Club de Nuit Untold (Armaf)

Francis Kurkdjian will be remembered as the perfumer who carved his name into the scent world with unmistakable boldness, sometimes too bold. I still recall my first encounter with Le Mâle in 1997. It wasn’t a fragrance; it was a lavender-tonka mushroom cloud, sweet and powdery, detonating across city blocks. It somehow smelled both cheap and expensive, which is Kurkdjian’s signature trick. My best friend wore it exclusively that year. I’ve been in therapy ever since.

Then came Green Tea in 1999, a complete pivot from Gaultier’s chest-thumping style. It was lemony, light, and delicately floral, like a polite ghost asking to be excused. A prelude to the herbal transparency of the 2000s, it became the scent of every frosted-blonde mom on her way to softball drop-off. Green Tea was a shrug in perfume form, but it launched a thousand copycats and eventually became foundational to Kurkdjian’s personal line.

Things stayed quiet until 2015, when he dropped his next bomb: Baccarat Rouge 540. Hard to believe it has been ten years since its launch, eight since the Extrait version arrived. My take? I don’t really have one. I’ve never reviewed it. The first time I smelled it, it was radiating off two Italian-American behavior analysts in Connecticut, glamorous, low-key "It" girls who always seemed perfectly on-trend without trying too hard.

What does BR 540 smell like? A sweet amber. That’s it. Ethyl maltol up front, a faint hit of citrus, then a cloud of safranal and cotton-candy sugars dissolving in the air, trailing into a warmer, still-candied amber. It’s pleasant but ephemeral. You catch it for a second, then it’s gone. Then back again. Then gone again. There’s a resinous green twist in the base, but it’s subtle and transparent, barely holding its own against the persistent sweetness.

Naturally, Armaf joined the clone parade. Their version, Club de Nuit Untold, comes in a flashy iridescent bottle with a reddish base. Easily the best-looking in the line, arguably worth the purchase on looks alone. The scent is nearly a dead ringer for BR 540. Some say it leans toward the Extrait due to its amped-up note concentration, though I haven’t smelled the Extrait to compare. The only real difference is that Untold smells slightly woodier in the drydown.

There is no major quality gap between the two. Performance is strong, though not quite as nuclear as some claim. Even accounting for olfactory fatigue, Untold feels rather restrained. There’s a softness and finesse to it that holds up surprisingly well. The ethyl maltol is there in spades, bringing to mind summer more than fall or winter. But like BR 540, there’s only so much to say. It smells good. It’s sweet. It’s warm, slightly spicy, a bit woody, comfortable, a little sexy, kind of edible, generally safe. It doesn’t blow me away, but it doesn’t bore me either.

As a clone of a Kurkdjian fragrance, it feels like it would shrink in the shadow of the original Le Mâle, as if unworthy by comparison. If I had smelled it in 1996, I might have thought more of it. Today, it’s just a likable modern oriental. You can’t really go wrong wearing it, but it also doesn’t give you much to care about.

I'll end with this: there is barely any quality difference between Untold and BR 540. You can get 105 ml of Untold in its heavy and modern mother-of-pearl bottle for around 35 dollars. BR 540, in a much plainer bottle, costs over 300 for 60 milliliters. Untold is slightly more dynamic, with more prominent jasmine and saffron, along with Ambroxan and Amberwood by Symrise, a kind of postmodern Iso-E-Super with woody accents and a sugar-glazed sheen. Its performance is rumored to beat BR 540’s. So why would anyone still choose the original? In the air, no one can tell them apart. You might as well save your money. Sorry Francis, but your latest masterwork has become a victim of its own success.

A Rose is Not a Rose

This one smells quite sweet and fresh!

I'm in Maine this weekend, staying with my partner's parents, who have a stunning garden: roses, peonies, lilacs, bleeding hearts, and purple-and-white irises. But a garden full of flowers wasn’t enough for us. We took a trip to a local peony farm and spent the early afternoon wandering through row after row of different cultivars.

Two stood out, Austin Pride and Bartzella. I couldn’t decide which I liked more. One smelled crisp and lemony with touches of mint and Turkish rose. The other had a deeper, fuller lemon note with a spicy rasp. Both were beautiful, and completely different.

That got me thinking about the only peony fragrance I own, Banana Republic’s Peony & Peppercorn. And it hit me: there’s no such thing as the peony smell. In the garden here, there are three types, and they all smell wildly different. At the farm, the range was even wider, from zesty citrus to heady, almost overripe sweetness. Some were so indolic I nearly disliked them. Almost. I’ve yet to meet a flower I truly dislike.

I started wondering about perfume reviews. Imagine a peony scent that captures the essence of one specific variety but gets panned because it doesn’t match the chemically peony smell people expect. Where’s the peony, they’ll ask. It might be right there, just not their version of it.

Peony & Peppercorn is synthetic but soothing, like a spa. It has a soft, sweet, slightly lemony freshness with a faint aquatic undertone. I never pick up the pepper, though some reviewers insist it’s there. After smelling over thirty peony types today, I can say none of them smelled like what’s in the bottle. Still, some came close enough that I’d call it a decent abstract version, especially if you're not aiming for realism.

But what about the indolic peonies, the darker ones, often purplish-red, or even coral-pink like Coral Sunset, which has a strange, stale edge to it? These are a world apart from the light, lemony Bartzella or Austin Pride. The scent range is huge. From citrus-clean to animalic-rich, peonies test the limits of what we think a flower should smell like. Luca Turin once said only bees, not people, should smell like flowers. But with so many variations, surely there's a peony out there for everyone.

This variety presents a real challenge for perfumers. Go light and lemony, and some will say it doesn't smell like peony at all. Go deep and indolic, and jasmine lovers might feel tricked. The middle ground, pale pink and white peonies with soft, sweet, slightly rosy aromas, is probably the safest choice. It’s where something like Peony & Peppercorn fits in. Not a literal replica, but a stylized blend that suggests peony without being any single one.

All of this points to how narrow our expectations have become. We want floral perfumes to fit a clean, familiar mold. But nature doesn’t work like that. Lilac can smell pink or white, and those don’t smell alike. Roses might be rich and velvety or bright and citrusy. The tea rose is sweet and green, while a wild rose is light and minty. So when someone asks for a rose perfume, the real question is, which rose?

Some believe abstract florals are best for this reason. They don’t try to copy one flower, but aim to create an impression. Take Nautica Voyage, for example. Though it’s sold as an aquatic, it’s actually an abstract green floral. When I wore it to work, I kept catching petal-like whiffs, sometimes pink, sometimes white, sometimes purple. Nothing distinct, but always pleasant.

Compare that to Tommy Girl, which features clearer floral notes: camellia, jasmine, apple blossom. Together, they become something new. A flower that doesn’t exist in nature, but still feels real.

I'm curious to try Creed’s re-release of Spring Flower. Reviews are split. Some describe it as sweet and fresh. Others say it smells outright poopy. A few Fragrantica users complain that their expensive blind buys ended up too animalic to wear. I remember the original from the 1990s as crisp and fresh, maybe a little sour, but never indolic. If the new version is dirtier and more complex, even better. In perfumery, one person’s scrubber is another’s holy grail.

And nowhere is that truer than with florals. One person’s perfect peony might not even register as peony to someone else. And maybe that’s the whole point. Nature doesn’t stick to a formula. Neither should perfume.

What Makes a Perfumer a Perfumer?

I watched a brief documentary on Pierre Bourdon in which he described his mindset as a perfumer, describing his love of travel and the arts, and came away wondering about him. What kind of mind creates Kouros and Cool Water? He was clearly obsessed with the latter. Throughout the film, he was shown sniffing the bottle and scent strip, staring out his study window with his mind's eye doing all the observing. What was he thinking about? What drives his inquisitive mind? 

