Jōvan Musk Oil for Men (Jōvan, 1974 Formula)

Damaged atomizer and typo on back of box: "And her" should be "And hers." 
This vintage box and bottle survived all these years because it was probably pulled
stock that was taken out of commercial circulation. 

I don't know if it's because Coty barely changed the box and bottle of Musk for Men, or if it's because Jōvan was ahead of its time with its packaging in the 1970s, but my deep vintage box of Musk Oil for Men from 1974 looks weirdly modern. Alas, the bottle is critically damaged. There's a massive, perfectly circular hole that looks factory made in the atomizer unit near the neck, so when I depress the nozzle, the fragrance sprays inside the bottle, and nothing exits the atomizer. The eBay merchant I dealt with lives in an area of Indiana that was hard hit by the recent rains and flooding, so his week-long delay in sending me the fragrance is somewhat understandable, though a post office, last I checked, doesn't care what the weather's doing.

However, he knew the atomizer was busted and half admitted it to me prior to shipping, asking if I still wanted it. (I disapprove of this sales tactic; he didn't mention any damage in the listing.) I said I did, because in my mind a deep vintage Jōvan Musk isn't really something I would wear with any regularity. The fragrance has barely changed in 53 years, and my much newer bottle of Musk for Men Signature Edition is just as shag-carpet perfume porno as this stuff is, so I'll never need to actually wear the vintage bottle itself. Collector piece only. How was I able to smell a locked-in fragrance? There's a neat little trick where a busted Jōvan atomizer stem — the part that holds the nozzle — depresses a hair too far, which, when the bottle is turned upside down, releases dribs and drabs of liquid, rapidly enough to make use of.

This deep vintage formula, released only a year after the fragrance's debut, is basically a straight-up synthesis of North Vietnamese musk deer secretion via a material called Tonquitone 0613. I smell this version of Tonquitone as the main difference from the Signature Edition, which features the updated variant, Tonquitone 1206. This is a very subtle difference, but it's noticeable. T-0613 is very warm and smooth, with no hard edges, no intense civet-like rasp or urinous sharpness. T-1206 is sharper, more overtly animalic, and just a touch trickier to pull off around polite company. I find Musk Oil smells, well, oilier. It's a softer, rounder scent, with a brighter white floral component complementing the musk and less mint than the Signature Edition, but with more musk overall — smooth as a baby's bottom. I recommend finding Musk Oil, if only to experience the original American musk profile that defined the '70s and early '80s. Mind-bending stuff? Hardly. But well made, and a lot of fun.

Jōvan White Musk for Men (Coty)

In 1992, Jōvan was still coasting on revenue generated by its landmark sponsorship of the Rolling Stones' Tattoo You Tour, with old faithfuls Musk and Musk for Men comprising the flagship line, and Jōvan Sex Appeal fleshing out the brand portfolio. Founder Barry Shipp, a former Revlon rep turned entrepreneur, had repurchased Jōvan from Beecham in 1988 and renamed it Quintessence, which led to the eventual re-enlistment of Murray Moscona to create the White Musk range. If you were alive and sentient in 1992, as I was, you remember smelling White Musk everywhere. It's one of the biggest fragrances of the decade, right up there with CK One, L'Eau d'Issey, and Acqua di Giò, yet it's almost never mentioned, as if the world has forgotten it. Let's remember it.

I should point out that the White Musk of '92 was a different animal from the White Musk of today. I first smelled it in high school, and my sensitive teenage nose was almost offended by the sheer potency of the stuff. It opened with a blast of aldehydes and sour citrus, with a sort of coriander-martini-onion off-note that flashed and was gone. Then came an intense fruit salad of apples and melons atop a salty, aqueous white musk accord that smelled deep, fuzzy, fatty — Egyptian musk, translated by Jōvan. I didn't hate it, but it was a bit intense and musky for me. I revisited it in college, and it hadn't changed much, except that by then it reminded me of the '90s. I hadn't smelled it in years since, but I'd read that subsequent reformulations were dilutions of the original, and a light went on: maybe the cleaner, cheaper formula of White Musk for Men is wearable now.

