Chelsea Flowers (Bond no.9)

This is the first Bond fragrance I've ever owned a full bottle of. I bought it blind, on the premise that it gets compared to Creed Spring Flower, and it generally gets positive reviews. It's also one of Bond's "foundational" offerings, released as part of their original lineup in 2003. I bought the 3.3 oz bottle for a little less than half of what Bond wants for it, so not a terrible deal. And I needed to know what Bond can do with a fruity-floral. A good brand will take an otherwise staid floral and raise it to new heights, so I was hoping to smell this in CF.

What I got was a gorgeously-packaged perfume that smells 90% like Tommy Girl by Tommy Hilfiger. What happens in the other 10%? Let me start with the notes - there's a fleeting chamomile tea note in the opening, instead of Tommy Girl's green tea, and no blackcurrant note. The lack of blackcurrant is the most obvious difference, as Hilfiger's scent has distinct elements of currant and cassis leaf throughout its evolution. There are fruity notes in CF, but I can't name them. They smell like a berry of some sort, and maybe a peachy-melon thing, as they're quite sweet.

Another difference is the ingredient quality. Tommy Girl's price averages at $50. What you get for that money is a bright and somewhat sweet tea floral that is just dry and dusky enough to be unisex. Its gender barrier is broken by an aquatic overtone, which refocuses the theme on freshness, rather than florals. The drawback is that TG smells pretty synthetic. Chelsea Flowers is also synthetic, but the quality of its synthetics is fully one notch higher than those used in the Hilfiger. Imagine if Chanel did Tommy Girl instead of Estée Lauder, and that's pretty much the quality of Chelsea Flowers. That sounds bad when you first read it, I know. But read on.

Chelsea Flowers smells satisfyingly good. It's a weird good, but good nonetheless. Its chamomile is tart and short-lived, and transitions into a very abstract white floral accord, with all the flowers blended into one living bloom, which occasionally smells greener and a bit more realistic than I thought it could. Its aquatic overlay is virtually identical to Tommy Girl's, but done with an aroma chemical that seems a touch more delicate and "dewy." There's a soapy freshness to it, and I've been told I smell like I just came out of the shower an hour after applying Chelsea Flowers. It oscillates between smelling like shampoo, and a serious study in floral abstraction. Laurent Le Guernec gave Bond its 1990s-style fresh floral, and they ran with it.

Price is an issue here. As good as it smells, it doesn't smell grey market Creed good. Spending what I spent on this is a ripoff, although not by a ton. It would be fairly priced at about $110. Chanel would charge that much, and like I said, this smells like a Chanel. I happen to think Chanel's prices are fair. But $300 from Bond? Well, you decide, folks. It's not 2003 anymore, and the brand has at least 900 floral perfumes out of their 1500 perfume lineup. So it's not like this is the only stop on the ride. But my main takeaway is that the packaging is stunning, the perfume is quite good for what it is, with good longevity and decent throw, and it's just as fresh and unisex as Tommy Girl, if Tommy Girl were taken to the next level. Is it what I hoped it would be? No, I wanted a variation of Creed's Spring Flower. But if you like this kind of thing, it's worth a sniff.

Chez Bond (Bond no.9)

Reviewing a fragrance that mirrors another so closely can feel redundant, yet here we are. Chez Bond, a fresh-green fougère, bears an uncanny resemblance to Green Irish Tweed, so I won’t waste time drawing endless comparisons that others have already made. What I will say is this: Chez Bond’s note pyramid? A bit of a sham.

Bond No. 9 relies heavily on synthetic ingredients, with little to no detectable natural materials. Despite claims of tea absolute and sandalwood oil, I remain unconvinced. And frankly, I’m not inclined to sift through Givaudan’s chemical catalog to identify which pricey compounds mimic those naturals. Let’s just say Chez Bond offers up about three distinct notes, only two of which are truly perceptible, and none feel particularly authentic. Yet somehow, it still manages to smell lovely, albeit in a very unoriginal way.

