L'Anarchiste (Caron)

L'Anarchiste was released in the year 2000, a fitting end to the 1990s, and the year I graduated from high school. The decade was bookended with spiced-apple orientals on one end, things like Balenciaga PH, Aubusson PH, Boss Bottled, and Tommy, and on the other with weird, fresh-green curiosities like Green Valley, Snow, S.T. Dupont, and this offering from the relatively obscure house of Caron.

Its theme is like some of the fragrances mentioned. I get woody sweetness marinated in aldehydes and muted lavender, gauzy vetiver root, and a medley of aromatics (neroli, coriander, orange rind, apple, cinnamon, cedar, you get the idea). While the fragrance is soft and pleasant, its diffuse profile and carefully harmonized accords rob it of potency and backbone, making L'Anarchiste a bit nondescript. I'm glumly reminded of seasonal potpourri, the kind you see in those little bags labeled "Bright Autumn Day" or "Forest Fantasy." It's as subversive as a trip to Ikea. 

This has been compared to sixties aftershave on Badger & Blade. Meh. I don't know. Maybe, but how is that an endorsement? Rumor has it the formula in the copper bottle was denser, louder, and better articulated, with a sparkly mint top note absent from this recent reformulation. While likely true, I'm not interested in hunting down that version. The idea behind this one is uninspired for a Caron, and I vastly prefer Yatagan (1976) and Le Troisième Homme (1985).

Caron Pour un Homme Turns 80. Let's Celebrate 8 Decades Of Natural Simplicity.

Last summer I paused at a rickety, hand-made perfume stall situated along the main drag of a Renaissance fair in New York state. Every year at Tuxedo Park there's a sizable Renaissance fair, full of bad costumes, bad actors, greasy food (if you go, try the famous turkey legs), unsanitary wooden barrels of giant pickles you can get for $3 each, and stall after stall of overpriced Renaissance-themed junk. It's loads of fun.

The perfume stall was really just a bunch of essential oils and cheap alcohol dilutions of unremarkable essences, rose water, Florida water, whatever. On one side were the absolutes, and on the other were the candles. I gave a few absolutes a quick sniff. The citruses were faint and absurdly expensive. The cinnamon oil was disgusting (is there such a thing as cinnamon oil, really?), and the pine wood was just okay. I was intrigued by the faint green lavender oil, and it was the last thing I tried. It smelled beautiful. Lavender oil always smells good. As I set the vial down, I thought to myself with amusement that they might have just poured a few milliliters of Caron Pour un Homme in there and called it lavender oil. No one would be the wiser.

PuH turns eighty this year, and this was rightly celebrated yesterday in an informative write-up by Serguey Borisov on Fragrantica. As it turns out, the fragrance is comprised of both lavandula and lavender oil, at 41% of the former, and 31% of the latter, making the combined lavender oil content 72% of the formula. This is astounding. Yet I'm not surprised by the figures, because I'm on my fourth 4 oz bottle (I also have two smaller nineties vintage bottles) and every time I wear PuH, I'm mesmerized by its natural freshness and elegance. It is always a pleasure to wear.

The fact that this fragrance has endured for eight decades suggests that simplicity has an excellent lifespan. Think of all the complex seventies and eighties masculines and feminines that have bitten the dust over the years. Most of them would have been no older than thirty or thirty-five today, if their manufacturers had continued making them. The secret to Caron's success is its directness, a basic, straightforward lavender, coumarin, vanilla, and musk quartet that plays on through the years and never goes out of tune. Its materials are inexpensive and unlikely to be restricted anytime soon. This fragrance is built to last for several centuries at least.

It was rumored a few years ago that Tom Ford wears PuH to work, and considers it an inspiration, yet his own Lavender Palm failed to add anything to the narrative of classic lavender fougères. This is one of those unimprovable designs of fresh minty herbal notes on a smooth bed of sweetened coumarin, which can and should be had for thirty dollars a bottle. Despite its low price, it smells pricey and sophisticated. May PuH live on for another eighty years, and continue to inspire and enthrall noses the world over.

My Favorite Fragrances

My wardrobe, as most of my steady readers already know, is rather small, although admittedly creeping up in size as the months pass. Still, it clocks in at about thirty fragrances, modest by most standards in this community. I have numerous samples and a few minis that I'm not including in that number, and most of the Al-Rehab oils (with the exception of Silver) aren't being included either. I don't count what I don't wear, and the Al-Rehabs aren't regular wearers for me. I'd say I take Silver out for a spin once or twice every couple of months. The other three almost never get out, but I will be using Fruit and perhaps Secret Man more and more as temps get warmer and spring time approaches. Meanwhile I have a steady rotation of everything else, and among those are five favorites, some interesting things I thought I'd talk about here. These aren't in any numerical order of favorability. They simply fall into the same pool of being my prized acquisitions, fragrances that I will continue wearing for the rest of my days, or until they're discontinued and disappeared, god forbid.