Indeed it is. The fragrance still opens with that familiar blast of soapy noise, but it's toned way, way down. No more onion off-note. There are gentle rustlings of green apple, and much less melon, with just enough sweetness to temper the apple's sourness. After a while, the recognizable Jōvan white musk accord wells up, smelling just as musky but not nearly as salty; the fuzzy texture of the white musk now resembles a baby cotton ball more than a sable rug. White Musk is there, and then it's not. Then it's there again. It has a way of receding to a suggestion of a skin scent — with anosmia accounting for the stretches in which it's barely detectable — but it pops back up out of nowhere once or twice an hour and briefly reminds me that I'm wearing something. Longevity is good — musk fragrances are composed of massive molecules that last forever, and the molecules here last no fewer than ten hours — but projection is, like, three, four inches? Listen, this stuff smells better than the entire Zoologist range, so I'm not complaining.

Blue Jeans (Versace)

To clear up any lingering confusion: some bottles say "Versus Versace" while others just say "Versace." Both versions are identical. Neither version is indicative of a vintage, as the fragrance has waffled between the two monikers for decades.

Since its release in 1994, Blue Jeans has been controversial. I think the main issue is it's cheap. It's always been cheap. Versus was the downmarket Versace brand of the 1990s and 2000s. You could spend upwards of a hundred dollars on other Versace frags in department stores, but Versus was the discount section, the stuff you'd find in Filene's Basement instead of regular Filene's. By this point you can get 75 mls for under $20, which is enough to send Basenotes snobs running for the hills. Hell, you can buy a tester of Blue Jeans for $10 if you apply yourself. It's cheap.

You know what else is cheap? Youth Dew by Lauder. And you know what Blue Jeans conjures for me? The casual fougère version of Youth Dew. It's the cola accord. It hits me right from the atomizer, and remains with me for eight hours, during which I get pleasant wafts of a crisp, fresh, woody sweetness that isn't exactly gourmand, but perhaps gourmand adjacent. What idiot YouTubers refer to as "overwhelming lemon cleaner" actually just smells similar to the herbal-citrus component of something like the original (cane sugar) Coca-Cola in the green glass, or even the more piquant opening of Pepsi. It's a weird, cola-like fruitiness, and it's always been intentionally difficult to pin down. In Blue Jeans, it feels like that same generic cola freshness, but given extra lift via lavender, which makes it smell quite shimmery, smooth, and perfect for summer. It's very nice.

To my nose, the drydown of Blue Jeans is the most surprising part. There's a musky finish, and it's a familiar early '90s musk, but not something found in any "blue" frags from that era. Instead, it's cut from the cloth of Balenciaga pour Homme and Joint by Roccobarocco, smelling fatty and musty, a sub for a banned nitro-musk that feels solid nonetheless. I have no clue what it is, exactly, but I like it. It lends the base a very masculine and woody feel, without going overboard. Blue Jeans is relatively light and airy, and it takes extra sprays to give it serious presence, but even with light application, I get whiffs all day. There's an oriental twist in the heart that bridges the fizzy top to the musky base, a mélange of gentle kitchen spices and hints of things like anise and jasmine, but the blending obfuscates everything, which is fine. With something this laid back, I don't need textured complexity, nor do I need to prove anything to anyone, so a simple pleasantness suffices.

Blue Jeans does smell very '90s, but I think it actually leans more into the '90s of Balenciaga, Bogart Witness, and Red for Men than the '90s of ck One, L'Eau d'Issey, and Acqua di Giò. It smells sorta sweet, sorta musky, sorta citrusy, and kinda-sorta casual, but like Youth Dew before it, it possesses a human element, a carnal off note that lends it sexual currency. I don't find it to be overbearingly sweet, like many other people do, nor do I think it's a "freshie" in the normative sense of that term. This is a unique perfume, and I know few others like it, so I think it's something every serious collector should have, in either version. Good stuff, and great bottle.

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.