Lovely (Sarah Jessica Parker)

Having just read the backstory to this fragrance, I can safely say that what I smell makes sense. Burr described the day he spent with Sarah Jessica Parker as enlightening; they ended it with a visit to her Manhattan home, where she confessed her love for Bonnie Belle Skin Musk (actually called Bonne Belle). She contrasted the scent of grade-school cologne with Incense Avignon by Comme des Garçons and some no-name Egyptian fragrance oil she buys from a guy on the street or something. (Apparently, Burr couldn't be bothered to actually track down who this guy was or what he was selling to the biggest TV star of the time. True journalism is dead.)

The story behind Lovely is interesting, but maybe not in the way the author intended. Following its evolution, from SJP's original idea, which Coty immediately ditched, to the eventual release of Laurent Le Guernec and Clément Gavarry's formula for the global market, I found a few things rather odd. First, SJP’s original concept was rejected, even though it wasn’t all that out there for a feminine fragrance. She liked the idea of "body smells" in a sexy way and wanted something dusky, earthy, and a little dark. In other words, she envisioned a classical French feminine from the 1940s, updated for the 21st century. For Coty to balk and steer her toward whatever they thought would sell seemed counterintuitive. But then again, what do I know?

The second oddity is that Burr never actually describes what Lovely ended up smelling like. It’s as if he wants the reader to go out, buy it, and discover it firsthand. That’s fine, I suppose, but it feels like he sacrificed some much-needed narrative connective tissue in the process. The story remains a vague sketch built on the idea that SJP was "learning" about perfume and its creation while developing her brief on the fly. And really, that’s all the story is: a brief. She tells the executives what she likes and doesn’t like, then offers up imagery of Easter eggs, ribbons, hat boxes, and other random things. None of it is particularly enlightening, because what truly matters is how Le Guernec and Gavarry interpret her direction and turn it into an actual fragrance. Unfortunately, that part was left out, and I'm left wondering what their creative process was like. 

Lovely is greener and more floral than I expected. I’ve never smelled Narciso Rodriguez for Her, so I can’t make the comparison myself, but over 2,000 people think they’re similar, while only about 400 disagree. That’s Armaf-level stealth cloning. Le Guernec is especially skilled at reinterpreting popular commercial hits; his 2003 Chelsea Flowers for Bond is clearly a riff on Calice Becker’s Tommy Girl from 1996. I would argue Lovely is just as beautiful as Tommy Girl. This brings me to the third oddity, which is that no one seems to mention the massive hyacinth in this. It’s right there, screaming through a megaphone for the entire wear. The fragrance is incredibly strong. And yet, it’s also delicate, with a straw-like texture that anchors the sweet floral brightness, all wrapped in a soft cloud of white musk. It’s basically Skin Musk for rich people.

Except, thankfully, this fragrance isn’t expensive. I paid fifteen bucks for a 3 oz tester. And for the record, it looks and feels quite classy. The bottle is heavy glass, with a pretty grey ribbon tied around the base of the atomizer. Gold lettering. A soft pink tint to the bottle, tasteful and not overdone. The sticker and box don’t mention Coty at all. I’m not sure if they still distribute Lovely or if “The Lovely Distribution Company” is just a faux brand name Coty uses to distance itself. Maybe SJP asked for a rebrand. Coty tends to scream "cheap," and SJP isn't exactly a discount-bin celebrity. Just another odd detail in the story of her debut scent.

Lovely isn’t complicated. It comes across as a sweet floral musk, likable, easy on the nose, and refreshingly free of the usual crutches: no transparent fruits, no sugary syrup, no fake aquatic shimmer. There’s nothing trite or formulaic here. It just smells gauzy and relaxed, like a sheer spring floral framed in soft cotton.

Hey, for a tenner, you can’t go wrong.

Book Review: Chandler Burr's Year in the Fragrance Industry (Cough!) 17 Years Later

Summer reading: It was either this or The Emperor of Scent, and since I’m a little weary of Luca Turin and Burr’s sycophantic worship of him, I went with this. Why am I reviewing it nearly two decades after publication? Don’t ask. I get to things when I can. With my schedule, I’m lucky to get to them at all.

First, a quick personal note on Mr. Burr. He followed this blog from 2012 to 2015. During that time, I’d published some carefully crafted pieces refuting his thesis on perfume as an art form. I disagreed with him loudly, even posted a photo of him (captioned “this guy”), and suddenly I was on his radar. Burr is famously litigious, and I suspect he followed me not out of interest, but to see if I’d give him a reason to sue. That didn’t pan out. My interest in him evaporated around the same time The New York Times’s did, and he unfollowed. In 2025, I doubt he remembers I exist.

