Davidoff Indigo & Essentials Blue: Brand Classism In 2 Bottles

Looks are Deceiving.

Last year, Davidoff released an international travel exclusive fragrance called Indigo. I saw reviews for it in a few places, and a couple of YouTube reviews, but feedback on it is scarce, likely due to its limited distribution. Travel exclusives aren't rare, and in the past two decades there have been several fragrances that could only be found at major airports, including CK One Essence's original release (before it trickled down into mainland retail), Azzaro Boarding from 2011, and Boss Bottled Pacific, which was originally a general release that got discontinued and reissued in 2023 as duty-free only. For Indigo to get a duty-free-only release did not pique my interest for this reason, and I forgot it existed a week or two after first reading about it. Honestly, not unusual for me at all.

But then, on vacation and bored, I happened across a bottle of something called Davidoff Essentials Blue at a local Burlington, and I remembered Indigo. Now my interest was piqued, because Essentials Blue is a weird thing for Davidoff to issue. The box headlines the "essentials" part, as though it's an existing range of fragrances within the Davidoff catalog, i.e., Essentials Green, Essentials Black, Essentials Red, etc. But a quick check online confirms that Blue stands completely alone. There are no other "essentials," and, quite frankly, I've never seen a more afterthought-looking box than the one for Blue. It's just a blank dark blue with the Davidoff logo and functional white text to tell you the name of the fragrance, and that's it. No graphics, no marketing image, nothing. The bottle is the same as Davidoff Hot Water's, with the wide ribbing, this time in clear glass. Very basic.

My immediate assumption was that Blue is just a renamed and repackaged Indigo. I imagined that Coty had used the duty-free point-of-sale approach to market test the popularity of the fragrance, and that Indigo had done surprisingly well with travelers, which then led to a general release to ordinary retailers. But what stymied my logic was the name change. Why not keep the name, Indigo? Why change it to a weird phantom "essentials" idea and give it the most basic and boring name imaginable, Blue? This part made no sense to me. I queried in some online forums, and got one response on Fragrantica from a random guy who told me they're the same fragrance with different names, so I was almost ready to call it "case closed." And then came eBay. Wonderful, magical eBay.

Someone on there was selling a 75 ml tester of Indigo for peanuts, so I grabbed it. When it arrived, I noticed a key difference between the fragrances right off the bat: Indigo has its name on the bottle, while Essentials Blue's bottle only says "Essentials" on it. It doesn't even say what color, I guess letting the color of the liquid inside tell that story instead. But why not take the same approach with Indigo? Also, the color of the liquids between the two bottles is slightly different. Blue is, well, blue; Indigo is more of a purple-blue. Maybe that shade doesn't align as well with Indigo, so they felt compelled to print the color on the bottle? It's curious. Anyway, my main focus was on the fragrances themselves. What I'll do here is give each fragrance its respective paragraph description, then compare the two in another paragraph, and then give you my honest thoughts on what's happening with these fragrances. By the way, both are EDTs.

Let's start with Indigo, which indicators suggest was the first release. Indigo opens with a very pleasant, Cool Water-adjacent accord of peppermint, crab apple, and lavender, with peppermint the main note. Not hugely natural smelling, but of respectable quality. There's a salinated neroli that adds some sweetness, greenness, and depth, and binds the minty lavender to a synthetic sandalwood and white musk base. I also get a bit of coriander in this blend, which adds even more woody freshness. It smells like it could be a Cool Water flanker, and again, that salty neroli accord in the mid is identical to the accord in Cool Water. Indigo is simpler, a little sweeter, not as aquatic, and weirdly, it's greener and more herbal than its name and image suggest. Derek reviews this stuff on his blog, and he rightly points out that despite Davidoff's tranche of recently released duds, Indigo smells like a competent and pleasant fragrance, and its simple composition and respectable quality set it apart. I happen to agree. Longevity and projection are decent, with two hours of noticeable sillage before it steps back and hums softly through the rest of the day, giving me around seven hours as a glowing skinscent. Nothing stellar, but solid enough.

Essentials Blue opens darker, with a malted lavender sweetness blended with only a fleeting bite of peppermint and ozonic freshness. It's a markedly bubblegum-amber generic designer feel, and I find it to be passable but very synthetic. The malted lavender effect carries subtly into a heart that, again, feels shaded and not all that fresh. There's a light suggestion of patchouli, a distinct basil note (not unlike the one found in Hot Water), and a flat jasmine reconstruction that frankly flattens all the other notes, a sort of weirdly rapid internal collapse of Blue's core into a very two-dimensional feel. I sense a solid presence of ethyl-maltol, and the usual sweet designer woody amber base upholds the otherwise unremarkable structure of this fragrance. The top lasts five minutes, and the mid does its implosion trick in another five, so from that ten-minute mark onward, Blue is a fairly linear and inanimate affair that only projects for ninety minutes before becoming a whisper for another six hours. Blue smells like half of a blue freshie, with the other half excised out by some olfactory surgeon. It's decent enough and wearable, and there is some minor interest in the interplay of basil and neutered florals, but it won't turn heads.

Comparing these two is very interesting. Essentials Blue smells 70% similar to Indigo, roughly speaking. They share the same sweet designer amber that has dominated masculine (and many feminine) releases for many years now. No surprise there. At a quick glance immediately after spraying, you might mistake Blue for Indigo. Like, if you weren't super familiar with either fragrance but had smelled both and liked both, and you walked by someone who had just applied Blue, your reaction might be, "Oh, is that Indigo?" Those first few seconds are a little tricky, but again, only at a quick glance. It really doesn't take long for the main differences between Blue and Indigo to reveal themselves. Put bluntly, Indigo is the superior fragrance. It's brighter, it's much fizzier, it's significantly fresher. Indigo's notes are far better elucidated—peppermint smells like peppermint from first application to far drydown; neroli is clear; lavender is herbal—and this clarity elevates Indigo above Blue. Indigo feels like a reimagining of vintage Lancaster Cool Water from the middle of the '90s. I really like Indigo. Really like it. It's not great, but it's very good, and I can see how travelers might appreciate a bottle on a trip. It's refreshing.

Blue calls to mind those "Inspired By" budget clones commonly found at Walmart and Target. "Inspired By" Davidoff Indigo. Same basic structure, some of the same materials, same overall approach. Different fragrance. How could it not be? Blue is cheaper. It smells cheaper. It supposedly contains more notes, yet it smells simpler and flatter than Indigo. No lucid peppermint, beyond the first ten seconds. No neroli. Not as much of a salinated feel. Not nearly as Cool Water adjacent. Blue does not recall vintage Cool Water. It recalls Indigo, but in a way that makes me wish I was wearing Indigo instead. You get the idea. Blue smells a bit darker with its more obvious patchouli material (some dusty transparent fraction of patchouli, not an actual patchouli note) and basil, and the basil is okayish, but represented better and more naturally in Hot Water. The fragrance seems to use the jasmine materials as a woody bridge to the sweetened amber base, and that amber base is dominant for most of the scent's lifespan. If you're more into woody ambers with sweetness, and prefer them light and short-lived, Blue is for you.

So what's going on with these two? Why make them look so similar, and put them in the same bottle, but formulate them so differently? I have a few ideas, but only one theory. First, the ideas: it's possible Davidoff wants to market-test two variations on the same olfactory theme (which is exactly what these fragrances are), and see which one does better, and which market performs better. Is duty-free a better commercial environment to release new Davidoffs? Or the broader distribution channels? It's also possible that Indigo and Blue are two mods of the same brief, and someone at Coty decided to release them both, sort of like Halston did with Z-14 and 1-12. It's possible Indigo was the pick, but they opted to put the other formula in its own "essentials" range to avoid wasting a good mod, with the justification that future usable (commercially viable) mods would also become color-coded "essentials." Lastly, it's possible that Indigo and Blue are the awkward results of some strange contract that Coty entered into with whatever perfumers and oil houses are involved, creating the unique conditions for the brand to reluctantly release both fragrances together instead of the more desirable Indigo alone.

My personal theory is less charitable, I must admit. I sense some brand classism at work here. Namely, Indigo is for the "traveling class" of those who can afford $1100 round-trip plane tickets to Mumbai, plus all the ancillary costs associated with international travel like baggage and overhead fees, while Essentials Blue is for the working class schlub who needs Uber to get to work. The two fragrances are similar enough that they feel like they're from the same mod, but one feels lush and worked-out, while the other feels hollow and unfinished. They spared the best formula for those who traverse what is increasingly a rarefied milieu, due to how expensive and restrictive air travel has become in the past decade, and they sent the cheaper stuff out to whoever has the $2 bus fare to Burlington. If your life is busy enough and important enough that you find yourself shopping for perfumes at duty-free retailers in major international airports, you deserve the exclusively-released Indigo. If you're the lazy proletariat, Blue is good enough for you. Can't spare the paint to print Blue on the bottle, because Essentials is a long word, and this is the econo-box version, so just deal. Indigo is beautiful, because open-minded people are beautiful, and open-minded people travel. Ignorant rubes stay home and shop at Burlington. They get the "Blue" juice. If they don't like it, they can mistakenly say that they don't like the reissued Indigo. Seem unlikely? Ask yourself if the photograph above is just as unlikely.

