Givenchy Gentleman (Givenchy)

Released in EDT concentration in 1974, Givenchy Gentleman was almost anachronistic at that point in time, when modern aromatic fougères were at long last threatening to usurp the reign of bitter-mossy midcentury chypres. Technical marvels like Paco Rabanne pour Homme, Grey Flannel, and Blue Stratos had begun to poke holes in the stuffy citrus-leathers of the 1950s and '60s, and so another olfactory brown study might have seemed passé. Hard to know what saved Gentleman from the fate of, say, Lancôme Balafre, or the original Drakkar, but I have a theory: maybe it was the patchouli. 

After all, patchouli was decidedly in with both the hippie and glitterati of the era, and if there's one thing Gentleman has in spades, it's patchouli. I've read a few dozen reviews of this fragrance, and everyone waxes poetic about its nuances, mentioning things like vetiver, and tarragon, and Russian leather, blah, blah. Perhaps those notes are there, but patchouli, with its myriad facets, is a magical material, capable of replicating an entire accord of subtle seasons. A quality patchouli oil will read as minty, cedar-like, chocolatey, leathery, grassy, and floral before it even begins to dry down, and the patchouli in Gentleman shows it all before you put the bottle away after spraying.

It’s essentially a citrus-herbal chypre, with a soft hint of bergamot and a tart, green note like tarragon—I don’t get much cinnamon—followed by an unfurling garrison flag of patchouli. There’s also something dry, bitter, and smoky, possibly vetiver or just patchouli’s darker side. A small touch of semisweet amber sits in the base, though it could be an early version of Paul Léger’s honeyed carnation from Anaïs Anaïs, or simply patchouli’s sugared finish. Either way, the materials feel top shelf; the fragrance is radiant yet modest, and if you love patchouli, this might be as good as it gets. Beautiful stuff.

The Reddit Test That Confirmed My Suspicions: When Politics Sneaks Into Perfume Recommendations

A few days ago I dropped a simple, pseudo-anonymous question into r/fragrance:

“Which Fragrance Blog: From Pyrgos or Varanis Ridari?”

The post was deliberately short and neutral. I wanted unfiltered opinions on two long-winded masculine-fragrance blogs. Anyone with two minutes and Reddit’s post-history feature could figure out it was me, as my handle is easily recognized on Reddit. That was the point. I wasn’t hiding; I was testing whether the answer would stay about the writing or drift somewhere else. Knowing that Redditors would self-censor and pass on commenting at the mere sight of me, I hoped that a clueless few would step into my room and take the test. After all, it's a fair question.

One lone commenter stepped up almost immediately: electrodan. His verdict:

“Varanis Ridari by a long shot.”

Strong words from Dan. When I politely asked what specifically made him prefer Derek’s site over mine, he gave a measured reply:

“FP is fine I suppose, there have been some times I don't enjoy his attitude, and he's made a few comments I strongly disagree with. I prefer VR’s demeanor and I think his knowledge is as strong or stronger than most, especially about traditionally masculine marketed scents.”

Fair enough on the surface. But when I asked for even one concrete example of what he meant by “attitude” or “comments I strongly disagree with,” the tone changed. He ran the post-history search, realized who I was, and the response became:

“Well, I find the fact that you’re pretending you’re some rando… disagreeable. You posted a way too long screed about a conversation you had on Reddit about Olivier Creed on your blog…”

Talk about a non sequitur. He was referring to my November 2024 piece, “The Trump Anomaly: How Olivier Creed Accidentally Harnessed the Unfortunate Power of ‘Orange Man Bad.’” In that post I simply noted how both Creed and Trump get misquoted, misconstrued, and misrepresented by false narratives convenient to the "progressive" class. I also pointed out (with photos, here and on Reddit) that vintage Creeds in larger flacon sizes have their Royal Warrant printed on the boxes, which is the detail a different Reddit troll had wrongly claimed was missing entirely from Creed's story.

That was the trigger for Dan. Suddenly the “by a long shot” preference wasn’t about prose, depth of experience, or scent knowledge anymore. It was about the fact that the From Pyrgos author has expressed conservative views that support the current President of the United States of America. How dare I?

Here’s why I ran my test and why I’m writing this now.

Fragrance appreciation is supposed to be about the perfumes, their notes, their history, the craft in creating them (not the art, wink, wink), but it is not, or at least it should not be a loyalty test for political tribes. When someone says “by a long shot” about two blogs that both deliver thousands of words on masculine scents, then pivots to politics and "Hey, no fair!" when pressed, that tells readers the recommendation was never about the writing. It was filtered through an external lens, and in this case the lens of a pugnacious NPC who had difficulty reading a room with one other person in it.

I’ve been at this for over a decade. My readers know exactly where I stand on everything because I’ve never hidden it. They keep coming back anyway, not because they agree with every aside, but because my fragrance analysis holds up. Derek’s blog is newer and also excellent; I’ve said so publicly many times. But the moment a reader’s preference flips from “by a long shot” to “you’re pretending to be a rando” after he remembers my politics, the mask slips and the truth becomes clear: the left will say anything.

