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 The prevailing sentiment is that this landmark release, Davidoff’s third perfume, has become outdated and cheap, reduced to a meaningless “shower fresh” relic.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.

Cool Water Has Officially Been Destroyed

Well, they finally did it. It took nearly three decades and at least four reformulations, but the manufacturers of Davidoff's iconic fresh fougère have officially ruined the fragrance. This is a devastating development for me, as this fragrance was one of my absolute favorites. Let me explain what happened.

Contrary to what you usually read about reformulations (from morons who opine about diminished ingredient quality and dramatic packaging changes), the changes here were insular, streamlined, and sneaky. I've had a theory for a while now that Coty Prestige is beginning to lose faith in this brand. The constant annual cycle of summer flankers and special editions belie the financial hard times this perfume has, in my estimation, fallen on. The truth is that Cool Water isn't embraced by youngsters anymore. People in their teens and early twenties aren't really wearing it. I haven't met a single young person in the last six years who claimed to wear Cool Water, and I've met a few people recently who have actually never even heard of it, which is hard to fathom.

Compounding the issue is the recent rise of the richer-smelling Green Irish Tweed. As of eight years ago, Creed's woodier, muskier take on this genre was still an obscure niche scent with little to no commercial visibility. A handful of eighties fougère connoisseurs knew about it, but it didn't have the notoriety that it currently enjoys. Then the buzz started. Threads began to fill the boards at basenotes, Fragrantica, Badger & Blade, and guys rendered their collective verdict to the world: GIT is better than Cool Water. This cut into Davidoff's cache. Where it once was the popular choice for people who wanted a semi-sweet, semi-green freshie, now it was being derisively labeled "cheap," "chemical," and "inferior." That GIT is just as cheap to manufacture, almost as chemical-smelling, and in no way more effective at what it does than Cool Water did not register. People simply equated "richer" with "better," and that was that.

My guess is that declining sales over the years have spurred Coty to reevaluate the formula. They're in it to save money at this point. I'm intimately familiar with all forms of this scent, including the deodorant spray, and I believe that they used the deodorant formula in the new EDT. Which wouldn't be a big deal, except the deodorant was always simpler and flatter smelling than the EDT. Instead of crisp, long-lasting lavender and green apple notes, the deodorant opens with a muted lavender, only lightly brushed with apple, that swiftly segues to a muted tobacco/musk accord. It's the stale, wet cement note that used to crop up in older versions of CW. It has incredible power and presence, and still fills a room. I imagine it's not immensely cheaper than what was in the EDT, but it's definitely less.

The result is a fragrance that simply lacks dynamism and contrast. It also lacks its sparkle and appeal. I don't want a dull tobacco powder on my skin for eight hours. I don't want something that far removed from the neroli-shimmer of the 2013 formula. Having done a code search, I can tell you that my new bottle was manufactured in December of last year. And oddly enough, Coty's people decided to enlarge the Cool Water logo on the bottle by a few millimeters, which I'm guessing cost them next to nothing (no dramatic color, design, or packaging change), but lets them identify the different formulas by simply glancing at the bottles. I know that enlarging a logo by a few millimeters can be done in InDesign within ten seconds, and would add nothing, or next to nothing, to the printer's bill. But just eye-balling the new bottle next to the old one reveals the difference, and cleverly makes identifying which bottle is which very easy.

This would be a true disaster if Green Irish Tweed and Grey Flannel didn't exist. Frankly, I like Cool Water better than GIT. But not anymore. This new version doesn't smell very good. It smells much less fresh and appealing than the version before it, and I'd rather save my money and buy GIT. So sad, and very rare for this to happen. It is literally the first reformulation in my collection that has made me feel this way.

Zino's Reformulation Is Just As Great: The "Zinoization" Canard, and Some Information About Sandalore

Vintage fragrances tend to exhibit similar characteristics, at least to me. They possess abbreviated top notes, or no top notes at all. Their heart accords usually show up early and smell unbalanced, lacking a certain degree of note separation that I prefer in compositions. Most of the notes in them are dulled a bit with age, an effect of murky, muddled simplification where there was once texture and complexity. Their base accords are either a great big smoosh of several notes into one super-smooth "cologney" wood note, or a small handful of feeble, out of focus notes that further fade into the sunset a few hours after application. 