Revisiting Quorum by Antonio Puig (1982)

My Quorum story is a unique one. I last owned a bottle of Quorum in 2011. I got through 75% of it and tossed it. It wasn't that I didn't like it; I really enjoyed it. The problem was the citrus. I don't know what the 2000s formula of Quorum was comprised of, but it smelled great, except for the citrus note. That older version used a grapefruit note, which I thought was an odd choice, because if I accidentally over-applied it, the sweetness stuck out of the burley tobacco and piney woods like a sore thumb. It smelled awful. And the more the fragrance aged in bottle, the more pronounced that note became, to the point where I didn't even need to over-apply it to have the wearing experience ruined. 

For that reason, I hadn't returned to this stuff, until now. To my pleasant surprise, Quorum has been reformulated. And like Halston 1-12, it has been recalibrated with mostly natural materials. In terms of aesthetics, the fragrance's image hasn't changed. Same ziggy brown box, and the iconic bottle designed by André Ricard Sala (who is 97 at the time of writing this). The "ingredients" list on the box cites patchouli as the foundational material, which makes perfect sense when you think about it. Quorum smells like a dark, sweaty man whose presence is redolent of cigar smoke and dried herbal grasses, its accords drifting effortlessly across the room as though it were nothing. The multifaceted nature of the composition could be achieved with a slew of lab chems, but why bother when one good natural will do? Patchouli is so complex and dynamic that overloading the formula with it and making it the first compound material is a no-brainer. Layer on top of it a healthy dose of bergamot oil—bergamot oil—and a kiss of orange oil in lieu of fake grapefruit, and the rest of the scent, which also includes some real jasmine and ylang oils, can manage. Clove, treemoss, and green synthetics help flesh out the drydown and add even more dimension. Quorum now smells even better than it did 15 years ago.

When I say even better, I mean amazingly better. This is Quorum living its best life. Every nuance smells natural and identifiable now. I get the fizzy juice of the citrus, the brawny spiced leather of the patchouli, the tobacco with its funky shadow lingering into the far drydown 7 hours later, along with all manner of subtle evergreen resins and garrigue. The atomizer matches the cap color, which is also different from my first bottle, and a nod to how deep vintage bottles were made. The only catch is sillage: Quorum is no longer a bonafide "powerhouse," and the abundance of naturals has made it a touch more polite than it once was, but as I said, it can still cross a large space and smack someone else in the schnoz, so use responsibly. I'm happy to say I approve, and look forward to keeping bottle #2 until there's nothing left to spray. 

Lacoste Original EDP: The Rise of Fashionably "Mid" Culture & The New Wave of Mid-Normative Chic

Smells the Way Ella Langley Sounds

It's tempting to say that we're experiencing the "enshittification" of everything, from movies to fashion to music and yes, perfume, but I'm not so blackpilled. Are Christopher Nolan movies the new avant-garde? No, unless you consider a 3-hour movie in which you can't hear the dialogue groundbreaking. Is country music making a comeback? Yes, but Ella Langley is the only real dyed-in-the-wool country singer on the charts today, so her 15 weeks on the Billboard 200 are kinda lonely. Has perfume become universally generic, infiltrated by the same three woody amber materials and sweet synthetic bubblegum effects? Without argument, but every perfume is its own case study in why that has happened. I can say the same for every pop song and movie since 2020. 

The pandemic is to blame, wholesale, for why perfumes are so gut-wrenchingly loud and synthetic (and tenacious) these days. Many, including many industry people, experienced severe losses of taste and smell, including their ability to sense some of the loudest and most chemical things. Those who would get nauseous from the smell of the janitor's floor stripper now pass without noticing a corrosive acid in the air. I don't have hard stats, but a 2021 mass eye/ear NHIS-based study noted that about 4% of Americans have lost their sense of smell, with a commensurate number reporting permanent loss of taste. This isn't a massive number, but it's also not insignificant. Imagine if someone walked into LVMH headquarters and announced that the customer base for perfume had unequivocally shrunk by 4% overnight. Tough pill to swallow.

But nothing is absolute, and even a 95% reduction in smell leaves a small percentage to sense something. Enter perfume: if it's loud enough, thick enough, and enduring enough, traces of it may penetrate the damaged nasal linings of Covid victims. Thus, perfumers are given briefs that are engineered to overcome the new normal of involuntarily insensitive noses. I can only imagine that Lacoste Original EDP, a 2024 release by Anne Flipo and Tanguy Guesnet for Inter Parfums, is the realization of one such brief. It is a study of Amber Xtreme in the context of the classic (now discontinued) unisex EDT from 1984, simply called "Lacoste." The result is a little disorienting, but once you give it a go and consider the situation in its entirety, it makes sense.

I once wore the original Lacoste fragrance, and my thoughts were simple: it was a basic sporty-green nouveau chypre sort of thing, with bergamot, lavender, galbanum, some piney/resinous nuances, and a heap of oakmoss paired with a popular minty musk that was popular in the 1970s, the type found in Jōvan Musk for Men, but dialed back against the moss. It was not animalic. It was fresh, very green, and weirdly basic and nondescript. It smelled great, but forgettable. It lacked distinction. You could spray it on, and you'd smell good for five hours at a low hum, but nobody would compliment you. Lacoste was essentially a continuation of deodorant soap by other means. 

This revival of Lacoste "Original" in EDP concentration is basically the same outcome, but modernized. I get a synthetic grapefruit citrus accord on top, rapidly mixing with intense violet materials that smell sharp and bittersweet for thirty minutes, very harshly. These eventually pare back to a resinous pink peppery accord that smells only incidentally green, with some nuances of pine resin, galbanum, and olibanum, and also a hint of elemi adding sparkly texture. For three hours, this accord both intensifies and expands, growing in measure both stronger and more diffuse. By the 4 hour mark, the fragrance smells closest to the 1984 fragrance, but the Amber Xtreme and Ambroxan carry this organic, soapy-green blob in a way that robs it of its subtlety and naturalness. 

Yet, despite that, it all smells good. It struck me while wearing it that Lacoste Original EDP is merely one click away from something like Creed's Wild Vetiver. The quality of the materials is pretty much the same. The composition is equally dense, almost candle-like, and the woody amber godzillas upholding its resinous structure possess a potency and vibrancy usually only found in pricy niche. Why are people embracing this style across all corners of the perfume industry? I think a reaction to Covid-nose is one factor, but I also think that people want their perfumes to feel solid and immovable, and ironically that sentiment in very "New Wave"—think back to the powerhouses, both feminine and masculine, of the 1980s. People then wanted what people now have. Loudness. Brashness. Back then it was animalic musks and intense neon florals. 

Today it's nuclear-grade woody ambers and bubblegum sweetness. All of these fragrances, many of the new Creeds included, smell very, well, mid. There's nothing special or particularly interesting about them, but most of them smell inarguably good, the same way a new box of Crayons smells good. The fragrance industry has found what some corners of Hollywood and Nashville have also uncovered: a sure thing in the form of a key accord that then gets grafted in not-so-subtle iterations into virtually every mainstream release. For movies, it's the CGI landscapes. For music, it's the 4/4 time signature from a pretty girl. For perfume, it's the sweetened woody amber. 

We live in crazy times, geopolitically and domestically, so getting a handle on normalcy demands a bit of boring compromise that it seems many are willing to accept. Such is the case here; Lacoste offers us a perfume that smells just as citrusy and vaguely green as the true original from 1984 did, but instead of using the then-clichéd tropes of grassy coumarin, cheap galbanum, oakmoss, and sanitized musk, we're instead treated to the now-clichéd motifs of fake grapefruit, weapons-grade pink pepper, nondescript green resins, and woody ambers from a B movie. The formula is different, but the outcome is the same. This is, for better or worse, a comforting thought. 