The intriguing part about Chez Bond is its ambition; it tries to fill shoes too large to fit. Like Cool Water, Green Irish Tweed is beyond improvement. It’s a flawless composition of green apple, lemon verbena, iris, violet, violet leaf, esters, sandalwood, and ambergris. Bond’s version, however, highlights just how masterfully Creed blends naturals with synthetics. Green Irish Tweed feels rich, dimensional, alive. It radiates from the skin and never wears out. The interplay of violet and woody green apple acidity atop a smooth Ambroxan base creates a dynamic beauty that Chez Bond simply doesn’t match. Creed’s synthesis of esters with naturals offers depth; Bond’s fragrance, leaning fully into synthetics, lacks that richness.

Chez Bond opens with a sweet violet note mixed with a minty dihydromyrcenol accord reminiscent of Quintessence’s Aspen. This bright beginning clings to the skin for about ninety minutes before settling into a creamy sandalwood and tea base. The violet never really fades, tinting the entire composition with its sweetness, while the tea note blends into the sandalwood until it almost vanishes. This creamy-sweet (rather than green) dry down carries the scent for hours, lingering through a moderate day with around nine hours of wear, though it might fade faster in warmer conditions.

Ultimately, Chez Bond is Bond No. 9 at its simplest; a tight, synthetic structure that tries to replicate the breezy expansiveness of its rivals. It succeeds to a point: it smells good. But it’s a shadow of its predecessor, a pleasant but ultimately unnecessary alternative. If you’re trying to save a few dollars and still want that Creed effect, Cool Water has you covered. Otherwise, just wear Green Irish Tweed and move on.

Chinatown (Bond no.9)

Aurelien Guichard's numerous accomplishments as a perfumer are difficult to discuss without bringing up two of his "masterpieces" - Chinatown, and the reformulation of Visa by Robert Piguet. Both are chypres overlaid with oriental accords, and both emit judicious rays of peachy light through dense arrangements of flowers and precious woods. Of the two, I've only worn Chinatown, and cannot comment from a personal perspective on Visa, but I do know that Guichard understands that bright fruity notes work especially well when they are given something substantial to shine through.

I approached Chinatown with some uncharacteristically specific hopes. I hoped it would contain an opalescent white floral accord. And it does. I hoped it would contain at least one interesting citrus note. And it does. I hoped it would have a bright holographic peach, if even for a moment. And it doesn't. I hoped it would exhibit a notable trajectory from an opening of bright, peachy florals, to the odd stewed-fruit note Luca Turin likened to Edmond Roudnitska's Prunol base, to what finally becomes a rich chypre foundation of gussied labdanum and oakmoss, with sheer sandalwood and vanilla adding oriental textures to everything. And . . . it doesn't do any of that at all. Herein lies the rub for me and Chinatown; I cannot expect perfumes to perform for me exclusively, but when their reputations precede them, and my knowledge of what makes a modern masterpiece braces itself for impact with virgin territory, the hope is that the little things, like bright floral and peach notes, will be dispensable, and the big things, like a drydown trajectory into definitive chypre and oriental stages, will be very much accounted for. Imagine my disappointment when I found that Chinatown lacks that which I desire most, and has in spades the things I'm not all in for. What's the matter with this perfume? What's the matter with me? Where's our chemistry, the tango I thought we'd do right from the start?

The first issue is the opening. Chinatown's interesting citrus note is a very thick, waxy bergamot and lemon accord. To my nose it's mostly synthetic bergamot. I don't know if it's just one layer too many for this composition, with a very light note struggling against a tsunami of darker, heavier base notes, or if it's simply a matter of Guichard choosing this specific type of bergamot for Chinatown, but something here is troublesome. I can't bring myself to fully enjoy its unusual "waxy"-type of cleanness. Maybe memories of my years as a janitor in an elementary school have something to do with that. All that disgusting floor wax, and those disgusting ZEP cleaning products, with their despicable fake-citrus odorants. I don't know what it is, but I'm not crazy about it, and that's really all I can say. Moving on.