I have recently gotten into formulating my own perfumes using artificial intelligence as my guide. I'd feel stupid admitting this if it weren't for another documentary that I watched about Calice Becker. In it, she describes being the Director of The Givaudan Perfumery School in Grasse, and intercut with her monologue are scenes of perfumery students formulating their accords in front of a massive touch screen that allows them to tweak proportions and have their ideas blended right on the spot. The perfume world has gone fully digital, and that is exactly how they're training perfumers.

If perfumery were simply a digital art, school wouldn't really be all that involved. But it takes years and many hurdles to actually become a perfumer for a big company like Givaudan, and apparently much of that time is spent cultivating a perfumer's personal philosophy. Pierre Bourdon describes the importance of reading In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. It is your assigned reading if you wish to study under him, as Jean-Christophe Hérault discovered. Why was this required reading? The novel, which spans seven volumes, depicts someone who connects scent to memory, and describes being transported back to childhood at the whiff of a food item and the air near the sea. 

This scent memory is likely what Bourdon wanted Hérault to absorb, and judging from the success of Aventus, he did. His compositions speak to people, just as his teacher's did decades before. But Bourdon strikes me as being a bit of a philosopher; his ruminations on life, on art, on nature, all seem thoughtfully abstract, as if you'd never truly understand them without getting to know the man in full. I imagine it would take several years to unpeel the onion of Pierre Bourdon. But then again, I may not need to -- perhaps I am a perfumer also. Maybe that is who I am.

So, what is my philosophy? What am I striving for in life? How do I view life? I consider age a requisite for success in this domain. At 43, I am still relatively young, but now old enough to recognize all the cruel limitations life imposes on me, and mature enough to accept them. Life is long, but life is also hard. Get up. Go to work. Get beat up for eight hours. Brave the increasingly crazy traffic home, and then take care of a dog and a partner, all while maintaining an inner zen. I felt uninspired for many years, unable to connect my imagination with any real beauty in nature, and thus incapable of processing natural beauty into scent. Being a perfumer wasn't in the cards for me.

Then I accompanied my partner up to her hometown in central Maine. Her parents own an ancient farmhouse up there, built on a hill sometime in the 19th century, and the property it sits on is a little piece of terrestrial paradise. Acres of meadow, some of it partitioned into a closed flower and vegetable garden, some of it open flower garden, and all of it lovely. There are patches of iris and daffodil, peony and wild rose, gladiolus and echinacea, crab apple blossoms and phlox and lilac trees on a sprawling expanse of green grass ringed with pine. They have several man-made ponds and bird feeders, which draw all sorts of little feathered wonders. To simply stand on their property is transformational. 

I come away from it believing something new: to be in nature is to be surrounded by the divine. What peace is found in lying under a blackberry bush, away from its nettles but close enough to watch raindrops filter through each layer of greenery until they patter around me, smacking into my cheeks? To not move for an hour, and observe each passing bee, each fluttering moth, each caterpillar nibbling along the stems overhead? Life and death are so cyclical there, in the proximity of divinity, that nothing corrupts their flow. One could imagine that blackberry bush is eternal. Yet nothing is, and eventually everything crumbles into the soil, becoming the soil itself, which in time yields new growth. 

After spending some time there, I came away inspired by nature. The scents of the flowers were vibrant and fresh, products of clean earth and good tending. The lemony lift of the wild roses, the dulcet sweetness of the lilac blossoms, and the grape-like purr of purple iris flowers all filled my lungs with a sense that there is simplicity in beauty, and much complexity in rendering it all secondhand through a perfume. It isn't that the formulas need to be lengthy and convoluted, no -- one must simply acquire the knowledge needed to ensure they avoid that fate. There are things that you can learn in school, perhaps by being one of the lucky that gets plucked from a pool of several thousand applicants each year to study at Givaudan. Then there are things that you can learn from years of reading and appreciation, by simply immersing yourself in the language of perfume, year after year, until eventually reaching a stage of intellectual Nirvana. 

I may be at that stage. I now view the possibility of formulating a masterful perfume as not out of reach. Artificial intelligence plays a role here, perhaps larger than would be considered "respectable" by professionals, I will admit, but still central enough to success regardless of how it is perceived. Through lengthy discussions and formulations, A.I. has rendered several formulas for me, formulas that I have viewed critically, knowing what the materials are, and what they're capable of. I've asked my digital friend to replace bergamot EO with bergamot FCF to avoid photosensitivity issues. I've queried it about including things like Helvetolide and Ambrettolide to enhance the quality of a base accord. I've investigated the radiance and power of high-dosing Hedione into a floral accord. I've looked into making a perfume "pulse," using irones, and not just sit there. I want movement. I want Creed-like intensity and quality. I don't want flat notes that smell stale and heavy and unbalanced. I want nature in a bottle, but using 90% synthetics. 

I'm starting with a marine rose perfume. It will contain extremely expensive rose absolutes and rose otto materials. It'll also contain a bunch of "booster" materials that will lend longevity and complexity to the rose, adding an ethereally modern element. The top will be citrus and tea; the heart rose and violet, the base salty-marine with a bit of melon. I know it doesn't sound original, and it isn't. But originality is overrated. What I value isn't originality of concept, but quality of construction and clarity. I want this to smell like a garden in Maine, and I will work on achieving that. The fragrance should transport me to that garden up north, where one can stand and breathe in the saline-saturated air, clear and clean, and use it to filter the bright glow of dewey roses. The perfume should smell rich and full, but also bright and fresh, and I want it to be of the sort of beauty that makes people pause and go, "Oh!" Their next move should be to ask for a bottle. 

Unlike Pierre Bourdon, I don't put much weight on a worldview that favors "the arts," nor do I think that traveling the world is a prerequisite. I don't need to go around with a notepad and scribble down every impression. I need to think about what I'm smelling, and simply remember it, and that isn't as difficult for me to do as many other things are. Surprisingly, my scent memory is pretty great. When I smell something remarkable, I remember it, and when I smell it again elsewhere, it takes me to the place where I first encountered it. I will know my fragrance is successful when I smell it and think, "That's it . . . that's the garden where I was reborn." 

Black (Kenneth Cole)

Some fragrance note pyramids I take seriously, while others strike me as marketing ploys, packed with alleged notes that don’t exist in the composition, serving only to mislead or confuse. Black (2003), in my view, falls into the latter category. I won’t bother listing its pyramid (“watermint,” etc.), as I find it largely fictitious. I also disagree with peers who see Black as a forward-thinking precursor to Bleu de Chanel or the standout of the brand’s lineup. Notably, despite its success as a mainstream masculine fragrance in the early 2000s, Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez omitted it from Perfumes: The Guide (2008).

My theory on this omission ties to my perception of Black: it’s essentially Davidoff Cool Water (1988), reimagined as an ozonic rather than aquatic scent. The resemblance to Cool Water is striking from the outset, surprising given how rarely this connection is noted. Black features a bold aromatic fougère accord of aldehydic lavender and green apple, with synthetics like Aldehyde C-12 MNA, Floralozone, and Helional creating a vague “fresh” profile that settles into a white musk aftertrail, dominated by the heart’s overpowering green apple. For six hours post-application, apple is nearly all I smell. It’s as if perfumers Harry Fremont and Sabine De Tscharner took Pierre Bourdon’s fougère formula, tweaked it to emphasize ozonic notes per their brief, and left the core unchanged. In 2003, Black may have felt trendy, but it always triggered a sense of déjà vu, as if I’d smelled it before.