Remarkable People (Etat Libre d'Orange)

I smell nods to Edmond Roudnitska's style in Remarkable People, Cécile Matton's 2015 creation for ELdO. I think it's the curry and champagne notes. The curry is slightly sweaty and smells more like cumin, which Roudnitska favored in several of his older creations, including Femme and Eau de Roche. Matton preceded Remarkable People five years earlier with a scent for the same brand called Josephine Baker, in which the same two notes are paired. (Josephine Baker was the first edit of this scent and was an exclusive European Sephora release that was discontinued to make way for Remarkable People.) Structurally, it is all but the same perfume with merely a different name. One might deduce that she has an interest in creating a signature accord, a type of commercially viable unisex freshness built around unconventional spicy notes, and here she succeeds. Remarkable People is coherent, smoothly blended, and subtle in a way only a deft nose can manage. It's a pleasantly understated fresh-spicy composition that works well for me, albeit with at least one major fault, which I'll get to.

It opens with a citrus-infused champagne beigeness that is both bright and oddly warm, feeling the way carbonated wine tastes after it's been left out a little too long. Cardamom essential oil adds much-needed body and a bit of green woodiness, while spiced jasmine and Mane's trademarked Lorenox dominate the drydown, lending a soft, delicately textured synthetic woodiness to the base. The floral component wafts up to me throughout the wear, which lasts about eight hours, and the sillage is limited to intimate encounters, rarely straying more than three inches beyond my shirt collar. Despite that, I appreciate the way the curry, reading as cumin, adds a subliminal skin tone where an otherwise sterile scent would be. This quietly animalic nuance elevates the experience just enough for me not only to notice Remarkable People, but to genuinely like it. It's not super remarkable, nor is it something that will stick in the memory for ages, but when it's on me, I can settle into it. I also like that it suddenly had me pondering Roudnitska. There's something to be said for a contemporary perfume that conjures memories of a master perfumer's works.

The big problem with Remarkable People is the question of its target audience. Who is this actually for? ELdO is a pricey niche brand that commands premium prices in the luxury perfume space, and this fragrance is no exception. But why would wealthy suburbanites or urban tastemakers gravitate toward something so soft and simple? This kind of colorless freshness was once popular on a much larger scale in the 1990s with fragrances like Chanel's Allure and Dior's Dune, but Remarkable People lacks their heft and bone structure. It comes across as limpid, timid, and a touch watery. I'm all for plunking down big bucks for something well made and olfactorily compelling, but I doubt that Remarkable People clears that bar. It could simply be a case of faulty concentration. The current formula feels more like a fortified cologne than a true eau de toilette, so perhaps modifying the dilution ratio of the fragrance compound would do the trick. All in all, it's a good effort with the potential for greatness, and one that the brand would be well served to revisit at least one more time—and this time, with feeling.

Old Spice Obscure Ocean (Procter & Gamble)

With virtually no fanfare, Procter & Gamble quietly released three new eau de colognes in what it has loosely referred to as its "Signature" range, naming them Forbidden Woods, Midnight Moon, and Obscure Ocean, which is the one I have.

The psychology here is difficult to figure out. With Old Spice enthusiasts openly yearning for P&G to reissue lost treasures like the original formula milk-glass Old Spice and its sleek 1980s flanker, Night Spice, the question of why they chose to create three entirely new fragrances is a fair one. Forbidden Woods is supposed to be some kind of spiced amber oud, while Midnight Moon appears to be a candied gourmand. For me, that's a double no thanks. Obscure Ocean, however, piqued my interest, chiefly because P&G, for all its faults, has never released a conventional aquatic. Old Spice Fresh Scent smells like a harsh marine storm, overloaded with minerals and cold, stony notes that are impossible to identify, while Pure Sport is like a teenager's deodorant turned up to eleven. Neither fragrance is particularly wearable, yet I cannot help liking them for their quirky originality.

I view Obscure Ocean as a possible market experiment on P&G's part. It is plausible that someone in management took a close look at eBay and realized the brand could release a few "premium" fragrances in attractive packaging, place them on the shelves of Target and Walmart with almost no marketing, then discontinue them after 12 to 18 months, knowing the aftermarket would generate enough buzz to steer customers back toward the older drugstore line that remains in continuous production. I can see the future fragcomm commentary now: "Obscure Ocean? The name is strangely appropriate. It was one of those one-off premium fragrances that lasted eight or nine months before retailers stopped ordering it, then spent another three or four months clearing out the remaining stock. Almost nobody knows what it smells like because almost nobody knew it existed. Now eBay sellers are asking $100 a bottle, which is oddly making it far more desirable than when it sold for a quarter of that price."

How does it smell? Frankly, a bit cheap, but not bad. Spending $50 on it is unwise unless you're a collector like me. I actually think the packaging is beautiful, with a subtly textured illustration of old seafaring adventures pressed into the background behind a bold sky-blue band bearing the fragrance's name and Old Spice in gold lettering at the top. The box even includes the classic milk-glass ship graphic on the outer opening flap. They also printed a batch code on it, which is, of course, completely meaningless, but still fun. The bottle has a plastic cap, though it is at least finished in chrome gold, and the glass bears the familiar ship in matching gold. This is a strong nod to the Shulton tradition, the first time in two decades that I have seen P&G reach back to those roots for an entire product line. I fully expected the fragrance itself to be as pedestrian as anything else released over the past year, but I was pleasantly surprised by what I got instead.

Obscure Ocean is, for all intents and purposes, a Dior Sauvage EDT clone. It's not a 1:1 copy, nor is it trying to be. The semi-sweet salted melon and citrus opening is distinctive, supported by a strong linalool "lavender" effect that guides the fresh, fruity, and ozonic top notes into a Sauvage-like salty Ambroxan accord, along with what smells like a touch of Cedramber draped over a very 2000s suede-style base. I suspect it contains something akin to IFF's Suederal LT, dressed up with a surprisingly restrained hint of Calone and whatever that extra salty material happens to be. It smells competent, and I readily admit that it smells good, albeit slightly dated. The entire structure of Obscure Ocean, however, is paint-by-numbers woody aquatic, the sort of fragrance that, in 20 years, will probably be dispensed from perfume vending machines in Yokohama train stations to budget travelers who forgot to pack deodorant. It smells like the textbook definition of Western "guy fresh," viewed through the restrained lens of a 1990s Asian designer fragrance. It is not high quality, but it is interesting enough to justify its existence.

I suspect, however, that the fragrance itself is not really the point of Obscure Ocean, or of its two siblings. Once Obscure Ocean disappears from store shelves, the very name "Obscure" will appeal to collectors, and the unusual attention it attracts on eBay and other secondhand marketplaces will drive prices and hype high enough to strengthen the broader Old Spice brand. If that happens, it will give P&G executives one more reason not to release the fragrances that longtime fans actually want, in keeping with their true (and truly unfortunate) tradition.

Lalique pour Homme "Lion" EDP (Lalique)

When I ponder a brand like Lalique, I consider the bottles before their contents. How could I not? As a student of art history, I am well aware of René Lalique’s historically significant jewelry and glasswork. He was arguably the most versatile glass artist of the first half of the 20th century (he died in 1945), and his contributions included inkwells, hood ornaments, and the design and manufacture of luxury perfume bottles for fragrance industry giants like François Coty (Chypre), Mary Dunhill (Flowers of Devonshire), and Jacques Guerlain (Bouquet de Faunes), among many others.

It is with pleasure that I hold Lalique pour Homme, the original “Lion” EDP version from 1997, in hand. It is a marvel of vertical, squared-off Art Deco geometry with an Art Nouveau flourish in the form of a lion’s head rendered in reverse relief. Every detail of this bottle design is well conceived, from the gentle curves of its sides to its metal shoulders and cog-shaped cap, which is also bizarrely reminiscent of classical Greek dentil molding. It is possibly the most beautiful bottle in my sizable collection, and I tip my hat to the Lalique Group for honoring their legacy with this degree of artful packaging. Well done.

The perfume within is by Maurice Roucel, who by 1997 had tinkered conservatively at the periphery of the male fragrance market with the understated Eros Homme (1990) for Tristano Onofri and the equally low-key R (1995) for Révillon. It is no surprise to me, then, that Lalique pour Homme is a barbershop dream of a woody-oriental fougère, with a subtle, streamlined design of its own: soft, bittersweet grapefruit, lavender, rosemary, sandalwood, sugarless vanilla in the vein of Caron pour Un Homme, a microdrop of patchouli, and a powdery mossy musk. There is no oakmoss or treemoss listed on the box, but I do detect something powdery and oakmoss-adjacent in the base accord, which I will return to in a moment.

It reads as perfectly simple, and its material quality is high enough for me to parse each note clearly. It reminds me of Clubman Classic Vanilla aftershave, and by extension, Caron Le Troisième Homme, minus the jasmine. Roucel’s scent is frequently likened to Creed Bois du Portugal (1987), and I think its dusty lavender and sour sandalwood are responsible for that particular comparison. I can agree, but the two aforementioned fragrances outweigh the Creed comparison for me. Maurice Roucel is incredibly talented, and he managed to capture a 1970s or ’80s gentleman’s cologne vibe on a budget without sacrificing quality. His creation smells crisp and fresh, yet sturdily masculine, with dry herbs and woods. It is an olfactory statement: “I am a true gentleman.”

