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| "The Greatest Green Scent" |
I'm just back from a refreshing Maine trip, during which I visited the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay, which are absolutely gorgeous and a requisite destination if you ever head up that way. The last time I visited was in early June, and the gardens were very "bloomy" that time of year, with countless varieties of hyacinths, tulips, irises, roses, peonies, and you name it. This early August visit was about echinacea and all shades of coneflowers, bee balm, lilies, phlox, yarrow, and hosta, among others. A less "bloomy" and colorful experience, but peaceful and inspiring nonetheless.
The verdant gardens got me thinking about my love of green fragrances. I started out in my pursuit of all things perfumed with an unalloyed interest in pursuing green scents, and perhaps I've strayed a bit since then, but still marvel at the concept of wearing a garden. I combed through my collection and remembered Geoffrey Beene's Bowling Green and its many laudatory reviews, many of which claim that it's the best "green" fragrance money can buy. Of course, this got me thinking of how much I disagree with that sentiment, and I realized that I'm at odds with the orthodoxy of popular perfume reviewers. It's not that I disagree for the sake of it, but that I simply don't come to the same conclusions.
It is indeed quite difficult to find reviews of Bowling Green that are less than glowing; the fragrance has long been considered the gold standard for inexpensive masculine/unisex green, thanks in no small part to its well regarded lemon verbena accord. I've had a 4 oz. bottle of it for a few years now, and have worn exactly half of it. I'm wearing it today. I got off to a rough start with this scent because the first bottle I tried was a bit turned, but not enough to be obvious, which negatively influenced my review. The bright citrus element had all but vanished, leaving only the "herbal amber" element at the scent's core, which alone smells okay but haggard. Later I bought the reissued reformulation, which didn't change the scent, and learned that it's really bright and airy, a springtime green.
But is Bowling Green the gold standard for "green" in perfumes for under $100? Yes and no. Yes, if you're looking at it purely subjectively, and you happen to love Beene's rendition of lemon verbena, which comprises about 75% of the fragrance pyramid here. No, if objectively you put it up against the hordes of other green frags out there, both in and out of production. I mean, Bowling Green is very good, don't get me wrong. If you're a college kid with $100 to spare, and you're looking for a lemony-green fougère idea that vaguely recalls Drakkar Noir (a weird thing for today's college set to seek), Bowling Green is a perfect solution. It's currently retailing for between $90 and $120 on eBay, and chances are the bottle you buy will smell great, as the packaging for this stuff is fantastic -- solid cardboard tubing that blocks light and protects against the elements.
If you're a college kid looking for this, I applaud you. I also don't expect you to be interested. And you'll probably meet my expectations, and be completely oblivious to Bowling Green, instead pursuing some sweet Hawas flanker or one of the Eros frags. I'd say you're missing out, but you're not so much missing out on Bowling Green as on the better stuff. From Beene's line, Grey Flannel is the superior fragrance, so I can start there. Beyond the brand are many superior compositions, ranging from Creed's Green Valley (discontinued and a fortune) to Jaguar for Men (still in production), Paul Smith Men (DC'd), Jacomo Silences (DC'd) Acqua di Selva (in production), Pino Silvestre (ditto), and any number of Green Irish Tweed variants, with GIT itself high on the list. If I want grassy green on a budget, Adidas Sport Field is still a good option. Even more of a budget, and something like Brut is, amazingly, still a respectable bet. For an inexpensive and truly unorthodox unisex fragrance, Vicky Tiel's Ulysse is excellent stuff. Silences sits next to Green Valley as the GOAT of green. I could go on and on. My point is, I find these to be preferable to Bowling Green because they smell better and (mostly) cost less.
If I test the outer limits of perfume orthodoxy on "green," I come up against some interesting philosophical tensions between nature as an ideal and nature as an illusion -- between what smells alive and what merely suggests life through carefully composed artifice. For example, Montblanc Starwalker is a suggestion of life, a fresh but brazenly synthetic precursor to Dior Sauvage with chemical "bamboo" overlaid with a bucketful of woody Ambroxan. It smells peaceful and zen-like in small doses, and works in a pinch, but if I really want the sensation of placid natural zen in an organic, living grove, I'm more likely to reach for Banana Republic's Cypress Cedar -- quite an interesting thing, considering the BR frag isn't exactly "natural." Perspective is useful here, because today's young buck might reach for any one of his designer frags and think, "I like how this smells," but a sizable number of people around him might think he smells like a chemical spill. Sure, Hawas smells good, but it doesn't take me to nature. It takes me to eighth grade.