Still, it left a bad taste. The idea that some elitist doofus making six figures in Manhattan doing fuck knows what thinks he can rattle me by appearing in my subscriber list is laughable. It didn’t intimidate me. I still think he’s an elitist doofus. And in my opinion, the Times is better off without him. I don’t know Burr personally, but he reads like someone who believes his own hype, and I find it strange that people like him make so much noise for a short period of time, only to vanish when the public collectively shrugs. 

Which brings me to The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York. Against all odds, it was a terrific read. I can’t remember the last time I tore through a book this fast. Started it last week, finished it today, epilogue pending. 

So, what is this book? It’s a dual narrative set in 2005–2006. One track follows Jean-Claude Ellena’s entry into his new role as in-house perfumer for Hermès, culminating in his creation of Un Jardin sur le Nil (A Garden on the Nile). The other follows Sarah Jessica Parker’s involvement in launching her first celebuscent, Lovely. Oddly, the book made me want to smell Lovely, so I bought it, but just as oddly didn’t do the same for Un Jardin sur le Nil. Of the two arcs, Parker’s is more compelling, though less developed. Burr gives far more oxygen to Ellena.

On the Ellena side: the prose is smooth but laced with French dialogue and its translations, clearly meant to signal worldliness. There’s no reason to pepper an American English book with French unless you're trying to show off. It’s annoying. That said, Ellena’s story is unintentionally funny. Three Hermès execs basically drag him to Egypt to stand by the Nile and magically become inspired to make a perfume that had already been named A Garden on the Nile. You can’t make this stuff up.

Does it work? Read the book. I’ll just say Ellena’s story aligns with his style: introverted, minimalist, and paradoxically dull. Watercolor perfumery is only as interesting as the materials used, and Ellena refuses to use more than 30. The result is often thin. Even Turin only gives Un Jardin sur le Nil three stars and skirts criticism, probably to avoid litigation (kidding, sort of). Is Ellena overrated? Maybe. But he also made Terre d’Hermès, which I consider one of the greats.

The SJP storyline had more promise. It shows the full industry pipeline, from a celebrity knocking on every corporate door, getting rejected across the board, then finally landing a meeting at Coty. I was surprised by how snobby the industry was. Parker was at peak fame, Sex and the City was huge, and everyone agreed she was incredibly nice. Burr confirms this but also paints her as a bit naïve, which made the read interesting. His day spent with her, meant to “pick her brain” (but really to boost his cultural cachet), was some of his best writing. No pointless French. Just clean, vivid narrative. Her creative process for Lovely was worth the page time.

Burr also breaks down the economics of the industry well. I appreciated the section on “The List” of top sellers -- it clarified a lot. He explains how fragrance houses like IFF and Givaudan actually function. He covers margins, supply chains, in-house vs. freelance perfumers. There were a few moments where I actually said, “Finally. That makes sense.” If you’re in the perfume world and have questions, this book answers many of them.

Now, the real criticism: Burr contradicts himself, just like his idol Turin. These guys love to moan about how perfumers are unappreciated artists slaving away in obscurity, and then, on the next page, they trash the very work these “artists” produce. Turin does it constantly in The Guide, panning most of Pierre Bourdon’s work while making a handful of exceptions. Cool Water and Kouros are brilliant, but Joop! Homme is “floor cleaner”? EROLFA is “thoroughly nasty”? Burr is even worse. Every mainstream masculine pre-1995 is either gasoline or Raid. He ridicules dihydromyrcenol like it's the olfactory equivalent of wearing sweatpants to work. He trashes the entire Hugo Boss line, including Number One, which is still one of the best fresh masculines around.

The common denominator? Price. If it costs under $0.50 per milliliter, it’s garbage. If it’s over $2 per milliliter, it’s a masterpiece. That’s not criticism, that’s classism disguised as connoisseurship. Burr loves to praise perfumers as underappreciated geniuses, then drags their work if it isn’t expensive or niche. Pick a lane.

His descriptions of molecules are bizarre. Everything smells like someone’s ass, armpit, or crotch. It all reads like a monologue from a sex comedy. “Nutty breath.” “Ammonia-like penis.” It’s gross, gratuitous, and not helpful. I’m pretty open-minded, but this was just off-putting. Burr might be the last person I’d ask to describe how something smells.