I love this fragrance. I have read reviews where authors contextualize it as “a dying breed” and “the last of its style,” with yet more comparisons to classics like Patou pour Homme, Cardin pour Monsieur, and Arden Sandalwood, but I am not so sure. Yes, the staid earthiness of the traditionally French lavender-sandalwood-oakmoss fougère speaks to that fading lineage, but Roucel cleverly added a very dry and ephemerally powdery orris note, like a pale gemstone in the center of an otherwise austere landscape of clean lines and muted tones. It hints at the makeup-powder iris fragrances that would follow.

The orris-laden Deauville by Michel Germain, released two years later, smells like a logical next step after Lalique pour Homme, as does the ambery and conservative Allure Homme, also released in 1999. Eventually, this desiccated and diffusive woody-floral style reached its apotheosis nearly ten years later in Dior Homme (2005). So it is not contradictory to view Lalique pour Homme as an old-school fragrance that also foreshadowed things to come.

Ultimately, it is simply a pleasurable barbershop fougère for me, something I will pair with Clubman aftershave on facial hair management days, when Brut feels a little too gauche or Azzaro feels too aggressive and macho. Lalique pour Homme is the guy who makes the girls grin by wearing a sport jacket to lunch, and who still has a landline phone in his apartment because his mom is hopelessly cellphone illiterate.

He is, in a word, charming.

Revisiting Lalique's Original Encre Noire

Summer Fields of Vetiver

Encre Noire is often referred to as a "modern" vetiver, and few can get through a sentence about it without mentioning Iso E Super, so let's just get that out of the way first: there's quite a bit of Iso E Super in Encre Noire. There, I said it. Let's move on.

Released in 2006 in a semi-opaque black cube bottle inspired by René Lalique's own 1913 "Biches" inkwell design, the perfume was created by Nathalie Lorson, an experienced professional in her second decade of high-profile designer output. It was a sensation almost immediately; the public embraced the glassmaker's "black ink" as if it were something avant-garde, innovative, or oddball, and its sales were brisk, with every fragrance community personality and blogger having their say. 

Oddly, few dwelled in any detail on Lorson herself, whose history includes her 1994 debut collaboration with Sophia Grojsman on Bvlgari pour Femme. After that, her portfolio gets a little hazy (rumors abound that she worked on something called Wish for Chopard, released in 1997), with her next confirmed fragrances, Dolce & Gabbana pour Femme, Boucheron Jaipur Saphir, and Chopard Casran, all appearing in 1999. Lorson has publicly mentioned that she loves working with vetiver, and yet had no known vetiver perfume to her name until Encre Noire, which I find interesting. While others may consider her contribution to the pantheon of vetiver perfumes to be austere and even a bit severe, I think it's a truly great vetiver fragrance that sits comfortably among its 20th-century predecessors in the genre, most notably the original Guerlain Vetiver from 1959. 

Spray Guerlain Vetiver on one wrist, and Encre Noire on the other, and it hits me: Encre Noire is merely an updated version of Jean-Paul Guerlain's first solo fragrance creation, and in my opinion, an improvement. Guerlain opened his composition with a dry bergamot and coriander accord that was puckeringly bitter-green and pungent; Lorson capitalized on vetiver's natural grapefruit facet, a result of nootkatone, a sesquiterpene ketone that occurs in both the citrus fruit and vetiver root, and used it to amplify vetiver's natural freshness in Encre Noire. Guerlain Vetiver only dwells on citrus for five minutes, after which it segues via tobacco into the main attraction, i.e., unadulterated vetiver, reputedly of the Bourbon variety. Encre Noire bridges its grapefruit fizz to a heart of both Haitian and Bourbon vetivers with what smells like a drop of natural cypress oil, although the effect is fleeting, at least to my nose. I'm sensitive to vetiver, and so even a suggestion of it overtakes my olfactory receptors and shoves me directly into its dense green thicket. 

Encre Noire's vetiver heart, just like Guerlain's, smells uncompromisingly of vetiver, vetiver, and more vetiver. I find that vetiver develops a sour quality with onion-like off notes, and I experience it here. I think the worst example of this is found in Route du Vétiver by Maître Parfumeur et Gantier. There, the onion quality is so pungent, and the vetiver extracts are so natural and concentrated, that it resembles the stink of sweaty, stuck-on-a-bus-for-three-days-in-Rome body odor vetiver, which is to say, not my absolute favorite kind. Fortunately, and unlike both Guerlain and MPG, Lorson's vetiver is fresher, brighter, airier. The root is there, but it's not covered in dirt and left in a wet clay pot. Instead, it's garnished with accents of citrus and evergreen, and the whole crisp affair is only passingly sweaty, which I can abide. The subtle but effective fixatives of base Cashmeran and Iso E Super disencumber the vetiver oils of their natural shortcomings, leaving a pristine, simple, and balanced fragrance that wafts pleasantly for hours at a very low hum that is unlikely to offend, even if overapplied. Encre Noire is, in a word, gorgeous. 

Vetiver will never be a "love" for me, as it isn't my favorite note by any brand or in any incarnation, but I accept Lorson's 2006 update to the traditional, straightforward vetiver genre, something that had, rather amusingly, gone extinct by that point in time. Guerlain Vetiver had always been the main reference for the material, and while I think it remains a very good fragrance, it smells of its time. Encre Noire, on the other hand, nods to that classic format while nudging the inherently dated olfactory profile of vetiver a few feet closer to the future. I like that Lorson did not try to reinvent the wheel here; she took advantage of vetiver's numerous facets and used a few key synthetics and naturals to highlight them and give them their time as her perfume develops. She extended the grapefruit/nootkatone facet on top, enhanced vetiver's woodiness with Cashmeran and Iso E Super in the base, and tickled the transitions with nuances reminiscent of green cypress needles, and to quote The Brownsville Herald, "That's all she wrote." 

Grape Raspberry Eau de Parfum Spray (Al-Rehab)

Smelling Al-Rehab's Grape Raspberry fragrance is like experiencing my own version of Stephen King's The Langoliers. I've accidentally stepped through a time rip into a past that sits empty and devoid of life, with every molecule of this past world lingering in a forgotten state. It's November 12th, 1988. The week of my first flu. I spent the whole day in bed, and at 4:30 pm, mom entered my room with a big bottle of Dimetapp Elixir, which she duly unscrewed and administered to me via tablespoon. Just as memory recalls, a bottle of Dimetapp Elixir is there on my nightstand, and the spoon rests beside it. Except mom and the child version of me are nowhere to be found. Feeling nostalgic, I unscrew the Elixir and pour it into the spoon, marveling at how closely it resembles alien blood. As I bring it up to my lips, I catch a whiff of its radioactivity: fakey-fake "Great Grape Taste."  

Grape Raspberry EDP spray is that exact flavor in fragrance form. Every sniff gives Dimetapp. There's no sense in trying to parse "notes" with it. There are none. It's just artificial grape with an acrid sugary aftertaste, diabolically potent and difficult to stomach. And yet I'm strangely drawn to it. It smells like my childhood, specifically the ailment-ridden part of it (I wasn't often sick, but when I was, I was sick sick). Perfumers usually overlook that sort of thing in favor of happier recollections. The impulse is to attempt romantic or adventurous angles, with all sorts of gourmand, fresh, dusky accords meant to evoke happy summers at the beach, or huddling under a baseball dugout during a rainstorm with someone who wears a totally normal cologne. But what about being a sick kid and ingesting a bizarre purple pancake syrup for a low dose of phenylpropanolamine (PPA)? Which, by the way, is now restricted due to young women developing hemorrhagic strokes from a much higher dose of PPA in diet pills. Good times!

I'm not sure if the rest of the world also used Dimetapp Elixir, or if it's uniquely American, but my guess would be there are massive swaths of Europe that would be horrified by both the texture and flavor of it. Likewise, the scent of Al-Rehab's Grape Raspberry is the stuff of nightmares, a dense, syrupy-sweet onslaught of synthesized methyl anthranilate, petroleum-based chemical byproducts of synthesized methyl anthranilate, and refined white cane sugar in a concentration high enough to kill a man. Jacques Bogart's Silver Scent eschews this level of crude bombast by allowing the orange blossoms from which its methyl anthranilate is derived to peek through and lighten its load; don't expect that level of care here. Al-Rehab has always been a garbagey brand that isn't worth the $5, but with this fragrance they've out-niched the topmost echelon of esoteric niche and given me, perhaps the sole inhabitant of this niche, exactly what I needed. 