In their book, Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez dismiss fragrances that mimic Cool Water without adding originality, and consider them to be olfactory complications to Bourdon's simple plot. This likely explains their refusal to review Black. Coles's scent echoes Cool Water but swaps its minimalist elegance -- marked by neroli, tobacco, and mineralic sea-spray notes -- for a heavier blend of soapy apple, wormwood (the base here is clearly the inspiration for Steve DeMercado's Guess Man three years later) and musk meant to evoke a woody amber. While Black appeals to fans of apple-forward fragrances, its reliance on Cool Water’s template feels dated and redundant. Why choose Black when Cool Water offers a purer expression of the same idea?

Panda (Zoologist)

Christian Carbonnel is the nose behind this one, and I have to say -- he nailed it. I’m talking about the 2017 formula here. Technically, I should call it Panda 2017, since the original was done by Paul Kiler around 2013 or 2014. But at this point, this version is Panda. It’s easily the freshest and most easygoing of Zoologist’s gender-neutral, masculine-leaning offerings, and I like it. A lot.

It opens with a cool burst of green tea and grassy, leafy florals. Nothing stands out individually, but they’re blended with just enough texture and nuance to give the air a soft, glowing greenness. Then comes a green apple note -- crisp, a little bitter, almost like a crab apple -- tempered by a hint of sugar. It’s not candy-sweet, more like the scent of just-picked fruit. There’s an earthy thread beneath the apple, never dominant, but present. Imagine a ripe apple resting in damp soil. That’s the vibe. Nothing here smells loud or synthetic, and despite civet being listed in the base, I don’t detect it at all. Maybe it’s there just to deepen the earthiness. If you’re an apple note lover, this is paradise. 

Of course, I have one caveat: you can get your apple fix for a lot less. Donna Karan, Hugo Boss, even Cool Water and Nautica Voyage, plus the fragrance in my next review -- they all do great apple-adjacent scents without the Zoologist price tag. So why splurge on Panda? Well, because Carbonnel’s take smells luminous, natural, and unusually lifelike. It’s a crisp-fruit reverie, bottled. If that’s your thing, and your wallet agrees, then by all means, go for it. I just don't have the scratch. 

Brut Splash-On Lotion (Unilever)

Closing out May, let's take a look at European Brut Splash-On. Here in America, we rubes are given tacky plastic bottles that look and feel junky and are in an unnecessarily deep shade of green. It's as if HRB thinks the darker color will help buyers overlook the fact that they're splurging on a great big bottle of cheap. But not in Europe -- oh god no. You fancy-pants Euros get the expensive plastic that looks and feels like glass and is finished in a tastefully subdued translucent green. 

How does your supermarket Brut smell? Well, after the initial alcohol bite, which is unexpectedly more pronounced than the American version, the Euro Splash-On settles into a delicate and very sweet sugared lavender fougère with wispy woody underpinnings, reminiscent of the Unilever EDT in glass (squat bottle). My war-torn nose sometimes struggles to get the full picture, but what I glean is that this is an "aura" fragrance, something any bloke with a few quid can grab in a pinch to send olfactorily subliminal signals of very civilized masculinity out to the world. An eau de cologne version of the Unilever formula, if you will. The irony here is that Europe and Asia, where this formula is primarily marketed and sold, is loaded with sophisticated and eye-wateringly expensive haute parfumerie, most of which fails to capture the ethereal beauty of this understated classic. You can find it across from the condoms at Tesco. 

This formula of Brut is sweet, gentle, yet nuanced enough to smell like a real composition. It "feels," more than smells, as if I'm relaxing in a grassy meadow full of wild pink catchfly, their dulcet aroma whirling past my senses on a warm breeze, along with a hint of English lavender from further afield. There's also a warmer hay-like essence, powdery and woody, just underneath. Truly beautiful for a drugstore pong, possibly better than HRB's here in the States. Now for a prawn salad and a bowl of Heinz beans. 

Brut Aftershave (Unilever)

I've used Brut aftershave for many years, but always the American formula, which comes in the usual green plastic. The Helen of Troy formula (Idelle Labs) was formidable enough and got it done until about 2016, at which point they lost the plot and pinched a penny too many, leaving little more than a sweet vanilla powder behind. Then High Ridge Brands snatched it up and did the best thing any company has done for a fragrance in the past thirty years -- reformulated it back to its pre-HoT days, circa 1995. 

But, as always, there is more than just one Brut, which at least partially explains my obsession with this stuff. The Europeans have their own formula, courtesy of Unilever, and it comes in the squat bottle, which also happens to be solid glass. Everyone knows perfume fares better in glass (and best in metal). Of further interest is how Unilever couldn't quite bring themselves to make it green glass, and instead opted for the cheaper route of coloring the liquid, which I find to be a little, what's the Euro word? Naff. But hey, at least they didn't do it to the EDT, I can't complain too much.

How does it work, and how does it smell? Beautifully, though not for nearly as long as the American version. The European EDT scales back the aromatics and amps up the woody vanilla, which really sings in the aftershave -- for all of thirty seconds -- before fading into the musky hum of a polite gentleman’s splash. Europeans pride themselves on being more sophisticated than their colonial counterparts, and this formula says, "I wear it for me, not for you." Very nice, and well worth owning if you're a Brut fanatic like I am. If not, stick with the American stuff. It's stronger and, thanks to fortune, smells just as good.

Brut Classic (Fabergé/Unilever)

My bottle of Brut Classic by "Fabergé" is the 1990s formula that was only sold from circa 1989 to circa 2000, after which point Unilever sold the North American license exclusively to Helen of Troy/Idelle Labs. I had never smelled this formula of Brut Classic until recently, having only owned several bottles of the 2000s stuff, which I was always a bit wary of. I'd spent years hearing older guys reminisce about how the current Classic smells like the original stuff from the 1960s, but I always questioned it. The fragrance smelled much better than the plastic bottle version sold in drugstores, but I felt it lacked something and seemed suspiciously thin in the drydown, a wispy white musk and powder vibe. 

The first five minutes of Fabergé's Classic smells very similar to the Idelle Labs reformulation, but the main difference that jumps out at you (if you have experience with the newer stuff) is that the vintage version has way more depth in its lavender and geranium accord, with brighter, mintier aromatics, and a sort of sparkling quality to the citrus and greens. The stearyl acetate accord really glows in Unilever's older version of Classic, and as it dries down the lavender remains lucid, guiding me through an array of powdery white florals and into a musky sandalwood and patchouli base that smells classy and overwhelmingly "adult" and sophisticated. Wearing it, it's hard to believe Brut was once the "cheap cologne" that anyone could grab at a Woolworths or K-Mart. Its projection exceeds the safety zone of three feet by at least another three, and its longevity is nuclear at 15 hours plus. Classic indeed, especially when you consider my bottle is the cologne and not the eau de toilette spray that was also available at the time. The Idelle Labs formula doesn't come close to touching this one in quality or strength. (The Parfums Prestige formula, also Unilever, is a different story.) 

It's interesting that Unilever kept the Fabergé marquee going for another decade after it was all but moot to associate the name of a Baltic jeweler with an inexpensive American barbershop scent, but I guess when a British multinational firm of its size buys something as iconic as Karl Mann's 1964 fougère, the incentive to maintain is there. Of note to me is how their post-'89 formula doesn't smell the least bit cheap or simplistic -- there's quite a stew of notes at work, and all of them smell sprightly, dimensional, and, for lack of a better word, solid. It stands apart from its powdery post-shave brethren, reminding me more of Trumper Wild Fern than Pinaud Clubman. If you have the cash, I say get this. 

Brut EDT, Gold Vs. Silver (Unilever)

I've always wondered why Unilever's Brut EDT comes in two shades, as shown in the image above. Are they distinct in scent, do they offer unique benefits, or is it just marketing through arbitrary packaging? I owned the silver-capped version (with a matching medallion) and bought the gold-capped one to investigate.

