ghost perfumer" like Pierre Bourdon or Jean-Christophe Hérault. If this is true, it’s a monumental fact, more significant than most realize. Amidst the accusations of Olivier’s perfume “theft” and dubious business tactics, and the widespread belief that he’s more of an "evaluator" than a creator, we find ourselves in complicated territory. If Olivier’s 2000 release indeed paved the way for Chanel’s blockbuster a decade later, then he is far from inconsequential. In fact, he might even be a visionary.

So, what makes Tabarome Millésime smell vaguely "blue"? It opens with a sharp, sour citrus accord, bracing and almost unpleasant in its tartness—bergamot with a lime-like bite, only slightly softened by sweet mandarin. The ginger that follows isn’t as effervescent as I expected, but it’s deeper and rounder than anything I’ve encountered in a designer fragrance. Beneath the ginger, black tea, sandalwood, smoky-salty ambergris, and raw tobacco leaf emerge, all resting on a base of petitgrain and white musk. The composition is simple, lacking contrast and dynamism, presenting more as a single, multi-faceted note—ginger with a few supporting elements. The freshness, likely from ambergris and a cool, aqueous musk, combined with the ginger, gives the fragrance its "blue" character, evoking the sensation of crisp water and clear air.

Some reviews suggest Tabarome Millésime is ideal for the office or for older men. Luca Turin called it a "sport fragrance" and dismissed it as "mislabeled and pointless." Given how faint the tobacco note is, it might indeed be mislabeled, but pointless? I beg to differ. The gingery woods at the heart of this scent, a concept later mastered by Jacques Polge in a world-shattering perfume, carry considerable weight within the realm of masculine fragrances. One Fragrantica reviewer compared it to Dirty English by Juicy Couture, and I see the resemblance. Ironically, I’ve compared Dirty English to Bleu de Chanel in the past, referring to it as "Brun de Chanel"—Dirty English smells earthy and brown, with a streak of blue running through it. It shares enough DNA with Bleu that I view it as another stepping stone toward the final 2010 iteration of this idea. Masculine perfumery evolves in stages, a few years at a time.

Why does Dirty English evoke a color? Once again, we find the same combination of notes that parallels Tabarome Millésime and Bleu de Chanel: cedar, vetiver, smoky woods (perhaps "oud"), and a sharp, synthetic citrus note that doesn’t resemble real fruit but feels like a technicolor image of one. ISO E Super is just as prominent as the esters and aldehydes. Though far from an aquatic or ozonic fragrance, and certainly not marketed as one, Dirty English achieves a distinct "blue" tone, a fresh yet somber quality that echoes in Chanel’s later creation. To be clear, Bleu de Chanel is the most refined of these three, while Tabarome Millésime, despite its high-quality ingredients, suffers from an inferior composition and balance. Olivier’s scent feels too evenly spread, with the notes never truly playing off each other. In contrast, Dirty English, the cheapest of the trio, smells livelier—but it’s a zephyr next to Bleu de Chanel's tempest.

All of this leads to one conclusion: the best "blue" fragrances evoke the color itself, and the tranquility it suggests, without relying on tired aquatic or synthetic accords. The "blue" quality of Bleu de Chanel, Tabarome Millésime, and Dirty English stems from their ability to conjure a mood—a certain quiet, misty atmosphere, the austere beauty of nature in the early morning, before the light fully dispels the night. These fragrances inspire the sensation of a color rather than a seascape or a sunlit beach. The genius lies in the perfumer’s ability to distill this achingly familiar feeling into a scent, one that transports us to that place we all recognize as "blue."

Dissecting "Bleu" Fragrances That Aren't Blue: A Meditation on Perfume Synesthesia, Part One

In 2010, the perfume world experienced a watershed moment, much like Hollywood did in 1999. It was a year marked by great releases and intriguing innovations. Fragrances like Portrait of a Lady, Memoir Man, Eau Sauvage Extrême (new), Sartorial, Bang, Aventus, and Bleu de Chanel hit the shelves, revitalizing department stores struggling to stay afloat. Among these, it was Bleu de Chanel that captured my attention. I purchased a bottle soon after its release, though I found its backstory both plausible and dubious. Jacques Polge claimed the inspiration came from the scent of men washing and shaving in airport bathrooms—an aromatic memory he couldn't shake. To me, Bleu de Chanel embodied the apex of a movement in masculine fragrance, representing the color "blue" without invoking any of the typical "blue" scents.