Bogart (Jacques Bogart)

The house of Jacques Bogart was established by Jacques Konckier in 1975, many years before its acquisition of Balenciaga in 1986, and Ted Lapidus in 1998. Konckier's stated vision for the brand was "I create only for men." Bogart's 1975 eponymous debut had been, until recently, their flagship scent; it is apparently discontinued. Jacques Bogart has always been a European concern, with its main distribution channels snaking through the central and eastern regions of the old continent and across the Middle East, only appearing in the USA via the secondary grey and eBay market. Bogart, dubbed "Signature" after the pen-and-ink graphic on its box, is often likened to another major European export of the time, Paco Rabanne pour Homme (1973), but I think it's a little more accurate to view it as the European progenitor to a popular American mainstay of that groovy era, Halston 1-12, which was released the following year. 

Halston 1-12's resemblance to Bogart is obvious from first spray, as they share a similarly bombastic opening accord of desiccated citrus, green galbanum, lavender, pine needles, and mastic resin, but Bogart's notes are filtered through more than just the soapy linalool of Roy Halston's scent. Max Gavarry and Vincent Marcello's collaboration on 1-12 was a unification of Marcello's mastery of the agrestic chypre (Lauder's Private Collection) with Gavarry's unique take on lavender and vetiver (Puig's Estivalia), which resulted in an erstwhile barn burner of a chypre-fougère hybrid. Their other Halston chypre, Z-14, was an early "clubber" (Studio 54) frag, while 1-12 competed with "mature" colognes like Royal Pub, Kanøn Man, and Grey Flannel to win over the Republican Wall Street types who quietly bankrolled these brands and demanded something in return. 

Perfumer Maurice Maurin nodded to this conservative segment of American fragrance culture with an aromatic fougère body on a rawhide leather chassis. The distinguishing feature of Bogart is a finessed accord of phenylacetic acid (dank sweetness), Atlas cedar oil (fetid woods), and trace isobutyl quinoline for an unassertive animalic base under otherwise clean greens. Bogart is like a cool breeze through a wilderness in late summer, after the funk of high heat has dissipated, with traces of deer and beaver gently lingering on its trail. Some reviewers mention the inclusion of dimetol, but Maurin may have also tinkered with trace amounts of dihydromyrcenol, which is perhaps why many link Bogart to Paco Rabanne pour Homme. Combined with dimetol, DHM creates the same nuanced herbal freshness found in Acteur, Maurin's 1989 brief submission for Azzaro. Bogart is unusual for the brand in that it is the only Bogart frag that lacks bombast; it smells demurely green, leathery, and dry, and recedes instead of reaching out. Patchouli and oakmoss complete its far drydown, with cedar-centered woods growing only slightly funkier, and I appreciate the somber woody-green aura of this stuff.

That said, I actually prefer many of Bogart's contemporaries over it, and find its staid personality a little too reserved for my liking. If you were to ask me which is better, Bogart "Signature" or One Man Show (1981), I'd have to point to the latter. It's cruder, yes, but it's also crisper, grassier, muskier, and all around more distinctive and, frankly, more fun. Still, Bogart "Signature" is a worthy olfactory callback to an era when men in suits and ties commuted by train to New York City for twelve-hour workdays, indulged in expensive martini lunches with their attractive female secretaries, then boarded the seven o'clock express home to their wives and young children in Groton.

Silver Scent (Jacques Bogart)

Grapes, Gum, Orange Blossom, Bacchus

I've done my best to ascertain why they named it "Silver" Scent, but I've come up empty. I'd like to say that it was their "silver" anniversary, but 2006 is not 25 years after 1975, so that doesn't wash. There's nothing silvery about the smell of Silver Scent, so its name and the story behind it remains an impenetrable mystery.

Methyl anthranilate is a naturally occurring chemical in Concord grapes, and I love how grapes smell. Additionally, MA is found in oranges and neroli, two things that also smell great, so finding it in such singular abundance in a fragrance is interesting. When I was a small child, I was briefly obsessed with a pearlescent black plastic necklace that my grandmother gave me to play with. I'll never forget one particular summer afternoon of fidgeting with the beads and marveling at how their colors shifted depending on their angle relative to the sunlight. Silver Scent is the olfactory incarnation of that necklace. It's a blast of black grape soda in the first fifteen minutes, followed by the neon of an expensive grape-flavored bubblegum from the 1990s. But then, an hour in, it shifts to subtle nuances of Joop! Homme, a distinct shimmer of off-white orange blossoms that add a retro floral glow. Bend down to tie my shoe, and it's purple candy again. 

I've seen some reviews that denigrate Silver Scent as simplistic, linear, one-note. It does play one simple tune, but it plays it with an affecting innocence that lingers long enough (and loudly enough) to elicit suspicions of disingenuousness, like the chronically-caffeinated coworker who always blurts "Awwwww!" when someone gets engaged. At its core, this is a decadent fragrance, steeped in the richness of amaranthine fruits and the cheap dessert wines rendered by them. Only a person who has achieved enough in life to enjoy it could wear this and understand what it's saying, a trait typical of the most seasoned among us. Perhaps that's what they meant by "silver" after all.

78 Vintage Green (Banana Republic)

Whenever I stop at Burlington, I try to find a 75 mL bottle of 78 Vintage Green (I once saw a 5 oz bottle and passed on it, years ago), and I've had no luck. I suspect the original Icon line of Banana Republic fragrances is quietly being discontinued, as grey market stock on several of them has dried up considerably since their first appearance in 2017. 

There are a handful of 30 mL bottles floating around store shelves, however, and the other day I paid the $13 for one. (I could've purchased two, but I'm stupid.) My take on the fragrance: This stuff is nice, but weirdly redundant in my collection. Everything I'd read about it suggested it was a bright, vegetal-green hesperidic scent with a hint of fig leaf and a surprising amount of galbanum. Instead, it's a soapy and overwhelmingly synthetic rehash of Versace Versence in the first 3 hours, with a woody fig note for 2 of them that recalls Salvatore Ferragamo, before settling at the 6-hour mark on Linen Vetiver's mossy-musky base. The far drydown is identical to Linen Vetiver's. 

Worth having? Not for me. There's an astringent green tea note tucked in the opening accord of 78 Vintage Green that strongly resembles the tea in ck One Essence, but Gino Percontino's composition never quite convinces me that it's better than any of the aforementioned releases. While I'm not a huge Versence fan, Versace's scent smells more balanced. Essence is more natural. Ferragamo is more focused. And Linen Vetiver is softer and more dimensional with its warmer greens undergirding a summery floral bouquet. I simply don't need this particular Icon fragrance. A 1 oz bottle is too much. 

Pino Silvestre Black Forest (Parfums Mavive)

No release date. No promo copy. No promo, period. A perfume that was nonexistent one day, and everywhere online the next. No reviews. No conversations. No mention of it anywhere. Until now: I own a bottle of Pino Silvestre Black Forest so you don't have to, and I'm here to tell you about it.

Except there isn't a ton for me to say. Do you remember Green Generation Him ♂ with the opaque black bottle that came in a silver cylinder? Of course not. Nobody does. Parfums Mavive releases these things to five "farmacias" out in the backwoods of Italy and then discontinues them a few months later because, surprise surprise, they don't sell. GGH was released in 1998 and is a watery-herbal thing with fennel and orange blossom over a pallid derivation of ck Eternity for Men. It's an extremely rare fragrance. How rare, you ask? So rare that the bottle and packaging shown on its Parfumo page is my bottle and packaging. Literally my photo, cropped out. Nobody can find the stuff, and they're not missing much, although I do like it, and it does smell pretty good. 

Black Forest reminds me of it. Same sweet orange blossom over lavender 1990s fresh fougère underpinnings, except a denser and sweeter accord to reflect the cavity-inducing times we live in. A hint of cinnamon, a very light sprinkling of amaretto, but then minutes later, minty herbs, woods, "dark" greens that refuse to fully elucidate their intentions, or their identities. Lush coumarin, a mossy texture that smells entirely synthetic, and some musk, perhaps after the brand's own Black Musk? That one also comes in opaque black glass. Black Forest is interesting but challenging and reminds me of a Zoologist scent I can't quite place. I rarely wear Green Generation Him ♂ but I really don't foresee myself wearing this much either. It's not terrible. It's wearable, and I guess I could see maybe wearing it for kicks now and then, but Jesus. Talk about oddball. 

I imagine this will be discontinued in a few months, and prices will skyrocket on eBay in the next five years, after whatever limited production run gets exhausted from grey market sellers. Mavive's inspired-by nineties scent is better, easier, much more accessible. But what do I know? Somewhere in Naples is a guy in a Ferrari rocking Black Forest while his buxom squeeze rocks him. Let's hope he reviews it, so I'm not the first and last word. 

