Is Deep Vintage Cool Water Worth It?

Brand-new is left; Early '90s is right

Of all the fragrances in my regrettably ever-growing collection, Davidoff's Cool Water is the most widely misunderstood. 

Let me explain.

Those who actually enjoy and read about perfume make the inevitable comparison between Cool Water and its predecessor, Creed's Green Irish Tweed, as "Fragrance A" and "Fragrance B." In other words, two entirely different fragrances from very different brands that just happened to have been authored by the same perfumer. This is understandable, but a flawed view.

Consider this: a perfumer on the rise has an idea based on Pierre Wargnye's 1982 masterpiece, Drakkar Noir. It's 1985, and Drakkar's generous use of dihydromyrcenol and Dimetol is a New Wave revolution for the nose; everyone, from Giorgio Beverly Hills, to Givenchy, to Francesco Smalto, to even Alain Delon's celebuscent brand, is trying to build off its framework to cash in on the sales momentum of Guy Laroche's surprising flanker hit. The perfumer knows that roughly 10% of Drakkar's formula is comprised of DHM, and figures he can take the dry, smoky, deceivingly complex juniper-patchouli idea and rework it into something bigger and fresher. He calls his idea "A New Freshness."  

He tinkers with, toys with, and eventually pitches to Lancôme what he feels is a fairly well-conceived version of his vision, but sees it rejected. When an obscure niche brand's emissary appears and offers to use it, he decides it's better that somebody enjoys it, rather than nobody, and basically gives it away for a relatively small fee. That emissary is the late Olivier Creed, and the fragrance is GIT. It's a modest success for Creed. GIT becomes their bestseller, and it propels the brand through the decade. The perfumer is pleased (and likely surprised) by this, but he isn't entirely satisfied with the composition. While GIT is certainly groundbreaking, it suffers from two issues. The first is that Creed, despite its growing popularity, remains invisible to the mainstream high street buyer, and what the brand considers its resounding success is what behemoth designers would consider a paltry failure. Put simply, the fragrance is finding a small and devoted audience, but it's truly a tiny niche, and Bourdon's idea is yet undiscovered by the general public. 

More pressingly to this perfumer, the composition itself isn't quite what he has in mind. While GIT takes a considerable and Drakkar-comparable dose of DHM and thrusts it into the sinuses of bank executives and Wall Street trading tycoons, it feels too simple, almost unfinished. Yes, the green apple and lemon verbena of the opening accord help to temper the spiky burst of grassy, DHM-fueled greenish-yellow noise, and yes, the intensely rich violet esters and iris irones that comprise the heart smell distinctive and quite lovely to virtually anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex, and also, yes, the base of genuine Mysore sandalwood oil and Creed's clever little blend of natural ambergris tincture and Ambroxan is insanely smooth and expensive smelling, and the perfumer should be proud of all of it. But because GIT exists, the perfumer feels he now knows what's missing. He vows to continue working on the same fragrance, not to change it—change isn't the goal of someone who makes a living by creating limitless blends to find the right one—but to improve it. He knows he can make it better. And now he knows how. 

Or, at least, he thinks he knows. He tries adding civet. Nope, that's not it. He dials up and down on various pieces of GIT, adding and subtracting various notes and synthetics, and wonders if maybe he just needs to crank the DHM up to eleven and hope for the best. So, he does. And he is hit by a seismic realization: he can make Green Irish Tweed again, only this time far more crisp and fresh, far more revolutionary, and far more complex, yet just as balanced, just as green, and just as expensive, formula-wise, by also cranking the Ambroxan, a very expensive synthetic in the 1980s, up to near-DHM levels. 

So, he out-Wargnyes Pierre Wargnye, and doubles the Drakkar-like DHM ratio in his own fragrance to a whopping 20% of the formula, and also pushes the Ambroxan to levels not seen in any mainstream release. He swaps out iris for violet and violet leaf, letting ionones do the speaking in GIT 2.0, rather than iris butter, octyn esters, and irones. He swaps out Granny Smith apple for crab apple bitterness, dialing down the sweetness. Peppermint replaces lemon verbena. Calone 1951 is microdosed in tandem with the Ambroxan overdose to add a salty, sea-breeze airiness to the traditional herbal tones of lavender, which is in turn added to help give body and weight to what would otherwise be an evanescent violet concoction that most would struggle to detect. 

Coumarin fleshes out this herbal mid, with additional notes of neroli, Valencia orange, and jasmine creating a subliminal greenness that is, to the perfumer's mind, more sophisticated than the overly simplistic two-step of octyn esters and irones in GIT 1.0. The biggest challenge is replacing that gorgeous sandalwood in the base. It can't go in, not because it's too expensive (let's remember, Ambroxan), but because it's too heavy. Luckily, Davidoff comes along, and its German execs request a follow-up to Zino, their 1986 breakthrough patchouli fougère. Being an international purveyor of fine cigarettes and cigars, the perfumer sees the perfect replacement for sandalwood in a mineralic cured tobacco note, which becomes the grounding base material.

The perfumer, of course, is Pierre Bourdon. He is the connective tissue to why GIT smells similar to Cool Water, but he's also the only perfumer in history to create a formula that overdoses two fairly rare and expensive synthetics for the general public in a mainstream release. Cool Water succeeds where GIT floundered; Davidoff, while not a Chanel-level designer, manages department store distribution on a mass production scale that reaches Europe and the Americas. Millions of bottles sell. His wish for his idea to be enjoyed by all is fulfilled. And his goal of building upon and improving the Drakkar Noir idea is satisfied not just on a material level, but on an artistic level. To Bourdon, Cool Water isn't better than Green Irish Tweed. To Bourdon, Cool Water is Green Irish Tweed. It's Green Irish Tweed in an eau de toilette concentration, i.e., lighter, fresher, and not nearly as stereotypically '80s, nor as purple and loud. It's the same idea, perfected. And upon its release, Bourdon is done with it. He can take it no further, and doesn't want to. 

I recently acquired a deep vintage bottle of Cool Water, pictured above. It's a 75 milliliter bottle, and it's beautiful to look at. It's truly an artifact of its time. The script font of both the brand logo and the fragrance name is gorgeous. The greenish-hued liquid adds depth to the blue glass of the bottle. The oversized black cap is very late '80s, feeling akin to shoulder pads or a pompadour hairstyle. The bottle dates to the early '90s, pre-1994. I'll have to take a look at the code again, because as I write this, I simply can't remember it, nor can I be bothered to push myself up to look at it again. But we're talking deep vintage, and with that in mind, I fully expected the fragrance to smell somewhat wrong.

If you were to ask me, "Bryan, is deep vintage Cool Water worth it in 2026?" I'd answer with, "It depends on what you want to get out of it." Do you want to smell better than reformulated Cool Water? That's a tricky one. There have been a few different formulas of Cool Water, and the current formula is actually Coty Prestige dialing things back to the early 2000s. The late '90s millennium formula of Cool Water has been revived, but at a cost—the concentration has been drastically reduced. The current version is semi-vintage Cool Water at eau de cologne concentration. Regular application of four or five sprays will last you maybe an hour. But being a complex blend with several reinstated hi-octane synthetics, you can "stack" the current by spraying like a maniac, anywhere from fifteen to twenty times. Doing this actually gets you to ten, maybe even twelve hours of longevity, and the amazing thing is, it smells like you're wearing O.G. Cool Water. It's truly great stuff. Shame they compensated for the increase in formula cost by watering it down, but it's better than crapping out on the materials. 

So, if the goal is to one-up the current formula with 2000s vintage, I'd say it's a maybe. But not with deep vintage. Deep vintage has gone too long. My bottle was brand new, with an unprimed atomizer, despite being over 30 years old. This is as fresh as a deep vintage can be. Its top notes still smell wrong. Almost like glass cleaner, weirdly washed out and alcohol-ridden. This passes within fifteen seconds, and the familiar apple and peppermint accord appears, and it smells beautiful and very familiar. But generally, the formula feels faded and translucent. This is a matter of taste; you may prefer this version, but I prefer the late '90s and early 2000s vintage where the brand name was in block font and the fragrance name was in cursive. That formula, which can still be found online, isn't as old, and therefore smells more potent and dynamic. 

Deep vintage Cool Water is worth it if you're a collector, and you appreciate the reality of what Cool Water is. The deep vintage bottle represents a fragrance that is synonymous with Green Irish Tweed in a way we've never seen before in any other fragrances by the same perfumer. It smells closer to vintage Green Irish Tweed from the late '90s, which I've also owned. Deep vintage Cool Water also smells like a work of art. The art piece is in two parts, and both parts are great but slightly different, representing different stages of the artist's expression. This is unique, singular, and has not happened since. 