The second issue is the peach note(s). There isn't a true peach in this fragrance. But there is peach blossom. There is also a very pretty melange of white flowers, with the headiness of tuberose and gardenia balanced by peony's freshness, all with peach blossom acting as the sweet fulcrum into the grandiloquence of Chinatown's kinda-sorta gourmandish, woody base. It's a well-executed floral element that somehow disappoints me by not being fruity enough. I want a succulent peach note! And I want it to be hyper-realistic for at least two or three minutes on skin! Why isn't it in here?

It's supposed to be bright and clean at first, and then rapidly subside into a slow-burning sweetness that smolders through cardamom, sandalwood, and patchouli. Instead it never appears at all, but the smoldering effect of something sweetly floral - i.e., peach blossom - arrives within five minutes after application, prefabricated and ready-made but lacking precedence and true context. It's like one of those artificial fireplaces that you plug in - a fire without the spark. Nevertheless, like the electric fire, it's there, it's very pretty, and I get partial satisfaction in this regard. Better to have less than nothing at all. But there could have been a little more of a deliberate reference point for the sweetness in Chinatown's dense (but oddly under-worked) heart. In fine art, particularly in painting, when artists work with a limited palette of mostly monochrome grey, splashes of color can only add to visual effect by inhabiting two opposite points in the composition. You never want your red, or your green, or your yellow to just sit there all alone in one corner of the canvas. It should have at least a dab of itself elsewhere. The peach blossom in Chinatown is like a color floating aimlessly on a canvas. It's striking, but separate from the image, and bears no relationship to it.

The third issue, and the greatest issue for me, is that of Chinatown's trajectory, or lack thereof. There's that waxy bergamot up top for sixty seconds on skin. Then, the floral accord, very nice, a touch plasticky and indolic, but still, very nice, with notable peach blossom. Just fine. And then . . . simply a linear chypre gesture of slightly funky labdanum, a resinous faux-moss base, mostly derived from the rosy interplay of guaiac wood against brisk patchouli and cedar notes, with the piquancy of cardamom connecting this uninteresting point to everything that came before. And it smells very flat. Disturbingly flat, actually, with images of vinyl records and someone's forgotten plastic raincoat left lying around somewhere. There's sweetness, there's spice, there's some woodsy notes, but they're all compressed into an inert accord that smells much too synthetic and much too contrived to be considered the stuff of greatness. I wish I could say otherwise, but all that comes to mind in Chinatown's drydown are those dreadful Yankee Candles. That's right folks, this fragrance reminds me of Yankee Candles.

This isn't the first time this has happened to me with Bond no.9. Andy Warhol Lexington Avenue gave me a serious Yankee Candle vibe as well. But Lexington Avenue also had a very festive feeling to it, and its vibe was a bit more occasion-specific (Thanksgiving gatherings, Christmas parties), whereas Chinatown comes across as being woefully nondescript. The synthetic nature of its base accord detracts from whatever impact its composition may have had on my imagination, and the only thing it alludes to is a candle, but I'm speaking subjectively here. I can understand how other people would find more parallels between this perfume and classical chypres of yesteryear, Thierry Mugler's more recent creations, and even other interesting Bond perfumes. People have said that Chinatown and Lexington Avenue are related, so I may have done well in trying Lexington first and following it up with this perfume. At least I know what's happening with the brand's creative mentality toward postmodern chypres. They want things to be sweet, sticky, brightly-lit, but through the recklessly coated lens of patchouli and synthetic wood notes. The synthetic feel is deliberate, part of the fun. But I'm not having all that much fun.