And why hasn't Rasasi been a contender in the quest for a natural "green" fragrance? They seem to be taken with the current mode of commercial wisdom, which suggests that releasing fifteen new fragrances in a year is the way to go. I would say that the public rewards this approach; reviews of their new releases, some of which haven't even hit stores yet, are broadly positive. If I were running Rasasi, I would acknowledge this financial reality, as their choices are assuredly generating remarkable sales, but I'd temper it with my own advice: go for quality, not quantity. Take Al Haramain's example -- this brand releases quite a few fragrances each year also, but unlike Rasasi, they seem interested in refining ideas that they had worked on previously, in the interest of pursuing new levels of quality. I haven't smelled L'Aventure Blanche, but I've been led to understand that it's an okay clone of Silver Mountain Water, but only that. It doesn't win brownie points over something like Armaf's Sillage, for example.
But then put your nose on L'Aventure Fraîche, and what do you smell? The current formula of Silver Mountain Water with petitgrain and fir accords amplified, and in a slightly higher (i.e., "oilier") concentration. A split-hair shy of SMW, but hell, if you can't afford the Creed, L'Aventure Fraîche will get you 99.99% of the way there if applied sparingly. I'd argue it does a better job of cloning the current Creed formula than Sillage does (Armaf famously targets vintage Creed formulas, and does a bang-up job). The attention to detail in Al Haramain's work is obvious, and it's also clear that they're not wasting time and resources spewing out flanker after flanker after flanker of some designer-grade template. Far from perfect, but I'd wager that the brains behind Al Haramain's operation are cognizant of the mark of quality one feels in their fragrances. Sure, you pay a bit more for an Al Haramain perfume than you do for anything by Rasasi, but not much more. These brands are in the same league. Why is one so much better than the other?
Another weird thing about perfume lately is how many fragrances are being shoved on the consumer. It's as if the "art" of perfumery were akin to five-and-dime comics. We're currently experiencing thousands of new releases per year. There were around 6,000 new fragrances released in 2024. That's a staggering number, even on the global market. Back in 2000 there were only about 700 new releases, so in 24 years we've seen a roughly tenfold increase in the number of new offerings. If you're a fragrance lover like me, this might seem like a wonderful thing. And sure, you won't find me complaining, as I like the thought that there is a veritable universe of perfumes to be explored. However, I sound a note of caution. This kind of market is unsustainable in the long term. Short-term, maybe the next five years or so will continue to see unparalleled growth in output. But long-term, the heat generated by this many releases will finally overwhelm the customer bases that designer brands established several decades ago, and we'll see a sudden and rather violent collapse of the fragrance market, with hundreds of brands going bye-bye.
Consider the market. In the last twenty years, we've seen inexpensive perfumes all but disappear. Every Western brand is now aiming for the luxury market, the wealthy customer, or the customer with so much disposable income that they can manage buying two or three $400 perfumes without fearing insolvency. I'm not wealthy, but I make a decent middle-class salary and I don't have any children, which puts me in that weird realm of being someone who can afford two or three expensive perfumes per year without feeling the pinch. This doesn't make me the market's core clientele, however. Chanel and I aren't friends. Dior and I rarely contact each other. Creed hasn't seen an online boutique purchase from me since 2014. I and all other collectors like me rely on chance and good financial acumen to score whatever pricy frags we can manage, and I'm well aware that the more serious collectors use their collections as self-sustaining leverage in the acquisition of new items. Want that new Francis Kurkdjian release? Sell his last one and use the proceeds. That's how the non-wealthy big-timers do it.
That approach works for the crazed collector set, of which I'm a member. It doesn't work for the average joe. The average guy or gal is not that interested in perfume. Women are marginally more interested, and the average middle class woman might accrue something like five or six bottles in a semi-regular rotation, and one or two of those are probably "body sprays," which I'll never fully understand. Men are more "signature scent" prone and usually buy one or two fragrances that are rarely worn. They wear what their wives or girlfriends give them, or approve of, and they might only wear fragrance on special occasions or on their "date nights." Right now, with this seemingly unending Renaissance of perfume, they might actually own -- wait for it -- three or four whole bottles. Which means their need for anything else will arrive sometime around 2060.