Pour un Homme de Caron

This fragrance is probably, among all of them, the easiest to love and wear. Pour un Homme wasn't love at first sniff for me, however. When I first tried it, I thought I'd made the biggest blind-buy mistake of all time. Its lavender is so cold and astringent on top that it smells incredibly metallic straight out of the atomizer. But that harsh intro rapidly settles into a beautiful herbal accord that is both soft and affecting, thanks to a discreet, inedible vanilla base. My overall impression of PuH is that it's a fragrance for men who wish to impart confidence and trustworthiness to others around them (read: women). I've had a couple of really attractive women compliment me while wearing this one. The ladies who respond favorably to it are likely women you'll want to hang around as much as possible. They have really good taste. Lavender is unremittingly fresh and cool, a flower in the mint family that somehow became associated with traditional American males who chop wood in the autumn, drive pick-up trucks to work, and wear blue jeans on dates with their wives. Its pairing with vanilla makes him snuggly and sexy, too. I've been through a few four ounce bottles, but I'll be upgrading to a sixteen or twenty-five ouncer soon. Disregard whining about the reformulation of this fragrance. I have an older early nineties vintage, and the balace between cool lavender and musky vanilla is almost identical to what's in my brand-new bottle. The only notable difference is a slightly skankier musk note, which actually doesn't do PuH any favors (perhaps the reason it was changed in later batches). The lavender grade used twenty, thirty, and forty years ago cannot possibly be any better than what is currently used, because the newest bottles are as natural-smelling as lavender gets. Easily the greatest lavender fragrance of all time. Pour un Homme de Caron is truly a masterpiece of modern perfumery, and something I'll always reach for.

Kouros

YSL has a lot to answer for for allowing the evil empire L'Oreal to buy up its all-star perfumery division and reformulate the bulk of their classics, but thus far Kouros' structure and beauty remains intact. This is the only fragrance in my wardrobe that completely bends my mind whenever I put it on. Unlike Caron PuH, Kouros is unsettling and downright scary in its intensity and ruggedness. It isn't for the faint of heart, and it certainly isn't something to be used without a second thought. People have lost their jobs for wearing stuff half as powerful as this. I love it because it exhibits a timeless quality, despite its swagger, and never feels like an "eighties cologne" or anything like that. The brilliance of pairing citrus, costus, and wildflowers with a rich animalic base of incense and musk has never been duplicated in quite the same way, and that's what makes Kouros something I keep back-up bottles of - this stuff is, first and foremost, unique. Beautifully crafted, a true performer, and something few other guys are aware of nowadays, I'm glad to have it, and even gladder to wear it. I had a girlfriend who was a serious asshole, and she hated Kouros, which tells me that bad people will shy away from it. Well, maybe not, but one can hope. Many people think of Kouros as an autumn and winter fragrance. It has year-round versatility, more so than most masculines, because the powdery freshness it adopts in frigid temps becomes a honeyed herbal sweetness in the heat of July. I wear Kouros in August and September more than any other time of year, mainly because temps become a bit tamer, but still hover around eighty-five degrees, and the world becomes a place of burnt grass and yellow-tinged leaves. Deep down inside, somewhere in the core of every man's brain, a receptor for Kouros exists, and that nerve is Freud's Ego incarnate. 

Grey Flannel

I fondly remember the day I smelled Grey Flannel for the first time. It was damp and grey outside, and kind of a "here goes the neighborhood" moment for me, as there are few fragrances that are as intimidating as this one. I'd heard a lot about it on basenotes, and read some very encouraging things in the blogosphere, but something was holding me back. I'm not sure what it was. The notion that it's a "cheap" fragrance, combined with its odd, apothecary-styled bottle may have conspired against me. But I was getting braver and braver with each blind purchase, and like the thick-headed fool I am, I went ahead and bought a satcheled bottle from a friendly acquaintance who had a wonderful perfume shop in Milford, CT, now sadly closed. I got to my car and tried it on, and was simply blown away by its beauty. To use descriptors like "gorgeous," "ravishing," "unparalleled," or "stunning" does GF no justice. This is, quite simply, the answer to every green chypre lover's prayers. If you must have a green fragrance, and have very little money in the wardrobe budget, then wear just this one. There is nothing else a man needs. Try not to let the negative press GF has recently generated on Youtube discourage you from getting this and wearing it. The guys who lambast it and call it disgusting are using fresh, contemporary compositions as their main frame of reference, and that's a skewed way of forming an opinion of any classic fragrance. You can connect dots between a forty year-old scent and a brand-new one, but the truth is that anything capable of surviving three or four decades is capable of working on any sentient man or woman. It's just a matter of faith as to whether or not people enjoy smelling it on you. I feel as though Grey Flannel is so perfectly attuned to my soul that wearing anything else often feels flat-out wrong. It's roughly two dollars an ounce, made of a terrific blend of natural and synthetic materials, still has a generous dose of real oakmoss in its formula, and would sell for $150 if sold by Parfumerie Générale.