I think people gravitate toward certain "feels" in their perfumes, and the Bond "feel" is a bit more synthetic, a little more "perfumey" and chic, in the most pleasant, fun-filled sense of the word. I haven't tried enough Bonds to say that with true authority, but it's my impression based on the two I have encountered, and this impression is, for lack of a better word, unimpressive. Creed is for people who want realism integrated into staid, gentlemanly compositions that rarely smile, but still know how to light up a room. There's nothing chic about Creed, as the brand takes itself far too seriously for that. It's kind of interesting to think that if Creed were to try to do Chinatown, they might also fall short of my expectations, but in the inverse way - good drydown proportions, nice movement, a few lucid notes, but no debauched vinyl-plasticky sneer for fun. I'm just difficult enough as a person to want both to intersect and become a sum far greater than its two parts could ever hope to be, and that's why I'll keep trying with Bond. I do not for one second think that Chinatown is a masterpiece, a "treasure in a beautiful bottle," and instead feel that it is a very mediocre perfume by a man who misjudged the charm of overtly synthetic materials. But Bond has so many fragrances. There must be one to love right around the corner.

Andy Warhol Lexington Avenue (Bond no.9)

Franco Scalamandré's "Zebras" wallpaper, seen in the iconic and now-defunct restaurant "Gino" on Lexington near Sixty-First Street.

This fragrance is one of the prettier things I've worn, tucked neatly between the usual designer fare and some better scents (Creed, Guerlain). Let me say this about Bond: their image is all that stands between me and fandom. I've heard all the horror stories about their lawyers ganging up on a poor little indie niche label for daring to use the apparently-trademarked word "peace" in a fragrance name. I've read the possibly-scurrilous accounts of Laurice Rahmé's allegedly racist ways with customers and employees (anyone need a light bulb changed?), although the word "hearsay" keeps popping into my head whenever I ponder these tales. It isn't their bad rep, but rather their entire design aesthetic that holds me at arm's length and prevents me from purchasing. The sometimes tacky names. The downright awful bottles. The gaudy colors. It's all a major turn-off.

In fairness, other brands are guilty of the same crimes. I mean, seriously now, Royal Water? Really? Doesn't get more vulgar than that, even for Creed. And Guerlain's bottles go down in history as some of the ugliest things ever placed within the immediate vicinity of Catherine Deneuve. I once saw a vintage container for Derby - two Tylenol and several eye drops later, I was still traumatized. So it's not like the external design sensibilities are an anomaly. One could reasonably argue that Bond's bottles are beautiful, or at least easy on the eyes. I'd agree that their shape isn't so bad, but still get queasy at the idea of a star-like thing showing up in my luggage. And the graphics are generally abysmal. Lexington Avenue's "boots 'n shoes" theme is no exception. This isn't class, this isn't style, this isn't chic. This is just wrong.

Fortunately, the fragrance is oh-so right. It opens with a lovely lemon-citrus accord, which swiftly shimmers into crisp star anise and cypress, a sweet, camphoraceous, green, and utterly delightful feeling. They maxed out the budget on those top notes, allowing for natural materials and top-shelf synthetics to provide extra "pop" and depth. This simple two-note opening gradually melts into a warm and spicy patchouli heart, full of pink pepper's fruitiness, cardamom's zinginess, an amber touched by fleeting hints of peach and vanilla. Different people smell it all differently, and come away with various interpretations, but I smell the archetypical Christmas candle here. Even after it fades into a soft melange of precious woods, Lexington feels rich and cozy. Applied judiciously, and you get a sexy-by-the-fire come-hither effect. Overdose it, and you may as well wear the word Yankee somewhere on yourself and carry a wick. 

Despite the ingredient quality, the excellent note separation (all things accounted for, but working together successfully on the bigger picture), and the cheerful vibe, there's still something a tad off-pitch here. It's a bit too much, like the olfactory equivalent of Phil Spector's famous "Wall of Sound." If Creed did Lexingtin, it would smell a little more transparent, a touch weaker, and probably just a few hairs better. They'd likely use slightly better ingredients, or perhaps just fewer synthetics. If Guerlain did it, the citrus top would be more vibrant by a few shades. Still, it's good stuff, and something to look for when the holidays draw near, which they're doing as I write.