What stood out most was its innovative structure and the unusual combination of notes. Ginger, a staple in men’s perfumes, was handled with a fresh, dynamic twist, alongside grapefruit, pink pepper, vetiver, incense, green tobacco, white florals, patchouli isolates, birchwood, synthetic oakmoss, and clean musk. None of these notes fell into the aquatic or ozonic categories that dominated the previous decade. Instead, they came together in a composition that smelled serene, somber, cool, and terrestrial—a shade of grey-blue that conjured inner calm. For me, the fragrance veered more towards tan or taupe, with the ginger and vetiver giving the heart a distinctive warmth. Synesthesia was in play.

As I wore Bleu de Chanel, I often pondered its origins. What perfume might have preceded it in the same way Drakkar Noir and Green Irish Tweed led to Cool Water? It felt so original that I suspected Chanel may have borrowed from a lesser-known brand. But the search for a clear predecessor proved elusive. Over time, I realized I had been misled by the "blue" marketing. I needed to explore beyond color and consider other successful mainstream fragrances. One contender that came to mind was Malizia Uomo Vetyver by Mirato. With its fresh vetiver, touches of ginger, citrus, cut grass, and neroli, it seemed to be a distant cousin of Bleu de Chanel. Yet, despite the similarities, Bleu wasn’t as overtly "green" as Vetyver. The ginger was subtler, and Vetyver’s transparent, sporty vibe didn’t carry the same gravitas as Bleu, which had an earthy, almost musty depth far removed from the frosted blue-bottle offerings at Perfumania.

I often wonder how differently I would have perceived Bleu de Chanel had it been housed in a brown bottle. Would the ginger and vetiver have spoken to me in a new way? Might I have imagined parched summer fields instead of misty autumn woods? The bottle’s color and name undeniably influenced my perception of the fragrance. Take Aqua Velva Ice Blue, a product of the 1930s that still smells remarkably modern. Its notes—menthol, citrus, peppermint, cedarwood, and abstract florals—create a balance between fresh top notes and earthier base notes, with a unique interplay of incense and leather. The parallels to Bleu de Chanel are clear, and I often wore both fragrances after a shave, with one person even remarking that I smelled “really beautiful.”

Yet, even with these comparisons, I can't shake the sense that something is missing. While Ice Blue and Vetyver share a gingery-peppery freshness, they occupy a lower tier in the commercial landscape compared to Chanel. It's hard to believe Polge would have drawn such direct inspiration from them. There’s a missing link—some forgotten fragrance in the higher echelons of the market—that quietly failed but laid the groundwork for something like Bleu de Chanel to flourish . . . 

What Are "Aquatics"?

Over the years, I’ve immersed myself in a sea of perfume literature, and one of my biggest pet peeves is when people misidentify the classification of a fragrance by claiming it belongs to the wrong genre. This confusion is especially common with fougères, chypres, and aquatics, with the latter being the most perplexing. While I understand the confusion around fougères, given the tricky distinction between "traditional" and "aromatic," and chypres being somewhat outdated, the mislabeling of a fragrance as an aquatic mystifies me. How does this happen?

Let’s unpack the term. An "aquatic" fragrance is one that conveys "aqua" elements above all else. These elements can evoke the scent of either saltwater or freshwater, each with distinct olfactory traits. Saltwater fragrances, often referred to as "marine," tend to be more defined, while freshwater scents can sometimes blend into ozonic or laundry musk notes, rather than anything explicitly liquid. Interestingly, freshwater fragrances rarely advertise a watery theme and often simply feature a color palette between green and blue. In contrast, saltwater fragrances usually convey their aquatic nature through packaging and names, suggesting a beach escape or a dive to explore a coral reef.