He also has a weird vendetta against lavender. He calls it cliché and says perfumers should stop using it. This is simply idiotic. Lavender has been foundational to perfumery for centuries, especially in masculines. Lavender is cliché? Tell that to Antonio Gardoni. 

And more to the point: Burr unintentionally undermines his own thesis that perfumery is an art form. He shows, in vivid detail, how artless the process actually is. Ellena is flown to Egypt to cruise the Nile for inspiration and ends up settling on a mango accord. Mango trees are native in over 90 countries. You don’t need to visit Egypt for mango. It is only associated with the Nile in Ellena's scent because Hermès printed “A Garden on the Nile” on the label. If this is art, then Paris Hilton for Men is Egyptian modernism. I'd argue Hilton has the better mango scent, but I'll have to smell the Hermès first. Turin left Paris Hilton for Men out of The Guide, even after reluctantly giving Un Jardin sur le Nil three stars. Burr side-eyes Hilton’s perfumes in his book, without mentioning her signature masculine. Funny how that works.

The SJP storyline is even more damning to the “perfume is art” claim. Real artists don’t need corporate meetings, market research, or celebrity handlers to decide what to make. Burr never really engages with the perfumers who actually created Lovely. He spends more time on the meetings than the making. The story just peters out. I finished that section not even knowing what Parker thought of the finished scent. That’s a problem.

And finally, the epilogue-to-the-epilogue. Burr wraps things up with a check-in on Ellena and SJP’s perfume career. Then we get a bloated “thank you” section where he thanks everyone short of the Dalai Lama. It reads like an Oscar speech. Unnecessary. You don’t end a nonfiction book with a victory lap. One page, tops. Keep it tight.

Zip Codes and Milliliters: Another Old Bottle of English Leather, But Still Not Old Enough . . .

In a recent post on Badger & Blade, I asked if anyone had come across English Leather bottles that predate the 1960s. After some friendly back and forth with a couple of members, I came up empty. One member, however, clarified something useful: older bottles are more likely to list their size in ounces only, not milliliters. That detail led me to consider Shulton's Old Spice. After 1967, Shulton began listing both ounces and milliliters on their bottles. It's reasonable to assume MEM followed suit around the same time—though it's unclear whether MEM did it first or copied Shulton.

The other day, I received the third English Leather bottle I’ve bought off eBay. It’s another 2-ounce cologne, nearly identical to a previous one, but with minor differences. The text is smaller, there’s no dividing line between the fragrance name and its concentration, and the colors are slightly darker. Most notably, the size is listed only in ounces. That suggests it predates 1967. But it also has a ZIP code on the label, and ZIP codes were first introduced in 1963. So it was made sometime after that year. This puts the bottle’s age between 1963 and 1967. Old, but not old enough. And that’s what baffles me.

The lotion I have also falls into that same post-1963, pre-1967 window. All my bottles are, at most, 62 years old. But I’m looking for one that’s 76. There’s a 14-year gap in English Leather’s early history. Where are the bottles from that period? Every example I’ve seen online includes a ZIP code, so none predate 1963. That’s remarkable.

Even more curious is the inconsistency in how the cologne smells. The post-1967 50 ml bottle I featured in my last article smelled flatter and less citrusy, less dimensional. That didn’t surprise me. But the older bottle pictured here? It’s crisp, bright, fruity. The citrus sings. The mossy base feels balanced. What’s going on?

I’m starting to wonder: is English Leather the first mass-market fragrance to fake its release date, and get away with it? Everything points to MEM fabricating the 1949 launch year. But why? What would they gain by lying about it? Or maybe MEM never mentioned a launch year? Maybe someone else just randomly invented 1949, made the claim to the public, and it stuck for no good reason?

To be clear, I’m not searching for a bottle that might predate 1963. I’m looking for one that definitely does. No ZIP code. No milliliters. Just "English Leather Cologne," the size in ounces, and maybe a short New Jersey address, if any.

H24 (Hermès)

The H24 line makes perfect sense to me. Hermès hadn’t released an original masculine-leaning fragrance in years, and Jean-Claude Ellena had stepped down from his role as in-house perfumer. In his place is his protégé, Christine Nagel, formerly of Jo Malone, tasked with inviting the 21st-century man into the world of Hermès leather and luxury. She had every reason to feel confident, having crafted successes for Dior, Armani, Cartier, and John Galliano. But how does one follow Terre d’Hermès? Her challenge was formidable.