Cool Water

My love for Cool Water evolved gradually over the last twenty years. Back when I was in high school I really hated it. The older formula was quite thick, cloying, and polluted with unbalanced mint and synthetic lavender notes that threatened to give me a migraine every time I smelled them. It was the very definition of a cheeseball's lounge-lizard fragrance in my view. But then Cool Water changed hands, changed formulas, and changed my mind. Now I think it's the greatest fresh aromatic of all time. Context is key, though. As a high school kid, I had no idea Green Irish Tweed existed. I'd heard of Creed in passing, and remember as a senior in high school wondering where products for this weird "Creed" brand I kept hearing about could be found. I went to private school in Connecticut, what can I say. People here dig that kind of stuff. But eighteen year-old Bryan was unable to locate Creed, and I forgot about them until sometime after I graduated from college. Then I discovered Green Irish Tweed, and realized I'd been flying blind the whole time. Without GIT, Cool Water would not exist. And without CW, most mainstream masculine fragrances from 1990 onward would also not exist. Therefore, without GIT, masculine perfumery of the last twenty-seven years would still be stuck on variations of Drakkar Noir, which arguably makes Creed's masterpiece more than just a really good perfume. But I digress; CW clearly fit into the scheme of things once GIT was appreciated, and I realized that Pierre Bourdon's gorgeous creation for Davidoff  is nothing more than his EDT version of GIT. If Creed wouldn't flank, Bourdon would do it for them, and every time I wear CW I get down on my knees and thank Bourdon for allowing me to access his genius. CW is the reason Bourdon is my favorite perfumer, and I'm happy to report that the compliments I've gotten from this fragrance have been ongoing. Women young and old think it's great, and even my mother feels that "it's really wonderful." High praise, coming from her.

Paco Rabanne Pour Homme

I don't have much to say about Paco Rabanne because it's a fairly recent love affair. I was a little unsure of it when I first tried it. I really love its bright citrusy-green top note, but its transition into a woody coumarin heart accord sometimes seems a bit stilted and unnatural. Having worn it for a while now, Paco continuously wins me over with every subsequent wearing. It has gotten to the point where I see it as a viable alternative to Kouros, which is serious business. To potentially replace Kouros means you're playing in the top echelon, the big leagues, and that gets my attention. The thing that I love about Paco is that after I complete a wet shave and slap some Skin Bracer or Brut on my face, PRPH feels like the best thing to accompany the aftershave. It feels like the best thing for after a shave, period. Its woodiness gets a little creamy and soapy, and something about it reminds me of shaving cream (many other guys get the association also). It might be a little old-school, and maybe is not the first choice for a date, but when you think of suave French actors like Alain Delon and Richard Bohringer, it's easy to think they wore Paco Rabanne. I think it's unfair that Paco gets seated behind Azzaro Pour Homme in popular opinion these days. Yeah, Azzaro is great, but Paco came before, and Paco is just as great. Azzaro is by no means a replacement for anything in my collection, but discovering Paco meant discovering a new avenue for satisfying my fougère cravings in the unhappy event that Kouros gets destroyed beyond recognition. It's lovely, and a compliment-getter like everything above. I hope it stays just as good. 

One final  note: you may have noticed that I mention these fragrances as being compliment machines. I seem to put a lot of emphasis on the fact that women appreciate and talk about these fragrances when I wear them. You might think, "Why is he putting so much stock in that? Who cares what they think?" I could care less what women think of the above. The fact that women seem to love them is simply a bonus feature of loving them too. If pretty women like how you smell, it shouldn't be taken for granted. I've worn hundreds of fragrances, and of them, maybe twelve have garnered compliments. 

Is Price Correlative To Quality?

When we see movies and photos with Cary Grant, we automatically think, "he's a high-class guy." I mean, look at him, with the chiseled features and the perfectly-combed hair, the pressed suits and ties. He's long deceased and forgotten (even unknown) by many people in the current generation of twenty-somethings, but for those who have some culture and knowledge of classic films, he remains an unforgettable Hollywood icon. How many men aspired to achieve Grant-esque levels of suave masculinity in their youths? How many women secretly wished they could happen upon someone with his looks and his charm? With Grant, the Robert Palmer song lyric directly applies: "there's no tellin' where the money is." He just had IT, whatever IT was, and this IT-Factor propelled him from the circus to international stardom.

The only problem with this assessment of Mr. Grant is that he himself wished he could be Cary Grant. Someone once said to him, "Everyone would like to be Cary Grant," and he said, "So do I." Grant projected wealth and luxury to the masses, but the truth is that no one on earth is as smooth and unruffled as his screen persona was. Millions paid money to see the fiction of Grant move in silvery wisps across a wall, but would millions pay as much to live with him if they knew how few of those wisps could be found in Archibald Leach? Archibald, unlike Cary, blew his nose, got spinach stuck in his teeth, stunk up portions of the house after using the john, and put his pants on one leg at a time, just like the rest of humanity. I'm sure he was still a great guy, but the stuff of legend? Maybe not.

