Laguna (Salvador Dali/Cofinluxe)

I'm becoming a fan of Mark Buxton. In the autumn of last year I got acquainted with Taxi, and thought it was excellent but hampered by its genre. I recently got my hands on an ounce of Laguna, the infamous 1991 fruity-floral that Buxton crafted for the partnership of The Salvador Dali Foundation and Cofinluxe, and my heart went all a-twitter when it touched my nose. There are times when fragrances generate instant love, and my first wearing of Laguna was one of them. This is fine stuff, the work of a man who takes pride in using cheap materials and alchemically transforming them into pricelessly classy fragrances. It's also historically important: Laguna was one of the first nineties fragrances to embrace the sweet-aquatic theme, employing fruit notes, lily-of-the-valley, and cleverly-disguised dihydromyrcenol to convey a languidly narcotic floral in a fresh, tropical style. The result is something brilliant and original. Nothing else smells quite like it.

The name Laguna refers to any one of several exotic locations (take your pick between Hong Kong, Brazil, Australia, Mexico, the Philippines), but I think it's an alteration of the word Lagoon. A Lagoon is a small body of water adjacent to the sea, with demarcations of coral reefs and small islands. Hearing Laguna transports my imagination to a little white beach, its coastline overflowing with green mosses and colorful flowers that dip their tendrils into sapphire waters. Indeed, the perfume conjures this scene, with a brief but rewardingly realistic pineapple-lemon-coconut accord, followed by a peachy lily, iris, and jasmine heart. The florals are blended, and almost flattened into a slick mess, but an airiness in the structure prevents it from smelling cheap. Then a curious thing: sweet but inedible vanilla and a very quiet sandalwood hold things steady as Laguna dissolves into a cool musk. This is oriental amber at its finest.

There's a milkiness to Laguna's drydown, and at first it seems like a typical oriental-vanilla amber was integrated into the structure, but vanilla is more than a sweet extract - it is also an orchid, with white flowers that yield their own cozy sweetness. I think Buxton replicated the scent of vanilla flowers in Laguna, and by doing so he managed to create an original amber accord that straddles edibility without betraying the promise of all those green top notes. I also get a whiff of tonka and spiced patchouli to round it out, and the dyrdown musk is of the salty variety. Laguna is soft, juicy, a little dewey, a little woody, and entirely wonderful. It's a great way to get exposure to Buxton's early style, perhaps to better understand how it evolved. When my ounce is finished, I'll be replacing it with a larger bottle, that's for sure!

Salvador Dali Pour Homme (Cofinluxe)

Much is made of this weird perfume. Salvador Dali is an inexpensive conceptual brand, and it's unsurprising that their signature masculine is a cheap ambery fougère with a deep baritone voice. This is, after all, a surrealist concept we're after here. The Dali-lips bottle, the dark tinted glass, the brushstroke font, all precede a good, old-fashioned, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink macho-man composition. It's dark, it's lusty, it's bold, it's eighties baby. This is a goth clubber's elixir. I expected to hear The Cure play "Friday I'm In Love" when I popped the cap open.

People go on about Dali being a brute, an extreme powerhouse, a liquid nightmare, etc. "This smells like blood," "This smells like a psycho's perfume," "This is a frightening fragrance," are all distillations of basenotes sentiments. Don't get me wrong, people do like it, but it's challenging, and consensus says the appropriate situation for wearing Dali is . . . almost never. When do you wear something this heavy, and this dark? A funeral? I'm tempted to say it's a good fragrance for taking final exams, because finals are currently society's scariest thing, hands down. But in truth, Dali is just another classical woody-amber construction on an aromatic fougère chassis.

Dali has been reformulated over the years, and I concede that earlier versions may have contained animalics such as castoreum and civet, but I smell none from my bottle. Castoreum, real or synthetic, is an odd note to incorporate into any structure, as it is full of sweet, urinous, tarry, and floral off-notes, all orbiting an astringent core. I smell sweetness, tarriness, and flowery notes. But these elements are all attributable to specific and entirely separate elements. Interestingly, Dali conveys itself as a fragrance that begins in a super-duper heavy concentration of bundled notes which simply loosen and diminish with time. I'm not getting any big movement in the heart and base, and certainly the top's burn-off period is the most dynamic part of the show.

The note bundle is a brusque burst of lavender, geranium, artemisia, anise, patchouli, and oakmoss. The lavender and anise are sweet, the geranium and artemisia are a bit urinous and bitter, and the patchouli and oakmoss are earthy, straying into tarry. I don't think Dali smells like Balenciaga Pour Homme, but I'd compare it to Balenciaga sooner than Kouros by YSL because of its artemisia note (Balenciaga has it, Kouros doesn't), and the fact that Balenciaga has a pungent earthiness in its core structure, while Kouros is drier and cleaner. For some reason though Dali gets compared to Kouros an awful lot. I guess when something smells complex and confrontational, Kouros becomes the default measuring rod for greatness. But I like how artemisia is handled in Dali. It's a well blended fragrance.

