Grey Flannel Without Oakmoss and Treemoss

I’d heard Grey Flannel had been stripped of all moss, a topic fragcomm was buzzing about as far back as 2015. I’m well stocked in Geoffrey Beene’s 1975 chypre, with French Fragrances, late-2000s EA, and Jacqueline Cochran formulas. In brief: FF is the mossiest, smooth, and powdery-green with muted florals; EA is sharper and only slightly harsher, with more hyacinth and gardenia but otherwise 98% like FF; JC is the smoothest and woodiest, with the largest violet–sandalwood accord, resembling Green Irish Tweed if Bourdon had skipped dihydromyrcenol in favor of galbanum and alpha ionone.

Curious how this legend smells post-IFRA and without natural moss, I bought a new bottle. Surprisingly, it’s not much different -- less plush, but barely so. It opens with bitter greens, like snapped green beans and old lemon rinds, then sweetens as a coumarinic cloud of violet leaf wraps around me. Vegetal, hay-sweet, and dry, yet evocative of cold humidity under a scraggly April rain-soaked bush, Grey Flannel remains the most distinctive green masculine I own. No wonder I wore it exclusively for a year. A landmark fragrance, it pioneered a crisp, fresh, green style that defined the eighties and nineties.

I recommend Grey Flannel in all its vintages, but with a note of caution on vintage hunting. If you want a smooth, woody violet akin to a more natural Green Irish Tweed, seek the Jacqueline Cochran or, better yet, the first Epocha version. For a rich, green, mossy take, go for Sanofi or early French Fragrances. To boost brightness, find early Elizabeth Arden bottles, and for the most direct violet leaf, the latest EA versions (sans moss) deliver well. Grey Flannel turns fifty this year, and I hope it lasts another fifty.

The Outer Limits of Perfume Orthodoxy

"The Greatest Green Scent"

I'm just back from a refreshing Maine trip, during which I visited the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay, which are absolutely gorgeous and a requisite destination if you ever head up that way. The last time I visited was in early June, and the gardens were very "bloomy" that time of year, with countless varieties of hyacinths, tulips, irises, roses, peonies, and you name it. This early August visit was about echinacea and all shades of coneflowers, bee balm, lilies, phlox, yarrow, and hosta, among others. A less "bloomy" and colorful experience, but peaceful and inspiring nonetheless. 

The verdant gardens got me thinking about my love of green fragrances. I started out in my pursuit of all things perfumed with an unalloyed interest in pursuing green scents, and perhaps I've strayed a bit since then, but still marvel at the concept of wearing a garden. I combed through my collection and remembered Geoffrey Beene's Bowling Green and its many laudatory reviews, many of which claim that it's the best "green" fragrance money can buy. Of course, this got me thinking of how much I disagree with that sentiment, and I realized that I'm at odds with the orthodoxy of popular perfume reviewers. It's not that I disagree for the sake of it, but that I simply don't come to the same conclusions. 

It is indeed quite difficult to find reviews of Bowling Green that are less than glowing; the fragrance has long been considered the gold standard for inexpensive masculine/unisex green, thanks in no small part to its well regarded lemon verbena accord. I've had a 4 oz. bottle of it for a few years now, and have worn exactly half of it. I'm wearing it today. I got off to a rough start with this scent because the first bottle I tried was a bit turned, but not enough to be obvious, which negatively influenced my review. The bright citrus element had all but vanished, leaving only the "herbal amber" element at the scent's core, which alone smells okay but haggard. Later I bought the reissued reformulation, which didn't change the scent, and learned that it's really bright and airy, a springtime green. 

But is Bowling Green the gold standard for "green" in perfumes for under $100? Yes and no. Yes, if you're looking at it purely subjectively, and you happen to love Beene's rendition of lemon verbena, which comprises about 75% of the fragrance pyramid here. No, if objectively you put it up against the hordes of other green frags out there, both in and out of production. I mean, Bowling Green is very good, don't get me wrong. If you're a college kid with $100 to spare, and you're looking for a lemony-green fougère idea that vaguely recalls Drakkar Noir (a weird thing for today's college set to seek), Bowling Green is a perfect solution. It's currently retailing for between $90 and $120 on eBay, and chances are the bottle you buy will smell great, as the packaging for this stuff is fantastic -- solid cardboard tubing that blocks light and protects against the elements. 

