L'Oréal's first Creed release is Iris Debonair, and already the fragrance has positive buzz. This is a good sign. The big fear was that Creed's quality would take an irrevocable hit, and the magic would disappear. The truth is, their quality took some modicum of a hit when Kering Beauté took over back in October of 2023, and Absolu Aventus hit shelves. Sure, Absolu was a success and received favorably, but dig a little deeper into the feedback online, and you find that many weren't entirely sold. Even those who bought bottles and backup bottles acquiesced to the possibility that its lack of real ambergris tincture and top-dollar naturals was a problem, price factored in.
The BlackRock era signalled that this change was coming, with the 2021 release of Wind Flowers, the first and last Creed released in a Chanel-style bottle with artificial coloring in the liquid (weird to see, as Olivier Creed still had a significant hand in production), along with Viking Cologne and the Aventus oil. But Kering really shifted the output and was aggressive in its approach, releasing 13 fragrances in the span of 3 years, starting with Absolu, and including gamechangers like Carmina and Oud Zarian, the former of which was the start of a new stylistic approach for Creed in the form of an herbal rose-jam floral. After Carmina, this novel rose accord appeared in several feminines, including Fragraria, Eladaria, and Kering's final release in March of this year, Wild Vetiver.
To me, Wild Vetiver was an interesting release. Before I get into a summation of my personal opinion on the fragrance, I'll highlight how it was received more broadly: Creed Facebook groups and fragrance forums saw men everywhere expressing excitement that they were finally releasing a new vetiver, as Creed has always released pleasing vetivers, starting with Vétiver '48, and including the unicorn Bayrhum-Vetiver, Original Vetiver, and Vetiver Geranium. The anticipation was that Wild Vetiver would adopt the somewhat less natural Creed style, but still smell green and fresh and utterly fantastic.
You could hear the bottom fall out when it landed. At first, guys were in denial, saying they loved it, and it was their new favorite. But the enthusiasm faded quickly, and I started reading comments like, "I like this, don't get me wrong, but I like it better on my wife." Carmina's signature rose had returned yet again, this time ensconced in sugar-dusted green-grassy accords, with only the faintest whisper of any actual vetiver at the 6-hour mark of the far drydown. By June, most guys were reluctantly posting stuff like, "I appreciate Wild Vetiver, but it isn't for me." The fragrance that was anticipated to be a new green masculine megahit turned out to be a feminine rose with a few masculine flourishes to appeal to the "unisex" market that Kering was determined to corner.
I view Wild Vetiver as frustrating on two fronts. The first: it smells like a greener rehash of Eladaria. The Carmina rose was spliced with a bit of Eladaria's pink peony and enlivened with peppery citrus, then made a little dense with "modern amber" in the mid, which to me was rather uncomfortably akin to what a Yankee Candle does when it wants to smell "outdoorsy." For a closer reference, consider the myriad designer offerings of the last ten years that attempt "green" while hewing to some form of nuclear woody amber for girth and longevity. This works fine in a $50 fragrance like Lacoste's reissued Original, which plays the same tune at a much more forgivable price-point, but when you're tacking another zero on the tag, one expects a little more. Wild Vetiver signalled to me that Creed's new approach is to take many very strong and expensive-smelling synthetics, and arrange them into perfumes anyone else could make if they could afford to use that many top-shelf synthetics. It's no longer about artistry. It's all commercial sophistry.
The second: Wild Vetiver is a green fragrance, yes. Creed created a green fragrance in 1999 that outdoes all other green fragrances of the past fifty years, and it was called Green Valley. Fans have held out hope that one of these new owners would reissue it under a new name. Wild Vetiver is not that reissue. This is a cope on my part, of course. I could lose the delusion and simply embrace the present, but I'm bitter. Green Valley is a masterpiece. It's better than Green Irish Tweed. Better by miles than Aventus. It's even better than Original Vetiver, although in terms of vibe, OV is closest. I can understand not reissuing Green Valley as itself, simply by virtue of not having two fragrances with "green" in the name, but give it another new A.I.-generated name, and pretend you created it. I don't care if you strip out 90% of the naturals, remove the ambergris base, and paste in the new nuclear post-Covid synthetics. Go ahead, do it. I'll still love you for bringing Green Valley back from the dead. The foibles of the past decade would be forgiven.