To date I have not encountered a vintage scent that smelled any differently, although Ocean Rain seems to be an exception, a living testament to the power of the genius behind its purely synthetic form, and even there it is hard for me to underscore my sentiment without prior knowledge of how Ocean Rain smelled when new. Things like Grey Flannel, Bleu Marine de Cardin, Feeling Man by Jil Sander, Davidoff's Relax, Dali Pour Homme, and Venezia Uomo did not fare as well. 

This isn't to say that I don't like how most of these vintages smell. I love how my vintage Grey Flannel smells, and also enjoy Bleu Marine. I like the synthetically lucid sandalwood-like "smooshed wood note" of Feeling Man's heart and base, although it could use more texture and contrast. I also like Relax's miniature Zino base accord, and the darkness of Dali PH is terrific. I currently consider my Venezia Uomo to be borderline unwearable, unfortunately. It's that far gone.

My bottle of vintage Zino is no different from the rest in that it smells like current Zino, but simplified to a small degree. It's like someone went into the formula with a wet paintbrush and smeared notes of lavender, sage, patchouli, cedar, rosewood, sandalwood, vanilla, and musk, condensing the entire scent's dynamism into two or three accords. The "someone" in question here is Father Time. Many years in a closet will predictably smooth out a scent's rougher edges and leave it very close to the same as it was, but slightly different. In Zino's case, the only difference between vintage and current is that a bit of the former's complexity is lost, while the latter shows me how it used to smell, boasting better note separation, an increase in the tonality and balance of notes, and a more rewarding experience in general.

When I approach vintage Zino from a subjective standpoint, I have the expectation that it will smell 95% the same as current Zino, so I'm not surprised by how my vintage smells. The 5% change is attributable to some staleness from age, and not to any significant difference in the chemical formula itself. Well, maybe .01% is a formula divergence: the bergamot note in vintage smells microscopically fresher than the top note of current, but I waffle a bit on that. In low doses the bergamot jumps out at me, but if I do a full wearing of vintage the day after a wearing of the reformulation, there is no perceptible difference. It's still a lovely scent.

The longevity in my vintage is compromised, as I get only two hours out of the base before it becomes a skin scent, but that doesn't surprise me, either. I get four or five hours out of current Zino. This was never a "powerhouse" masculine, it's more a gentleman's scent. The bottom line here is that my Parfums Davidoff, "Made in France" bottling of Zino with a modified Edwardian script logo and moderately lighter reddish-brown glass is indistinguishable from my more current Lancaster block-font formula, save for a little weakness and staleness. Owning juice from thirty years ago makes no major difference with this scent.

Refer to basenotes threads on this to find that my impression must be mistaken. Vintage enthusiasts feel that vintage Zino boasts a beautiful sandalwood note. According to one of them, that sandalwood note was removed from the newer formula entirely, and its melange of remaining synthetics were made denser to compensate for that extraction. They were "amped up," apparently in an attempt to disguise the removal of that precious sandalwood. This has been coined the "Zinoization" of Zino, a term that its author applies to many reformulated classics.

The majority of posters in the thread linked to above find little to no difference between the vintage and current formulas, and one person even questions if it was even reformulated at all. He challenges the assertion that a change in packaging automatically signals a change in formula. Only a select few feel they can detect major differences between the two. What I find amusing about their chief complaint is the notion that sandalwood was removed, and that it was really good sandalwood. Despite this, no one has ever come forward to contend that natural sandalwood was definitely used in vintage Zino, but it is strongly implied.

What is contended is that Zino's sandalwood note disappeared. Yet most find the current formula to be unchanged, or changed to a barely perceptible degree. Is it possible to remove a good and possibly natural sandalwood note from a formula and leave it changed to a degree so small that most would argue about it? I say no. In my opinion, the contention that Zino suffered a "Zinoization" at the hands of shrewd accountants is illogical. Let's take a brief look at what Davidoff's release was to the world back in 1986.