So, how should a true aquatic fragrance smell? There’s no single answer, but the fragrance should impress with certain distinctive qualities. I often associate salinated water with a genuine aquatic scent, so oceanic compositions resonate most with me. Examples like Heeley’s Sel Marin, Mario Valentino’s Ocean Rain, Bvlgari’s Aqva, Ralph Lauren’s Polo Ultra Blue, Creed’s Millésime Impérial (and Armaf’s Club de Nuit Milestone), Halston’s Unbound for Men, Nautica's Voyage, and Azzaro’s Chrome Legend are quintessential examples of aquatics. Sel Marin stands out as a pristine example, featuring a tangy citrus blend saturated with sand, salt, seaweed, and brine. It evokes the scent of your skin after a refreshing swim in the Irish Sea on a crisp 55° day, clad in a Speedo.

Bvlgari Aqva combines seaweed and salty accords with an abstract floral arrangement, allowing its briny elements to bask in daylight. Polo Ultra Blue is intriguing for its synthetic nature and often criticized as overly generic, yet its balance of herbal and citrus tones contrasts well with heavy salt notes, creating an abstract representation of a rocky beach at high tide. Ocean Rain captures a similar beach at low tide but further down the coast, where sand meets gentle rain—a true representation of beach petrichor. The rest of these fragrances offer fruitier and fresher variants, but all share salty, vaguely briny seawater notes. These are true aquatics.

When it comes to freshwater aquatics, clear examples are rarer. From my collection, two notable ones are L'Eau Bleue Pour Homme by Issey Miyake and Silences by Jacomo. Yes, I consider Silences a freshwater aquatic. Wearing vintage Silences reveals it’s not aiming for a field of greens; Jean-Claude Niel’s 1978 creation evokes a foggy emerald over glassy pond water at dawn on a frigid 42° Fahrenheit morning. The scene is blanketed in mist, with only sage thickets and cattails visible through the murk. It’s eerie, green, and murky, reminiscent of pond water. Similarly, L'Eau Bleue offers a cool, crisp watery aroma, complemented by a complex mix of aromatics that gradually shift from aquatic to more terrestrial notes, though the water reference remains throughout.

So, what isn’t an aquatic? My prime example is Davidoff’s Cool Water. Despite its name and blue glass bottle, it doesn’t fit the aquatic profile. Yes, the name "Cool Water" and the blue bottle suggest an aquatic theme, but here’s the issue: Cool Water lacks the salty, marine quality, and its freshness doesn’t evoke natural freshwater. Pierre Bourdon aimed to create "a new kind of freshness" using familiar aromatics like linalool and Hedione, along with a substantial amount of dihydromyrcenol. This latter component smells ozonic, slightly metallic, and woody on its own. In Cool Water, it adds a frosted effect to mint, lavender, and florals, with a touch of room-temperature crab apple and tobacco notes.

Cool Water includes a hint of salty sea spray, sweetened by a smidge of Calone 1951, which is indeed an aquatic element. However, this doesn’t make the fragrance as a whole an aquatic. It’s better classified as Bourdon’s "modernized" aromatic fougère, with fougère notes making up about 90% of the composition. The remaining 10% consists of standalone aroma chemicals like Ambroxan, Hedione, and a more marine-like Methyl Cyclopentenolone. The name "Cool Water" implies the wearer is "cool" due to the fragrance, an update on the French "Eau Fraîche". While mint and lavender are cooling, and the blue glass suggests "coolness," these factors don’t make it an aquatic.

Another non-aquatic example is Bleu de Chanel. Despite the reference to "Blue," the fragrance has nothing to do with the ocean or a lake. Inspired by men’s aftershave, it bears a striking resemblance to Aqua Velva Ice Blue. Jacques Polge aimed for a moody-woody scent, using ginger for freshness and ingredients like incense and vetiver for depth. It’s a woody-fresh scent, more a glorified woody amber than anything aquatic. So, please stop calling Bleu de Chanel an aquatic.

There are other examples, but these two are significant. I could continue ad infinitum, but I’ll conclude by saying that if you want a true aquatic fragrance and want me to recognize it as such, avoid anything in the Green Irish Tweed or Dylan Blue realms. Instead, opt for something that genuinely evokes the sea or a lakeside, like the briny saltiness of a mineralic, sea-weedy coast or the murky dankness of a quiet fishing pier at dawn. Think of the essence of dirty water, and you’ll be on the right track.