H24 debuted in 2021 and smells like a postmodern fougère. To me, it smells exactly like the image above. Cold, metallic, faintly green-woody, vaguely fruity, and unmistakably industrial, it reimagines the classical aromatic fougère of the late 20th century. Lavender and herbal notes are cleverly disguised beneath a forbidding, austere base that recalls the freshly inked pages of a glossy fashion magazine from 2003. Nagel’s follow-up, H24 Eau de Parfum (2022), deepens the mossy-woody dimension, while H24 Herbes Vives (2024) explores the green-fruity angle. There’s something in the line for everyone, but the original EDT is my starting point. So, here we go with a brief review.

The internet has buzzed with a handful of recurring descriptors: metallic, sharp, aldehydic, pear, banana, bitter, boring, simplistic, forgettable. Some of these I agree with. Yes, it is slightly metallic. That effect comes mostly from how the snowy aldehydes have been pared down to their coldest essence and arranged like olfactory spines across the sterile calm of the opening. I catch a trace of what I can only call a “fantasy fruit,” not quite pear and not quite banana, but something green and fruity that offers a soft, ethereal sweetness. There’s also a whisper of narcissus, the honeyed scent of yellow daffodils drifting in on a stale breeze. And sage. Lots and lots of synthetic sage, resting on an elegant mineral-amber base. Very "designer frag," but still compelling.

Some reviewers call H24 boring or uninspired, and I can understand why. It’s a fragrance for grown-ups. No sugary bombast, no candy, no aquatic freshness, no obvious spice. Nagel’s instinct was to take the traditional fougère structure, built around lavender, coumarin, and musk, and pair it with something that smells nothing like any of them. Then she let the unfamiliar take over. This isn’t a fougère in the traditional sense so much as a meditation on the quiet dignity of modern decay. H24 evokes the image of an abandoned office tower, sealed so tightly it feels airless. Evening sunlight filters across the concrete floors and drywall, casting a tranquil prism of green, blue, and gold. In the first hour, it smells like looking out a window at rain falling on leaves. It’s peaceful, nearly spiritual, and you linger there, thoughtless. You feel no desire to move.

By hour three, the light shifts. That same sun casts a paler, colder yellow, throwing green shadows into sterile blue rooms. By hour six, the scent becomes a memory of the world before the fall: metal paperclips, bitter and dry; publishing ink and glossy magazine paper warmed by a vent, releasing their chemical perfume. It smells like living inside an issue of Italian Vogue. I must be an ink addict, because I can’t get enough of it. And here, it’s not just the ink. It’s the paper, too. Every glossy magazine has its own scent, no two quite alike. Some are faint and clean, others bold and slightly rancid, the ink sterile and the paper faintly alive. Some are delicate, others hit you with a glorious wall of aroma, even tinged with a whisper of binding glue.

I come away from H24 thinking it’s excellent. Challenging, yes, but excellent. This is not your crowd-pleasing Terre d’Hermès. This is something new, a distinct shape. It echoes the past but offers something entirely original. Lavender becomes a solar chill that feels synthetic and abstract. Yellow florals merge into a bittersweet paper accord. Sage straddles the line between herbal and chemical. A soft woody amber and mineral base molecule ties it all together into an olfactory glyph for forgotten spaces. Perfume as poetry, bottled in a minimalist flask with a hidden atomizer stem, refillable, efficient, and unmistakably Hermès. Was this what the brand needed to make waves again? Maybe, maybe not. But I’m glad Nagel made it, and I really, really like it.

My English Leather Investigation Continues . . .

The Lotion's Bottle Reads "Bottle Made in West Germany"

I received two of the three English Leather bottles that I purchased on eBay, pictured above, and the outstanding bottle is identical to the one on the right, so I don't expect much enlightenment there, with possibly only a mild difference in scent between them. The bottle on the left, the "All-Purpose Lotion," is apparently the older of the two, and from the scent alone I can tell that. It's a bit weaker but smells like there's an old and likely banned nitro musk in it, although strangely the scent dies pretty fast, so who knows? 

Aside from the concentration and aesthetic differences between the two, I can't tell their ages on looks and smell alone. Big, fuzzy first-gen nitro musks were in widespread use during the 1950s, '60s, and even the '70s, so the bottle on the left could be from any of those. It does have "Bottle Made in West Germany" embossed on the bottom, so that's a clue the product is from a much earlier era than any other I've encountered. Strangely though its label is pristine, while the newer 2 ouncer on the right looks more worn and scuffed. So if the lotion is older, it must've been kept in a relatively air-tight and dry spot for decades, away from heat, moisture, and sunlight. Honestly, it looks like it was printed yesterday. It's spotless. I'm impressed. 