The truth is, there's no difference between the two beyond the metal color and one minor detail specific to my bottles. The silver bottle's clear plastic box had a manufacturing sticker lacking any company information—no Unilever "U" logo, making it hard to trace its origin. The gold bottle's box, however, bears a Unilever logo on a more detailed sticker. Otherwise, both bottles are identical in appearance and scent.

Despite the identical fragrance, I’m left wondering why Unilever offers two colors. My theory is that silver targets the Asian market, while gold is aimed at Europe—a notion I vaguely recall reading somewhere, though unverified. Like much of Brut’s branding, this choice remains a mystery, although a scam has surfaced on platforms like eBay and YouTube, where Indian resellers package genuine or fake Parfums Prestige silver bottles in Fabergé Brut Classic boxes, passing them off as vintage. At least one YouTuber fell for this, reviewing a current bottle in a vintage Fabergé box, which is unfortunate.

Buyers should beware of Brut Classic boxes with the Fabergé logo, especially from sellers omitting bottle photos. Many of these boxes are likely counterfeit, part of a petty Indian scam. It’s baffling why resellers don’t just use the clear plastic packaging typical of '70s vintage Fabergé bottles, but there you have it.

Brut Special Reserve (High Ridge Brands)

It's Back

Brut Special Reserve is no longer discontinued. Sorry, eBay scalpers. You'll have to forget about charging $125 for 89 milliliters of this stuff, because it can be had for $18 again. And, I have more bad news for you: the $18 formula, new from High Ridge Brands, is better than the old version from twelve years ago. So go fish. 

Is there a lot to say about this new Brut? No, not really. I finally understand what High Ridge Brands is doing, and it makes me feel a lot better about my life. Back about four years ago, they reissued Brut 33 (the plastic bottle drugstore version) with a beautiful formula that took Brut back to 2000. I was awestruck by it, because I never expected anyone to buy an old, over-reformulated legacy drugstore cologne and "fix" it. But that's exactly what they did, and it smelled great. I bought two backup bottles. 

Then HRB did the unthinkable, and quickly reformulated it, cheapening the top notes and messing with the warm, ambery finish by adding shrill white florals. Not terrible, and still miles better than what Helen of Troy had brought us to, but why? Well, now I know why -- they decided to take their first formula, increase the concentration by 10%, and put it in a glass bottle, to be marketed as the new Special Reserve. This new stuff smells rather similar to Brut Special Reserve 2013, but it's smoother, drier, more put together, and a bit less crude in how it impacts the nose. I like it better, let's put it that way. 

Brut remains one of the most difficult fragrances for me to pin down, given its myriad incarnations and the simple fact that it's been around for 61 years. I find myself obsessing over Brut in much the same way I obsess over Creeds, and indeed, I have a bottle of the original glass Fabergé cologne on the way, so I'll be taking my obsession to its logical endpoint. Stay tuned. In the meantime, if you're someone who has been gnashing his teeth over Special Reserve's discontinuation, and you had not, until now, heard of its re-release, well, you're very welcome. 

This One Is Now Officially "Cheap"

It has always bothered me that Drakkar Noir is so expensive. Online, hard to get for under $25. In discount retailers, even harder to get for under $30. At retail? Ridiculous, naturally, typically $45 for 50 ml, and don't even know what they ask for 100 ml bottles. I'd scratch my head and ask myself, what gives? Why is this old foghorn from the early eighties still commanding a premium price, when nobody really wears it anymore? 

Even on eBay, it was difficult to source a big bottle for less than $30. Many would fall under that price, but they'd come without a box, which always put me off. If you can't get Drakkar Noir with its box, one wonders what you're really getting. The other day, this all changed -- I hopped on eBay and found what I'd always hoped to find -- Drakkar Noir has now slid into clearance bin prices. I just bought a 100 ml bottle with its box for $16, free shipping. This stuff is now cheaper than Cool Water. Finally! 

But the question is, why now? Why didn't this happen twenty years ago, when the fragrance was still well past its expiration date? There's no clear reason, but I have my own theory, and I think it's kind of obvious, once you get past the shock of seeing the market turn on a famous men's cologne to the point where it prices it under Coty's Aspen on some sites. Drakkar Noir is a sharp, crisp, bitter, soapy, somewhat peppery, somewhat green/grey lavender-centric fougère. You know what isn't popular today, and hasn't been popular for over ten years? Sharp, bitter, greenish fougères. 

But not being popular (in the high school cafeteria sense of the word) isn't enough to drive a fragrance's price down by ten dollars or more. There are plenty of fairly esoteric frags that go for big bucks. If Drakkar Noir was the first to go against the grain, it'd never lose its retail value. No, the thing that put it out to pasture is what is popular: extremely sweet and cloyingly saccharine olfactory sugar bombs. Liquid candy that you can spray everywhere, even on your crotch, and suddenly feel hungry. Everyone and their cousin is into these extreme derivations of Le Male and Joop! Homme that have evolved from those relatively modest semisweet masterpieces into nefariously nectarous beasts. 

Against this gourmand tableau, Drakkar Noir smells all the more bitter, peppery, smoky, unapproachable, and downright intimidating. Drakkar Noir is too much of a contrast, and a bridge too far for the budding Gen Z crowd of saplings who now smell Le Male and Joop! Homme and wrinkle their noses. The thought that anyone who was born after 2000 would find Drakkar Noir an easy wear is increasingly laughable. Not so in 2015. No so in 2005. Certainly not so in 1995, when virtually every other fragrance that was released riffed on Guy Laroche's signature masculine. One forgets that Drakkar Noir was once the Dior Sauvage of the fragrance world, inspiring countless imitations, clones, and smell-alikes that barely hid what they were trying to do. For nearly two decades, Drakkar Noir was the cornerstone of masculine perfumery, shaping its trends and defining its essence. How distant and even bizarre that very fact has become now. 

I'm sure there were legions of men who revelled in the discovery that Drakkar Noir had officially lost its premium department store cache, and was no longer going for Macy's prices. I imagine the hen-pecked Gen X guy who walked into a Walmart in 2003 and happily discovered Drakkar Noir priced at $38 instead of $48. Fast forward to today, when finally, after extra innings, it isn't even worth Walmart prices anymore, and can be had for less than $18, consistently less than Avon fragrances. It probably means nothing to the youngsters out there, but I'm overjoyed. Finally I can stock up on a few bottles of Drakkar Noir, and wear it with abandon. 

1 Million Royal (Rabanne)

Did the world need this? It's not really the fragrance I take issue with, although that also sucks, but what's with the price? They're asking $145 for 100 ml of this, retail. I'm sorry, but if I have $145 to spend on a fragrance, I'm going to look into an upscale Guerlain, or Tom Ford, or even an aftermarket Creed. The last thing I'd do is drop that kind of cash on Paco Rabanne's 1 millionth 1 million flanker. Especially when I can get 1 Million Royal's scent profile for $120 less and done a gajillion times better by Lataffa's Qaa'ed (2018). 

This one opens with, you guessed it, bubblegummy vanillic notes, supersweet and cloying, not to mention insanely chemical. It rapidly mellows into a sort of sweet woody/foody thing, the cardamom, before sticking a woody amber landing of mostly benzoin, cedar, patchouli, and vanilla. Rabanne attempted a sage or lavender note here, but it just smells of nakedly chemical sclarene. There's also a bit of a scratchy quality to the amber, suggesting garden variety amberwood/Ambroxan at play. Meh. You could go wild and buy a bottle of this, but only if you happened to love all things Rabanne and had a limitless budget. 

As for the comparison to Baccarat Rouge 540, all I can say is I haven't really gotten into that one, and often wonder if Francis Kurkdjian single handedly ruined perfumery forever with it. In our post-Baccarat world, the landscape is awash with bubblegum-laced quasi-gourmand fragrances, and I'm really starting to hate the world because of it. If you want to smell like this, but prefer to smell interesting, wear Qaa'ed. If you desperately wish to cement your NPC status by losing all unique identifying traits and wandering with the herd repeating pointless memes on X, this is for you.  