Jungle Vibe (Rayhaan): Nineties Vibe

Using Forbidden Words

If you were to ask the folks at Estée Lauder, I think they'd say "jungle" is not politically correct enough to include in a fragrance name. Synthetic Nature was once called Synthetic Jungle, but a decade after Lauder's acquisition of Frédéric Malle, one might suppose that a combo of market testing, possible trademark infringement (Kenzo Jungle), and distaste for the perceived "cultural appropriation" of jungle-adjacent communities led to the decision to delete "jungle" and pretend it never happened.

Rayhaan does not possess the same scruples. Jungle Vibe, released in 2025, celebrates the jungle in its vibe. Green bottle. Leaf patterned glass. Bodoni Poster font in all-caps. The fragrance smells at least a little wild and green, and everything it puts out alludes to that. But having taken a closer look, I've concluded that the fragrance is a victim of an even wilder and painfully shortsighted influencer campaign. Apparently every YouTube and TikTok broccoli head out there is saying Jungle Vibe is a clone of Dries Van Noten's 2022 Santal Greenery, as if Santal Greenery is the only other green-woody fig frag. 

I hasten to proffer a contrarian view: Jungle Vibe is instead a first cousin of Salvatore Ferragamo pour Homme (1999). My evidence? By the way, do not confuse evidence with proof; many complain of a dill pickle smell in the Rayhaan, but if you refer to the reviews of Ferragamo pour Homme on Fragrantica, you find immediate references to dill pickles there as well. Jungle Vibe smells like a carbon copy of the older perfume, but with blatant embellishments tacked on to give it its own identity. For example, Ferragamo predates Rayhaan's crisp fig and sandalwood structure, but Rayhaan modified this scent profile into something grassier and vaguely herby, and with salty Ambroxan in the base. 

Jungle Vibe is enjoyable, not because it smells like another green fig scent (it does), but because I relish it as a late 1990s throwback. That Bodoni font with the script over it, that color fade on the box and bottle, that abstract fig in the fragrance, all are reminiscent of the artistic and cultural styles of 30 years ago. Refer to Chopard Heaven as the starting point for the packaging aesthetic, and work out from there. The "pickle" problem is really a matter of personal perception, i.e., how an individual nose smells Javanol. Some perceive smooth creamy woods with accents of green twigs and rose, while others smell brine. I smell a good perfume, green, a little herbal, sweet with fig, and woody, with pickled Javanol that doesn't bother me in the slightest. 

My partner remarked more than once that Jungle Vibe smells intensely green and bitter-grassy, which is interesting because my nose picks up way more of the sugary fig and grapefruit. But there's no denying Jungle Vibe smells good, and is well made. Why all the video-reviewing midwits are hellbent on claiming it's like one particular niche scent is beyond me. It's not like Dries Van Noten's scent profile is "original." The late 1990s were littered with fig scents, including numerous masculines, so when you smell this type of fragrance, you can really take your pick of what it most resembles.

Ithaque (Memo Paris)

Ithaque is a Greek mythological isle said to be the home of Odysseus. Well, Ithaca is the reference name for it, and Ithaque is the French translation. Memo is interested in French flourishes, and contrasts the name with stylized ancient Grecian imagery on the bottle of their 2023 fragrance, luring in the fat wallets with an admittedly striking package. You'd be forgiven for assuming this scent has a direct connection to Greece, when in fact it bears little to no resemblance to anything from Pyrgos. 

Instead, Ithaque (the fragrance) smells rather like a minimalist interpretation of the dead-horse Aventus DNA. It's also an "ignore the official pyramid" perfume. The market copy says little about what's really going on here. Ithaque opens with one of those weird, contemporary-luxe "fruity" accords that bears a glancing likeness to citrus/fruits (grapefruit, pineapple, red apple) yet smells anything but natural. This weird Franken-citrus also reads as slightly floral, with tartness, crispness, greenness. Eventually it dusks up and resolves into a recognizable shape: blackcurrant, paired with Texas cedar-like woodiness for a dry-smoky profile that lingers for the duration of the fragrance's 12-hour lifespan. Eventually, it fades out to a discreet, low-dose laundry musk. 

There's clearly Hedione HC and Iso E Super here, but there's also a few fancier chems that flesh out the juniper-like fruitiness that lingers in the periphery of that massive blackcurrant accord. I happen to love anything blackcurrant, so despite my misgivings about Ithaque smelling 99.9% synthetic, which is troubling at Memo's price-point, I actually really like this stuff. At the 45-minute mark, the cedar element pushes past the fruity tones to give Ithaque a similarity to Banana Republic's equally fruity-woody Cypress Cedar, but only until the smoky currant fully kicks in with marginal sweetness.

Another pleasantly clean, transparent scent indebted to Aventus. 

Violette Eau de Toilette (Molinard)

Molinard is a house whose name echoes my own; I find the "Miller" of Italy to be quite the interesting fragrance house. Fragonard, Molinard, and Galimard are all Grasse firms whose lineage stretches back into the 18th and 19th centuries, with Molinard citing 1849 on the purple boxes of its "Les Fleurs" range. As a violet fan, I've always wanted to own the now-discontinued Violette EDT, and finally got a chance to purchase an unsprayed specimen in its "tombstone" bottle, brand-new old stock, still factory cello-wrapped. 

Les Fleurs Violette was first released in 1910, then re-released in 1994 as the fragrance reviewed here, alongside a handful of other floral reissues (a couple of which were released in 1993), including Rose, Mimosa, Muguet, Lavande, and Jasmin, with Fleur de Figuer arriving very late to the party in 1999. Looking at these, I really wonder what their angle was. The 1990s was largely about spiced fruitchouli/ambery things, yet Molinard reverted back to very spare and simple Victorian and Edwardian soliflores, eschewing the bombastic, Angel-fueled trends of the time for a demure sensibility more suited to lace-collared dowager duchesses than leather-chokered glam-rock ingénues. Violette is exactly that: demure. It's as shy as it gets, with little more than a bright and semisweet Parma violet note, the requisite sharpness of violet petrol, and a soft, subtle, and very powdery base of some understated white musk. The whole affair is direct, dry, and one-note. There isn't even violet leaf to add any aquatic or spicy tones. It's 100% chalky-petrol violet flower, with only the shadow of a hint of juicy sweetness in the first two minutes. 

I'm not gonna lie: I expected more. But then again, I didn't expect very much more, because I wanted a pure violet soliflore in this conservative style. I'm not even sure my expectation being crushed by reality is a bad thing; what more could this kind of fragrance do? Yes, my $10 bottle of Violetas Francesas cologne smells pretty much identical, at a lower concentration, but if I splash that on and follow it with a healthy spritzing of Molinard Violette, I'm about as violet as a violet-lover can be. Yardley's April Violets offers coy suggestions of stone fruits and watery violet leaf with a tingle of botanical pepper, and feels downright Rococo in comparison, but if I'm in the mood for that kind of violet non-soliflore, I know where to go, and it isn't here. Like Yardley, Molinard's material quality isn't mind-blowing, but it's very good, and maybe a little better. Its ionones and irones are delicately balanced upon their powdery undercarriage, which says "competent perfumer." Longevity is 12+ hours. You want a solid, no-games, no-frills violet? This is it. You can still find a few bottles on eBay for not insane prices if you apply yourself, so I recommend looking there first, and/or perusing the frag-forum swap boards. 

April Violets (Modern Classics Version, Yardley)

April Violets is getting reviewed in June. Sue me. 

I wanted the vintage version of this one, but Yardley is plagued by a downmarket vibe that makes spending $100 on a bottle feel wrong enough to not want to do it, so I shaved a zero off and grabbed the "Modern/Contemporary Classics" version instead. 

My bottle is the "90% Naturally Derived Ingredients" formula. On Yardley's website, the copy on the newest bottles reads "94% Natural" because I guess British regulators asked that the company push their claims to the absolute limits. Add "Vegan & Cruelty Free" on there, and you can hear Keir Starmer fart with every depress of the atomizer. 

It's no secret that I'm a lover of violets. The problem is, there's a dearth of violet fragrances on the market, and finding a daily-driver violet is no small task. My violet collection is sadly limited to Grey Flannel, Aoud Violet, Love in Black, Fahrenheit, Violetas Francesas, Royal Violets, Tres Nuit, and now April Violets, and of those, really only Grey Flannel, Fahrenheit, Violetas Francesas, and Love in Black are true dyed-in-the-wool violets. 

There's a reluctance among manufacturers to produce violet fragrances because ionones are notoriously difficult on the nose, sometimes overpowering the senses, but more often fading into anosmia-induced invisibility, which then deceives the wearer into believing the perfume is off. I can see this as a problem for April Violets, which smells sturdy enough after first spray (brisk violet leaf and apple, with hints of peach, mimosa, and green leaves), but after five minutes the ionones and natural violet leaf extract take over, and the composition flickers in and out of perceptibility. 