The cologne is much stronger and basically as I remembered it. The thing about English Leather that most people don't realize is it's the scent of my childhood. English Leather was the one cologne I actually wore as a kid, albeit infrequently. I remember wearing it on more than one occasion to church and to family functions, and we're going back to when I was eight, nine, ten years old. Pre-teen years. Back then I remember this stuff being incredibly dense and powerful, and frankly I disliked it. But my parents encouraged me to wear it, and my dad had his father's 1980s bottles (then brand new) sleeping under the bathroom sink, so English Leather it was. I even remember my mother teaching me how to apply it: a little tiny dab behind each ear, and a couple on the throat, of all places. 

My nose has likely been worn down over the years, but perhaps the vintage fragrance has also weakened over time, because the cologne smells less intense than it used to. I could wear this -- lightly wear it -- and not get a headache like I used to. But that makes aging these bottles difficult. I'm confident the cologne is from the late '70s or early '80s, before MEM did their 75th aesthetic change-up on the labels and caps that my father's bore. My guess on the lotion is it's from the late 1960s or early '70s. Legend has it English Leather was originally produced in Europe and named Russian Leather, and MEM operated out of Germany. It's entirely possible my lotion is a "missing link" bottle of English Leather, a rarely-seen 1950s vintage, somewhat "deep vintage," if you will. 

But I still think there's a "dark vintage" element to English Leather, bottles that are entirely missing from the conversation because nobody has ever actually seen them. I view English Leather as being more important to the pantheon of masculine perfumery than even Ivory Tower fragrance writers like Luca Turin and Chandler Burr believe it to be. I trace the lineage of this type of citrus chypre through to things like Tabaróme Millésime, Dirty English, and Bleu de Chanel. Those fragrances wouldn't exist if it weren't for English Leather's unique burled woody-citrus scent. But another factor is the anonymity of English Leather's perfumer, which ChatGPT credits merely to a midcentury "oil house." One might view it, by the AI's description, as something MEM took extra profits from by essentially marketing a premade base as a finished fragrance, while also selling it to third parties for use in more complex compositions. 

That's how English Leather smells to me -- more like a base than a truly finished scent. It has a dense muskiness to it that feels like it's all about the base, or "bass," Meghan Trainor style. There's a lick of bitter citrus in the top, but it mellows and pervades through to the far drydown, feeling more fixed and foundational than like an extra layer. Beyond the citrus there's a woody sweetness that feels like a clear call-in on whatever musk is used, and the woodiness is very flat and one-dimensional. There isn't much of a leather note, but one might smell something of saddle soap in MEM's formula. I have a much newer bottle of this stuff that I reviewed many years ago, a massive bottle that has darkened over time, and that version, despite all the crap it took in the forums at the time, smells even more like the stuff I wore as a kid than these vintage bottles do. Brighter, heavier, soapier. 

I'll continue to play with these in the days ahead, and will look into the lotion. ChatGPT puts the lotion in the late 1960s to early 1970s, and the cologne in the late 1970s and early 1980s, just like I did before I even asked it. It suggests that the rounded wooden cap of the lotion was more the style of the late 1960s vintages, while the darker and more cylindrical style was what MEM was putting out a decade later. Both predate the 1990s and the reunification of Germany. So, really not telling me much there, as that much was obvious to me. The question still lingers in my mind . . . what did a 1950s bottle look like? Does anyone out there own one? Has anyone out there even seen one? 

Anything that predates 1963?

Where Are All The 'Deep Vintage' Bottles of MEM English Leather?

A 1963 print ad, the oldest I could find.

One of the many things that plague the fragrance house of Creed is the argument that "deep vintage" bottles that predate the 1970s don't exist, despite Olivier and Erwin's claims to the contrary. Indeed, an internet search fails to yield imagery of anything particularly antiquated, beyond perhaps a few very early iterations of the contemporary flask bottles, all of which read "Olivier Creed." This of course exposes them to constant criticism. 

As I've argued in the past, Creed has a built-in excuse for this problem that, to me at least, actually washes: their pre-seventies output was primarily bespoke. If you're only in the market for individualized orders, there will be no examples of those products for the public to see, not unless any of Creed's clients offer them up. If I'm a multi-millionaire who hires the Creed company to make me a bespoke cologne, and I pay $100,000 for a 17 ounce flacon (with a bonus refresh flacon), the outside world won't see those bottles. They'll never see what I privately commissioned for myself, because, well, it's private. 