Linen Vetiver (Banana Republic)

The Banana Republic Icon Collection fragrances, the originals in the black boxes produced by Gap’s sister brand, are increasingly difficult to find. These scents aren’t budget buys -- retailing around $100, with online prices hovering near $45. For deals, discount retailers like Marshalls, Ross, and Burlington often stock them at roughly $20 for a 75 ml bottle. Recently, my local stores have had an abundance of Dark Cherry & Amber, Gardenia & Cardamom, and Cypress Cedar, with occasional sightings of 06 Black Platinum. However, 90 Pure White, Linen Vetiver, and 78 Vintage Green are becoming scarce, especially Vintage Green. Fortunately, I recently scored a bottle of Linen Vetiver, and it’s a standout fragrance.

It's good because it's obviously an unused mod of Julien Rasquinet's Asian Green Tea, released by Creed in 2014. It opens with a lively bergamot and petitgrain accord, tinged with a spiced sweetness that evokes crab apple. This apple-like note lingers, framing the scent with subtle fruitiness. The heart reveals a blend of iris, hyacinth, and watery jasmine, closely mirroring Asian Green Tea’s profile. Despite its name, Linen Vetiver lacks vetiver, making it a remarkable, streamlined take on what Creed could have achieved with a simpler floral chypre. The vetiver-shaped hole instead of the note suggests that Banana Republic’s perfume team has a wry sense of humor, repurposing a potential Creed scent with a nod to Olivier’s habit of naming fragrances after absent ingredients.

The key distinction lies in Linen Vetiver’s lack of a tea note, relying entirely on its florals to carry the composition—a choice that works beautifully. In Creed’s version, the tea note felt sharp and astringent, almost celery-like, as my mother once noted. Banana Republic’s decision to focus on the floral structure, sweetened by a green apple haze, results in a fresh, mass-appealing fragrance. It’s unclear why Creed passed on this formulation, but their loss is my gain. At Banana Republic’s accessible price point, Linen Vetiver is a gem I’ll happily keep in my rotation for years to come.

L'Aventure Fraîche (Al Haramain)

For reasons that continue to elude me, Silver Mountain Water clones seem to be the yardstick by which Dubai perfumers measure their worth. There are so many variations on this one Creed fragrance that I sometimes wonder if Pierre Bourdon struck a secret deal with a sheik. It’s as if every brand is legally obligated to release its own version of his scrapped L’Eau d’Issey brief. At this point, I’ve lost track of them all. I already own a handful—Ajmal’s Silver Shade, Rasasi’s Al Wisam Day, Al Rehab’s Silver, Armaf’s Club de Nuit Sillage, Afnan’s Supremacy in Heaven, and now this latest entry from Al Haramain, L’Aventure Fraîche.

I’d be lying if I said it was easy to keep these fragrances straight. You’d think that owning SMW itself, plus half its clones, would help build a mental map, but no. This is only my second Al Haramain fragrance, and Amber Oud Carbon Edition was a bit of a letdown for me. Its take on Cool Water was a splice between that and Coty’s Aspen, and I’ve always preferred Cool Water, so its faint pine note threw me off. Interestingly, that same pine note shows up again in L’Aventure Fraîche, and this time, I like it. Silver Mountain Water has a whisper of pine anyway -- unlike Cool Water, which contains none -- so it’s not a stretch to see how a perfumer might lean into that aspect. And here, it works. Instead of fizzy orange and metallic aldehydes, the top notes present bergamot, pine needles, and that same sharp metallic shimmer, blended into a smooth and surprisingly high-quality accord that smells nearly as good as the original Creed. On a budget, this passes muster. 

But like most SMW clones, L’Aventure Fraîche turns a little sour in the drydown. Its crisp metallic brightness eventually gets muddied. The synthetic ambergris, which is popular in UAE perfumery, lends a faintly dirty comb effect that becomes more noticeable about six hours in. Compared to SMW or its closest clone, Sillage, this scent is much simpler. It builds a base around green tea, ginger, and violet leaf, which hums along for hours under the frosty veil of bergamot and pine. There's nothing to complement the whale vomit when it arrives, making it feel out of place. In comparison, Sillage also uses Ambroxan, but balances it with a salty accord that L’Aventure Fraîche lacks. Still, it's beautifully built, it smells expensive, and it’s perfect for sweltering summer days.

If you love the Silver Mountain Water profile, Sillage, Supremacy in Heaven, and the Creed itself are all you need. Add L’Aventure Fraîche only if you’re like me: fully obsessed.

Moth (Zoologist)

Tomoo Inaba is the author of both Moth and Nightingale, and I found the latter beautiful, if strained and derivative. It draws heavily from antique chypres, chiefly Mitsouko, with a whisper of modern flair. It smells lovely, and I’d wear it -- except, well, Mitsouko. Inaba clearly lifted from it, and did so skillfully, but in the end, Guerlain does it better, and for far less. There’s no sense in paying a premium and waiting for an import from Canada (or California, if you’re a Luckyscent customer) when you can find a superior rendition on eBay or Amazon and have Mitsy at your door the next day for $200 less.

Moth, however, is another story. I wouldn’t wear it even if you paid me --  and if you offered a million-dollar check, I’d hesitate. It opens promisingly: nutmeg, cinnamon, clove, pepper, saffron, cumin, with each note distinct and vivid for five fleeting minutes, and a lemon aldehyde lifting the whole into clarity. I almost believe I could enjoy it. Then the curtain drops. Florals: mimosa, rose, iris, heliotrope, and jasmine well up sweetly, but are yoked to a synthetic oud accord that crushes every bit of their natural dreaminess. It smells like damp wood, dried mouse droppings, and mothballs. It doesn’t evoke a forgotten drawer; it shoves you into a rotting attic, like something from a gothic horror movie set. Oh, and it fleetingly reminds me of how my great grandmother's house used to smell, back when we'd visit her in the very late 1980s and very early 1990s, shortly before her death. Her house reeked. Truly a dismal memory. 

For the first hour, I hoped to love Moth. It lingered in that peculiar space of possibly being another Cockatiel, i.e., a Zoologist I'd consider buying. But at ninety minutes, Moth crossed the point of no return. The oud, the faux ambergris (not Ambroxan, as it smells like Inaba needlessly attempted to go the long way around and do his own painstaking reconstruction), the honey, the unwashed patchouli -- all of it grotesque, like a brutalist portrait of decay. It conjures the stench of wood saturated by decades of human hands, like old church pews blooming on a humid summer's day with their own unholy spirit. That’s Moth, for no less than twelve suffocating hours. Ugh.

Cypress Cedar (Banana Republic)

In recent years, I've come to embrace perfume as a gateway to Zen. I seek fragrances that feel meditative, compositions that soothe the body and spirit into stillness. It turns out that the powerhouse chypres and fougères of the seventies, eighties, and even early nineties rarely offer that kind of serenity. Their dense arrangements of caustic fruits, pungent woods, intense musks, and heavy spices feel more theatrical than tranquil. When I want to feel at peace, I reach for scents with softer textures, muted tones, and a calm connection to nature. These are perfumes that don’t shout from the bottle but instead whisper gently, inviting quiet rather than commanding attention.

