Burberry Hero (Burberry)

If you ever look back at the early 1970s, you’ll see a world that embraced excess with a certain kind of reckless pride. Films were bawdy, vulgar, and all sorts of other things that begin with the letter “v,” but they were competently made and carried an undeniable vibrance. Even the most outrageous productions had craftsmanship behind them, and people took pride in their work—no matter what that work was. You didn’t watch movies in the comfort of your home; even the most risqué entertainment had to be viewed in public theaters, often in major metro hubs like Times Square. After the show, you could step out for a hot dog and then spend the rest of the afternoon shopping at Bloomingdale’s.

Perfume was that way, too. Brut. Jovan Musk. Pierre Cardin Pour Monsieur. Bawdy, bare-chested, ready for anything at any moment—brutal and assaulting the senses as olfactory assailants in their private romances. Yet they were produced on generous budgets using skilled perfumers, and despite their downmarket appeal, they were respectable and widely loved, not unlike the raunchy, provocative films of Jean Rollin. America and Europe had their many differences, but they could agree on their love for indulgence, and perfume was no exception. This was good for culture, good for art, good for society. People were freer, their sense of intellect was deeper, and their senses were attuned to finer things. I dare say that although it was a time before the digital age, it was a time when people were more advanced in their understanding of life.

Today, none of this is true. We have jettisoned art, jettisoned the vulgar, abandoned the wanton excesses of yore, all for the restrictive safety of risk-free sure-things. Movies are pallid ghosts of their former selves, devoid of humor, seduction, and sin. Perfumes have also shriveled up into little shivering weaklings, created not by people of knowledge and power but by scared little runts in off-the-rack suits who think that, because they’re European, sophistication is innate to them and need not be cultivated. They churn out the most focus-grouped garbage, boring sweet ambers, a dime a dozen, simply because an A.I. app tells them it will sell, and they sprinkle in whatever organic note the A.I. is kind enough to recommend. In Burberry Hero Eau de Parfum’s case, it was pine.

Sloth (Zoologist)

I often wonder if rich people actually wear these perfumes. If I were a millionaire, would Sloth by Zoologist be my signature scent? Then I hop into my downmarket Toyota Corolla and drive to Woodbury, where I drop $100 on seven grocery items at New Morning Market, inhaling that unmistakable “health food store” aroma—spices, grains, and wood. And that’s when it hits me: Sloth is right at home in a millionaire’s lair. This is the premier fragrance of choice for the Connecticut blue blood who drops $500 on groceries that barely last the weekend. Why not?

There’s no use romanticizing this fragrance. Sloth smells like spicy body odor, and wearing it feels like a social experiment gone wrong. It reminds me of a grad school professor—another lefty blue blood—who spent half a class reminiscing about visiting India, where crowds of poor people reached out and touched her clothes, which she somehow recalled fondly. I imagine that scene smelled exactly like Sloth. Prin Lomros (the nose behind Bat and Rhinoceros) created this one, but I just don’t get it. Perfume is supposed to make you smell good. Sloth does the opposite.

What anyone sees in this is beyond me. The stench of unwashed skin is precisely what I’m trying to avoid, and if I’ve just showered and shaved, the last thing I want is a fragrance that instantly reverses my progress. This won’t get you a date. It won’t impress your significant other—because there isn’t a woman in America who wants her man to smell like this. It doesn’t even work as some highbrow intellectual exercise, because no amount of Ego can override the lizard brain screaming that this smells spoiled and vaguely hazardous. Sloth isn’t just a bad perfume—it’s a joke. Dollar store body spray is more useful, more desirable, more respectable.

Quorum Silver (Antonio Puig)

Cedar? I smell ginger. Nearly all ginger, in fact. Quorum Silver hits with a massive wallop of it in the top notes -- brisk, spicy, a little sweet -- and rapidly segues into an aromatic mixture of lavender and herbal notes to buttress the longevity of that gingery freshness. Eventually, as in after six or seven hours, a light cedar woodiness is apparent, but it's not like I'd call Quorum Silver a "cedar scent." It is certainly a ginger fragrance.