Here's the thing: this isn't what the market is doing. The market is shelling out new fragrances like there's an enormous swath of men and women who house 300+ bottle wardrobes that are ever-expanding. This simply isn't the case. Their target audience is literally 1% of the population. Every designer and niche brand in America is targeting about 3,400,000 people. Of them, there might be 1% who are actually lovingly dedicated to collecting perfumes, so we're talking 34,000 people here. That's right, you're reading this correctly. The income bracket of the 1% of America's population that are inarguably "wealthy" covers only a few million people, and of them, maybe 1% are obsessed with perfume enough to amass respectable wardrobes and be repeat buyers, but their number is staggeringly small, fewer than the amount who attend the Superbowl.
So why does the market keep churning things out at this breakneck pace? Right now many of the Western brands are competing against the Eastern brands, so there is a collective push against the market's answer to bad socioeconomics. Arabian and UAE brands are that answer. They are overall cheaper and better distributed than their Western counterparts, now appearing everywhere in the USA in discount stores and mall kiosks. Where once it was entirely an internet game to buy anything by Rasasi or Armaf or Al Haramain, now it is a matter of stopping at your local Burlington or Ross and seeing what new array of Middle Eastern releases are available. You hop on Fragrantica, check it out, then put away your phone and buy the thing that seems the most promising. It costs you anywhere from $10 to $45, and the quality is often on par with that $170 designer fragrance being distributed only at "authorized retailers" like Neiman Marcus or Sephora. The Eastern brands are putting things out at an impossible pace, swamping the global market with releases, and many of these are offered within the value parameters of the wider population. This is a hot market that might very well sustain, because there are far more than 3.4 million customers for them here in the USA.
If you're reading this and thinking, "Bryan, that doesn't explain why Western brands are churning out tons of releases and pricing them at five or six times the going rate," you're not wrong. It doesn't explain the shift to the wealthy. But what it does explain is the shift in equality. The bare truth of the matter is that most people in America are making less than $45K per year, if they have a job at all. Meanwhile, those who are wealthy aren't just a little wealthy. They're very wealthy. They are enjoying eight, nine, ten digit bank accounts. And within those circles is the expectation of choices and options. Western brands are attempting to keep up with that ethos by shoveling dozens of new frags per brand at jaw-dropping prices onto the market, rarely pricing anything under $50 per ounce, all in the attempt to lock the majority out of buying, more than to welcome the wealthy in. The problem with Veblen goods is that they lose their cachet the minute any non-luxury client makes a purchase. If you're Louis Vuitton, the last thing you want is for me in my blue jeans and sneakers to come sauntering in to buy a suitcase, and the absolute worst case scenario is for me to actually buy it.
But okay, say I do buy one of their $38,000 suitcases. Not likely, but maybe I'm just dumb with money. They make the sale. They're not thrilled, because after talking to me for five minutes they figure out that I'm a schlub in the wrong store, but money is money. No biggie. I go on my merry way. The real nightmare begins with the next guy who walks in. Is he wearing a baseball cap on backwards and jeans from Walmart? Is he also buying a suitcase? And the next guy? And the next? If any percentage of the middle class is encroaching on the luxury status of a brand, that brand will lose its coveted ivory tower spot and begin to slide "downmarket." The more middle class buyers walk in, the more you have to cater to them, which means offering deals, and advertising for them, and actually giving a shit about them, none of which is desired. By keeping prices very high, Louis Vuitton might see one Bryan with his middle class salary walk in and actually buy something once every twenty years. That's exactly how they like it.
But the luxury leather goods market isn't nearly as saturated as the perfume market. It takes months to develop a high quality leather luxury good, and years to refine it. It can take as little as a few weeks to both develop and refine a perfume, and then use its rejected mods as flankers to be rolled out six months apart. There is no danger of overheating in the luxury suitcase market. But there is a grave danger of overheating in the luxury perfume market. In their mad dash to keep people out of buying their perfumes, many Western brands are spending capital on products that are seeing diminishing returns, as evidenced by the rapid discontinuation of releases that are often in stores for only a year or two. Some have pointed to this as the secret weapon in the fragrance industry's war chest, but I see it as a sign of chronic illness; healthy brands keep products alive because they've done the work of figuring out what their customers actually want before foisting products on them. The fragrance industry is flailing haplessly after customers it isn't sure even exist, often without gaining purchase.