If you're a college kid looking for this, I applaud you. I also don't expect you to be interested. And you'll probably meet my expectations, and be completely oblivious to Bowling Green, instead pursuing some sweet Hawas flanker or one of the Eros frags. I'd say you're missing out, but you're not so much missing out on Bowling Green as on the better stuff. From Beene's line, Grey Flannel is the superior fragrance, so I can start there. Beyond the brand are many superior compositions, ranging from Creed's Green Valley (discontinued and a fortune) to Jaguar for Men (still in production), Paul Smith Men (DC'd), Jacomo Silences (DC'd) Acqua di Selva (in production), Pino Silvestre (ditto), and any number of Green Irish Tweed variants, with GIT itself high on the list. If I want grassy green on a budget, Adidas Sport Field is still a good option. Even more of a budget, and something like Brut is, amazingly, still a respectable bet. For an inexpensive and truly unorthodox unisex fragrance, Vicky Tiel's Ulysse is excellent stuff. Silences sits next to Green Valley as the GOAT of green. I could go on and on. My point is, I find these to be preferable to Bowling Green because they smell better and (mostly) cost less. 

If I test the outer limits of perfume orthodoxy on "green," I come up against some interesting philosophical tensions between nature as an ideal and nature as an illusion -- between what smells alive and what merely suggests life through carefully composed artifice. For example, Montblanc Starwalker is a suggestion of life, a fresh but brazenly synthetic precursor to Dior Sauvage with chemical "bamboo" overlaid with a bucketful of woody Ambroxan. It smells peaceful and zen-like in small doses, and works in a pinch, but if I really want the sensation of placid natural zen in an organic, living grove, I'm more likely to reach for Banana Republic's Cypress Cedar -- quite an interesting thing, considering the BR frag isn't exactly "natural." Perspective is useful here, because today's young buck might reach for any one of his designer frags and think, "I like how this smells," but a sizable number of people around him might think he smells like a chemical spill. Sure, Hawas smells good, but it doesn't take me to nature. It takes me to eighth grade.  

And why hasn't Rasasi been a contender in the quest for a natural "green" fragrance? They seem to be taken with the current mode of commercial wisdom, which suggests that releasing fifteen new fragrances in a year is the way to go. I would say that the public rewards this approach; reviews of their new releases, some of which haven't even hit stores yet, are broadly positive. If I were running Rasasi, I would acknowledge this financial reality, as their choices are assuredly generating remarkable sales, but I'd temper it with my own advice: go for quality, not quantity. Take Al Haramain's example -- this brand releases quite a few fragrances each year also, but unlike Rasasi, they seem interested in refining ideas that they had worked on previously, in the interest of pursuing new levels of quality. I haven't smelled L'Aventure Blanche, but I've been led to understand that it's an okay clone of Silver Mountain Water, but only that. It doesn't win brownie points over something like Armaf's Sillage, for example. 

But then put your nose on L'Aventure Fraîche, and what do you smell? The current formula of Silver Mountain Water with petitgrain and fir accords amplified, and in a slightly higher (i.e., "oilier") concentration. A split-hair shy of SMW, but hell, if you can't afford the Creed, L'Aventure Fraîche will get you 99.99% of the way there if applied sparingly. I'd argue it does a better job of cloning the current Creed formula than Sillage does (Armaf famously targets vintage Creed formulas, and does a bang-up job). The attention to detail in Al Haramain's work is obvious, and it's also clear that they're not wasting time and resources spewing out flanker after flanker after flanker of some designer-grade template. Far from perfect, but I'd wager that the brains behind Al Haramain's operation are cognizant of the mark of quality one feels in their fragrances. Sure, you pay a bit more for an Al Haramain perfume than you do for anything by Rasasi, but not much more. These brands are in the same league. Why is one so much better than the other? 