When it comes to the subject of this blog post, I often feel that the same rosy thinking Grant's fans applied to him gets applied to today's perfumes. We want to be romanced by our fragrances before we buy them. We want to think that a bigger financial investment in this romance will yield more satisfying returns in the long, leisurely relationship that ensues. We tend to believe the promises sold to us about the quality and appeal of a perfume if it comes from a place that exhibits a finer pedigree, a honed commercial image, and are angry if the illusion doesn't hold up in the long-haul. But like people, perfume is complicated. Just because a brand puts one in fancy clothing, with a cool tagline, and an exclusive price tag, doesn't mean the liquid inside matches these external trimmings, and this is simply a fact of life.

Tania Sanchez, in her review of Aspen by Coty, remarked that Aspen's successful smell was surprising, until you remember that the only appeal of the non-luxury brands is their smell. This comment is arguably the most insightful one in her book. We get caught up in the idea that perfumes with high prices MUST be better, because they cost more, but the reality is that price is in no way directly correlative to how good a perfume smells. This truth is evident in a simple analysis of several factors, ranging from whether or not a fragrance subjectively suits one's taste, to whether a brand objectively reaps as much profit from a perfume's formula as it does from its packaging and marketing. One must consider too whether or not a brand slaps a premium on its products because of the high costs of packaging and marketing alone. Many brands have done careful market studies on the best approach, and it wouldn't surprise me if they found fancy bottles are a worthier investment than fancy formulas.

Victoria at Bois de Jasmin weighed in on this a year ago:

"Last year the weekly French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur published an interesting article about perfume creation called La Guerre des Nez (The War of the Nose). It featured a candid interview with perfumers Dominique Ropion and Anne Flipo and provided a table outlining the price breakdown for an average prestige brand perfume. The revelation is that in a bottle of perfume that costs 100 euros, the value of the fragrance concentrate is only 1-1.50 euros, or about 2-3 dollars. The rest is for marketing and distribution: 19.6 euros for value added taxes, 36 euros for distribution, 25 euros for ads and so on. I know all too well the economics of making a perfume, but seeing this table was still a shock."

Between the marketing, distribution, taxes, ad campaigns (part of marketing but not all of it), costs for perfume creation is high, almost out of necessity, just to have competitive market presence. The laws of business have a pressure-cooker effect on the perfume industry, because seventy-five percent of a brand's appeal to customers is visual, not olfactory. It's the reason Chanel went out of their way to find a unique, unparalleled shade of "Bleu" for Bleu de Chanel. It's the reason Cartier went all nineteen-thirties nouveau with the bottle design for Roadster. It's the reason Creed wrapped bottles of Aventus in strands of black leather. Fragrances, like people, require fancy Cary Grant suits if their manufacturers want to justify raising individual unit costs by twenty or thirty bucks.

So what about little ol' Aspen? It has no fancy packaging, no hi-falutin' bottle, and no advertising/marketing campaign. Of course it had a little campaign once, back when it was a new fragrance, but we're talking a couple of print ads here. There was nothing outrageously far-reaching about the Aspen campaign, just a few words and pictures to make people aware that it exists. Someone over at Clive Christian could look at Quintessence/Coty and understandably think, "Aspen might smell okay, but it couldn't touch us." But that supposition is based on image. How much better do CC perfumes smell? Is five hundred dollars and fewer ounces per bottle justifiable in the face of something selling for five dollars an ounce? If you know anything about postmodern perfumery, you know that yes, Aspen smells very good. No, it doesn't blow all niche brands out of the water in terms of fragrance quality, but it's probably worth at least a little more than five dollars an ounce, in a just world. But with Aspen, you have to wonder, is it worth wearing over Cool Water and Green Irish Tweed? Or is it just a budget alternative to those fragrances? And does CC have a good reason to ignore the market model Coty uses in selling Aspen?

Yes, it's worth wearing Aspen over CW and GIT as a budget option, if and only if you feel it smells better, which makes it a completely subjective call, but a viable one. The other two, being more expensive perfumes, are understandably preferable to many men and women, but that doesn't mean their advantage over Aspen equates to Coty's frag being of lower quality. Aside from concentration and complexity, Aspen is not really a lower-quality product. Some may feel that the minty-herbal freshness in Aspen is unique enough to make it a preferable fragrance, especially with its strong outdoorsy vibe.

And CC's market model is the very thing Victoria illustrates above - high overhead. Clive Christian No.1 is "The World's Most Expensive Perfume" because its fugly bottle is plated in precious metals and studded with a diamond. Strip the thing down to Malle proportions (still pricey, but not the same), and suddenly the justification for the high premium is gone. I can't speak to the perfume, having never tried it, but I can say that whatever it smells like, it isn't being shouted about from roof tops, so spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on it seems aspirational at best. The fragrance oils used to perfume the contents of whatever bottle No.1 is sold in likely cost little more than a dollar. If Aspen's oils cost fifty cents, and CC's cost two dollars, that's not a big enough difference. And I doubt the cost of the extrait for CC surpasses a mark that would cut a one-thousand percent profit margin.