Cypress Cedar is one such fragrance. Interestingly, the perfumer behind it remains unnamed, a rarity for Banana Republic’s Icon Collection. Often compared to Terre d'Hermès (2006), Cypress Cedar offers a greener, quieter experience. Where Terre d'Hermès leans into orange, grapefruit, and a mineral flint heart, Cypress Cedar plays with bergamot, lemon, and a touch of spearmint for a brisk opening. It introduces rhubarb in the mid-notes, offering a green twist before settling into a base of cedar, vetiver, patchouli, and white musk. The result is less fiery than its Hermès counterpart, lacking the warmth of benzoin and black pepper, but delivering a sense of cool restraint. It won’t dazzle in a crowd, but it might leave you feeling unexpectedly grounded and calm, like a well-tended bonsai on a windowsill.

Fragrances like this are about simplicity and intention, creating accords that stay true to their promise. Like Jo Malone or Yardley offerings, Cypress Cedar doesn't aim to surprise, but it offers quiet depth. There's a chance the perfumer used Iso E Super in a style reminiscent of Jean-Claude Ellena, with a nod to the aesthetic of a Japanese pebble garden. The citrus notes aren't Guerlain quality, but they avoid the sharpness of cheap aldehydes. They smell fresh, juicy, and green—an ideal setup for what follows. The woody notes are smooth and never get too deep or funky. This is what Montblanc Starwalker wanted to be: a cool, misty morning in a grove of cypress, where tension dissolves in the hush of rustling branches. Not extraordinary, but quietly beautiful.

Limonata (Narcotica)

With notes like red currant, grapefruit, ginger, pink pepper, mango, fig, Ambroxan, and musk, you'd think Limonata would be a slam dunk, but I have some issues with it. Claude Dir's 2025 release doesn't open with that appealing melange, instead falling back on the familiar bubblegum note found in mid-market designers of the past decade -- a surprising choice in an expensive niche scent. That bubblegum accord lasts for just five or ten minutes before giving way to a more naturalistic blend of the listed aromatics, but still, why lead with something so uninspired? Familiarity breeds contempt. 

From there it becomes fruitier, with grapefruit, mango, and fig taking the lead, backed by a salty sea-breeze twang of Ambroxan and white musk. It smells good, if a little linear, and the saltiness turns faintly sour over time. I can appreciate the realism of the fruit accord, something Dir clearly excels at, but the grapefruit in Guerlain's L’Homme Idéal Cologne is vastly superior, thanks to Thierry Wasser’s genius addition of piney terpenes that lend both dimension and longevity. Dir’s version is saltier, sweeter, and it lingers for hours, but it lacks the ripe juiciness expected at this price. Blended so closely into sugary mango and fig, the grapefruit loses some of its brightness. Judging by online reviews, though, most people don’t seem to mind, and the fragrance overall gets high marks. 

Limonata’s biggest strength is its aquatic overlay, which gives it its clearest sense of place: salinated beachside air, warm eddies of a rising tide, the scent of a fruit cocktail with salt on the rim as waves crash in the distance. Based on the chatter I'm seeing, I think the fragrance appeals mostly to young women who apparently enjoy sweet and fruity aquatics with bubblegum top notes, a trend that makes me question where perfume culture is heading. At this price point, Narcotica’s summery citrus should come across as super fresh and very natural, not bogged down by unnecessary olfactory calories.

Tommy Girl or Chelsea Flowers? What Is the Specific Connective Tissue Between These Two Floral Scents?

At long last, I finally have these two fragrances side by side. My story with Tommy Girl is a bit tiresome (crib notes: I developed an allergy), and I abandoned it in 2014, then gave my pre-IFRA bottle to a girlfriend at the time, and it took her all of five minutes to wear half the bottle down to empty. This kind of thing doesn't often happen to me, but I recall being annoyed that it did with Tommy Girl, especially since I genuinely love the fragrance.

Imagine that you enjoy tea-based fragrances, you enjoy blackcurrant notes, you love green fragrances, and you happen to have more than a passing appreciation for bucolic florals. Then imagine finding all of these traits in a single inexpensive fragrance by an American designer brand once all the rage in the 1990s. Then take that a bit further, and picture the day when you realize you simply can't wear the stuff. You can be near it, on someone else, but your sinuses forbid you from wearing it yourself. What a dreadful feeling that was. At the time, I didn't really blame anyone or anything but myself. I told myself that it had happened because I was too sensitive, and couldn't handle the composition, and also that I had absolutely awful luck, which like a perverse slot machine in some infernal casino meant getting all three pineapples on a whiff of Calice Becker's masterpiece. 

The truth was less dramatic than that. My bottle was made before the IFRA really kicked their aroma chemical censorship regime into high gear by restricting and banning floral materials, and the Lauder formula at that time (late '90s or early 2000s) definitely used a few things on their list. I don't often thank the IFRA for restricting and removing perfumery materials, but in the case of Tommy Girl, I'll just lay it on the line: they did a good thing here. The old formula was gorgeous, but it was also overpowering. There was a denseness to it, a radiance that was nearly blinding, and at some point whatever floral components were responsible simply overpowered my immune system and triggered an overreaction. It wasn't the tea base with its papery green svelteness, or the abstracted blackcurrant haze under all the white floral and rose materials, but some element in the bouquet itself, some floral note that was overpowering me. 

Fast forward to 2025, and suddenly I find myself faced with a peculiar choice. I'm in a discount retail store perusing the seemingly endless array of "budget" fragrances on offer, many of them actually quite expensive and in some cases egregiously overpriced, when I spot a few bottles of Tommy Girl. It's in the new packaging with red stripes, and it's obvious that the Hilfiger fragrance division has pawned itself off to someone else, with Lauder no longer producing their wares. Why this happened is beyond me, and I don't really care enough to look into it, although I'm sure someone like Derek or Andre have already dug into and explained it, and if they haven't, I'm just as sure that someday they will. But the plain fact is that these fragrances have been reformulated, and are now living in a post-IFRA world. The wheels start to turn, and I reckon that there's a good chance whatever was in Tommy Girl in 2000 is very likely no longer in Tommy Girl today. 

So I take a chance and buy a bottle, knowing full well that if I spend the $27 on it and it still gives me a massive headache, I'll have burned that $27. But I suspect that the fragrance will be chemically altered to enough of a degree that it likely will not mess me up, and upon bringing it home and giving it a spritz, am pleased to report many days after the fact that indeed, the floral materials that once comprised the supernova of "fresh" petals are no longer the same, and I can wear Tommy Girl with no after effects. This gives me a chance to do something that I've wanted to do since 2020: figure out in a side by side comparison why exactly Tommy Girl and Chelsea Flowers smell so similar? Laurent Le Guernec's 2003 "niche" floral doesn't share all that many similar notes, yet at the very first spray, I recognized and said out loud, "Tommy Girl!" But why? 

Chelsea Flowers doesn't have a tea note. There's no blackcurrant in the mix, and there's a soapy-green aspect that resembles the starched floral bouquets in drugstore refrigerators. But the sweetness of its florals is muted, with its damp, green, stemmy facet dialed up instead. Meanwhile, Tommy Girl is all about green tea, intensely blossomy florals, and blackcurrant, which smells more focused, rounded, and juicy in the new formula (actually miles better than vintage). Becker's composition isn't as finely textured as Le Guernec's, but its texture flows in broad, wonderful strokes, with each whiff of a blossom followed five minutes later by a slightly nuanced whiff of another beside it. Chelsea Flowers, in contrast, smells of grassy greens in a humid environment chilled by artificial rain drops and a cooling unit on high. The faint sweetness of the blossoms exists not becuase these flowers are aromatic, but simply by virtue of their numbers -- there are a hundred of them crammed into a little space, and if you could climb in with them, their collective odor would eventually make an impression. Undergirding all of this is a weirdly nondescript soapiness where in Tommy Girl there is green tea, green tea, and more green tea. 