One thing I've noticed is the formula that preceded the current Cool Water has begun to smell like the 2000s vintage, adopting the same ashy Ambroxan and tobacco accord in the base, and a slightly unbalanced opening accord. The truth is, Cool Water doesn't keep especially well, and anything past ten years runs the risk of smelling undeniably "off" for a beat or two. The question of owning a deep vintage bottle is really this question: Who are you? If you're like me, an insane person, then it's worth owning, for all the reasons and all the evolutionary arcs and idiosyncrasies I've written about in this article. If you don't value your money as much as you value perfume, by all means, you ought to spend the $200 (I didn't pay anything near that, but I easily could have) for that deep vintage bottle with the all-script font and slightly oversized black cap.

If, however, you're just a guy like all the other guys who wear fragrance to impress girls, and your true loves are video games and football, then no, owning deep vintage Cool Water is not worth it. If you've only ever owned two or three bottles at one time, and you blow through the same signature fragrance bottle after bottle and are perfectly happy with that, like most normal, healthy people, stay clear of spending the big bucks on this Davidoff. Not worth it. Not a good use of your time. Just move on. I envy you. 

Davidoff Indigo & Essentials Blue: Brand Classism In 2 Bottles

Looks are Deceiving.

Last year, Davidoff released an international travel exclusive fragrance called Indigo. I saw reviews for it in a few places, and a couple of YouTube reviews, but feedback on it is scarce, likely due to its limited distribution. Travel exclusives aren't rare, and in the past two decades there have been several fragrances that could only be found at major airports, including CK One Essence's original release (before it trickled down into mainland retail), Azzaro Boarding from 2011, and Boss Bottled Pacific, which was originally a general release that got discontinued and reissued in 2023 as duty-free only. For Indigo to get a duty-free-only release did not pique my interest for this reason, and I forgot it existed a week or two after first reading about it. Honestly, not unusual for me at all.

But then, on vacation and bored, I happened across a bottle of something called Davidoff Essentials Blue at a local Burlington, and I remembered Indigo. Now my interest was piqued, because Essentials Blue is a weird thing for Davidoff to issue. The box headlines the "essentials" part, as though it's an existing range of fragrances within the Davidoff catalog, i.e., Essentials Green, Essentials Black, Essentials Red, etc. But a quick check online confirms that Blue stands completely alone. There are no other "essentials," and, quite frankly, I've never seen a more afterthought-looking box than the one for Blue. It's just a blank dark blue with the Davidoff logo and functional white text to tell you the name of the fragrance, and that's it. No graphics, no marketing image, nothing. The bottle is the same as Davidoff Hot Water's, with the wide ribbing, this time in clear glass. Very basic.

My immediate assumption was that Blue is just a renamed and repackaged Indigo. I imagined that Coty had used the duty-free point-of-sale approach to market test the popularity of the fragrance, and that Indigo had done surprisingly well with travelers, which then led to a general release to ordinary retailers. But what stymied my logic was the name change. Why not keep the name, Indigo? Why change it to a weird phantom "essentials" idea and give it the most basic and boring name imaginable, Blue? This part made no sense to me. I queried in some online forums, and got one response on Fragrantica from a random guy who told me they're the same fragrance with different names, so I was almost ready to call it "case closed." And then came eBay. Wonderful, magical eBay.

Someone on there was selling a 75 ml tester of Indigo for peanuts, so I grabbed it. When it arrived, I noticed a key difference between the fragrances right off the bat: Indigo has its name on the bottle, while Essentials Blue's bottle only says "Essentials" on it. It doesn't even say what color, I guess letting the color of the liquid inside tell that story instead. But why not take the same approach with Indigo? Also, the color of the liquids between the two bottles is slightly different. Blue is, well, blue; Indigo is more of a purple-blue. Maybe that shade doesn't align as well with Indigo, so they felt compelled to print the color on the bottle? It's curious. Anyway, my main focus was on the fragrances themselves. What I'll do here is give each fragrance its respective paragraph description, then compare the two in another paragraph, and then give you my honest thoughts on what's happening with these fragrances. By the way, both are EDTs.

Let's start with Indigo, which indicators suggest was the first release. Indigo opens with a very pleasant, Cool Water-adjacent accord of peppermint, crab apple, and lavender, with peppermint the main note. Not hugely natural smelling, but of respectable quality. There's a salinated neroli that adds some sweetness, greenness, and depth, and binds the minty lavender to a synthetic sandalwood and white musk base. I also get a bit of coriander in this blend, which adds even more woody freshness. It smells like it could be a Cool Water flanker, and again, that salty neroli accord in the mid is identical to the accord in Cool Water. Indigo is simpler, a little sweeter, not as aquatic, and weirdly, it's greener and more herbal than its name and image suggest. Derek reviews this stuff on his blog, and he rightly points out that despite Davidoff's tranche of recently released duds, Indigo smells like a competent and pleasant fragrance, and its simple composition and respectable quality set it apart. I happen to agree. Longevity and projection are decent, with two hours of noticeable sillage before it steps back and hums softly through the rest of the day, giving me around seven hours as a glowing skinscent. Nothing stellar, but solid enough.

Essentials Blue opens darker, with a malted lavender sweetness blended with only a fleeting bite of peppermint and ozonic freshness. It's a markedly bubblegum-amber generic designer feel, and I find it to be passable but very synthetic. The malted lavender effect carries subtly into a heart that, again, feels shaded and not all that fresh. There's a light suggestion of patchouli, a distinct basil note (not unlike the one found in Hot Water), and a flat jasmine reconstruction that frankly flattens all the other notes, a sort of weirdly rapid internal collapse of Blue's core into a very two-dimensional feel. I sense a solid presence of ethyl-maltol, and the usual sweet designer woody amber base upholds the otherwise unremarkable structure of this fragrance. The top lasts five minutes, and the mid does its implosion trick in another five, so from that ten-minute mark onward, Blue is a fairly linear and inanimate affair that only projects for ninety minutes before becoming a whisper for another six hours. Blue smells like half of a blue freshie, with the other half excised out by some olfactory surgeon. It's decent enough and wearable, and there is some minor interest in the interplay of basil and neutered florals, but it won't turn heads.

Comparing these two is very interesting. Essentials Blue smells 70% similar to Indigo, roughly speaking. They share the same sweet designer amber that has dominated masculine (and many feminine) releases for many years now. No surprise there. At a quick glance immediately after spraying, you might mistake Blue for Indigo. Like, if you weren't super familiar with either fragrance but had smelled both and liked both, and you walked by someone who had just applied Blue, your reaction might be, "Oh, is that Indigo?" Those first few seconds are a little tricky, but again, only at a quick glance. It really doesn't take long for the main differences between Blue and Indigo to reveal themselves. Put bluntly, Indigo is the superior fragrance. It's brighter, it's much fizzier, it's significantly fresher. Indigo's notes are far better elucidated—peppermint smells like peppermint from first application to far drydown; neroli is clear; lavender is herbal—and this clarity elevates Indigo above Blue. Indigo feels like a reimagining of vintage Lancaster Cool Water from the middle of the '90s. I really like Indigo. Really like it. It's not great, but it's very good, and I can see how travelers might appreciate a bottle on a trip. It's refreshing.

Blue calls to mind those "Inspired By" budget clones commonly found at Walmart and Target. "Inspired By" Davidoff Indigo. Same basic structure, some of the same materials, same overall approach. Different fragrance. How could it not be? Blue is cheaper. It smells cheaper. It supposedly contains more notes, yet it smells simpler and flatter than Indigo. No lucid peppermint, beyond the first ten seconds. No neroli. Not as much of a salinated feel. Not nearly as Cool Water adjacent. Blue does not recall vintage Cool Water. It recalls Indigo, but in a way that makes me wish I was wearing Indigo instead. You get the idea. Blue smells a bit darker with its more obvious patchouli material (some dusty transparent fraction of patchouli, not an actual patchouli note) and basil, and the basil is okayish, but represented better and more naturally in Hot Water. The fragrance seems to use the jasmine materials as a woody bridge to the sweetened amber base, and that amber base is dominant for most of the scent's lifespan. If you're more into woody ambers with sweetness, and prefer them light and short-lived, Blue is for you.