Over on basenotes, a member started a thread entitled, Cheap Fragrances Are Rarely The Best. Typical sort of nonsense one sees out of BN, but the responses to this thread suggests that even basenoters feel this is a false sentiment. To simply sum-up the OP's position, he feels that "in most cases, you get what you pay for." He goes on to say,

"Most fragrances that you could get for $50 or less are not really good quality. I'm not saying fragrances above $100 are all worth the price either, because that's the niche priceline and niche fragrances tend to make hate-or-love fragrances that are peculiar and challenge people to expand their tastes. So, even if you spend $250 on a niche fragrance, you may hate it. But the chances of finding something you really really like above $100 is much greater than at under $50."

Now, I could go on, and on, and on, and on about how dumb this paragraph is. I don't really know what this guy was smoking when he posted this, and he's a smart guy who has written many very interesting and informative comparison reviews in the past, on basenotes and Fragrantica, so I don't directly question his intelligence. However, I do question, with love of course, his sanity. I mean, really? Most fragrances for fifty dollars or less are not really good quality? This is a thesis he is going forward with?

You can buy any of the Caron masculines for less than forty dollars. All are of superior quality and composition, to the point where I use Pour un Homme as the continuing proof that a quality raw material (lavender oil) need not jack unit prices into the stratosphere if used to simple effect. There's a whole army of men who would argue that fragrances in the Pinaud range outclass things three and four times as expensive, and Pinauds usually sell at around eight bucks a bottle. Rive Gauche Pour Homme can be found online for well under forty dollars, and is by most accounts, including Luca Turin's, a true classic that is very well made, and smells divine. Kouros can be found in any formulation for around fifty dollars, and stands the test of time as one of the freshest, most beautiful masculine compositions ever made. LustandFury and Shamu1 recently called my attention to Taxi by Cofinluxe. When I wore Taxi to dinner with my family one weekend, my mother told me it smelled amazing, and she almost never thinks fragrances smell "amazing," let alone compliments them. Taxi is by Mark Buxton, and goes for about ten adjusted-for-inflation dollars these days. Rochas Moustache can be had for thirty-five dollars at brick and mortars around the country, and is steeped in classical tradition, ala Edmond Roudnitska and his wife Thèrèse. The very fact that Thèrèse had a direct hand in Moustache's creation makes it worth so much more than anything anyone could scribble on a price tag, yet it remains absurdly affordable in the formulation pictured on my blog (which is the one I own - I took that photo). The list goes on, and on, and on.

But people bit back on this. One guy wrote:

"Disagree. Prices change following sales. A presumed great scent can be sold at 100 dollars or euros today, and at 25 after a few months. Some scents launched without any advertisement -and sold in supermarkets and small stores- have a very low price and real good quality. Animal Oud sold at 10 euros/ 13 dollars, and it's impossible to find in stores the next day. You have to buy it immediately."

This comment supports what I said above, and what Tania Sanchez wrote in The Guide, i.e., inexpensive fragrances can smell good enough to be in very high demand, despite having low prices and no ad campaigns. Another guy said,

"I think it all comes down to whether one believes that an objective assessment of a fragrance's 'quality' can be made independently from whether one actually likes the fragrance or not. Certainly most buyers would like to think that when they spend more they get a higher quality product where there is greater attention to detail and less cost-cutting."

This illustrates my comments about the subjectivity of finding something "better" than something else, and how this variable throws a little monkey wrench into accurately gauging the effectiveness of discerning fragrance quality based blindly on price. And it's true, most buyers WOULD LIKE to think that they get a higher-quality product when they spend more, based on the notion that there is greater attention to the manufacturing details. This is questionable, and is a subject leveled more at the integrity of brand management than perfumers themselves. How many perfumers wanted to create a masterpiece, but were only given a budget with which to create something that is only "good"? And don't personal associations factor in with the enjoyment of any fragrance? Another guy answered that question:

"What it all boils down to is how well a scent resonates with you. If Pino Silvestre at $10 conjures up great memories of family vacations spent camping in the woods, it will be worth more to you than a $250 bottle of Invasion Barbare if you think it just smells like fancy shaving cream."

Still another guy wrote,

"While maybe I personally *expect* more from a fragrance that sells at a relatively high price point, I personally have found little correlation of price and whether I will enjoy a scent or not. I also should mention I have found (and own) more than my fair share of relatively inexpensive fragrances that I would put up against others selling for many, many times their price points. In short, I respectfully disagree with your premise. "In many cases you get what you pay for..." And in many more, you don't."