Velvet (Commodity)

Velvet hits the skin with a rush of saffron and almond, creating a striking 3D, non-alcoholic amaretto accord, quite unexpected from this house, and something that immediately drew me in. Commodity’s booklet mentions “black amber,” which I take as a nod to an accord akin to Noir de Noir’s black truffle and amber. Indeed, Velvet bears a strong resemblance to Noir de Noir (and by extension, Club de Nuit Intense for Women). As the top notes fade, the heart of Turkish rose and balsamic notes rises, leaving me wondering if they were aiming for a Tom Ford effect here.

As it continues to dry down, the fragrance becomes sweeter. Hints of hot chocolate, toasted nuts, vanilla, amber, and musk dance in and out, until the vanillic notes firm up, blending seamlessly with the rose. The result is a semi-floral, semi-gourmand vibe that projects steadily for at least eight hours. Despite its allure, Velvet belongs to an overwrought scent profile that has been a bit too popular in the last twenty years. Although it lacks Noir de Noir's oud, wearing Velvet delivers a similar experience. Yes, it feels a little less opulent, a touch cheaper, but for those avoiding the Armaf route, Velvet offers a niche-like option without the hefty price tag or overt gendering. The plush amber gives it a distinctly unisex character, leaning slightly masculine. This sort of fragrance has never been for me, but it's undeniably pleasant.

Yet, I can't help but wonder about the people who buy and wear Commodity fragrances. Why doesn’t this brand resonate with me? The minimalistic bottles, the postmodern typeface on color-matched labels, the clinical names—they both attract and repel. My inner Curious George longs to “get” whatever it is I’m seeing and smelling, while another part of me simply doesn’t care. I picture myself in The Backrooms, drifting from one liminal space to another, until I stumble upon a Commodity bottle on a table in a hallway. I spray it, briefly thinking an eternity in damp-carpet purgatory might not be so bad—until the lights go out. Time to move on.

Replica Beach Walk (Maison Margiela)

A.I. Still Struggles With Hands

Artificial Intelligence has been with us for over a decade, with Nvidia and other software companies challenging traditional norms in creativity and beyond. Smelling Beach Walk by Maison Margiela, I can't help but wonder how many perfumes have been created by AI in that time. This one smells like a carbon copy of Tom Ford's Soleil Blanc — essentially a high-end suntan lotion scent. We've encountered this fragrance profile at least half a dozen times before: a jasmine/ylang bouquet with coconut and benzoin.

Can an AI perfume be identified by scent alone? I suspect I have a couple in my collection. Grassland by Banana Republic, for instance, smells like an AI-generated fragrance from start to finish. It's as if someone ran a gas chromatography analysis on Parfums de Marly's Greenley, fed the data into an AI composition tool, and voilà — Greenley on a budget, minus the expensive pine notes. It smells like a computer's take on seafoam green, with smooth mints and a vague freshness that avoids being generic or cheap. Beach Walk has a similar vibe, except it seems like a straightforward, slightly cheaper copy of the Tom Ford scent. Would a human perfumer even bother with that?

A growing concern with AI is its rapid learning and improvement — it’s evolving at a dizzying speed. Just a year ago, AI-generated imagery was grotesquely mediocre, but today the quality is worlds apart. Now, the only human input required is crafting keywords that yield the best result; the AI does the rest. AI has been capable of high-level generation since at least 2010, possibly earlier. Beach Walk dates back to 2012, and I wouldn't be surprised if the perfumers simply used Soleil Blanc’s formula as their prompt.

Let's Talk About Tea Fragrances.

Tea notes are among the more mysterious elements in the perfumer's organ, and I've always been intrigued by them. I own several fragrances where tea is a central feature, some of which are my favorites, and all of which I would buy again. Here, I want to explore what tea means in perfumery terms, as the note is far from monolithic, with many twists and varieties found in both mainstream and niche compositions.

