Green Tea (Alyssa Ashley)

For some unknown reason, the 1990s was the decade of tea fragrances. Jean-Claude Ellena's iconic Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert (1992) famously combined ionone beta with hedione to form the scent of green tea, and it was a smash hit. Bulgari's scent was elegant and refined, but its imitators were often less so. Alyssa Ashley's Green Tea Essence (release date unknown) was born sometime after Arden's Green Tea (1999), but before the 2000s ozonic trend took off. Basenotes suggests 2002; Fragrantica says 2003. I say it was probably released between 2000 and 2002. Why? It looks and smells like it. 

It's odd, getting old. I remember thinking as a teenager in the late nineties and early 2000s that the world was full of "fresh" fragrances that blew old school frags out of the water. Think CK One overtaking Paco Rabanne Pour Homme. Now, as an adult, when I smell a nineties or pre-2003 fragrance, I'm often struck by how weird "fresh" was back then. Millennium freshness isn't 2020s freshness; it's a different animal. Imagine Christmas Shopping in a mall in 2002 and asking the clerk to smell the latest "fresh and clean" scent, and being handed a tester of Alyssa Ashley's Green Tea Essence. You spray it, and your nose is blasted by a searing flash of lemon and ginger, blended in a cloud of cheap aldehydes for a "fizzy" effect. Frigid, bitter, biting, unfriendly. 

This might sound conventional for a fresh tea scent, and it is, to a certain degree. But when the top notes fade off, are you left with a clean shower gel aquatic thing? No, this is 2002. What remains on your skin is the smell of stale water with an algae-like greenness and a whisper of citrus, a lemon wedge floating in a mug. The camphor quality of the ginger lingers without any of its aroma, and it's almost like you're wearing pond water. It's green, it's a little metallic (thanks to a thin lavender note), it smells sort of like tea, but also like a chlorinated swimming pool. It's devoid of sweetness and vaguely sophisticated. You ask your shopping buddy: Doesn't everyone wear tea things these days? Yes? I'll take it. 

This detached rendition of green tea is spa-like and aromatherapeutic, without actually offering any clear floral or woody notes, which is rather rare. Tea, citrus, a hint of lavender, and a super sheer jasmine in the barely-there base, and that's it. It's a prototypical late nineties "fresh" fragrance concept that somehow survived. Alyssa Ashley no longer calls it "Green Tea Essence," and the redesigned box and bottle look even more basic without the unisex symbol, but the scent hasn't been tampered with. It takes me back to my salad-eating college days. Three ounces goes for six bucks on eBay. 

Vanilla (Alyssa Ashley)

It took me several hours to write this post, not because of writer's block or editorial peccadillos, but for the simple and stupid reason that Blogger has inexplicably made the once speedy act of uploading desktop jpeg images an incredible technical hassle. It's one in which I'm forced to upload an image that I can't see on the page unless I do a deep plunge into my Google image archive and manually select the photo of choice to get it to show up on the post. Failure to do this means you see a minus symbol in a grey circle, not the desired image. Images seem to be Blogger's main weakness, and I hope they get it together, because this has been going on for years. 

The picture I shed blood for is of a full-color 1990 magazine print ad for Alyssa Ashley's Vanilla eau de toilette, released the same year to little fanfare. Alyssa Ashley claims to be the daughter of Italian Surrealist artist Enrico Donati, that she was born in 1968 (yet she's only 50), and with an autobiographical timeline that doesn't quite jive, lays claim to a 1970s heritage that has carried on to present day. She's managed to alter the time-space continuum by aging at a rate far slower than the rest of us, and she's also created a simple but effective fragrance that I think most red-blooded testosterone-laden men could use as a wetshaver scent. Vanilla doesn't smell so much like its namesake as it does canned vanilla frosting. It's a vanilla flavor bomb. 

The top is unadulterated cotton candy. An ethyl maltol sucker punch, like my visage is buried, ears deep, in a pillow of frosty sucre. Then it mellows into the decadent aroma of freshly-baked yellow cake. This rich gateau quality fortifies its insulin-deprived state with a comforting vanilla, its subtleties replete with the buttery accents that attend the finest mock creams. Longevity and projection are pretty great, weighing in at eight hours and several feet with minimal application. This sounds like it's a woman's world, but there are so few vanilla fragrances for wetshavers that it's exactly what men need in their arsenal. I find it unisex, even leaning a bit masculine, and look forward to wearing it post-scratch. Note: for longevity, get the edt, not the cologne.