So what's going on with these two? Why make them look so similar, and put them in the same bottle, but formulate them so differently? I have a few ideas, but only one theory. First, the ideas: it's possible Davidoff wants to market-test two variations on the same olfactory theme (which is exactly what these fragrances are), and see which one does better, and which market performs better. Is duty-free a better commercial environment to release new Davidoffs? Or the broader distribution channels? It's also possible that Indigo and Blue are two mods of the same brief, and someone at Coty decided to release them both, sort of like Halston did with Z-14 and 1-12. It's possible Indigo was the pick, but they opted to put the other formula in its own "essentials" range to avoid wasting a good mod, with the justification that future usable (commercially viable) mods would also become color-coded "essentials." Lastly, it's possible that Indigo and Blue are the awkward results of some strange contract that Coty entered into with whatever perfumers and oil houses are involved, creating the unique conditions for the brand to reluctantly release both fragrances together instead of the more desirable Indigo alone.

My personal theory is less charitable, I must admit. I sense some brand classism at work here. Namely, Indigo is for the "traveling class" of those who can afford $1100 round-trip plane tickets to Mumbai, plus all the ancillary costs associated with international travel like baggage and overhead fees, while Essentials Blue is for the working class schlub who needs Uber to get to work. The two fragrances are similar enough that they feel like they're from the same mod, but one feels lush and worked-out, while the other feels hollow and unfinished. They spared the best formula for those who traverse what is increasingly a rarefied milieu, due to how expensive and restrictive air travel has become in the past decade, and they sent the cheaper stuff out to whoever has the $2 bus fare to Burlington. If your life is busy enough and important enough that you find yourself shopping for perfumes at duty-free retailers in major international airports, you deserve the exclusively-released Indigo. If you're the lazy proletariat, Blue is good enough for you. Can't spare the paint to print Blue on the bottle, because Essentials is a long word, and this is the econo-box version, so just deal. Indigo is beautiful, because open-minded people are beautiful, and open-minded people travel. Ignorant rubes stay home and shop at Burlington. They get the "Blue" juice. If they don't like it, they can mistakenly say that they don't like the reissued Indigo. Seem unlikely? Ask yourself if the photograph above is just as unlikely.

This Fragrance Did Not Slip Out Of 'Cool' and Into 'Old-Fogey'

An Original 1988 Cool Water Print Ad

Lately, I’ve noticed a trend among YouTubers, posting about Davidoff’s Cool Water, the original 1988 release, and to be blunt, I’m not impressed. It grates on me to see so many in their twenties and thirties deem it “Old School” and “Mature.” The prevailing sentiment is that this landmark release, Davidoff’s third perfume, has become outdated and cheap, reduced to a meaningless “shower fresh” relic. The implication? No one finds it relevant anymore. Apparently, Cool Water is no longer wanted by the young.

There’s something bizarre about watching a YouTuber standing in his bedroom, pontificating on how his older brother used to wear Cool Water to death, and how he vaguely appreciates it for that reason alone, while also proclaiming it inferior to Cool Water Intense. That’s where it becomes surreal. Standing there in a baseball cap and a bro goatee, shrugging away on camera, while dismissing the single most significant perfume in the history of masculine perfumery—no competition, no close second, full stop. To simply say, “Yeah, I mean, it’s okay. I like it, but I don’t wear it,” is truly surreal.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that everyone should love or like Cool Water. There are plenty of people who loathe the stuff, and that’s fine by me. Tell me you hate Cool Water, that you’d never dream of wearing it, and I’d shrug right along with you. I’m not all that enamored with Dior’s Fahrenheit myself, and that fragrance inhabits the same legendary neighborhood as Cool Water. If my cool indifference to Fahrenheit ruffled a fan or two, I’d completely understand. Tastes differ; life thrives on contrast.

But what really gets under my skin is when people treat Cool Water like some mere footnote in the annals of fragrance, a scent that may have been cool once but that real FragBros outgrow. They then feel entitled to go on camera and wax lyrical about how trivial it is compared to modern competitors like Sauvage or Luna Rossa. These guys sound like self-proclaimed car buffs scoffing at the Ford Model T for not being an Acura TLX. In the case of Cool Water, a more fitting analogy might be swapping out the Model T for a Buick Grand National and whining that it’s no Tesla.

You don’t hold up a bottle of Cool Water and say, “This just smells played out now,” and expect that to slide. No, Cool Water is anything but played out. It single-handedly redirected the trajectory of the entire perfume industry, and it did so when the trajectory was so deeply entrenched that no one imagined it could change. Cool Water is the work of a perfumer who submitted a rough draft to an obscure niche house, which then made it their masculine flagship, which is now hailed as a masterpiece in its own right. Cool Water is the refined realization of that original masterpiece, the ultimate manifestation of Pierre Bourdon’s vision, the scent that, even today, he still ponders and savors. It is the perfect aromatic fougère. It is the only truly "modern" fougère in my collection. 

Now, I’m not blind to reality. Times change, and older fragrances inevitably get labeled as just that: old. I can even admit that Green Irish Tweed, once the scent of cutting-edge modernity, now carries a whiff of the eighties. And yes, Cool Water has its ties to the shopping mall. I live in the real world; I understand. I have my own associations, remembering friends and family wearing it, myself as a teenager not quite grasping its appeal. It took me years to come around.

But as 2024 draws to a close, I can look at Cool Water and recognize that true greatness doesn’t fade with time. Its pristine design endures. Cool Water’s brilliance sparkles undimmed, a glimmering abalone in a sea of limpets.

We'll Never Get These Back: Eleven Discontinued Fragrances That Are Gone Forever . . .

Fragrances are discontinued all the time, and it means nothing. When I hear that something is discontinued, my first thought is, okay, what is it exactly that was slashed? Are we talking about just another prosaic designer? Some obscure discount brand like Zirh finally let go of Corduroy? An old Italian house from the fifties finally buried one of its unremarkable citrus colognes? It is likely true that the discontinued product, whatever it was, is replaceable. Nothing to lose sleep over.  

But there are some discontinued fragrances that bum me and millions like me out. Invariably they were stylistically unique, undeniably well made (sometimes surprisingly so), and things I wish I could always own, price be damned. Back in 2013, I wrote an article (link) about the "Blog-Driven" resurrection of "Zombie Perfumes," i.e., fragrances that had lived on in people's hearts and on the review boards, despite their having been discontinued for some time. My point was that the power of popular demand, largely expressed by the best and the brightest fragrance writers at that time, had brought left-for-dead perfumes back to life via endless praise on Fragrantica and Basenotes.  

One example is Azzaro Acteur. This one was discontinued in the early nineties despite its 1989 release, as it was not an impressive draw for customers and lacked a convincing marketing campaign, probably due to its being out of step with the dihydromyrcenol and Calone 1951 times. It managed to lurk in the aftermarket for over a decade, and eventually the development of sites like Fragrantica allowed nostalgic Azzaro fans to wax enough poetics that they briefly reissued the darned thing. Ditto for Geoffrey Beene's 1986 aromatic-woody Bowling Green, which EA made a point to reissue for well over a year, making it possible for me to procure a bottle from Amazon for dirt-cheap. It wouldn't have been reissued if it weren't for all the singing about it on the internet, and ultimately it was discontinued again for selling just as poorly as it did the first time around. 

If Acteur and Bowling Green were granted commercial immortality, I and thousands of guys my age would be eternally grateful. Unfortunately their sales stats are on their tombstones, and it's understandably unlikely that they'll ever see the light of day again. Given that they managed to escape hell once, it's hard to say that we'll never see them again, but I'm not holding my breath. However, there are some fragrances that are special in ways that make their disappearances feel criminal. They are fragrances that had no easy comparatives, no peers in the canon of perfumes gone by, and things I would trade my left testicle to have again (for sane prices). Here are eleven discontinued fragrances that are truly gone forever, in no particular order . . . 