Very few people seem to accept this logic, however. So, Creed continues to get hammered on the issue, and likely always will be. But strangely enough, the benefit of the doubt is very readily given to another fragrance that sneakily claims to have a wizened lineage that also is not supported by any available sources, at least not online. The fragrance in question is English Leather by MEM/Dana. MEM had cited English Leather's release date as 1949, with tales of it originally being launched as "Russian Leather" sometime in 1930s Germany, then discontinued, then relaunched after WWII, again as Russian Leather and again in Germany, before being renamed "English Leather" and marketed to Americans throughout the 1950s and 1960s. 

If you look on Basenotes, Parfumo, and Fragrantica, they all cite 1949 as English Leather's release date. This is curious, because 1949 is a long time ago, but not that long ago. There should be an abundance of print ads dating back to the 1950s available online, much as there were for Old Spice, which predates it by nine years. Yet when I search for those print ads, nothing comes up. The oldest ad I can find online dates back to 1963. And, also quite curiously, there is no record of MEM Company, Inc. ever existing on 347 Fifth Avenue. It's like the fragrance and the company behind it were legacy inventions for 1960s consumers, and that invented legacy continued to transition along unchallenged through the subsequent five decades, all the way up to today.

Today, I'm challenging it. Where are all the "deep vintage" bottles of MEM English Leather? A search online yields results that again only date back to the early 1960s. I've purchased the oldest vintage "all-purpose lotion" bottle I could find on eBay, with a label marked "MEM Company Inc., Northvale, NJ" and a bottle marked "Bottle made in West Germany for MEM." The product is clearly from the early or middle 1960s, and it's even possibly a little newer given its pristine like-new condition and blond wood cap. One thing I do know -- it's definitely not a 1950s bottle. I can't find one of those, nor can I find an ad for one.

Neither can Chat GPT, for that matter. I asked the A.I. to utilize its research mode and find me links to documents that prove English Leather predates the 1960s. After conducting an exhaustive scouring of the internet that took just under an hour to complete, it admitted to me that it couldn't find any evidence of English Leather ever predating 1963. There are zero documents, zero patents, zero bottles, zero print ads, and zero photographs to back up the claim that English Leather was released in 1949. Not one single spec of information to support the claim that MEM produced English Leather as "Russian Leather" in the 1930s. No documented proof that MEM ever marketed English Leather to anyone other than postwar Americans. No proof that MEM manufactured English Leather prior to the 1960s. I've scoured eBay for "deep vintage" bottles, and 95% of the deepest deep vintage bottles available are from the 1980s. 

I also purchased the bottle pictured below, after searching "1950s Vintage English Leather," and finding this among only a few bottles. The fancy metallic leafing on the label's border and lettering suggests to this commercial design major that it's an early 1980s bottle of cologne. 

And this is the other bottle I purchased, a late 1960s to mid 1970s vintage:

As with Creeds, the only thing consistent about MEM's production and packaging of English Leather are its inconsistencies. From year to year there are wildly varying graphic designs for the labels and types of wood caps used. No two bottles look alike. Bottles from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s are all very difficult to match, and neither of the bottles shown in this article resemble the 1980s vintage bottles I used growing up. But all bottles have one thing in common -- they all say "English Leather." Where are those first-issue "Russian Leather" bottles? 

What does this dearth of documentation mean for English Leather? Hard to say for certain. It's possible that there are simply no surviving bottles or print ads for deep vintage 1950s English Leather. No surviving "first issue" bottles from 1949. No "dark vintage" bottles of the original prewar release. ("Dark Vintage," by the way, is my term for fragrance vintages that are exceedingly rare, borderline extinct, or possibly never seen.) These bottles simply were used up and thrown out, and nobody has access to them anymore. The print ads? Lost to the annals of time. The documentation of MEM Company's residency on Fifth Avenue in NY City? Also lost. This is all totally possible. 

Or, it could be that MEM did not make English Leather prior to the 1960s, and someone at MEM coughed up a random release date of 1949 to give the brand the postwar luster that so many real postwar fragrances enjoyed. This fib would give it a rosier history than the Vietnam era could offer, and make it substantially more romantic in the eyes of vintage hounds. What guy doesn't want to envision square-jawed mad men of the 1950s powering through their martinis and secretaries while reeking of vintage MEM English Leather? Better that the Silent Generation than the Baby Boomers lay claim to the stuff.