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| 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.