At that time, Zino was a middle-shelf designer masculine at lower middle-shelf prices. This was never a "pricey" perfume. It wasn't a "luxe" fragrance in the same league as products by Chanel and Guerlain. The likelihood that it contained natural sandalwood at its price-point is not especially good. Certainly natural sandalwood materials were not as expensive as they became in the nineties, but they were still quite expensive, and Zino never warranted that sort of expenditure. Remember, this is a Davidoff scent from before Davidoff became a household name, pre-Cool Water. As a purveyor of fine tobacco products, the brand had the money to spend on its perfumes, yet it didn't use much of that money to advertise them, which suggests the perfume division was on a tight budget, probably to minimize risk.

There are two or three print ads, and one television commercial from Zino's release. As a graphic design major I can tell you that most of the print ads are retreaded "comps," the same images in subtly different juxtapositions, a super-cheap way in the world of advertising to wring the most out of very little. I can practically see the Scotch tape and thumbtacks holding X-Acto knived prints against bristol boards.

The commercial is from the early Coty years, when its Lancaster division took over production in the nineties. Enough sales revenue had been generated to justify a TV spot, and those sales were from Cool Water. I used to catch it between shows when I was in middle school, interspersed with those weird black and white Obsession commercials, and those Kate Moss CK commercials. Davidoff had the "normal" commercial.

So far I have not been able to find a commercial from the eighties, and doubt that one exists. Judging by its continued availability at absurdly low prices, I suspect that Coty Prestige continues to manufacture Zino under the pretense of still being Lancaster, in the same way that Colgate-Palmolive continues to print "By Mennen" on labels for Skin Bracer, a sly and well-advised commercial maneuver to keep finicky fans of certain "classics" coming back for more.

It is therefore relatively difficult to figure that Davidoff executives were willing to inject significant (i.e., "noticeable") doses of natural sandalwood oil into perfumes that had not yet been internationally successful, and which the brand seemed unwilling to aggressively market in the first place. The original Davidoff scent was hardly a hot seller, and was discontinued only a few years after its release. Zino came on its heels. This doesn't mean that the company wasn't interested in finding the best and most practical synthetics available, or that it wouldn't hire top talent to formulate their scents - to do so were smart uses of their cash, far smarter than dropping bundles on natural wood oils that are difficult to use. It just means that claims of smelling a "natural" sandalwood note in Zino smack of ignorance about the general importance of naturals vs synthetics in fragrance formulas, and the limits that were obviously being imposed on Davidoff perfumes in the eighties.

Even the worldwide renown of Guerlain didn't generate enough cache to justify using natural sandalwood in Samsara, a sandalwood perfume from the same era. Why would anyone with any comprehensive understanding of the industry imagine Davidoff thought differently about their fragrances?

There are really only two kinds of natural sandalwood that were ever used to great effect in classic twentieth century perfumes: Mysore sandalwood from India and Australian sandalwood from the country's southwestern region, both of which are potent fixatives with unmistakable profiles. I'm familiar with them because Jim Gehr, a very talented perfumer and founder of Garner James, sent me generous samples of both oil types, although the Australian oil is from New Caledonia, an outlying island province.

Mysore sandalwood is deep, rich, buttery, and incredibly complex. New Caldedonian sandalwood is also rich and buttery, but it is significantly brighter and airier than its Indian counterpart. It has a more herbal and urinous quality to it, while the Indian sandalwood is earthier and smoother. Both smell very, very similar after two hours on skin, but those first two hours show remarkable differences. Mysore seems better suited for pungent, earthy notes like patchouli, while Australian would work better with strident animalic musks.

Zino in both formulations does have a sandalwood note to my nose, but it's the same sandalwood note. The note performs identically in both. It lends smoothness and a woody backbone to the intense patchouli note in the heart and base, and also supports a strong rosewood note. The fact that the performance of this note is interchangeable in these formulas suggests that it's a synthetic molecule, which means it is just one molecule. I think it is Sandal ore, otherwise known as molecule CI4H260, which Givaudan trademarked in the summer of 1977. The molecule seems to be used very sparingly in Zino's original formula, and in the reformulation. Sandal ore was used in several other eighties perfumes, including Samsara, and yes, that's where Samsara got its sandalwood from, although with Guerlain being Guerlain, it's not implausible to suppose a smidgen of the real stuff was used in early Samsara formulas. Synthetic sandalwood's use in Zino would explain why its two formulas smell virtually identical to each other. With a synthetic molecule, the only variable to its performance is the degree to which it is used.