In my collection, the most successful rendition of tea is probably found in Thé Brun by Jean-Charles Brosseau, a 2005 creation by Pierre Bourdon aimed at the niche crowd. This was a semi-retired Bourdon playing with ideas that '90s designers had rejected or overlooked, such as his now-famous pineapple note, which he paired with an ethereal, salty accord distantly related to his earlier Millésime Impérial for Creed. To me, this fragrance captures an Earl Grey type of black tea with remarkable accuracy, featuring the distinct bergamot of Earl Grey followed by a creamy "brown tea" note reminiscent of a morning tipple with milk. The tea note persists throughout the fragrance's life, from the first spray to the far drydown five hours later. While I'm not particularly impressed with the rest of the pyramid, I find the tea note grounding, calming, and serene.

Bourdon, like his teacher Edmond Roudnitska, revered Japanese art and tradition, drawing inspiration from the orientalism of the 20th-century Old Masters. There are whispers of floral sweetness—perhaps cherry blossom?—and a faint woodiness under the salinity, like a garden near the sea. The black tea, diluted to a warm brown, shimmers in a cup at dawn. These impressions are evoked by the fragrance, and at no point does Thé Brun feel ordinary or trite; I am certain I've never smelled anything like it. Unlike most tea fragrances, Bourdon didn't disguise a white floral note with lemon to call it tea; his tea is literal, a refreshing and realistic effect, like spilling Tetley on my collar. Although Thé Brun has not been well-received by everyone (one female coworker wrinkled her nose and said, "Not a good one, Bryan"), I like it.

If Thé Brun is a placid Earl Grey, Alyssa Ashley's Green Tea is a verdant spin on the theme. Dirt cheap and probably the least compelling tea fragrance in my collection, it is still a satisfying wear, largely due to the interesting pairing of lavender with papery gunpowder green notes. The fragrance smells aromatic, dank, and slightly stale—but intentionally so. I've compared it to the smell of pool or pond water, that green, murky scent of water infused with botanicals. In 2002, this was Alyssa Ashley jumping on the green tea bandwagon, which had kicked off almost a decade earlier with Bvlgari's Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert (1993) by Jean-Claude Ellena. The fragrance feels fresh, bright, eccentric.

Here, the tea note isn't as relaxing but more of an abstraction for the nose to play with. At times, it smells a bit chemical until I realize that the lavender doesn't always blend well with the other aromatics, as if it wants to dominate. This isn't a lavender fragrance—it's a tea fragrance, and while lavender has its own calming properties, green tea possesses a serene stillness when it cuts through flanking accords. Thus, the fragrance manages to smell tense, with the crisp aromatics, citruses, and a cold, perhaps forgotten green tea note pulling at my senses.

When I'm in the mood for a '90s pop of unisex-leaning-feminine tea, I reach for a fragrance that wasn't made in the '90s: Elie Tahari's signature feminine from 2019, a buoyant fruity-floral brimming with notes of sweet pear, tart bergamot, green apple, and what reads as a bergamot-infused green tea, with that crisp sour citrus element carrying most of the plot. Elie Tahari's tea note isn't about meditative seclusion from the world; it wants its wearer to feel sunny and happy, and the fruit notes are so in-your-face that feeling down is nearly impossible while wearing this scent. Composed by Nicole Mancini and Rodrigo Flores-Roux (although "composed" may be a stretch since AI has been signing briefs since at least 2016), it smells like an unused mod for a Bvlgari tea entry that the perfumers freshened up and repurposed for the brand.

I like Elie Tahari, but it wears rather "thick" and oily on me, smelling weirdly dense and unzipped, as if it needs a few extra hours to open up and truly shine. This could be because the fragrance is blended almost to an extreme; the typically standoffish notes of pear and apple somehow merge to create a new type of fruit, rendered to stunning effect. Instead of a standard pear note, they chose the exotic lushness of Doyenné du Comice pear, which smells heavenly against the backdrop of magnolia blossom and tea. The quality of materials is surprisingly high for the price (you can get a bottle for less than $20 if you play your cards right), and the tea note is the central spine that holds all this frivolity together. A few sprays on your collar, and it's 1999 again.

To me, tea is a spiritual note, something felt more than smelled, with a naturally quiet and monastic aroma. CK One is an oddly spiritual take on tea, blending green and the rarely-used white tea note—a very soft, almost powdery-musky variant of the leaf. It remains one of Calvin Klein's finest perfumes. There are ten-ounce bottles of CK One on eBay, and I'm inclined to purchase one. I wore this scent today and realized it is masterful and unforgettable, a fragrance that immediately transports me to a jetty on a foggy lake, with glassy water at early dawn, an hour before the sun rises. Everything is colorless and still. The roses and orange blossoms of a nearby garden carry on the faintest breeze, pulling with them the many essences of the greens growing by the water and the distinct bite of cedar from the wilderness beyond. A morning frozen in time.