Another weird thing about perfume lately is how many fragrances are being shoved on the consumer. It's as if the "art" of perfumery were akin to five-and-dime comics. We're currently experiencing thousands of new releases per year. There were around 6,000 new fragrances released in 2024. That's a staggering number, even on the global market. Back in 2000 there were only about 700 new releases, so in 24 years we've seen a roughly tenfold increase in the number of new offerings. If you're a fragrance lover like me, this might seem like a wonderful thing. And sure, you won't find me complaining, as I like the thought that there is a veritable universe of perfumes to be explored. However, I sound a note of caution. This kind of market is unsustainable in the long term. Short-term, maybe the next five years or so will continue to see unparalleled growth in output. But long-term, the heat generated by this many releases will finally overwhelm the customer bases that designer brands established several decades ago, and we'll see a sudden and rather violent collapse of the fragrance market, with hundreds of brands going bye-bye. 

Consider the market. In the last twenty years, we've seen inexpensive perfumes all but disappear. Every Western brand is now aiming for the luxury market, the wealthy customer, or the customer with so much disposable income that they can manage buying two or three $400 perfumes without fearing insolvency. I'm not wealthy, but I make a decent middle-class salary and I don't have any children, which puts me in that weird realm of being someone who can afford two or three expensive perfumes per year without feeling the pinch. This doesn't make me the market's core clientele, however. Chanel and I aren't friends. Dior and I rarely contact each other. Creed hasn't seen an online boutique purchase from me since 2014. I and all other collectors like me rely on chance and good financial acumen to score whatever pricy frags we can manage, and I'm well aware that the more serious collectors use their collections as self-sustaining leverage in the acquisition of new items. Want that new Francis Kurkdjian release? Sell his last one and use the proceeds. That's how the non-wealthy big-timers do it. 

That approach works for the crazed collector set, of which I'm a member. It doesn't work for the average joe. The average guy or gal is not that interested in perfume. Women are marginally more interested, and the average middle class woman might accrue something like five or six bottles in a semi-regular rotation, and one or two of those are probably "body sprays," which I'll never fully understand. Men are more "signature scent" prone and usually buy one or two fragrances that are rarely worn. They wear what their wives or girlfriends give them, or approve of, and they might only wear fragrance on special occasions or on their "date nights." Right now, with this seemingly unending Renaissance of perfume, they might actually own -- wait for it -- three or four whole bottles. Which means their need for anything else will arrive sometime around 2060. 

Here's the thing: this isn't what the market is doing. The market is shelling out new fragrances like there's an enormous swath of men and women who house 300+ bottle wardrobes that are ever-expanding. This simply isn't the case. Their target audience is literally 1% of the population. Every designer and niche brand in America is targeting about 3,400,000 people. Of them, there might be 1% who are actually lovingly dedicated to collecting perfumes, so we're talking 34,000 people here. That's right, you're reading this correctly. The income bracket of the 1% of America's population that are inarguably "wealthy" covers only a few million people, and of them, maybe 1% are obsessed with perfume enough to amass respectable wardrobes and be repeat buyers, but their number is staggeringly small, fewer than the amount who attend the Superbowl. 

So why does the market keep churning things out at this breakneck pace? Right now many of the Western brands are competing against the Eastern brands, so there is a collective push against the market's answer to bad socioeconomics. Arabian and UAE brands are that answer. They are overall cheaper and better distributed than their Western counterparts, now appearing everywhere in the USA in discount stores and mall kiosks. Where once it was entirely an internet game to buy anything by Rasasi or Armaf or Al Haramain, now it is a matter of stopping at your local Burlington or Ross and seeing what new array of Middle Eastern releases are available. You hop on Fragrantica, check it out, then put away your phone and buy the thing that seems the most promising. It costs you anywhere from $10 to $45, and the quality is often on par with that $170 designer fragrance being distributed only at "authorized retailers" like Neiman Marcus or Sephora. The Eastern brands are putting things out at an impossible pace, swamping the global market with releases, and many of these are offered within the value parameters of the wider population. This is a hot market that might very well sustain, because there are far more than 3.4 million customers for them here in the USA.  