What would a fragrance industry overheat/meltdown look like? It would start with a whimper, and end with a bang. At first it would look like business as usual -- a few small indie/niche brands go kaput, a couple of fairly prominent but B-list designers would discontinue their entire perfume ranges like Jean Patou did a few years back. A collective shrug would follow, with no expectations of further decline. But then something strange will occur, there, in the corner . . . a major niche brand will suddenly vanish. No explanation. This will be followed by another. And yet another. Like dominoes, the niche brands will suddenly shutter, one by one. The buzz will claim that these were "planned" shutdowns and all sorts of convoluted reasons will ensue, from things like, "our financiers are restructuring" and "the market has shifted and we are realigning ourselves to stay true to our mission." In other words, don't hold your breath, because we've discontinued everything. From there, the rot will spread to designer, and indeed may be even more rapid there. In attempting to curry favor with the wealthiest of the wealthy, names like Chanel and Dior and Prada may discover that younger generations are usurping the trends of older, wealthier generations and simply putting their moolah with the mullahs instead. Why spend $176 on 100 milliliters of Coco Mademoiselle when you can get Club de Nuit Woman for $150 less with barely any difference in quality?
What effect will this have on giants like Chanel? Look at this way: in 2003, a 3.3 oz. bottle of Platinum Égoïste was $50. Reddit morons would have you think otherwise, with some claiming it went for $70 back then. I'm here to tell you, no, no it did not. I wouldn't have been able to afford bottles of it in college if it were that much. I went through at least two or three large bottles of PÉ by graduation. The same size costs $135 now. This is simply ridiculous. Armaf Legesi is $27 and silly reviewers say it's "a metallic Platinum Égoïste," as if the adjective denotes a difference (PÉ is metallic as fuck). If Armaf can convincingly clone Green Irish Tweed, to the point where I don't need to buy and wear GIT anymore, do I doubt they can handle the super-synth Chanel?
When several thousand Bryans start to multiply around the bottom line of PÉ, Chanel will realize, perhaps too late, that they're losing money hand over fist to Armaf, and a few other clone brands. They'll be forced to either (A) lower its price, or (B) axe the fragrance. Knowing how these designers operate, my money says they'll choose B. But that'll only be the start of their problem. Seeing blood in the water, Armaf and Al Haramain and several other Arabian brands will circle the Chanel wagon, picking off their exclusive couture fragrances, one by one, and gradually they'll have to disappear once-cherised classics, to the point where all they'll have left will be that old aldehydic Marilyn Monroe mess that nobody likes but everyone feels obligated to say good things about.
With niche, the deaths will happen en masse. With designer, the fatalities will be slower, one cut at a time, until rapidly and without recompense there will no longer be options. The wealthy will be left with tiny selections, the very thing they hate, while the rest of us will have donned turbans and developed a taste for sipping motor oil before heading off to our low-paying jobs. Prada, Gucci, Armani, all will fold their flanker mills, one discontinuation after another, until all that are left are a few core scents. Consider Thierry Mugler's fate as an early indicator, a canary in the coal mine here. But even the Saudi market will whither, as the glut of options for the average buyer takes its toll on public perception. The UAE is relatively unfamiliar with the dangers of over-leveraging a brand.
They could use a few crash courses on what happened to Roy Halston, Liz Claiborne, and Pierre Cardin. Americans understand that even when a brand offers quality products, a preponderance of said products results in overexposure, never a good thing. While many Arabian brands don't have designer names attached, sometimes with no brand name visible at all, the sheer number of perfumes will both self-poach sales and foster a sense of cheapness and disposability that will curdle the budget buyer's enthusiasm faster than designer and niche blunders sap the millionaire's.
When the Arabian fragrance market collapses, which is also coming, the burnout will be complete. So I finish with a warning to the fragrance industry as a whole: Do not squander your wares on misallocated capital and dilute your brand cachet with bloated ranges. Think quality, not quantity, and think realistically about who is dumber with their money in the long run -- it ain't the people who have it. Stop pricing the middle class out of the market, when it was the middle class that made the market possible in the first place. We're all okay with fewer options, if those options take us back to the halcyon days of perfumes that smelled rich and were $10 at Walgreens.