Ocean Rain (Mario Valentino, 1990)

Ocean Rain is Edmond Roudnitska's last commercial creation before his death at age 91 in 1996. Understand, that means he worked on Ocean Rain for Mario Valentino, obscure Italian peddler of luxury leather goods, when he was in his eighties. You'd be forgiven for expecting it to smell stodgy, given that the man who made it was likely running on sailboat fumes by that late stage of his artistic élan, but you'd be wrong. Ocean Rain is absolutely timeless and sublime, a dusky chypre that I personally interpret as an "oriental aquatic" of sorts, simply because its heart offers the sandiest amber accord I've ever had the pleasure of smelling. Ocean Rain is likely a splice-up of Roudnitska's "greatest hits," with bits and bobs of Diorella and Le Parfum de Thérèse thrown in, but it's easy to over-generalize Roudnitska's style after such a consistent and accomplished career. Ever the pioneer of new and exciting synthetics, the perfumer handed Valentino a fragrance that smells like the beach after a summer shower, a wet/dry petrichor only emitted by pulverized grains of quartz and silicon dioxide. Running parallel is an impression of a woman reclining on that beach, replete with whiffs of her fruity perfume and the weirdly universal sweetness of her kiss (healthy mean interpret the saliva of healthy women as tasting vaguely of Coca-Cola). Ocean Rain is probably the only perfume in my collection that seems eerily alive, as if the headspace of a sex-on-the-beach encounter was bottled by some dark magic. Long gone, this one will eventually vanish from eBay, and when it does, that's it. 

Yohji Homme (Yohji Yamamoto, 1999)

Of the fragrances on this list, this one is my least favorite. Still, I recognized it as a one-off freak of nature beauty when I reviewed it over a decade ago, and my opinion holds: The original unedited formula of Yohji Homme deserves a permanent resurrection. This was one of those nineties fragrances that captured the zeitgeist better than most, an era of profound optimism and ebullience that expressed itself with heady-sweet concoctions that eschewed foodiness in favor of freshness. Where most post-Cool Water fougères went with floral-aquatic accords, Yohji Homme adopted a far riskier coffee/lavender trick, with a heavy twist of licorice root and a silvery base of whiskey and woods. In the last ten years, we've witnessed the depressing rise of what the kids think is "fresh" these days: tons of ethyl-maltol and ooey-gooey sugary ambery crapola, a bad date for any nose. Rewind to the end of the Clinton administration, and youngsters were surprisingly sophisticated, wearing bonafide masterpieces like Tommy Girl and Le Male like they were nothing, which allowed something like this to be born. Why Yohji Homme's original formula was discontinued is anyone's guess -- I almost never believe the reasons given by the people involved in making the fragrance. Their input is interesting, but when something is dc'd and then reissued, it makes me wonder what's up. Now the reissue is also dc'd, making the whole thing moot. I think Yohji Homme was arguably a little thin and weak, but it was also a finely-tooled piece of sleek machinery, a summery lavender ensconced in herbal-sweet aromatics that belied the foibles of the year "American Pie" was a blockbuster. 

Aqua Quorum (Antonio Puig, 1994)

Let's face it: the original Quorum from 1982 should be sent to pasture. I'm not saying it shouldn't be worn, or that people who enjoy it are fuddy-duddies; I'm just pointing out that its era of overwrought brown-study powerhouses, full of burnt grasses and woods and fermented tobaccos and musks and screaming "I'M A MAN," has officially passed us by, and is now a distant speck in our rearview mirror. That doesn't mean we should abandon Aqua Quorum, however. When I bought my bottle a decade ago, I expected it to be a cheap and forgettable "blue" fragrance that hankered after Cool Water and Polo Sport, but I was mistaken. It's actually a riff on Lauder's New West (1988), but in my opinion it's better. Much better. Calone 1951 is the driver in the engine room that accidentally fell asleep on the throttle and pushed the ride up to eleven. It's a mysterious synthetic in that unlike typical perfumery chems that we perceive as growing ever weaker in proportion to increased exposure, Calone gets stronger instead. If on Monday you spray one or two puffs of Aqua Quorum and it smells like a light bay breeze, by Friday you will experience an hallucinogenic freshness that literally seizes your brain via your nose and sends jolts of pink lightning through it. They overdosed this molecule in the formula, and usually that would read as a big mistake, but not here. Shimmery aldehydes, briny driftwood, and crisp pine notes all lend crucial balance to what would otherwise be a catastrophic mess of a freshie, and by getting this equilibrium on the money, Aqua Quorum is instead a masterpiece of nineties freshness. This perfume is kinetic, like smelling a moving piece of nature, and is to date the only "cheapie" that has ever rivaled a vintage Creed. It's still available for pennies on Fragrancenet, but they only have a few bottles left. 

Fendi "Donna" (Fendi, 1985)

This was my mom's signature fragrance, right up until the day stores took it off shelves and it vanished forever. It has since been bottled unicorn tears on eBay, fetching prices in excess of $300. I'll be honest and say that if it were just my mom's old standard, I probably wouldn't care (sorry mom). But here's the thing about the original Fendi for women: there is nothing else like this stuff. Like everything else on this list, it is one of a kind. I once got her a bottle of K de Krizia as a substitute, hoping its similar overall aldehydic chypre aesthetic would hit the spot, but no. Not even close. And why did I ever think it would be? Fendi was peculiarly masculine for an eighties feminine, a trait no other big-boned hybrid of its era possessed. The world was awash in mink-and-pearls stuff like Chanel's Coco and Calvin Klein's Obsession, bawdy orientals that lavished customers with overdoses of syrupy florals and spiced ambers. One whiff of those and I immediately picture every woman I met as a child except my mom, who somehow, despite being a perfectly normal feminine woman, managed to pull off this illicit exercise in oakmoss and dry leather. This fragrance wasn't a spice bomb or a dowdy floral, nor was it a rosy thing like Lauder's Beautiful. Fendi was an austere leather, bone dry, with no obvious spice or floral notes, save for a gorgeous coriander and sage accord mated to something green and bitter and smoky, and just wonderful. There's no point in even directing you to remaining bottles; for everyone but the filthy rich, this fragrance is officially gone, and has been for no less than thirty years. I've hunted the world over for something, anything like it, to no avail.  

Ungaro Pour L'Homme II (Emanuel Ungaro, 1992)

There were three Ungaros for men, and the first one has eluded me, although only because I don't care to go out of my way to find it. I have the other two, and surprisingly found that I prefer III over II, if only because I'm a sucker for masculines with overt rose notes. II is a lavender fragrance, fashioned after Guerlain's original Jicky (1889), and for this reason is a holotype in the record perfumus obscurus; to date there are no other "clones" of Jicky that have ever surfaced. There are fragrances that owe a debt to Jicky (Guerlain's own Mouchoir de Monsieur), and there are those that are inspired by it, but II would not exist were it not for Jicky, plain and simple. I find the fragrance is introverted and anodyne compared to the muskier fougèrientals of the eighties and nineties, but its civet and fetid wood notes lend it a burlier countenance than it might otherwise have. One thing is for certain: If I ever stumble across I, my nose is going into comparison overdrive to see how and why Ungaro (technically Chanel) opted to veer into this rarest of rare parking spots. There were plenty of others that were closer to the door, yet they went with something that nobody would try again, and now my bottle is worth well over $100. 

Relax (Davidoff, 1990)

Davidoff fragrances are generally replaceable, and if they discontinued Zino, or Hot Water, or The Game, few would miss them. (By the way, for those of you who insist on yelling that Zino is discontinued, I direct you to eBay, where a 4.2 oz. bottle is two dollars cheaper than the same size of The Game. Can we just admit that the stuff is still being made, or do we have to keep pretending?) Even a discontinuation of Cool Water would suck more for Davidoff and Coty than it would for the buying public, which has largely moved on from the dihydromyrcenol-fueled nineties to all manner of awful oud and praline things. There are two fragrances that Davidoff discontinued that simply can't be replaced: Good Life and Relax. I can't comment on Good Life, except to say that I've never smelled it, but if and when I do, I'll probably include it in this list as well. Currently Good Life sets the records for most expensive vintage Davidoff; Relax is not far behind. And Relax is one helluva good fragrance, I can promise you. It boggles the mind as to why a company would put out something as true to its name, only to can it a couple years later, but that's exactly what Lancaster did, probably when Coty took over. Rumor has it Relax was available at Davidoff tobacco boutiques until the mid-2000s, but I recall searching for it in 2010 and finding nothing, with high-priced bottles on eBay even then. How does it smell? Simply beautiful, an ambery fougère with oriental underpinnings of velvety woods and sweet florals, with just a hint of cushy vanilla, this fragrance opens bright and fruity-fresh, then rapidly segues into what can only be described as a formal reimagining of Brut. Its unique blend of mint, citrus, lavender, jasmine, woods, and musks has never been replicated. I could hunt for decades for a replacement and come up empty, so I've stopped trying.  

