Tumi is a Joe Connecticut luggage brand that sells luxury-priced bags to Joe Connecticut types. (If you don't know who Joe Connecticut is, come to Connecticut for a little stay and look carefully at the middle-aged white men in Polo shirts and chinos who drive Audi Q7s and Toyota Highlanders and have wives who look like birds.) Tumi apparently struggled during the pandemic—understandable given the circumstances—and turned to fragrance to keep the brand afloat. Atlas is just one of several EDPs they rolled out, and I figured it was time to give the brand a chance, and bought a bottle.
What can I say about Atlas? It smells fine. Bright, minty ginger, a little metallic at the start and at the very end, with licks of grapefruit, amberwood (intense woody freshness), and cardamom for cool piquancy, followed by mintier geranium leaf and yet more ginger, all atop a mossy coumarinic base of semisweet amber and synthetic vetiver. The fake vetiver is forgivable because they put a good amount of IFRA-compliant oakmoss in here, which fleshes it out. I find it to be fairly lush and complex enough to warrant owning, but this style has been done a hundred times before, and often for less money. One example is Quorum Silver, which is about $20 for 100 milliliters and smells remarkably similar, and arguably better. Having said that, I think Atlas deserves praise for not succumbing to the ongoing designer trend of putting staid aromatics atop a basket of carnival burnt-sugar sweets. At least this carries a properly masculine character, expressed through a traditional yet contemporary bitter-green style.
I also find the packaging unique, another plus. Solid, heavy glass, with a very heavy metal cap that screws shut. I spent the first ten seconds of ownership tugging in vain at the cap; it took me a few to realize the trick. They should have an instruction manual for people with my diminished IQ. All told, Atlas is a decent woody-fresh masculine that smells like a stab at a 90s throwback aromatic fougère, or "nu-gère" as they were sometimes called, those bright and usually synthetic shaver scents that often intentionally excluded true lavender from the blend. I foresee my bottle gathering dust, and me sometimes pausing to look at it before deciding time and again to wear something else.