After an hour the budget becomes evident, and while remnants of lavender and artemisia remain to lend woody-herbal spice, the other notes hollow out and become rather flat, forming a bitter envelope into which all of the above is sealed away and lost. The intensity of Dali's intro is what gives people the chills, but with such rough-hewn patchouli (could have used a smoother patchouli), bitter evernia prunastri, growly wormwood, and stark lavender/anise, that's understandable! I prefer Balenciaga, but Dali is a dark, intelligent, unmatched piece of modern perfumery, and despite a relatively lackluster second act, deserving of any compliment it receives. Just wear it with commensurate confidence.

Taxi (Cofinluxe) - Mark Buxton Gets Started

Thanks to reader LustandFury, who happened to mention this fragrance in a conversation we had about Halston 1-12, and also to Shamu1's excellent reviews on his blog, I decided to snag a bottle of this stuff and give it a try. I got lucky and had it delivered extremely fast, and I'm wearing it as I type. I just want to say, it's so nice to smell a traditional fougère that simply IS. Let me explain.

Aromatic fougères are traditional fougères with added spices, woods, and herbs. If you take a look at the pyramids for Drakkar Noir, Azzaro Pour Homme, and Paco Rabanne, you'll find there's an assload of green-woody stuff in them. Fir, patchouli, coriander, sandalwood, cedarwood, clary sage, rosewood, you name it. The basic framework is still there of course - lavender, oakmoss, and coumarin, with brief hits of citrus off the top, and aridity in the drydown. But the embellishments make them more complex, significantly louder, and sometimes harder to decipher.

Traditional fougères are much more basic, with simpler movements, fewer elements, and a directness not usually found in their aromatic brethren. It's rare to find a traditional fern these days because the style has become outmoded and "dandified", with oldies like English Fern, Fougère Royale, and Worth inhabiting rarefied territory. Aromatic and fresh aromatic fougères are still at the forefront of today's fougère market, catering to the proclivities of the masses. People still buy gallons of Cool Water and Polo Sport, but Arden's Sandalwood and Rochas' Moustache are no longer nearly as popular. They are not the default setting for people's notion of a crisp, clean fragrance. That's not to say they're not still sought after, but the general populace has moved on.

Taxi brings it back. Smelling Taxi for the first time, I pulled my nose away, closed my eyes, and smiled. There, in my nostrils, was a traditional lavender/coumarin/oakmoss fougère, arrayed with excellent raw materials in a timeless composition. Perfumers can take creative license with traditional fougères and adorn their spare frames with one or two additional notes, and in Taxi, the legendary Mark Buxton (of Comme des Garcons fame) used heady notes of juniper and star anise to keep things interesting. 

But the basic fougère makes its presence known from beginning to end: Taxi starts with a beautiful 10-second bergamot and spike lavender accord, brightened by a lovely non-toothpasty mint note, and when the bergamot burns away, juniper wells up from under the minty lavender, and dominates the top and early heart phases. Smooth coumarin eventually develops in the mid, but it isn't the saccharine honey-like coumarin of Paco Rabanne, or the coy nanosecond of sweet aftertaste to Drakkar's leather. Taxi's coumarin is simply rich, warm, sunny, salty, suggestive of weathered hay, and altogether the fulcrum from which everything else pivots.

And everything else is simply oakmoss, dihydromyrcenol, a faint touch of star anise, which bends things into an herbal zone, and a simple, soapy-green drydown. The one thing about Taxi is that it smells brighter and mintier than any of the aromatic ferns in my collection. LustandFury mentioned an association he made with Taxi to Irish Spring soap, and he's spot on - although it certainly doesn't smell just like Irish Spring, it has the same fresh-green ambiance that somewhat approximates the aura of Irish Spring. There's a very good chypre out there, which I've reviewed here and spoken of before, and it's called Sung Homme - Sung is nearly identical to Irish Spring, and carries all the brute-force manliness of the soap on its spicy-green tide. 

Taxi is much, much gentler, with fewer jagged edges, and more unisex appeal in its creamy freshness. It is what I want from a fougère, that classical and straight-forward masculine accessory from nature (and the lab), that exists without frills, without the need for anything beyond a universal notion of the hypothetical smell of "fern." Some say Taxi resembles Drakkar Noir, but I smell it a bit differently. Other than having identical spike lavender notes, the two fragrances don't have all that much in common. Taxi isn't really a simpler variant of Drakkar Noir. Taxi is what Drakkar would be if you pulled it out of the aromatic fougère category and placed it alongside the old-fashioned traditional fougères of days gone by. Instead of Warren Beatty and Robert Redford, think Cary Grant and Gregory Peck. What terrific stuff it is, and amazing to think it's already 29 years old!