But they didn't do that. Kering's farewell shot was Wild Vetiver, and I had smelled Carmina's rose a few times before, so encountering it in Wild Vetiver didn't thrill me. With that said, I recognize something now that Armaf also spotted, probably years ago: it's even easier to clone a Creed these days. When you don't have layers of natural tinctures and real ambergris to contend with, the challenge changes completely. At this point, Armaf can utilize the newer multi-tier GC/LC-MS technology to dissect the exact structure of a Creed, and once the list of naturals and synthetics is comprised, they can do a bang-up job of simply buying and using them to basically carbon-copy the fragrance and release it at a tenth of the price. Gone are the days when Creed would source small-farm oils for things like petitgrain, neroli, juniper berry. Now it's just any designer-grade natural oil of modest quality, utterly attainable by the likes of Armaf. And they show up in Club de Nuit Élite's ingredients list, which cites several naturals, including juniper and cedar oils.
Armaf has also included the Carmina rose, virtually identical to the accord in Carmina. But here, one should understand the truth: Kering stole the rose from Armaf. Club de Nuit Intense for women contains that rose, and it was released years before Carmina. Creed added its accents of lavender oil and orange marmalade, and Armaf has since adopted those and tucked them into the rose found in Élite. I will say that the main difference between Wild Vetiver and Élite, to my nose, is that the rose in the latter does not possess the peony angle of the rose in the former. Élite hews to Carmina more than Eladaria. Armaf's fragrance opens with a piquant citrus in the same vein as Wild Vetiver, but perhaps a touch greener and less spicy, which I think is a plus. The lack of heavy-handed pepper tones down the Yankee Candle association. The citrus is soft and fresh, and the first five minutes of Élite are pleasantly green and masculine in feel.
The rose accord steps forward fairly quickly, and while it isn't shy, it also isn't as central as in Wild Vetiver, and manages to share the olfactory space with subtle wafts of grassy tones, black currant, a pleasant geranium leaf that gives a little eucalyptus nuance, a bit of piney juniper berry, and Armaf's signature black ambergris reconstruction, which I appreciate for its technical precision beyond just slapping Ambroxan into the mix. The marine quality is more pronounced in Élite than it is in Wild Vetiver, but Armaf still remained true to the Creed's sugar-dusted woody amber. I say "dusted" because this isn't a dessert-cart amber, nor was it one in the Creed. It's just a bit of a sweetness to complement the woody, patchouli-adjacent intensity of modern amber molecules. I also feel some mineralic nuances, and just as I did with Wild Vetiver, I feel like Élite is expressing the idea of tasting a sweet after a picnic lunch in a field of wild roses.
And here is where Armaf is living its best life: Élite does something better than the Creed it emulates by employing a true wild rose note. If you're familiar with wild roses, Rosa rugosa, you know that they possess a distinctly lemony freshness that undergirds the more typical rosy richness. This citrus quality coalesces with the rosy sweetness into something uniquely green and fresh, which then meets with the leaves and stem of the plant to make sniffing it a religious experience. If you want to smell this in all its glory, try Zoologist's Dragonfly Edition 2021, which is a deep meditation on the wild rose. I'm familiar with them because my partner's father grows them in his garden in Maine. The flower is also found in Armaf's Club de Nuit Élite, and my goodness, what an upgrade. Why Kering didn't use this same rose in Wild Vetiver is beyond me, because if they had, my opinion of it would've been different. Instead, I find it here in a $60 fragrance, and for once, Armaf has not only outdone Creed in general execution, but outsmarted them in their choice of notes. Those who like Wild Vetiver might like it less after smelling Élite.
And then there's the last thing, which is that Wild Vetiver doesn't do much with vetiver. Yes, you can sense some vetiver in the base, and it shows up around hour 6, like I said earlier. But in Élite, there are subtle flickers of vetiver all throughout the fragrance evolution. Élite isn't a vetiver bomb either, but it doesn't claim to be a vetiver fragrance anyway, so it doesn't matter. That it uses more vetiver than its template says something about the level of intelligence employed in the perfume's creation. I'm no lover of vetiver, so I'm perfectly happy to have it play a low-key supporting role, superseded by other things, and Armaf's fragrance allows it to exist with clarity without dominating. Very nice. As "meh" as I was with Wild Vetiver, I find myself liking Club de Nuit Élite quite a bit more. For one thing, it smells like a Kering Creed, and at no point does it smell like a Club de Nuit fragrance from the 2010s. The quality here is amazing. And for another, Élite simply smells better than Wild Vetiver, using the same high-end synthetics to achieve a smarter and dare I say greener fragrance. Two thumbs up for this stuff, and well done, Armaf.