With all of these differences, why is the comparison inevitable? Why, when I smell Chelsea Flowers, does my mind immediately leap to Tommy Girl? No single material or cluster of notes can be isolated and used to identify the olfactory similarities that I experience with these two fragrances, yet it's there. I can only speculate. Perhaps Chelsea Flowers contains a cleverly hidden green tea note? Maybe there's a speck of blackcurrant in there, too, which somehow tilts the overall balance into Tommy territory? Le Guernec's fragrance came out seven years after Becker's, so clearly he was using her work as inspiration when he authored this floral marvel, but what, other than the smell of grocery store bouquets, was he after? Did he imitate the soapy amber and give it just enough of a sweet floral lilt to be evocative of the designer tea floral? Is there a note in Tommy Girl that eludes definition, and is the secret god molecule for making any "fresh" floral smell like Tommy Girl? I may never know. The fragrances are very much abstract meditations on the quietude that surrounds flowers, and in that headspace I zen out, so perhaps it's simply a shared psychological effect gleaned from both compositions. 

So, too, might I find answers in noticing what is different about them. Tommy Girl is radiant, but it's also dusky and dry, save for the blackcurrant note. Chelsea Flowers is also radiant, but dewey and wet all the way through, and I can't not think of cheap clutches of hothouse flowers sitting in buckets of water on the floor of a glass fridge in a Price Chopper or Big Y. Tommy Girl is sweet; Chelsea Flowers less so. Tommy Girl uses green tea for most of its "green" vibe, while Chelsea Flowers seems to eschew any obvious tea note in favor of less exotic stems and leaves rubber-banded together. There's a kind of pollen-like quality to Chelsea that Tommy lacks, while Tommy's more blatant watery florals are louder and grander and in no way as peripheral. 

It's clear that both fragrances share a fundamental skeletal structure, but in Chelsea, this core is layered beneath elements that set it apart from Tommy. Between the two, I definitely like Tommy more, which is weird considering the price difference. I mean, if I were to pass on paying retail for Chelsea, I could buy about ten bottles of Tommy Girl and have a lifetime supply. With that said, I actually think owning Chelsea Flowers has been worth it (granted, I paid a third of what the going rate is), and I like it very much, and would repurchase it if the price was right. Now that Creed is getting ridiculous with its pricing, and now that tariffs are about to jack those prices even higher (not really, but everyone likes to pretend there's a good reason to increase prices), Olivier's biggest competitor might have an edge, even with me. In any case, I want the world to know that owning both of these is not redundant, but owning one, the cheaper one, is really all you need. 

Tommy Girl, Reformulated (Hilfiger)

I’d forgotten how good this fragrance is. Released in 1996, Tommy Girl was the preppy brand’s answer to the original masculine scent that launched a few years earlier, arriving at just the right moment in the height of the 90s when everyone was wearing bold, fruity, and sweet fragrances. While the masculine version focused on citrus, apple, cardamom, and sandalwood, Estée Lauder tapped Calice Becker to craft the feminine counterpart. Her brief captured the decade’s obsession with green tea and watery florals, resulting in a luminous, airy composition that set the standard for tea florals.

I had a vintage bottle in the late 2000s, and it felt made for me -- a bright blend of lemon sencha, camellia, blackcurrant, honeysuckle, jasmine, and lotus, grounded in a cool, aquatic green tea and sandalwood base. It was smooth and radiant, and I loved it until I developed a mild allergy to something in it, probably a lily of the valley material. After an hour with it on, I’d get lightheaded and feel pressure in my chest. Eventually, I passed the bottle to a girlfriend, feeling a bit embarrassed that a “girly” scent had been too much for me. I still missed it, though, and wondered if I'd ever get to enjoy it again, which sounds like a minor concern, and it would be, except that I really, really liked it. 

Fast forward to 2025, and I decided to give the reformulation a fair shot, thinking it might be gentler now that many of the old-school materials, like hydroxycitronellal, lilial, and lyral, have been banned or restricted. To my surprise, it smells just like I remember. Same crisp lemon tea opening, same tart blackcurrant and green tea swirl, same floral mist. No allergic reaction, no compromises. It’s as if the formula had been rebuilt note for note using modern components. Whoever reworked it—maybe Becker herself—deserves major credit. And as for whether a guy can wear Tommy Girl? Absolutely. It’s not overly sweet early on, and frankly, it’s better than the masculine version. Why settle for less? This fragrance is still stunning and very much worth wearing today.

Carmina (Creed)

In 2019, Banana Republic released Dark Cherry & Amber in its Icon line, a wonderful table cherry and praline composition by Claude Dir that is as majestic as it is austere. It smells great, and wears well in most situations and seasons, but I find that its praline and cherry blossom accord is easily its best feature, with the cherry merely a top note that segues well into the florals. It's a cheap fragrance that doesn't smell cheap, and could easily pass as something by Montale or Etat Libre d'Orange.

Carmina is one of the first Kering Creeds, released in 2023 shortly after their acquisition, and is thus subject to the latest version of “Let’s Shit on Creed,” formally titled “Kering is Driving Creed Into the Ground.” The premise is simple: Kering is a big company full of suited gorillas who wouldn’t recognize a proper perfume if it popped them in the schnoz. Naturally, their ownership of Creed means that all future Creeds will officially suck and not smell like Creed. Every NPC from here to the Kerguelen Islands will consider themselves privileged to impugn the legitimacy of a brand that has forever eschewed its former base blend of natural ambergris tincture and Ambroxan for new, “scratchy” Norlimbanol and safranal bases that smell generic and flat. Since Carmina comes in the new 75 ml Kering bottle and boasts a pyramid suspiciously similar to Dark Cherry & Amber, it must be an unused Claude Dir mod that was simply appropriated and given a luxury makeover.

Not so fast, cynical NPC. I've finally had a chance to wear Carmina and spend some quality time with it. As an owner of Dark Cherry & Amber, I can tell you that Carmina is similar about three hours into its drydown, but the differences from top note to eleventh-hour base make owning both far from redundant. Carmina smells gorgeous at every stage, shimmering for hours with a remarkably radiant accord of sweet Bing cherry preserve, fruity pink pepper, Fahrenheit-style violet, and jammy Turkish rose. This is all atop a stunning blend of safranal, Cashmeran, Norlimbanol, and Ambroxan. The material quality is Creed level, and the scent is reminiscent of Creed Love in Black (2008). The fragrance resembles Love in Black just as much as it does Dark Cherry & Amber. Frankly, I think Kering didn’t pay Dir's formula much mind at all; they took an easier route, using a forgotten mod from Creed’s own feminine line from 15 years prior and “updating” it with contemporary tropes of cherry and overly sweet florals. Carmina feels like a rush job by Kering, relying on a pre-existing Creed formula that they merely gave a facelift.

Anyone who gives this a thumbs down needs to explain why, as I find it hard to believe anyone could smell this and think it's just another overpriced cherry fragrance. There’s a reason Carmina has become popular among women; it has effectively become Creed's feminine Aventus—ironic, since Aventus for Her exists. Carmina smells amazing. I don’t miss the ambergris; Love in Black didn’t use it either, likely because it doesn’t suit this scent. It's addictive, with crystalline cherry and rose as its standout features. Unlike Dark Cherry & Amber, Carmina captures the essence of cherry from top to base. Creed has a new masterpiece, and as always, the only question is: who is the perfumer?

Sakura Snow (d'Annam)

My interpretation of Anh Ngo's name for this fragrance may differ from the public's; I don’t take Sakura Snow to imply notes of cherry blossom and snow. Rather, I believe Ngo was being poetic, likening the falling blossoms of the ornamental cherry tree to snowfall. 