The pernicious part isn't the politics alone; people are allowed their views. What’s corrosive is when those views quietly become the unspoken filter for “which blog is better.” It turns a community of scent enthusiasts into another battleground. I’ve watched it happen in other pursuits; once it starts, the actual subject matter (perfume writing in my case) gets sidelined, sometimes out of sheer necessity. My 2023 post about Reddit trolls and the decline of Parfumo/Basenotes was written for exactly this reason. This test just supplied fresh evidence.

If you’re reading this and you like Derek’s writing, great — keep reading him. Derek is a fantastic voice in the fragrance community, and deserves everyone's readership, including mine. If you like my blog, stay here. If you like both, even better. Just know the difference between a recommendation based on the actual writing and one that arrives with an invisible asterisk attached. My readers have always been here for the scents, not the scoreboard, and I’m grateful for them every single day.

Jaguar for Men (Pardis SA/Sodimars)

The more I read about this fragrance, the more confusing its history gets. Thierry Wasser is credited as having authored the original formula at the ripe old age of 19. But then in 2002, Dominique Preyssas reformulated it into Jaguar "Classic" which is the version I reviewed last year. However, Perfume Intelligence does not credit Wasser with Jaguar 1988. This suggests that Wasser was not the perfumer after all, and that Basenoters and others (including me) have spread yet another rumor as fact into the ether. 

We may never know who the actual perfumer was. I find it difficult to believe that Wasser, at 19, could have formulated the vintage version in my collection, which dates to the early and middle 1990s. The Sodimars formula smells very old-school in a great way, and the word that springs to mind is "plush." Rich but softly-rendered mandarin orange top note, followed by gentle but radiant accords of resinous evergreen woods and patchouli, with a hint of artemisia (the one note that does not appear in the reformulation), a sort of vague white floral that for some unknown reason people pretend to know is gardenia (again, I'm one of them), cloves, the dusky silhouette of incense through all the agrestic artifice. The main thing that separates vintage Jaguar from current is the obvious presence of oakmoss, and and overall powdery-green aura that recalls one of its contemporaries, Gucci Nobile. 

The reformulation in the darker glass with silver cap has a much more vibrant citrus accord that lasts and pervades the structure into the drydown, and for some reason the subtle shifts in focus from spicy-green (1988) to cedar-green (2002) slides my association from Nobile to Krizia Uomo. Preyssas's formula is soapy; the original formula is more powdery, and not soapy, although not very powdery, either. Between the two, the vintage is softer, its patchouli vibes with oakmoss in a quieter and more sophisticated way, while the reformulation is sharper, brighter, and could also be compared with accuracy to any version of Paco Rabanne XS pour Homme, while the vintage could not. An interesting fragrance that has been through some interesting permutations over the decades!

Archives 69 (Etat Libre d'Orange)

Christine Nagel of Hermès fame (H24 line) authored Archives 69 for ELDO in 2011, and I find a stylistic connection between it and Nagel's later work. She seems to favor creating bold and bittersweet accords that are abstract, durable, memorable. Much like modernist New York School painters, she deals in the spontaneous fluidity of individual artistic gestures. In H24, narcissus (daffodils) becomes dark green bananas; sclarene sage becomes citrus; rosewood becomes magazine ink. She subverts expectations by using disparate perfumery materials as a sculptor in 1954 used wire—twisting, tying, weaving—to create new forms not previously witnessed by man.

Archives 69 is more focused than H24 in that it isolates and then cultivates our perception of incense. Nagel allows incense the flexibility to become a bouquet of flowers, and a grinder full of exotic peppercorns, and even a synthetic machine-moulded polystyrene yogurt container. After a brief, peppered-citrus topnote, Archives 69 moves to a Day-Glo dab of olibanum, kaleidoscoping its spicy, sweet, smoky, resinous, floral, woody, milky, and bitter facets into a smoothly undulating central accord. Archives 69 invites an experience of movement, color, and depth that it abandons at the thirty minute mark, to become disappointingly weak and thin. In those early moments, I find genius in how Nagel portrays incense. It possesses not any one particular quality, but all the qualities lightened to a very low f-stop, an over-exposed brilliance that gives life to a material then tends towards leaden solemnity, at least in most ecuminically-minded perfumes. Various citrus and floral nuances float and drift in and out of perception, and the fragrance feels complex yet effusive and friendly, a 1960s hippie chick in a bottle. 

Then the deflation happens. Everything runs out of puff, the notes flatten, the accords suddenly feel frozen and vaguely chemical, and Archives 69 stalls. I blame the art direction of Etat Libre d'Orange more than I blame Christine Nagel for this; the brand clearly wanted a light and evanescent incense fragrance that one could imagine as patchouli-adjacent in true post-Summer of Love, Woodstock fashion. All fine and well. But if you want that, you have to make some practical concessions, and one of those would be to accept that the only way someone can give you an avant-garde incense cologne that actually smells good for a few hours is to let the materials say what they need to, for as long as they need to. Running out of steam after ninety minutes says, "We cut the budget," and for that sort of thing you're better off naming your fragrance Archives 79. Why do I keep feeling like this brand could solve its many problems by picking better names for its fragrances?