If you're reading this and thinking, "Bryan, that doesn't explain why Western brands are churning out tons of releases and pricing them at five or six times the going rate," you're not wrong. It doesn't explain the shift to the wealthy. But what it does explain is the shift in equality. The bare truth of the matter is that most people in America are making less than $45K per year, if they have a job at all. Meanwhile, those who are wealthy aren't just a little wealthy. They're very wealthy. They are enjoying eight, nine, ten digit bank accounts. And within those circles is the expectation of choices and options. Western brands are attempting to keep up with that ethos by shoveling dozens of new frags per brand at jaw-dropping prices onto the market, rarely pricing anything under $50 per ounce, all in the attempt to lock the majority out of buying, more than to welcome the wealthy in. The problem with Veblen goods is that they lose their cachet the minute any non-luxury client makes a purchase. If you're Louis Vuitton, the last thing you want is for me in my blue jeans and sneakers to come sauntering in to buy a suitcase, and the absolute worst case scenario is for me to actually buy it. 

But okay, say I do buy one of their $38,000 suitcases. Not likely, but maybe I'm just dumb with money. They make the sale. They're not thrilled, because after talking to me for five minutes they figure out that I'm a schlub in the wrong store, but money is money. No biggie. I go on my merry way. The real nightmare begins with the next guy who walks in. Is he wearing a baseball cap on backwards and jeans from Walmart? Is he also buying a suitcase? And the next guy? And the next? If any percentage of the middle class is encroaching on the luxury status of a brand, that brand will lose its coveted ivory tower spot and begin to slide "downmarket." The more middle class buyers walk in, the more you have to cater to them, which means offering deals, and advertising for them, and actually giving a shit about them, none of which is desired. By keeping prices very high, Louis Vuitton might see one Bryan with his middle class salary walk in and actually buy something once every twenty years. That's exactly how they like it.

But the luxury leather goods market isn't nearly as saturated as the perfume market. It takes months to develop a high quality leather luxury good, and years to refine it. It can take as little as a few weeks to both develop and refine a perfume, and then use its rejected mods as flankers to be rolled out six months apart. There is no danger of overheating in the luxury suitcase market. But there is a grave danger of overheating in the luxury perfume market. In their mad dash to keep people out of buying their perfumes, many Western brands are spending capital on products that are seeing diminishing returns, as evidenced by the rapid discontinuation of releases that are often in stores for only a year or two. Some have pointed to this as the secret weapon in the fragrance industry's war chest, but I see it as a sign of chronic illness; healthy brands keep products alive because they've done the work of figuring out what their customers actually want before foisting products on them. The fragrance industry is flailing haplessly after customers it isn't sure even exist, often without gaining purchase. 

What would a fragrance industry overheat/meltdown look like? It would start with a whimper, and end with a bang. At first it would look like business as usual -- a few small indie/niche brands go kaput, a couple of fairly prominent but B-list designers would discontinue their entire perfume ranges like Jean Patou did a few years back. A collective shrug would follow, with no expectations of further decline. But then something strange will occur, there, in the corner . . . a major niche brand will suddenly vanish. No explanation. This will be followed by another. And yet another. Like dominoes, the niche brands will suddenly shutter, one by one. The buzz will claim that these were "planned" shutdowns and all sorts of convoluted reasons will ensue, from things like, "our financiers are restructuring" and "the market has shifted and we are realigning ourselves to stay true to our mission." In other words, don't hold your breath, because we've discontinued everything. From there, the rot will spread to designer, and indeed may be even more rapid there. In attempting to curry favor with the wealthiest of the wealthy, names like Chanel and Dior and Prada may discover that younger generations are usurping the trends of older, wealthier generations and simply putting their moolah with the mullahs instead. Why spend $176 on 100 milliliters of Coco Mademoiselle when you can get Club de Nuit Woman for $150 less with barely any difference in quality? 