Unbound for Men (Halston, 2002)

Roy Halston Fenwick is known for Z-14 and 1-12 because those fragrances are great. But Unbound for Men was released almost thirty years later to very little fanfare, as by that point the Halston brand had already faded into bargain-basement obscurity, due in no small part to how Roy had sold his name to all the wrong people over the course of five decades. My generation doesn't know how important Halston was to American fashion; he went global after he designed Jackie Kennedy's famous inaugural "pillbox" hat. Hats were his bag, until he branched out into the wider world of high fashion during the sixties and on into the Nixon years, when he eventually made the leap to perfume. EA Fragrances eventually acquired the perfume rights, and for reasons unknown they issued Unbound fully twelve years after the designer's death. Overlooked as a wonky Acqua di Giò clone, it's actually better than its template, and quite unlike anything I've ever smelled before or since. Imagine Acqua di Giò, but with a ton of tomato leaf in the top notes, followed by salty watermelon and cucumber, then dust it all with some coriander and let everything settle on synthetic ambergris and basil. Now imagine the ingredient quality is three notches above what it should be for a $25 fragrance, and you have Unbound for Men. Yeah, it seemed like another pedestrian "freshie" at first glance, but by about a third of the way through my large bottle, I realized I had something very special on my hands. The bright and bitter greenness of its tomato leaf, its zesty coriander, the juiciness of its watermelon, and its sparkly-salty base accord was addictive and cheerful and helped me through a particularly drab time in my life. But it was also one-of-a-kind in how its herbal spices were balanced against crisply fresh fruits and aquatic musks. Now that it's gone, I wonder what kind of soul-selling it would take to convince EA to bring it back. Somehow I doubt they'd be interested after their Bowling Green fiasco. Yeah, it's gone for good. 

Nobile (Gucci, 1988)

My best friend had a bottle of this. It smelled like the eighties had stepped out of a Crocodile Dundee movie wearing Kouros and Antaeus and Zino, then took a long hot shower with the original Irish Spring bar soap, all sudsy and soapy-clean but with lingering echos of those older and darker powerhouses. Nobile wasn't a masterpiece, nor was it avant-garde, but it was the best at what it did, which was represent eighties male virility in a style that encapsulated the marriage of Italianate green-piney old-world cologne to Bausch + Lomb-wearing Wall Street modernity. Everything is on offer -- lavender, citruses, florals, a bucketload of irones and ionones, cis-3-Hexen-1-ol (grassiness), oakmoss, sandalwood, with whispers of labdanum and other lyre chypre tones played by Orpheus for Eurydice -- and I could get into the nitty-gritty of how all of Nobile's notes fit together to form a big, soapy, super-green masculine that is extremely potent without smelling obnoxious, but what's the point? You get the point. This was that fragrance, but it was better than the rest. It's hard to say how, but Nobile possessed a quality of freshness and vitality that transcended green fougères and strayed into mythical beauty, the sort of scent you could smell once and never forget. It's been dead and buried for several decades now, and while many green aromatics for men have since been born and killed off, none have ever come close to emulating how great Nobile smelled. 

Touch for Men (Fred Hayman, 1995)

I interviewed Jeffrey Dame, the creator of this fragrance, back in 2013 (please dig into my blog archives for that), and to sum up, Touch was his labor of love. I'm talking the original Touch by Parlux with the black cap, not the silver cap reformulation by Victory International that came out many years later. I'm told the silver version is a different fragrance altogether. My bottle is from 1995, and I find that to be odd. Nothing about it says "I'm a nineties frag." Its box and bottle look like the late seventies or early eighties in both name and aesthetic, but that speaks to just how variegated the styles of the nineties were. Gen Z (Zoomers) think of the decade as being their dad's era, and when I spritz on Touch, I see their point. Often compared to Brut, Touch does smell remarkably similar, a powdery floral fougère with a hint of citrus brightness on top and mossy musk below. There are also shades of Avon's Wild Country, due to Dame's reliance on powder to create a dry barbershop aura. But Touch is even more similar to Neutrogena's famous $20 shower gel called Rainbath. It's almost the exact same smell. So I suppose you could argue that this discontinued gem lives on for Rainbath users, except, well, not so fast . . . Touch has a few things Rainbath doesn't. For starters, its lavender note is far more complex, weaving in and out of warmth and coolness, and most of its bitter herbal background players flit just beyond the realm of perceptibility. Touch is also sweet, with an ambery and vanillic drydown that ensconses the wearer for hours in a cloud of happiness. Brut is soapier, simpler, greener, muskier, but Touch is a sweet lavender mist, and when the last few bottles vanish from eBay, I'm sure I'll never find anything quite like it again. 

Agua Lavanda Puig, Green Glass Bottle Version 

(Antonio Puig, 1940)

I know, I know, there are two Puig fragrances on this list, and how can that be? Well, if Aqua Quorum represents a discontinued gem that did amazingly original things with amazingly unoriginal materials, Agua Lavanda Puig (or Puig's Lavender Water) symbolizes the passing of Old World tradition into the sands of time. Technically this fragrance is still in production, and very easy to find in Spain and Portugal, among other stretches of Mediterranean Europe, but there were always two versions, the one in green glass and the one in plastic shampoo bottles. The glass version is no more, gone for at least fifteen years, and probably longer. Lavender is one of those universally recognized notes that I'd be hard-pressed to consider unique in any way, but the version in this stuff was simply glorious in its simplicity and beauty, yet also maddening in its longevity. I would get maybe twenty minutes out of a very generous splashing before it evaporated into thin air and took its gorgeous scent with it. It wasn't one-note lavender; ALP was lavender with a vibrant rosemary note, and both smelled of natural essential oils in generous concentration. Sprightly and bitter geranium, tonka, cedar, and some sort of midcentury white musk all drew around the central lavender note, which smelled unique in its own right. It was less like stereotypical lavender and more like some kind of watery "eau" that smelled way ahead of its time. No other lavender cologne/after shower splash has come anywhere close to replicating the polished chrome diopside languor of vintage Agua Lavanda Puig. Given that it's still being watered-down and sold year after year in those tired plastic monstrosities, I nurture the fantasy that the company will go back to respecting their bedrock fragrance again, but I'm not holding my breath. 

Green Valley (Creed, 1999)

I'm gonna just come right out and say it: Green Valley is the best fragrance I've ever smelled. Out of the roughly 800 perfumes that I've put my nose on, this one beats all of them, and it isn't even close. This hurts me deeply, because it's been discontinued for ten years with zero availability in the aftermarket, save for a few obscenely priced survivor bottles that are probably spoiled by now and not worth the glass that holds them. The version pictured here, with the green cap, was the original release from 1999, which within six years was replaced by a transparent cap, for reasons that defy explanation, other than it was Olivier Creed being needlessly OCD about one of his products again. But here's the real kicker with Green Valley: there is literally nothing else on the planet that smells like it. With nearly every fragrance in history, you can assemble a small coterie of similar things that either riff on or blatantly copy each other, but not so here. This fragrance, despite conveying what seems like (on paper) a pedestrian fruity-green "fresh" profile, manages to smell so radically unique and brilliantly executed that it defies the laws of physics. I can describe Green Valley -- green minty/grassy top accord, bitter and slightly floral, some mandarin orange sweetness, followed by ginger, blackcurrant, vetiver, more mint, more grassiness, with ghostly notes of watermelon, coumarin, green tea, hawthorne, violet leaf, resting on ambergris and sandalwood -- but that doesn't really describe Green Valley. You can't understand it until you actually smell it, and you need to spray liberally, meaning you need a full 2.5 oz bottle to get the full effect. This suggests that you have $1200 to spare on a "vaulted" Creed. You can drop that kind of cash on an eBay seller's old dusty bottle, but buyer beware, as it will likely smell off. I don't have much hope that Kering will bring Green Valley back, for a few reasons. First, they can't really do it. The formula for it was super expensive and had grafted together bits of Millesime Imperial, Silver Mountain Water, Tabarome Millesime, and Green Irish Tweed, but also had original accords of bitter wildflowers and an intense green grassiness woven in. Another issue is material quality; Kering is all about cutting corners on formula cost, and now that Olivier is no longer obsessing over the very best of the best ingredients, it's unlikely that any reissue would smell right. Green Valley was a fragrance in motion. It would drift and waft and shimmer through my nose, the exact smell of a dew-covered field of uncut grass and weeds on a cool morning, with a gentle gust of air rustling through it all. I could actually smell the fronds of green moving and glittering with moisture, a sea of emeralds rippling to the horizon. Green Valley was magical, mystical, on another plane of existence. The perfume world seems to understand this, because almost no one has attempted to clone or recreate Green Valley, a fact I find both amusing and annoying. It's a little funny because it tells me that despite all the bitching about Creed, people have to give them this one. They created something truly new, truly beautiful, and truly one-off. But now that we've smelled it, why hasn't anyone at least attempted a clone? Well, DUA Fragrances, that weird scammy brand that sells one ounce bottles for stupid money, is the only company with the balls to put out a Green Valley clone (Vert Instinct), so I might as well try it. But make no mistake, this fragrance, like all of the fragrances I've written about here, is gone forever. 

