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| 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.