This brings up the Aspen analogy. Indeed, paying for an expensive perfume may give you what you paid for, but there's always the inexpensive perfume that gives you much more than you paid for, and how do you decide which purchase was wiser? Rationalizing often occurs, and I don't doubt that there are many Lutens buyers out there who are stuck with half a bottle of Arabie, wondering when and how they'll ever get through the remaining half-ounce. "Wear-ability" should factor into these considerations! And still another guy astutely said,

"Common sense says that you get what you pay for, and as a general rule, it's a relatively safe way to make an uneducated decision. Price and "best" are based on so many factors that have nothing to do with quality. Do a bit of homework and you'll find bests in all price points. Best, in this case, is meaningless since you've given no qualifier to explain the scale. Best for? Best at?"

Such a great point! What exactly is "best" being qualified with? Best against the worst? It's an arbitrary way of skewing the factors to favor your argument by saying that cheap fragrances are rarely the best, when you think the "best" and "worst" of something reflects in its price. Prices, after all, are related to demand, even in luxury goods. The OP responded:

"There are a lot of quality ones at low price; not the BEST ones, but good quality ones. For casual wearers, they're really good. But for people looking to build a collection, save your money for until you smell more fragrances."

This is an interesting sentiment. Let me tell you how interesting I find this - it sneaks something new into the dialogue, something nefarious, something otherwise unspoken among fragrance snobs online and within fragrance communities. It sneaks the notion that "aficionados" are wiser to build a large (read: huge) collection of pricier perfumes, at a leisurely pace, instead of bum-rushing into inexpensive things just because they're easily affordable, because this can taint your comprehension of perfume, and your stamina in having a perfume-collector's hobby.

Naturally there are some people who share this misguided and hilariously fallacious notion in the blogosphere. It's like saying you can only understand quality automobiles not by driving one, but by owning a garage full of them. But if you own one Corvette and drive it half the year, then you'll know a high-quality, relatively inexpensive car better than the guy who has a garage of three hundred expensive cars that he only gets to drive once a year at a steady rotation. The guy with the Corvette is likely to have a more finely-honed sense of quality because he has become intimately familiar with a shining example of it, a true standard, and seeks to know more about it (a profound person does not rise up, after all, but goes deeper), while the Jay Leno personality will have difficulty culling basic facts about his vehicles from memory, due to having so many, and will need to constantly back-track and try to re-evaluate the complicated world he's built around himself.

Building a collection is in no way reflective of how astutely one can appraise fragrances and fragrance quality, and the process of building a collection should not be based on trying to assemble higher price-points. If collection size were key to success in understanding fragrance quality, and also in maintaining stamina in writing about perfume, then this blog could not continue to exist, as I only have about thirty inexpensive perfumes in my wardrobe. Yet I've been blogging now for the better part of two years. And if assembling higher price-points were important, then every perfume enthusiast from here to Macau would either be broke, or very rich to begin with, because in actuality fragrance collections are based on what interests the collector, just like any other collection. If your interest is in affordable and what Luca Turin might call "lethally-effective" perfumes, as Shamu1's seems to be, then you will collect fragrances without regard to price point, and you will collect them based on wanting to wear them and enjoy them, not because you want to point to a large collection and pretend that this somehow ensures your longevity in the world of fragrance writing and appreciation.

If we're thinkers and perfume collectors, we can take two or three inexpensive perfumes and write volumes about them, without needing to defer to higher prices or a greater variety in our wardrobes. And if we're intelligent perfume writers, we don't need to ponder prices in assembling a collection and enjoying it. There are great things at every price-point, for every collector. Someone astutely mentioned that on basenotes:

"Where, in your original post, does it say best for building a collection? Are you talking about a collection of fragrances to wear, or do you mean a collection of fragrances to own as art pieces? Assuming one is building a collection of fragrances to wear, there absolutely are bests among the bargains."

To quote mister Leach, er, Grant: "Beware of snobbery; it is the unwelcome recognition of past failings." In a word, Amen.

Le Troisième Homme (Caron)

Perhaps the nicest thing about having 100 years of modern perfumery behind you is the ability to trace the thematic evolution of popular scent profiles. It's as easy to connect the dots between Skin Bracer, Caron Pour Homme, and Agua Lavanda Puig, as to follow the gilded path from Grey Flannel to anything "fresh" and "green" from the last twenty-five years. The fact that one could miss genuinely unique and distinguished entries is the only possible downside, as those rarest of rare diamonds-in-the-rough sometimes have an elusive way about them. Which brings me to Le Troisième Homme, Caron's "Third Man" in its esteemed masculine range. 

Released in 1985, this brilliant fougère stands aloof, safely away from a myriad of woody-fresh fougères of that era, although I contend it's loosely book-ended by Pierre Cardin Pour Monsieur cologne and Creed's Bois du Portugal, with Guerlain's Héritage further afield. All parallels aside, comparing Le Troisième Homme to anything misses the point: this fragrance is one of a kind, and its nose is undoubtedly the sort of slightly-eccentric woman who voluntarily reads Ada and Beautiful Losers and plays Fruchtchen! for fun.