Hot Water (Davidoff)

Some fragrances are created with a specific purpose in mind, rather like cars. An econobox isn't made to be a race car, but it is made to get you anywhere reliably. I thought of a car when I first tried Davidoff's Hot Water, the long-awaited yang to Cool Water's yin. While the 1988 Bourdon fougère is most certainly a macaw blue BMW M3 (e30) Evolution 2, replete with rear spoiler, sunroof delete, and 11.0:1 compression ratio, the 2009 Hot Water is a relatively meek tenth generation wide-body E140 Corolla sedan in Barcelona red. Sure, it boasts a hip image with its ribbed bottle and ominous blackout badging, but this stuff gets the shakes when you try to push it past 95. Its performance is the opposite of sexy. But it doesn't need to seduce you, it just needs to get you through the workday, and Hot Water performs handily in the carpool lane. 

Its top is a sweet melange of herbal and woody notes, mostly light artemisia and basil, with hints of pink and black pepper to liven things, but honestly it's the tamest intro to any fragrance in my collection. You could hate this stuff and still be tempted to wear it, just to see what kind of mileage you get. It's that innocuous. Get over the first ten minutes, and Hot Water settles into a droning hum of synthetic styrax, benzoin resin, basil, more basil, and clean musk. This endures for roughly seven hours, after which the whole thing chugs down to a thin whisper of mostly semisweet musk. I find the basil note to be interesting: when I sniff where I sprayed, exhale on it a few times, then inhale deeply, I get a very realistic and natural-smelling basil note. Pull back and breathe normal, and it's simply a dull sweetness, reminiscent of Joop! Homme with none of the power. 

So do I recommend Hot Water? Yes, I do. I do if you're looking for a work scent that will offend nobody and still smell better than whatever anyone else is wearing. It's light, but it's balanced. It's uninteresting, but it's solid. It's not too spicy, not too sweet, not too woody, not too green. It's not too much of anything, yet it captures the feeling of a professional middle-management dad with three kids at home and a wife with frosted hair who spends her days grocery shopping and lunching with girlfriends. Hot Water isn't exciting, but it's dependable, and on the days when you're not sure which way is up, sometimes you need the little things to fly straight. Hot Water flies straight. If you're looking for something that will get you there with zero drama, and you're not an obsessed fraghead who needs a different fragrance for every mood and whim, I would give you this. You won't regift it, and by Labor Day you'll be on your third bottle. 

My Thoughts On Post-Covid Cool Water

New Script to the Left.

Eight years ago I purchased a 4.2 fluid oz bottle of Cool Water by Davidoff, and I wrote that Cool Water's formula had officially been destroyed by Coty. It may have been a stale bottle, or it was truly a lame reformulation of a classic that should never have been altered in the first place. I took my time with that bottle and noticed two things: It grew subtly stronger over time, and the liquid changed to a light green. I guess this explains why old bottles look greenish-blue. The juice changed with age (although I think script-font bottles did use a darker glass). In any case, it improved slightly, but still smelled stale. 

Fast-forward to today, and I picked up a 2.5 oz bottle of the newest formulation. There has been a community rumor going around for years now that the smaller sizes for fragrances contain slightly stronger fragrance, while the larger and "jumbo" sizes (like 6.7 oz bottles) have watered-down concentrations, which may or may not be true. I really don't know. What I notice with the 2.5 oz Cool Water is it smells sharper, clearer, and fresher than the previous bottle did, and it comes in packaging that is noticeably different as well. 

This new packaging has yet another variation on the font of Cool Water. Now the "L" of "Cool" is a line with no loop, and the "W" of "Water" lacks the flourishes on either end (downward rake on the left, overhead swoop to the right), with nothing more than a slanted style. Also, "eau de toilette" is printed on one line instead of two at the bottom. The color of the glass, the bevel cut, and the cap are all the same. If anything, the new glass may be a shade darker, which might be an illusion due to the smaller size. 

The new formula smells pretty good to me. Longevity and projection seem to be the same, but I think they amped-up the top accord of crab apple and lavender, with brighter fruit and floral notes, and also perked up the peppermint and rosemary by a hair, which is nice. I get a bit more iris in the mid, and a bit less violet than I used to, but the iris and tobacco in the drydown play very well. Coty has been mis-marketing Cool Water as an aquatic for many years, and so it's interesting to me that they haven't attempted to make it smell like one. Thankfully they've still kept the original scent profile, and when I compare it to my 2006 bottle, it smells like its old self, albeit in a fresher tone. 

Covid-19 may have come for Cool Water. In 2020, a terrible pandemic swept the globe, and damaged the olfactory senses of millions of people, some temporarily, others for good. This scourge of the nasal passages punished not just civilians, but also fragrance industry workers. Imagine the Cool Water division of Coty in the thick of 2020. Several high-profile executives get Covid, and suddenly are unable to interpret perfume - any perfume. Things from Dior's Poison to Tom Ford's Tobacco Vanille to, yes, Cool Water, were suddenly nigh undetectable to those who were accustomed to detecting everything. What were once vivid scent profiles with varying textures and weights had suddenly vanished into thin air.

Cool Water would have been especially undetectable. It's certainly possible that my previous bottle was stale, but I don't really think so. I think it was Coty's pre-pandemic formula of the 2010s that had been whittled down to a shadow of its former self. Greed and cynicism led to Coty gutting its flagship fragrance, and they basically took the deodorant formula and made it the fragrance formula. Predictably, this led to complaints by people on Fragrantica and YouTube, which further sullied Cool Water's reputation.

But then the Great Anosmia of 2020 took hold. Executives struggled to smell, which meant the formulas needed to reverse course. My theory is that they dug into the archives and retrieved the formula from the mid 2000s, and threw it into 2.5 oz bottles (I haven't seen any 4.2 oz bottles of this new packaging, but I'm sure they're out there in droves). A version of Cool Water that most people haven't smelled in years was revived, simply to make it possible for everyone at Coty to smell what they sell. By resorting to using a previous formula instead of yet another reformulation, they saved money (no need to hire perfumers), and put the savings into the formula budget. 

I don't think it's any accident that Coty issued Cool Water Parfum in 2021, or Cool Water Reborn in 2022, both of which were heftier than anything the company had released in a long time. To keep pace, I think they supercharged the original fragrance and hoped nobody would notice the timing. Now, is this to say that Cool Water is really going to behave the way Lancaster's version did twenty years ago? Maybe, or maybe not. It all depends on exactly how faithfully they adhered to their prior formula. It's possible they cut some corners, despite wanting to rejuvenate the intensity, and these betrayals will make themselves evident in the years to come. I'm not entirely sure how far back they turned the dial. All I can say is, it smells like they turned it back. For the first time in living memory, a company reversed their bullshit. 

Of interest to me is how beautiful Cool Water is, and how well it stands against the ravages of time. I think Green Irish Tweed helped Coty keep it in production, with Creed's landmark perfume drawing men and women in to make the comparison, which had the unintended effect of bolstering Davidoff's fragrance and keeping it alive. The similarities between the two fragrances are undeniable, and Cool Water remains the best alternative to GIT if you're looking for Pierre Bourdon's work. 

I still consider it to be Bourdon's eau de toilette version of GIT, sort of the way Chanel has different versions of the same scent in different concentrations (Coco EDT is entirely different from the EDP). If Creed did EDTs of their perfumes, GIT's would inevitably smell like Cool Water. It's fascinating that Bourdon executed this concept while under contract with two different brands. I imagine that he wanted to give Creed the Cool Water formula for GIT, but just hadn't figured it out yet, and so Davidoff was the lucky winner. 

With its sprightly notes of minty aromatics, apple, lavender, neroli, tobacco, iris, violet, and musk, Cool Water remains a masterpiece, and something every man should have in his collection. It's a modernized and lighter variation of Green Irish Tweed, no more synthetic than its predecessor (if we're being honest), and well worth the twenty bucks you'll pay for a bottle. But a word to Coty: Bring back the original all-script logo and font. Bring back the brass-colored lettering. Give us the white rectangle on the box again, with the difficult to read words scrawled and crossed on the cardboard. It was classier, it was easier on the eyes, and it kept the riff-raff out. 