Contrast this to natural sandalwood oil, which is comprised of hundreds of different molecules. Using this material in a formula like Zino would certainly enhance its performance, but with distinct variations in smell. Since the wood notes in Zino are strong, one might deduce that the concentration of wood molecules is high. But if natural oils were used at high concentration (in this case it would probably have to be Mysore sandalwood, given the intensity of patchouli in Zino and lack of animalic elements), the perfume would smell different bottle-to-bottle, due to the variables of natural sandalwood. Different oil grades would slip in now and then, sources would vary, and the natural changeability of the wood would shade Zino as being noticeably "inconsistent" from batch to batch. We've all seen how guys perk up when Creed issues perfumes that smell inconsistent between batches. The boards fill up constantly with threads about it. No such hysteria exists with Zino. Not even close.

Now take into account that the nose for Zino is Michel Almairac, a man who studied perfumery at the Roure School in the early 1970s, and whose career took off around the time that Givaudan trademarked "Sandalore," and you begin to see why it might have been used by Almairac in 1986. Roure was a subsidiary of Givaudan; Almairac was probably exposed to Sandal ore's potential during his apprenticeship, and inspired to use it in his own creations.

The claims that the reformulation of Zino smells "busier on top" and "denser" can be attributed to the fresher perfume having more texture and dynamism in its top notes than older batches, while the suggestion that vintage lasts longer can be attributed to the possible use of oakmoss, which may have been reduced and/or eliminated in the reformulation, or possibly supplemented with treemoss (moss is not a prominent note in this composition). I find that the vintage actually lasts a shorter amount of time than the reformulation, so I can't endorse any of these longevity claims. And if any of my readers feel a contradiction between my positions on counterfeit vintages and the divergences between my experiences with vintage and those of others, proceed with caution. The majority of my vintages were bought in person from trusted shops (not anonymous internet sellers) with cosmetic codes intact, usually on the boxes and on stickers glued to the bottles, all carefully checked on checkcosmetic.net.

So was Zino ever really "Zinoized?" Was a natural sandalwood material removed from its formula and then disguised with the "amping-up" of several cheaper synthetics? This is unlikely. What is more plausible is that many of the textured patchouli and woody-herbal notes of vintage Zino fused together with time to form a quieter and somewhat blotted precious wood effect that some people mistake for better balanced top notes and natural sandalwood base notes. Meanwhile a very effective sandalwood synthetic pokes through, perhaps bolstering an illusion of "naturalness."

The older and newer formulas are so similar that I believe the Sandal ore molecule is present in both, and serves the same purpose in both. I also believe that the "amping up" theory, which is the backbone of the "Zinoization" claim, is nonsense. Zino's reformulation doesn't have "amped up" notes. Zino's vintage has "amped down" notes, due to age. The intense lavender and clary sage combination doesn't punch the nostrils as hard in the vintage, because those materials have waned a bit. Some folks argue that something like a "spiced vanilla note" is used to replace the sandalwood, but no such effect registers to my nose at all.

I don't understand why some people insist that two identical formulas are different, when they plainly are not. I also don't know where the paranoid "Zinoization" concept comes from, but I find it ludicrous to extrapolate its theory to other fragrances when the logic behind it is so dubious, and so obviously erroneous from the outset. I have to wonder if the vintage enthusiasts who claim that Zino's older formula is superior have ever really owned and worn the reformulation, or if they merely sniffed spritzes in perfume shops somewhere and allowed their collective "Feeler" bias to do the work that their noses should have been doing instead. In any case, I'm glad I didn't spend much money for my bottle of vintage Zino when I bought it. The newer stuff is great. 

Heck, the only reason to own the vintage is to have a bottle with that cool Davidoff script logo on it. I think it's the finest logo in the business, and it's too bad it was reformulated.