Le Troisième Homme, created in a Givaudan laboratory by a Japanese perfumer named Akiko Kamei, takes a yuzu-tinged citrus and lavender note and enlivens it with a fresh, cool, almost-lactonic woody-floral accord of surprising strength and tenacity, thanks to synthetics that extend the lavender well past its sell-by date. Its herbal coolness is flanked by a judicious touch of oakmoss, and forms a subtle tension against a warm and musky base. Coriander lends a feral edge to clean jasmine and an anisic, ephemerally-camphorous base of cedar, vanilla, and sandalwood. 

Although its drydown is lovely (and dare I say it, sexy too), I'm more enamored with the fragrance's champagne-fizz top. It's comprised of nothing special, yet somehow smells new, unprecedented, successfully inventive. A standard arrangement of orange, lemon, lavender, and oakmoss is passable on paper, but in practice here it astonishes me, as it smells of nothing else, and smells very, very good. You could blame it on the angelic touch of aldehydes in the first five seconds, or perhaps the liqueur-like dulcitude of syrupy orange and lemon as they mingle with a tempered version of Pour un Homme's unmatched lavender. Whatever it is, it works, and the somewhat-questionable sheer musk that plagues other Caron masculines, Yatagan in particular, is right at home here as well. Nice work.

It took me four years to get around to trying this scent, due in no small part to the scattered reviews about it in online forums. I'd come close to a blind-buy, and then read more about it and get spooked. People have the most divergent opinions about Third Man, with comments ranging from "Tom Selleck with his shirt open," to "a great scent to wear on Easter, with its association of flowers and candies." Some say it's too feminine, too "pretty," while others claim it's almost unisex, but in some ways too masculine for the ladies to pull off. Still others suggest that it's completely unisex. Having finally worn it myself, I can say that I fall firmly into the last camp, finding LTH neither overtly masculine, nor overwhelmingly feminine, but somewhere in the middle, a terrain inhabited by everyone, from the girliest of girly-girls, to the butchest lesbians, the strongest archetypical silent types, to the classiest bisexual Hollywood players.

Ironically enough, virtually no one wears it. Their loss - I'm definitely keeping it in my rotation for the rest of my life.

My Spring Picks

May is the loveliest month. It's not too hot, sometimes even cool outside, with occasional showers coloring everything forty shades of green. And man oh man, do I like me some green - the greener the better.

This month I've used a steady rotation of all the greenest stuff in my arsenal. Mind you, I consider anything with heady florals and herbs to be green, as well as pure greens featuring citrus and grasses. The season for green is surprisingly short - by August I've switched to muskier fare. But it's beautiful while it lasts. The past two weeks have seen repeated applications of the following:

Tsar (Van Cleef & Arpels) - Simply an amazing fougère. Such gorgeous bergamot, lavender, artemisia, oakmoss, and many other dark, spicy green notes. It's more refreshing than a walk through a forest in the rain.

Sport Field (Adidas) - This is Creed Green Valley Lite. A pop of lemon and ginger, then hours of air conditioned coumarin playing the grassiest one-note I've ever smelled. Divine, and criminally affordable.

Silences (Jacomo) - Perfect for rainy days. Starts off with a punch of galbanum, and slips through the reeds into flowers and bouquets of cut stems. When I smell this on my shirt the day after, I totally understand the meaning of "true green" in perfumery. This is nature in a bottle.

Sung Homme (Alfred Sung) - A good spicy, soapy, and unerringly green chypre with the soul of a fresh fougère. Nice on Thursdays and Fridays when Irish Spring 2.0 is the desired effect.

Horizon (Guy Laroche) - Bright grapefruit, mint, lavender, crushed herbs, dihydromyrcenol, ambergris, and cedar, all bundled in a seaweedy aquamarine-colored bottle. I don't reach for it as often as the others, but I never regret it when I do. Another good one for the rain.

Brut (Helen of Troy) - White floral powder. Not good for high heat, but when there's still a cool breeze to cut the sun, Brut works wonders, especially with light application.

Pour un Homme de Caron (Caron) - I'm never really sure when to wear this scent. Its frigid lavender top is too cold for winter; the warm and powdery vanilla-musk base is too heavy for summer. Spring is a good season I suppose. Autumn too, but we have Yatagan for autumn. Anyway, you can't go wrong with hyper-realistic bouquets of French lavender. The fragrance for gentlemen, this stuff is.

Just as an aside: Am I the only one who finds Kristen Stewart attractive? My guy friends think she's mediocre, even unattractive. As a movie buff I'm familiar with all the current beautiful female stars, and there's certainly a slew of more traditionally-beautiful women coming out of Hollywood, but I dunno . . . Ms. Stewart has always captured my imagination in ways the other gals couldn't. Although I hate most of her films (except The Runaways), I often find myself watching them just to see how she moves through the frames. The girl's got something going on. Anyhoo . . . thanks for reading.