Cool Water Sea Rose (Davidoff)

Davidoff is a quality brand with several masterpieces under its belt, many of which are on the masculine side of the aisle. Most of their feminine offerings are simply not as good. Cool Water Woman was a tepid fruity-floral that was amiable enough in 1996, but now smells a little cheap and flat. That it garnered many flankers is unsurprising, but Sea Rose (2013) is arguably the most banal of them all. 

It smells rather like the original CWW in the first minute, an overexposed and very shrill accord of sour citrus and super-synth pear, which is blended into the familiar "aqua" notes of Calone-like nineties molecules that no longer interest people. Think of any shampoo. It takes about five minutes for the off-notes to dissipate, and then the fruitiness resolves into something akin to rosy peony. Frankly, I find it a bit weak, dry, and nondescript, like a unisex sport fragrance. But heck, the pink packaging is as girly as it gets. 

At the eight hour mark the floral element vanishes, and all that remains is a laundry musk that leaves your shirt and skin smelling clean. So, yeah . . . boring. I can appreciate what Aurelien Guichard was going for here, and imagine his perfumery brief had a very limited budget. But Sea Rose is the olfactory equivalent of an airplane movie: mindlessly amusing, forgotten immediately upon landing.  

Horizon (Davidoff)

Sometimes a guy just wants to smell good, and on those occasions guys with good taste reach for something like Horizon by Davidoff. What surprises me about this fragrance is that despite being a very recent release, it smells organic. There aren't "fantasy accords" or super modern, overly-blended soapy notes. Horizon, though relatively innocuous and smooth, conveys clear tonalities of ginger, vetiver, cinnamon, nutmeg, cedar, and mandarin orange. It isn't particularly natural, and ingredient quality is pretty middle of the road, but I have to give it its due and praise it for at least smelling well balanced, mature, and thoroughly pleasant. Wearing it is a nice experience.

What does sadden me a little is seeing Horizon as evidence that a part of the Davidoff fragrance division wants to return to the glories of their eighties and nineties frags. Clearly the desire to bring back the herbal woody powerhouses of the Reagan era is there, but they aren't sure of how to go about it. If they were more confident, Horizon would have "extreme" intensity to begin with, nullifying the need for an "extreme" flanker. Ingredient quality would also be better, as would the pyramid. Instead of watery "fresh" violet leaf, which feels a little out of place in a spicy woody scent like this, they could have added more patchouli and moss.

The semisweet kitchen spices lend decent warmth to the proceedings, but why not get a little Wall Street and add a hit of skanky musk? A little pinch would do - no need to go full Kouros here. I can't help but think of Bogart's Witness as being a better option, along with Z-14, Aubusson, and Balenciaga Pour Homme.

If you're looking for a light, fresh, spicy, woody, gentlemanly EDT, and you're a professional father of two with a wife in real estate and a weekend time share on Cape Cod, Horizon is a very good, inoffensive choice, the sort of scent that emits patriarchal authority without going too far. If you're looking for an alpha male powerhouse reminiscent of popped collars and Members Only jackets, look elsewhere.

Cool Water Night Dive for Men (Davidoff)

For those free-wheelin', third-wheelin' nights.

The reason I don't like Cool Water Night Dive for Men is the same as why I think married Russian thirty-something females with six year-old sons should avoid open-marriage flirtations with single childless Americans: it's the clearest manifestation of a bad idea. For too long now guys have been at the mercy of the sugar-bomb club-frag phenomenon, a dire situation in which perfume brands erroneously think testosterone reaches its peak efficiency after a guilty pleasure jelly roll from Tim Hortons. Night Dive smells like someone smooshed a candied fruit pastry into a cheap wet-shaver fougère (none other than its namesake), and wham! Disgusting, asexual tawdriness with a vaguely edible edge. Exactly what nobody with even half a brain wants to smell like.

I know what they were trying to do. This whole sticky mess got started when Drakkar Noir and Green Irish Tweed started making waves, back in the early eighties, before the self-deprecating weirdness of Angel, but after the unapologetically stodgy conservatism of everything sixties and seventies. Why was Drakkar so attractive? It had crossover appeal, which is why a small but notable community of lesbians appropriated it in Europe while The Clash and Joan Jett blared from monolithic Advents and sent sonic ripples through their bong smoke. Something about the bittersweet tang of tangerine mated to soapy lavender and smoked woods screams penis envy.

Green Irish Tweed took things a step further by appealing to gents who, you know, don't want to get caught. That extra whiff of violet and iris, all balled up (pardon the pun) in a wad (pardon it again) of Ambroxan and sandalwood goes both ways on guys who do the same. Catch it after a light misting of rain, and it smells like the sultriest feminine perfume ever made. Let it sit under fluorescent lights for five and a half hours, and it's Paul Newman meets Robert Redford and a small army of pissed-off Bolivians. My point is that this idea of taking a traditional fougère and sweetening it up has its roots with the beautiful ambiguities of the Old School.

The last ten years have yielded few success stories on this front. Oddly, I can think of only one true example: Joop! Jump. Odder still is that Night Dive gets compared to Jump pretty frequently. I guess they share some traits, but Jump smells good, while Night Dive smells like ass. You could go back a bit further in time and consider the merits of things like Jil Sander's Feeling Man, Versace's The Dreamer, Gaultier's Le Mâle, and Bourdon's wonderful Individuel, but why go on tangents when Jump encapsulates the only way this idea can be done right? If you want sweet fruits, make sure to balance the fructose with a hefty slug of cold potato vodka. Looking for a floral coumarin accord on sugar roids? Throw some serene vetiver next to the bouquet. It's all about balance in Jump, but Night Dive is another story.

Davidoff foolishly thought that more of everything vulgar and none of anything clever would somehow work, long as a vague sketch of the original Cool Water remained recognizable beneath it all. What they forgot was how vulgar and borderline Cool Water is without embellishment. They heaped a pre-mixed "tropical fruit" blend on top of the green apple, infused the salinated amber with a spiced patchouli so flamboyant that it makes Colour by Numbers-era Boy George look demure in comparison, and barfed the nasty mess into a weird Freedom Tower version of the iconic Cool Water bottle. One spritz, and you're repelling every gender and gender-bender within a five block radius. Want to smell sexy? Wear Jump instead. Enough said.

The "Goodness" Of Good Scents

The quote pictured above is ironic and daft to me. Rand was wrong in her assertion, or at least she was not thorough enough; she fell shy of the truth. I agree instead with a philosophical view which Elizabeth Warren recently put forth. She contended that we all step into the world as people who have benefitted from the labor of our neighbors, with their combined efforts making our forward trajectory not only possible, but also bound to the dual responsibilities of upholding their work while paving new roads for future generations. Men and women are armed with more than their own visions; they carry the advantages bestowed upon them by their communities, and are also armed with the self-aware acculturations from which their visions can be enacted.

Rand suggested that some men are genuinely "self made," and that they alone were the pavers of their own "new roads," but this is a fiction. She re-crafted a bit of a mythology, one that has always been very popular with right-wingers (and extreme right-wingers). As with all things political, such thought processes punctuate the mindsets of different people with different interests, and the fragrance world is no exception. There has recently been a bit of "Randian" thinking on basenotes.net, in which a couple of members suggested that "perception" of a scent is the only thing that matters in moving forward with personal preferences - which I find to be, like Rand's quote, an example of incomplete thinking and faulty logic.

One member posited the following sentiment, which is entirely true:

"Now some may say, 'But i have a pre-reformulation bottle, and it smells nothing like the new one.' Fair enough, but one thing that can and does happen many times is a scent will degrade over time. Slowly. Slow enough that changes may not register as they are so gradual. The bottle you buy today will not smell identical in ten years. There are so many factors at play."

I smiled while reading this. I thought: Yes! People are finally getting it! The real world context of vintage and discontinued classics is being thoroughly weighed by noses with brains - and this one is a newbie!

The quoted sentiment was received with a statement that was entirely subjective and perhaps honest, but also intellectually limited:

"It's important not to bring in another issue which serves to obfuscate the discussion in favor of the 'pro reformulation' side of things. That is, I'd be the first to mention that I used to wear vintage more often, and that some vintage I don't like as much as I used to, whereas others I like more. This, however, has nothing to do with my perception of the 'quality' of the scent. Now sometimes I don't feel the need to wear a quality scent, and I often reach for a 'super cheapo,' but if I'm in the mood for vintage Zino, for example, that's what I want. I have no interest in wearing what I believe to be reformulated Zino, ever. Others can't detect any difference, or claim it is negligible . . . so the best you can do is read the relevant information online and try to make the right decision (but it will only be the right decision for you, not necessarily for anyone else).

