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.