Yatagan (Caron)

Autumn is officially here, and with it comes a need for crisp, dry things. Goodbye, flacid summer aquatics and fougères, and goodbye humid, unforgiving heat. Time to bring in the hearty, multifaceted woody chypres. I love October because it's the one month of the year where I'm always guaranteed a beautiful moment in nature - whether it's the stunning New England foliage, the gorgeous clarity of 50° air, or the sight of leaves fluttering to the ground, something always wins me over. This is my favorite month.

I can think of no better chypre to wear in October than Caron's Yatagan. Named after the curved Turkish sword, this scent boasts the driest topnote structure I've ever sniffed. It's a wall of celery seed, wormwood, and petitgrain. There's plenty of press about how intense the celery note is, but it's really not that bad - Yatagan does have a prominent celery accord, but it passes quickly, after only a few seconds, and is rapidly replaced by artimesia. The artemisia is what becomes larger than life. The woodiness is stark and medicinal, and becomes the focal point of the scent. It's this wormwood that people confuse with celery seed, mainly because the distinct whiff of celery compliments it so well. Vincent Marcello's deftness of blending never ceases to amaze me.

Embedded in the heartnotes are green and floral elements, all of a certain ilk, one not sniffed elsewhere. Distinct notes of pine, geranium, hints of lavender, and patchouli waft from the wood. This pine isn't green and fresh, but old, layered on the forest floor, and burnt. This pine forest is on fire. Its oils are thick and lusty and full of evergreen's astringency, yet also battened down by an underlying impression of carbonized woods. Smelling it, I'm given a sense of olfactory bi-location, as all surrounding smells disappear, and are replaced with a feeling of standing in the middle of a black forest. The rosy sweetness of lavender mixed with cooling geranium flits in colorful shadows between the trees, and if the sun beats down on your skin when wearing it, Yatagan's composition can become quite herbal and fresh.

Caron has been accused of wrongful reformulations in recent years, and many of its most prized perfumes have suffered. The entire masculine line has been rehashed, with certain ingredients pared down or replaced. Once upon a time, Yatagan was full of deep, funky castoreum and pungent styrax. Today, I smell approximations of the animalic in the earthy density of the woods, but no distinct note of castoreum comes through. Nor does a full-fledged benzoin emerge - the overall effect of its ingredients does suggest a bit of "churchiness," but not frankincense. I'm not really too hung up on these changes, as I've never sniffed the original version of Yatagan. 

But what does bother me is an incorporation of sheer musk in the base. As the fragrance dries down and ages on my skin, a soft white glow tinges the edges of pine and patchouli. It's very gauzy, almost a white musk, but not quite. It's out of place here. It makes me feel like I'm sniffing a log cabin built on a foundation of sugar paper. The clean, semi-sweet mystery note suggests weakness in an otherwise extraordinary effort. I wonder, too, if I can attribute Yatagan's mediocre longevity to this note. If you get five hours out of it, you're lucky. I've had to re-apply Yatagan once or twice a day.

All faults aside, this offering from Caron stands as one of the boldest, most unique masculine fragrances to ever hit the shelves. I think it's perfect for a rural guy, or someone who wants to approximate that kind of machismo. It's also a good choice for the unconventional woman. Vive Octobre!

Pour un Homme (Caron)

When I smelled Pour un Homme for the first time, I wrinkled my nose, and almost returned the bottle. What the hell is that? I asked myself. Cold, not sweet, sorta-green, sorta-metallic, and altogether like nothing I'd ever smelled before. There was a urinous quality, too, like someone had pissed in a male sport aftershave. I sat there puzzled as this odd brew slowly resolved itself on my hand, and opened into the most gorgeous, natural-smelling lavender I'd ever met. Intrigued, I started my car and left the mall parking lot, certain now that the last thing I wanted to do was give this bottle back.

By the time I made it home, the lavender had receded, and a luminous, rich, earthy, and completely inedible vanilla had taken its place. The purple herbal luster of lavender hadn't entirely disappeared, and the urinous tinge to the base still appeared from time to time, but instead of smelling offensive, it was glorious. I smelled like I'd spent an afternoon in Provence running through the fields, and had finally returned to my chateau for a little cognac. It was wild and civilized, with an aura of something so simple and direct that it couldn't be ignored. Honestly, I felt like a changed man.

Pour un Homme is the fragrance for a conservative man. It's something a good woman gives to her man and makes him wear, even if it's against his wishes, because she knows it does him good (and she's right). It's the smell of someone who makes a home for his family, and protects it with love. It's a powerful essay on lavender, civet, vanilla, and musk, and it's 77 years old. Composed by Caron's founder, Ernest Daltroff, Pour un Homme was Daltroff's answer to the famous Guerlain masculine, Jicky. Unlike Jicky, Pour un Homme never found appeal with women - it was always man juice.