With that said, I can smell it if I focus on it, and it smells great. Delicate greens, pert fruits that aren't juvenilely sweet, and a tender, transparent violet bouquet against a dewy backdrop of aquatic violet leaf—a sanguine purple study in olfactory watercolors. I've seen reviewers bitch about it being "harsh," which raises the question: do you people also think deep tissue massages are harsh? A watery floral that lasts four hours with zero projection and fades into literally nothing is harsh?

If so, then Fahrenheit is obscenely abusive, and Grey Flannel is 60 grit sandpaper for the nose. I can't think of a gentler scent in my catalog, which says a lot, since I'm always seeking meditative green fragrances like this one. Bet it's a hit in Japan!

Cancelling GoDaddy, The Worst Blog Hosting Company in the World, & Starting From Scratch

I'll make this brief; I'm no longer using GoDaddy as my web hosting servicer, and am cancelling frompyrgos.com in that iteration. Rather than go on a long ramble about my problems with them, I'll make it as short and sweet as possible. The reason I'm cancelling my deal with them is simple: GoDaddy broke my trust. 

I spent months trying to configure their absolutely pathetic blog features to allow mobile and desktop users the smoothest experience. All I wanted was three pages: a home page (they couldn't even manage that), a "reviews by brand" page that was extensively linked to each individual review that I've written, and a blog page that simply linked directly to GoDaddy's awful-looking blog, which is only customizable three ways, none of which are user friendly. This was too difficult for GoDaddy, and after spending months creating links on the "reviews by brand" page, one day they just randomly erased all of those links, and erased my entire blog. Even on the dashboard, they simply said, "your blog hasn't been published yet," when it was published almost a year ago. Truly insane. 

One can argue that I should've called customer service to straighten it out, but no. I'm not straightening it out. If they can erase months of work with a technical glitch, a random screw-up, for no clear reason, straight out of the blue, then I see no point in continuing my work with their hosting service. I'm not going to spend another month toiling to make my blog functional (it shouldn't be that difficult), only to have another random glitch come up and erase everything again. With GoDaddy's virtually nonexistent blogging features, its non-intuitive creative dashboard that takes hours to figure out (sometimes for things as measly as simple links), and its incessant glitchiness, I see GoDaddy's expensive hosting service as a liability, and have no further interest in doing business with them. 

I'm done.

As I mentioned in earlier posts on this topic, my goal was to cobble together a modernized blog that at least got readers to my content without confusion or technical issues, after which I would eventually utilize GoDaddy's rather good merchant features to promote my own products. While I haven't ruled them out as a hosting service for my future commercial endeavors, attaching the blog to them has proven to be a complete and utter waste of time, and I strongly discourage anyone from using them as a writing platform. I can see now why Blogger and Wordpress are so highly regarded in this space—after 16 years, no problems with frompyrgos.blogspot.com, not even a single issue. Wordpress has just as good a reputation, if not even better, and I'm considering transferring my content over to them, but will weigh my options. 

Meanwhile, continue enjoying the content here uninterrupted, as I will continue posting, and will keep you updated as to Plan B for using a more 21st-century site, something attractive and user-friendly. Of chief interest to me is to find a site that is mobile friendly, and I suspect Wordpress will be the place for that . . . 

Mystique Bouquet (Afnan)

"The 1960s Called and Wants its Catherine Deneuve Back . . ."

I'm told there's a bit of a backstory as to how this fragrance was created, something about Quentin Bisch winning so much with Ex Nihilo's Fleur Narcotique (2014) that Parfums de Marly asked him to self-flatter in the original Valaya (2023). But how Imran Fazlani's 2024 creation fits into that situation is beyond me. I've gleaned that these fragrances represent a newer style of florals unique to the '20s. At least, that's the take on Fragrantica. My take is different. In any case, Mystique Bouquet smells a lot like Valaya in the first two minutes—like, a lot. But then it goes even further in a surprising direction.

There are some clones out there where you smell them and tell yourself, okay, this smells like fragrance X in the top and mid, but the base is totally different. Then there's clones where you smell the original and then smell the dupe, and you're like, Christ, there's no point in wearing the original anymore. Enter Mystique Bouquet: Fazlani took the intensely synthetic dryer-sheet musk explosion of Valaya and reinterpreted its chemical cacophony as a French chypre from the 1900s with a contemporary sheen of Ambroxan. At heart, the scent structure here is the sort of thing a sexy French woman in 1967 woud wear, and the old-school feel shimmers through in a very classical, wonderful way. But that's not the only thing that grabs me about it. My heart opens to Mystique Bouquet in its first hour, because that's when I get hit in the face by a massive wallop of regular 'ol oakmoss. And the kicker is it's not even listed on the box (although it does appear in the pyramid).  

When you've worn as many fragrances as I have, you know that oakmoss has a lung feel to it. There's a body and heft to it that can sometimes impart a heaviness to the air you breathe. It's here in this fragrance, and enough of it that I know it can't possibly be IFRA compliant. It isn't some hypoallergenic version of oakmoss. It's vintage Mitsouko-moss. Combined with an intensely radiant bergamot/peach accord, a bleached bouquet of squeaky-clean white florals, cistus labdanum, a big grassy-green note, and a salty base of multilayered white musks, Mystique Bouquet far outdoes Valaya (piss poor in comparison) for roughly a quarter of the price. Plus it comes in a gorgeous bottle and box, so kudos to Afnan for once again blowing me away on all fronts in the quality department. 

Lecture Time: How Olivier Creed's Death Hits the Fragcomm, & What His Legacy Gives Us . . .

Park Your Carcass, Kid. I'd Like A Word.

Olivier Creed died about a week ago from an undisclosed cause, and this hit me. My first thought upon learning of his passing was, do people realize what he gave us? 

I'd like to take a moment to cut through the bullshit that has surrounded Olivier Creed and his brand for decades now. It kind of started after Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez published The Guide (2008) and insinuated in not-so-opaque language that Creed was a fraud. With snarky reviews and faint praise for even established classics like Green Irish Tweed and Bois du Portugal, the duo's appraisal amounted to an indictment of quality and character that to this day feels spiteful, mean-spirited, and unjustified. 

After The Guide, it became de rigeur to act like you were "too good" for Creed fragrances. In January of 2014, The Candy Perfume Boy wrote:

"I have a turbulent relationship with the house of CREED. They are definitely on the pricey side for what they are and their quality can be a bit hit or miss, but it would be unfair to say that none of their scents are worth seeking out."

This left me rolling my eyes. Then, a few years later, I read his river of glaze for Prerogative, the Britney Spears celebuscent. His fawning over her and the fragrance made me think he was taking the piss. It would be "unfair" to say none of the Creeds are worth seeking out. Why, thank you, Candy Perfume Boy, how genteel of you to admit Creed into your teeny-bopper club. I suppose one can find solace in knowing that knife-wielding, raccoon-eyed Britney Spears—yes, that's your girl—calms your turbulence. 

But it wasn't just the Candy Perfume Boy. Every other blogger had some dismissive or trite word for Olivier and his fragrances. There was always a gripe: price too high (yet just fine for far clunkier brands like Maître Parfumeur et Gantier and Etat Libre d'Orange), marketing a lie (and nobody bats an eyelash when Parfums de Marly staples a wizened date on its masthead), or inspiration too dry (Green Irish Tweed is very old-school, but Mitsouko, well, Mitsouko . . . ), there was always a reason to crap on Creed. 

So let's cut the bullshit. Was Guerlain a god-seed brand, as Luca Turin is wont to characterize it? For the 20th century, particularly the first 60 years, yes. But times change. Tastes shift. And in the final chapter of the millennium, it wasn't Jean-Paul Guerlain who permanently shifted the direction of masculine perfumery for the 21st century. It was Olivier Creed. Not Pierre Bourdon. Olivier. Creed.

Let's get something straight here. The perfume industry isn't just about the perfumer. Creativity is a driving but also distracting force, and when dealing with things as delicate and temperamental as scent and its finest finesses, it takes an evaluator to recognize the winning timbre, and a businessman to put it in people's hands. Olivier Creed delivered on both counts. The suits at Lancôme weren't smart enough to recognize the genius in Bourdon's submission for Sagamore? Had it ended there, Green Irish Tweed would not exist. It was Creed's commiseration with the jilted perfumer that brought it to life. The fragrance went from "green beans" (Chantal Roos, YSL) to masterpiece. Olivier looks bad? Imagine being YSL right now. Jazz is discontinued, and was never nearly as popular as its close contemporaries, GIT and Cool Water. Do the math.