Has this been reformulated? For twenty years, I've been reading people's chatter about how Quorum Silver is a one-note cedar bomb from top to bottom, yet my experience is sharply divergent from theirs. When I think of cedar, I think of Krizia Uomo. That's a cedar fragrance. Intensely woody, all the way through. Puig's scent is what I had hoped Creed's Tabarome Millesime would be (but wasn't), an intense blast of ginger that softens into greener notes in the drydown. There's a light tea-like effect in the base of QS, and the quality of materials is high enough that I can envision this as a niche offering.

I'm not sure I understand what everyone has been experiencing with this fragrance, but I have a thought. There's a known phenomenon that when one person of repute says something, everyone follows. It's The Emperor's New Clothes, only here it's a note, and not magical clothing in question. At some point someone influential shouted "cedar!" and the whole world scrambled to echo it, fearing that an opposing take would rattle things. Well, I'm the little boy pointing at the naked man: "GINGER!" 

Elephant (Zoologist)

Released in 2017, Elephant is one of Chris Bartlett's compositions, he of Pell Wall Perfumes, and I have to say, it's not bad. It also happened to be an Art & Olfaction Awards Finalist of 2018. The notes listed are tree leaves, darjeeling tea, magnolia, cocoa, coconut milk, incense, jasmine, woods, amber, musk, patchouli, and sandalwood. I can detect every single one of these notes with clarity. Well done, Chris. 

The good: Elephant wears nicely. It opens with an aggressive accord of bitter greens, pungent cedar, magnolia, and jasmine, with a slightly sweet/skanky balance calibrated just right. The dominant note to my sniffer is jasmine blossom, a beautifully indolic and very floral-ambrosial nuance that penetrates every level of the fragrance's pyramid. Eventually the grounding notes of cocoa and coconut milk appear and smooth out the rough edges, leaving some of the smokiness of the tea and jasmine, which then morph into an incense and patchouli accord for depth. Rich, green, woody, relaxed. Very nice.

The bad: This stuff is linear as hell. After the first half hour, everything hits a stasis point, and the dynamism fizzles. I'm left with a woody-floral coconut musk that holds for hours and never dries out. Sounds okay, but you may find yourself wishing you could get your nose on the rather good sandalwood undergirding everything. Bartlett is a prominent member of Basenotes and a competent perfumer, but Elephant suffers from being a bit of a one-trick pony. Wrong animal there. 

She Was an Anomaly (Etat Libre d'Orange)

This smells like something Prada would put have put out fifteen years ago, a bready/carrot iris followed by a semisweet powdery musk. The irones and ionones are restrained and tempered by a massive dose of white musk and Amberfix™ in the base, a salty nuance that perpetually wavers between ambergris and sandalwood. The first ten minutes have me wondering if this is going to be a full-throated iris fragrance, but once the synthetics start to buzz around, it gets pretty vague in intention and a little nondescript in overall smell. To my nose, the notes that stand out are a slightly floral iris and orris accord, which ends up reminding me of a much stronger and more resolute scent at less than a quarter of the price: Deauville Pour Homme.  

Daniela Andrier claims that she asked AI to generate a formula for her, and it gave her the bones of this scent, with an expectation that she would (paraphrasing) "overdose on two materials." She obliged the algorithm, so to speak, but made a few human adjustments along the way to produce She Was an Anomaly. I find it interesting that she admits to relying on AI for a formula, because we all know that if she did it with this perfume, she's done it with a bunch of others as well. Once you rub that lamp, there ain't no putting the genie back in. Andrier used Givaudan's Carto, a program perfumers can use to develop a perfume within a month, neck-snapping in perfumery terms, even for the designer flanker mills out there. Time is money, and Carto likely saves a ton of cabbage. 

To my nose, this scent smells like an AI formula that was corrected. I'm not sure how long it took to compose, and suspect Andrier spent a more traditional length of time on it after that initial Carto suggestion. I like She Was an Anomaly, but I certainly don't love it, and I fall into the camp of people who feel that it's a bit too discreet and one-dimensional for something at ELDO's price-point. I mean, if I can spritz on a little of my Deauville and have a more satisfying experience with the same set of notes (plus a few that Andrier didn't use), why would I deviate from the ten dollar scent? Big brand cache only works when the story behind the perfume implies hard-won gains. I think ELDO would've been better off keeping the backstory to She Was an Anomaly to itself.