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.