Here, tea is brushed into the artistic body of the perfume in a way that both mutes and magnifies its scent; the greenness is fresh, but the dryness of the tea leaf is still present, while the white tea sends a snowy veil of watery freshness across the woody florals. Several potent white musks support this fragrance, and while I'm not usually a fan of them, I make an exception here. CK One smells like a dream but also captures the essence of its niche—a Gen-Xer's scent of the day, if that day is an eternal Saturday with plenty of time to kill at Borders Books before a matinee with a date.

Speaking of dates, Chez Bond is an interesting throwback tea frag in that Bond took the basic structure of Green Irish Tweed (lemon verbena, violet leaf, iris, sandalwood) and transformed it into a semi-gourmand flavor of tea. The lemon twist one might add to morning tea replaces the lemon verbena, and instead of powdery iris and sweet violet, there's a milky-smooth sweetness of sugared black tea that lasts for five to eight hours. Chez Bond is fairly linear and isn't in my collection (yet), but aside from some off-putting minty notes in the first five minutes, I like it. It's one of Bond's better compositions, even though it clearly riffs on the Creed. How does it make me feel? Green Irish Tweed feels very '80s and formal, but because Bond went for a warm mug effect, Chez Bond feels more early 2000s and hipster-ish—something clever and comfy to wear while book shopping in Soho.

Abstraction in perfumery is becoming rarer, with perfumers increasingly opting for intense and overtly clunky orientals and chypres, especially in the upper-bracket of the niche market. If you want an abstracted green tea note, Azzaro's Chrome Legend takes the vibe to a definite 2000s place. I find Legend to be a bit of a paradox; the perfume is unique and, to date, never imitated, yet it is little more than a great big house accord welded to a heavily pixelated jasmine. Overlaid with white florals is a disjointed green tea note, which emerges intermittently as the loud aquatics simmer and fizz. Green apple is perhaps the most approachable note here, yet the green tea seems determined to be the star, consistently playing off the sweeter jasmine to give Legend the aura of futuristic suntan lotion. Not the most relaxing green tea, but intellectually stimulating and well-crafted. I still have a couple of ounces left, and this one is popular with women.

Lastly, perhaps the most beautiful fragrance in my collection is the celestial Supremacy in Heaven by Afnan. This is one of the most irresistibly gorgeous scents, likely one of four or five masterpieces I've come across in the past fifteen years. I hope to the supreme heavens that they never discontinue it. Marketed as a clone of Silver Mountain Water with a few drops of Aventus, the more I wear it, the more I feel this is just a lazy marketing ploy by Afnan's top brass. The Supremacy series has several popular entries, and I'm open to trying the others, but even if I don't, I can die very happy, as this is a tea scent for the ages. I'm constantly surprised that this perfume isn't getting more buzz online, but maybe that's a good thing. Afnan's scent packs are very reasonable, and their quality control is generally high, so I would suggest picking up a bottle (it's only $25-$30 on eBay).

If Silver Mountain Water represents a cold green tea note undercut by metallic ozone, Supremacy in Heaven is the dark blackcurrant twist, with the freshness of white tea writ large across the evening sky. There's a pale iris here too, as if the perfumer wanted to give his tea note a slightly floral edge, reminiscent of how Mugler Cologne imbued its floral soap with a white-green jasmine leaf. Whether there is actual tea in this composition is debatable, but it smells like a mug of silver needle left to cool in a Japanese teahouse. In the buzz, Supremacy in Heaven sounds like a cheap clone of a Creed fragrance, but I find that my heart has abandoned Silver Mountain Water almost entirely in favor of this—and I don't think I've ever preferred a "clone" to its predecessor before. (Spoiler alert, I love SMW too, and consider it a masterpiece.)

All in all, tea in fragrance remains something I find indispensable. The purity and peacefulness it can bring to the wearer through scent are unmatched.