The fragrance reflects this perfectly -- there’s nothing snowy about it (if you want a snowy floral, try Snowy Owl by Zoologist). Instead, it highlights juniper berries and cherry blossoms -- an intriguing combination, if I may say so. The juniper berry is bright and dimensional, offering a cool, aromatic texture that blends seamlessly with the benzyl acetate and Hedione HC of cherry blossom. Sakura Snow’s almost gin-like opening soon softens into a feathery cherry blossom scent -- light, airy, and expansive, yet surprisingly potent. It’s one of those rare compositions that seems to grow stronger as it dries down, amplifying rather than fading. Supporting this delicate floral core is an ambery structure that feels radiant yet refined, with a touch of woodiness that never fully materializes into a recognizable bark or branch note. There’s a familiar twang, subtler than the usual Ambroxan -- perhaps Cetalox? Whatever it is, it lends a mineralic but gentle quality, with a hint of salty animalics -- clean without being soapy, cozy without being sweet.

After ten hours -- yes, it lasts that long -- Sakura Snow settles into a quiet hum of everything that came before, its refined Ambroxan-like base still whispering echoes of juniper and ethereal florals. Does it smell rich, dimensional, and naturalistic? In a way, yes. It smells expensive. And it is expensive. But if you love cherry blossom and the zen-like serenity of its airy florals, that dulcet olfactory tone, Sakura Snow is likely worth it. I enjoyed it, and if cherry blossom were a note I adored, I’d own a bottle.

I am Trash - Les Fleurs du Déchet (Etat Libre d'Orange)

Etat Libre d'Orange isn't the niche brand to go for if you're looking for "natural." Unlike the offerings of Amouage, Xerjoff, Creed, ELdO's frags rarely inspire a sense of realism or depth; they clearly use synthetics, and appear to be very proud of it. I recall wearing Antiheros a while back and being struck by its harshness. It was like I'd lost a fight with a bottle of lavender hand soap from a truck stop restroom. 

I Am Trash – The Flowers of Waste goes all-in on its soapy-chemical tones, delivering a composition that wouldn’t feel out of place in the haircare aisle of a drugstore. I think ELdO was trying to emulate the smell of scented trash bags, but I could be wrong. Daniela Andrier seems to have drawn from her CK Contradiction archive of Y2K “fresh” profiles and leftover submissions when she handed this to Etienne de Swardt’s firm in 2017 or 2018. The result? A fruity-floral shampoo accord, drenched in the overly sweetened “fresh” aesthetic. A silvery flicker of tuberose, neroli, and green apple opens the fragrance before quickly dissolving into juicy fruit esters. The drydown settles into a crisp-woody base, courtesy of Iso E Super and Akigalawood. There are floral nuances that echo Tuberose Overdose, along with a heavy dose of apple, calling to mind just about anything from Donna Karan.

Fragrances like this are why the niche realm and the perfume industry in general have grown far beyond the bounds of what the market can ultimately sustain. There are too many products out there now, swamping the sub-sectors of what the average consumer will buy, with the gross overrepresentation of various segments exacerbated by needless designer-level entries in the niche realm. I Am Trash isn't really trash or trashy, but it's unnecessary, especially for a fragrance priced at over $50 an ounce. If you're in the market for something that smells like this, look to the aforementioned Calvin Klein, Banana Republic, or Donna Karan and save yourself time, money, and heartache.

Phantom Parfum (Rabanne)

Having never smelled Phantom EDT, I can’t fully assess the parfum’s place in the lineup, though, to be fair, Rabanne isn’t a brand I have much experience with anyway. (It was once called Paco Rabanne, after its founder, but in today’s world, gendering a company is practically a mortal sin—so begone, first name!) I’ll admit, I underestimated this scent. It’s actually quite pleasant.

The original Phantom, Rabanne’s first openly AI-generated formula, is a slightly bizarre hodgepodge of counterintuitive notes. The parfum, however, is a human-handed flanker, which raises the question: why not go all in? If you’re going to let the algorithm bless us, commit. Instead, Rabanne handed this one over to Dominique Ropion, Anne Flipo, and Juliette Karagueuzoglou, and it shows—Phantom Parfum smells “safe,” meticulously curated to fit every current trend: sweet, warm, soft, and loud. The opening is the same post-Invictus bubblegum top note I’ve smelled a dozen times this year. The transition? Predictably swift—an aromatic jolt of robust lavender, then the inevitable base of patchouli, vanilla, and woods. Familiar to a fault, though it does nod to Thierry Mugler’s A*Men (1996) and a handful of late-’90s and early-2000s gourmands.

Its best feature is the lavender heart, sharpened by what Rabanne claims is rhubarb—though I don’t detect it outright, more as a textural effect. As a starter fougère for men under thirty, it’s solid: well-balanced, versatile, and safely within the bounds of its target audience. Loud and sweet enough for a club night, but not so cloying as to repel anyone past that phase. I enjoyed it, but unsurprisingly, not enough to reach for my wallet.

Born in Roma (Valentino Uomo)

A prominent fragrance reviewer describes Born in Roma (2019) as opening with “fruity musky tones,” claiming these “nostril-tingling notes will recall the early 2000s Y2K dynamism and pop.” Yet, I find myself utterly perplexed about which fragrance he’s referring to. To my nose, this scent feels like a tired echo of the past five years—little more than a derivative riff on Invictus, akin to Hawas, but lacking its charm.

The perfume unfurls with that all-too-familiar sweet, pseudo-bubblegum accord—a synthetic medley of "froot" flavors that swiftly collapses into the predictable Ambroxan-driven heart. It’s a synthetic slog, a chemical haze that lacks any spark of originality. What elevates Hawas, in contrast, is its ambergris reconstruction, crafted with above-average, designer-grade materials. That salty, flattering ambiance lends Hawas a whisper of natural depth, a lifeline for someone craving even a hint of authenticity in their fragrance. Born in Roma EDT, however, doesn’t even attempt such finesse. While Ambroxan does appear in its expected dry-down slot, it sits there nakedly, exuding a stark, metallic saltiness with no effort to mimic the nuanced warmth of true ambergris. The result is a cheap, chemical midsection that feels oddly flabby and uninspired. It’s difficult to fathom why anyone would shell out the extra money for this when Rasasi’s Hawas delivers a superior experience at a third of the cost.

Perhaps Invictus, one of those early 2010s fragrances, was more influential than it first appeared, joining the ranks of Bleu de Chanel and Sauvage in shaping an era overrun with imitators. My issue lies in their sameness—they all seem to be chasing Invictus’s shadow. Born in Roma isn’t a bad fragrance, per se, but its “been there, done that” aura saps any joy from the wearing experience. I can’t recommend it. You want this? Reach for the original Invictus, or better yet, grab Hawas and revel in something with a bit more soul.

Gold+ (Commodity)

I'm pleasantly surprised by this fragrance. It consists of three main notes—nutmeg, saffron, and patchouli—and that’s exactly what I get. My issue with Gold+ is that it forgoes the vanilla freshness of its namesake in favor of a spice mélange that resembles Prada Luna Rossa Ocean EDP and Parfum, without adding anything new to the conversation.

Gold+ opens with an incredibly realistic nutmeg note, as if I had taken a McCormick shaker and dusted the spice directly onto my skin. The only other detectable note is a slight shimmer of ISO E Super to smooth the edges. Within ninety minutes, the nutmeg shifts to safranal, intensifying the fragrance with a quality reminiscent of Luna Rossa Ocean Le Parfum—but without the same depth or complexity. Still, it’s impressive.

The patchouli finally emerges, six hours later, though it’s weak. The nutmeg-saffron duo is so dominant that little else breaks through, leaving the scent locked into a simplified Italian designer profile. It remains static and unchanging until you do laundry or take three or four showers. Whatever these materials are, they’re nothing short of nuclear. With Ocean, even after four wash cycles, I can still smell it. Gold+ is just as clingy. If you want to drench yourself in liquid gold and never smell anything else again, this is for you.