What Gabe Oppenheim left out of his clumsily-written book, The Ghost Perfumer: Creed, Lies, & The Scent of the Century (2021), even as he derided Olivier for "stealing" the formula, is that Pierre Bourdon never came up with dusky ambergris in the base. 

That's Creed's signature accord. It's what makes GIT. It is, more than perhaps any other contemporary perfume of the last 50 years, a fragrance about the base. And I'm not talking the post-2013 reformulations of GIT that gradually stripped out the sandalwood and natural ambergris tinctures. I'm talking the 1990s and 2000s formula, which I've smelled, and which boasted the richest, smoothest sandalwood base I have ever encountered in a perfume, including Guerlain's classics—and it isn't particularly close. Even Turin had the decency to at least grudgingly admit the fragrance was brilliant. 

Oppenheim, by the way, characterizes Creed's adjustments to Bourdon's formula as "modified, because Olivier would sometimes take the ingredients Pierre recommended and replace them with the most expensive version of those ingredients," a rare devotion to quality for the consumer summed up with: "Olivier had no idea how to meet a perfumer's budget but he couldn't have cut costs even if he'd wanted to, according to a [conveniently anonymous] source." His sentence doesn't even make much sense, but I glean from it that Oppenheim believes Bourdon's formula was at risk in Creed's hands. 

So, in cutting the bullshit, no, Pierre Bourdon is not the only perfumer who created Green Irish Tweed. He supplied the original formula, and with that there is no argument. But Creed then took the original formula, and subsequent iterations, and figured out which one worked. He then crafted the specific base, by choosing the specific base materials over the recommendations of Bourdon (excluding him from that particular process) and fitted it to the novel, post-Drakkar Noir opening and gusty-floral heart of the scent. Clearly, by Oppenheim's own account, Olivier had a heavy hand in the making of Green Irish Tweed, and why wouldn't he? Creeds of that era all shared the "Creed Water" base, comprised of a precarious balance between natural ambergris, salty-synthetic ambergris, expensive musks, subtle florals, and precious woods. 

To a degree, Olivier Creed was a perfumer. In keeping with my cut-the-bullshit approach to the man, I'd like to point out that there were perfumes that he solely authored. Its isn't clear exactly which (accounts differ), but if you know enough Creeds, you can spot which among the complex masterpieces smell relatively "minor," and make an educated guess. I'd hazard that Tabaróme Millésime and Love in Black are Olivier creations. To my knowledge there have been no attributions to the contrary (not that the brand is very forthcoming) and Tabaróme smells like a proto-Bleu fragrance with little more than ginger, citrus, green tea, a dab of hay-bale coumarin, and amber comprising its lithe structure, frankly smelling like the work of a man who "dabbles" in the art without actually committing to it. Likewise, in LiB, the overall feel is of a fragrance made by someone who took a 20th century violet toilet water and simply amped it up with the best violet and irone materials money can buy. Another trademark of Creed's personal style: simple elegance that frankly any amateur with an unlimited budget could pull off.

I won't eulogize Mr. Creed here, because I did not know him personally. The man's many foibles are on record, and I recognize them for what they were. Yes, he fibbed in the marketing copy. As does literally every other market manager for a niche perfume brand. And no, it has never been established that Olivier fabricated his family's history in the perfume industry. There was no perfume industry in Creed's salad years, so logically (and yes logic eludes Creed critics on this point) there is no way to disprove or verify Olivier's claims to family formulas and centuries of parfumeur lineage. Bespoke perfumery typically leaves literal record-keeping breadcrumbs, and until someone proffers a convincing explanation as to how Olivier was able to create a hit-after-hit range of impeccably—and classically—tailored Grey Cap EDTs, (and no, one does not pull that many beautiful fragrances out of his ass), they are the only breadcrumbs to follow. 

My observation of how Olivier Creed's death has impacted the community is filled with sadness. Yes, there are numerous farewells that acknowledge the beauty Creed brought into our world, and their sentiments are noted with warmth. However, the staccato of Gen-Zombie insults peppers the condolences with a salt of nastiness unlike anything I've ever seen before. What the hell is wrong with you people? This one dimwit who goes by the moniker "gezakolab" continuously harangues the Fragrantica obit with senseless comments about how Olivier "scammed all his life." 

Social justice keyboard warrioring against a dead man because you read a crappy book is just pathetic. Despite others imploring him to recognize that there's a time and place, he had to keep adding his digs. 

Then there's "50shadesofscent," another loser, who writes, "We let him rest, we just don't care about him" . . . which is a weird and ugly thing to say when someone has just died. I mean, it's a take. If you don't care about him, then . . . what are you doing in the comments of the Fragrantica obit for him? What have you, anonymous keyboard warrior, contributed to the fragrance world that qualifies your opinion of Olivier Creed in death over that of his hundreds of thousands of fans? Name one thing. But you won't, because you're a disgusting little turd who hides her face behind an avatar and an ugliness, the only things you can show the world, or what little of it wants to see you. 

There have been some readers of mine who have messaged me privately to applaud my stance on Creed and the company as a whole, and they have rightly pointed out that nobody has ever just said the thing with receipts to show for it: Olivier Creed stole people's intellectual property and defrauded them of millions of dollars over the course of his career. If you want to say that, just say it. Stop hiding behind snarky innuendo, dismissive attitudes, acting like you're above appreciating a brand because you heard some random things that you've chosen to believe. Everybody says stuff like, "Creed stole the formula . . . aaaand he edited it and inserted expensive materials, and evaluated multiple iterations of the formula (because he was an amazing evaluator), and then decided this was the one he would release, this fragrance that has sold hundreds of thousands of bottles over 40 years, and nobody could legally stop him because, well, nobody wanted to." 

There have also been readers of mine who have cited Oppenheim's recalling of Bourdon's testimony to him. Bourdon does, according to Oppenheim, outright state that Olivier Creed stole from him. But the question is, how exactly did Bourdon put that? Was it a casual French quip made by a quirky elderly perfumer who was obsessed with the dihydromyrcenol-fueled violet/iris profile of GIT, and to an even greater extent, Cool Water? Or was it really the teary-eyed regret-filled rant of someone who feels deeply wronged, and if so, where is the follow-up to that? Where is the meat on the bones of "Creed stole from me" that any wronged perfumer would gladly hand up? Nowhere in Oppenheim's book does Bourdon say anything like, "Olivier Creed stole my formula, and here's how hard I tried to make things right." 

No. In fact, Bourdon's testimony recollects the opposite: after supposedly getting ripped off with GIT, he did the obvious thing for revenge and offered the cheater Silver Mountain Water and Millésime Impérial as well, allowing Olivier to steal from him twice more and continue "scamming" the public. 

Make it make sense. 

Olivier Creed's legacy is rich and grossly underrated. While people like Luca Turin bang on about the dusty and casually-glossed-over antisemitic legacies of the Guerlains and Chanels, Olivier Creed, who has fundamentally shaped the modern perfume landscape in ways that are too numerous to count (there would be no Sauvage if Aventus had not been commissioned), goes relatively neglected and unnoticed. You can always tell when someone has never smelled Green Valley, for instance. They'll mourn the loss of Samsara, and opine on the beauty of 31 Rue Cambon, and then say something like, "Oh, Creed? Eh." Nobody who has ever seriously worn Green Valley has ever said "Eh" about Creed.

Olivier leaves us Green Valley, the finest fragrance I have ever encountered, as well as a bevy of other, mostly older fragrances, many of which are now discontinued. The IFRA was the final nail in classical Creed's coffin, securing draconian regulatory liens against the production of practically every Grey Cap Creed and the earliest stabs at the "Millésime" range, before it was a thing. I'm nursing a bottle of vintage 2005 Fleurissimo, which today smells like a bouquet of heavily-salted tuberose, because it was the one Creed that Olivier would hold up in advertising photos, glad to let the sunlight glint like gold from its yellow-hued liquid. Fleurissimo is another flawless example of what Creed offered us in his legacy, that rarest of things: a commitment to giving the customer the very best, no expense spared. How many founding fathers of major niche brands think that way today? Precious few. 

People bitch about profit being the sole driving force behind many of today's releases, and they're not wrong; the perfume industry of the '20s is hellbent on taking ethyl-maltol and ethyl-vanillin and slapping $250 tags on them. They forget that back in the late 1960s, there was a young man who wanted to drive up his own margins to nearly-unbearable levels, just so his customers could feel like they were wearing something unique, unforgettable, special. Scoff if you want to, that's fine. But the day will come when some teenager will happen across a bottle of unused and untouched Fleurissimo, and after one wearing will hit the Reddit boards and bro forums to ask, unironically, "Why don't any of my girlfriend's perfumes smell this good?" 

The silence in response will be deafening.