First, I have to say as an aside that I wonder if this basenotes member frequently uses Zino as an example in these discussions precisely because its reformulation is indiscernible from a well-preserved vintage? It’s like he’s counter-intuitively using a perfume that blatantly contradicts his argument as a distraction, with which he can claim that there’s some special “quality” in the original formulation that correlates with a “cheapness” in the new stuff - an assertion that nobody can convincingly corroborate for obvious reasons. This would then seem to fortify his position that only “perceptive” noses - an implicitly rare kind of human, according to him - can detect the discrepancy, when in fact no such discrepancy exists. Unfortunately, I can only commit to my own opinions on the general issue of reformulations, and the more specific case of Zino.

On the surface, this seems to be the whole thrust of his comment, and I take issue with it. It suggests that if someone points out the deleterious effects of time on perfume, they are "obfuscating" the issue for a "pro-reformulation side of things," which is completely absurd. It's absurd because the smells of most perfumes will absolutely change over time, beyond a doubt, with the exception of a small percentage of extremely synthetic compositions. It's also absurd because whenever anyone points this out, they're merely acknowledging the existence of time's effect on matter, which in the case of perfume is usually not very positive.* To mention this is to clarify, not obfuscate. It may be an inconvenient truth for the "pro-vintage" crowd, and they might want people to believe it is an obfuscation, but cherry-picking facts is never a good way to respond in these kinds of discussions. Here it just re-crafts another mythology.

If you're coming to this as a newbie, you might wonder why it matters. So a perfume changes, but still smells good - so what? The "what" here is how a perfume smells within the years of its peak shelf life, otherwise known as "what the perfumer intends for you to smell." Some perfumers labor for months on formulas, but all of their work is an effort to discover where designs function best, and preserve them for as long as possible, before the inexorable march of days alters their compositions into liquids that are no longer pristine specimens of talent.

Perfumers know that the creation of their perfume, after weeks and weeks of toiling in a lab, happens in but a moment, that priceless instant when they sniff the strip and realize the synchronization of their assembled parts has quite suddenly been perfected. This moment is then temporarily frozen for us to enjoy. It's what perfumers want you to experience, and therefore is, quite paradoxically, the nexus and event horizon of a perfume. No perfume lasts forever, but forever truly resides in perfume.

Now, getting back to that comment I dislike so much - I wrote, "On the surface, this seems . . . " because later in the thread, the same author wrote the following:

"Those who can't smell the difference [between vintage and new] appear to get irritated that such threads exist, which makes no sense to me."

This revealed to me, reader and reluctant non-participant, the real message: "You can't smell it, BUT I CAN! Nah, nah, nah-nah naaaah!" (Raspberry noises.) How this person could possibly know what people can smell is a mystery. It would take a certain level of paranormal ability to develop such knowledge. Mind reading, perhaps? I'll let you decide.

I also dislike that the initial response is naked speculation, cloaked in intricately-woven airs of fact, and made semi-acceptable to some functioning minds by its appealingly subjective form. The writer uses "I" and "My" throughout, which is very attractive, winning, and wise, but also dangerously misleading. The scent that he mentions is a curious one. I happen to own vintage eighties "script font" Zino, and brand-new "block font" Zino. I am also acutely aware of how exhaustively this fragrance has been discussed on basenotes and fragrantica. There are several people out there who agree with me that it's not even clear if Zino was reformulated. In fact, I have read respectable people write that they doubt there was ever a reformulation at all. If ever there is a perfume not to hold up in an honest argument for vintage, it's Zino.

I personally believe Zino was reformulated, but I strongly feel, based on all the note comparisons that I can possibly make for myself, that the reformulation is just as great as the original formula. I am speculating, and I am honest about it, but my guess is educated, based on background information I dug up on Michel Almairac's career trajectory, and how it coincided with some remarkable advances in chemistry. I learned that he went to the Roure School in the early 1970s, and that he began making a name for himself when Givaudan (which was associated with Roure) invented "Sandalore." This synthetically-made molecule was patented to cut costs on natural sandalwood oil, without sacrificing the sensations of real sandalwood's texture and richness. For cheap scents like Zino, its implementation makes as much sense then as it does now.

In making the formula comparisons, there was something I had to overcome: the degradation of the vintage. And by "degradation," I don't just mean the loss of top notes. Ninety-nine percent of my vintage experiences have revealed problems with all stages of development. The loss of top notes is the least of it. With vintage Zino, the fragrance is intact and legible, and each note is basically where it belongs. Yet it suffers from potency issues, balance issues, and the typical "fuzz-out" effect that seems to occur frequently with woody classics. In short, the potency seems attenuated, down three or four hours compared to the recent stuff; the zesty bergamot and lavender head notes smell like they've separated from each other, where once they were blended (both notes are a little too strident); the precious wood notes in the base "fuzz" into a gentle, sandalwood-like blob that fails to yield individual tones (the bergamot goes on, amazingly).

At stake here is not the perception of "quality" in the vintage fragrance. I can smell that the composition is comprised of "quality" materials. For the record, I can't recall anyone ever announcing that they couldn't smell the "goodness" of something that smelled good to them. Therefore, the suggestion that those wary of vintage can't detect their "quality" rests on the fallacious idea that the perception a wearer has of a fragrance can parallel, and even diverge from the recognition of its effect on his mood. What is more likely to occur in the minds of anyone studying fragrances in-depth is the surprising realization that the durability of a beautiful perfume is just as important as its beauty.

To make sense of this, I had to "read" my two Zinos carefully. This means that I took note of what I smelled in vintage Zino, and then had to readjust my impression afterward against what I know about degradation, and the smell of current Zino. Industry veteran Jeffrey Dame made it clear to me and my readers that the shelf-life of most fragrances, with the exception of orientals, is to be taken seriously; with Zino, I had to acknowledge that what I smelled matched his assessment of the time/quality factor, and then set the information he gave me aside to better judge whether the olfactory impressions of vintage Zino's somewhat degraded accords correlated with the current juice.

In other words, I had to ask myself, "Is what I'm smelling in the old stuff the same as what I'm smelling in the new stuff, only degraded?" There's something a bit archeological about doing this. You have to dust off what exists, and use what you know to imagine what used to exist. Except here you must use your nose, not your eyes. And the "dusting off" process is really just accepting the irreversible and quirky nature of aged perfume.

I'm telling you this because it requires a sensitive nose to figure these things out. Having a feeble nose will do you no good if you're really interested in determining whether vintages are for you. Those who survey the field of classics and make a focused effort to familiarize themselves with specific olfactory structures, such as the aromatic fern, the ambery oriental, the mossy chypre, and specific notes, such as bergamot, lavender, labdanum, vanilla, sandalwood, oakmoss, musk, are bound to develop better noses. Once developed, they can use their heightened sense to pick apart the true quality differences that abound between the worlds of "vintage" perfume and "new" perfume.

But those differences in quality will have to be weighed against degradation. In most cases, I'd say the degradation will be relatively minor. In other cases, however, it will certainly be overwhelming. Recognizing how notes and accords degrade is a skill which takes that of simple note identification quite a bit further.

I've long suspected that the person who made the Zino comment quoted above actually has tremendous difficulty with this level of recognition. I believe this to be true because this person has stated on more than one occasion that he has never encountered a vintage fragrance that smelled like it had gone bad, or gone off. I won't call this person a liar. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, and suggest that this is representative of what might be a true deficit in his olfactory abilities. I suspect that instead of acknowledging and admitting this shortcoming, he and others like him pretend the exact opposite: that they possess remarkable abilities of incredible "quality" discernment.

If your nose is good, you'll have no problem admitting that many vintage perfumes don't smell quite right - in fact, most will seem a bit "off." It's important to recognize that this doesn't mean the perfumes will smell bad, or unwearable, or offensive in any way. There's often a good chance that they'll smell appealing. But the key is to determine if what you're smelling is an accurate representation of itself, as it was intended to smell. Only then can you really decide whether or not this matters to you. With some perfumes, the accuracy of what you smell might matter; with others it might not. You must ask yourself, "How has this changed?" And once that is answered, you must follow up with, "Has anyone fucked with the formula?"

These are very different questions. Don't get them confused.

* This refers to time in the long term, beyond what may be construed as in-bottle maceration, or any other maceration process that gradually allows the volatilities of naturals to synchronize.