What effect will this have on giants like Chanel? Look at this way: in 2003, a 3.3 oz. bottle of Platinum Égoïste was $50. Reddit morons would have you think otherwise, with some claiming it went for $70 back then. I'm here to tell you, no, no it did not. I wouldn't have been able to afford bottles of it in college if it were that much. I went through at least two or three large bottles of PÉ by graduation. The same size costs $135 now. This is simply ridiculous. Armaf Legesi is $27 and silly reviewers say it's "a metallic Platinum Égoïste," as if the adjective denotes a difference (PÉ is metallic as fuck). If Armaf can convincingly clone Green Irish Tweed, to the point where I don't need to buy and wear GIT anymore, do I doubt they can handle the super-synth Chanel? 

When several thousand Bryans start to multiply around the bottom line of PÉ, Chanel will realize, perhaps too late, that they're losing money hand over fist to Armaf, and a few other clone brands. They'll be forced to either (A) lower its price, or (B) axe the fragrance. Knowing how these designers operate, my money says they'll choose B. But that'll only be the start of their problem. Seeing blood in the water, Armaf and Al Haramain and several other Arabian brands will circle the Chanel wagon, picking off their exclusive couture fragrances, one by one, and gradually they'll have to disappear once-cherised classics, to the point where all they'll have left will be that old aldehydic Marilyn Monroe mess that nobody likes but everyone feels obligated to say good things about. 

With niche, the deaths will happen en masse. With designer, the fatalities will be slower, one cut at a time, until rapidly and without recompense there will no longer be options. The wealthy will be left with tiny selections, the very thing they hate, while the rest of us will have donned turbans and developed a taste for sipping motor oil before heading off to our low-paying jobs. Prada, Gucci, Armani, all will fold their flanker mills, one discontinuation after another, until all that are left are a few core scents. Consider Thierry Mugler's fate as an early indicator, a canary in the coal mine here. But even the Saudi market will whither, as the glut of options for the average buyer takes its toll on public perception. The UAE is relatively unfamiliar with the dangers of over-leveraging a brand. 

They could use a few crash courses on what happened to Roy Halston, Liz Claiborne, and Pierre Cardin. Americans understand that even when a brand offers quality products, a preponderance of said products results in overexposure, never a good thing. While many Arabian brands don't have designer names attached, sometimes with no brand name visible at all, the sheer number of perfumes will both self-poach sales and foster a sense of cheapness and disposability that will curdle the budget buyer's enthusiasm faster than designer and niche blunders sap the millionaire's. 

When the Arabian fragrance market collapses, which is also coming, the burnout will be complete. So I finish with a warning to the fragrance industry as a whole: Do not squander your wares on misallocated capital and dilute your brand cachet with bloated ranges. Think quality, not quantity, and think realistically about who is dumber with their money in the long run -- it ain't the people who have it. Stop pricing the middle class out of the market, when it was the middle class that made the market possible in the first place. We're all okay with fewer options, if those options take us back to the halcyon days of perfumes that smelled rich and were $10 at Walgreens.

Revisiting Bowling Green by Geoffrey Beene

This one has been the subject of enough controversy to warrant another look. Many have questioned if the bottles being sold online are current or "new old stock" vintage that someone unearthed from a basement somewhere and inexplicably opted to sell for pennies (my 4 oz was $12 after taxes). Having just received a bottle from Amazon, I now have an answer.

My bottle is clearly not NOS or deep vintage. It's also not a weird middle-ages vintage from twelve years ago, but recent enough that there's no oakmoss in the formula, which makes it no more than five years old. It's marked with newer EA Fragrances labels on both the box and bottle, as well as several lines that read "Made in England." It's marked "eau de toilette" and the color of the liquid is medium yellow, not a rich beer gold. It doesn't have the cloth cover tied over the lid like older bottles did. This looks like a recent batch of a very good fragrance. I bought it, I received it, mystery solved.

The fragrance remains familiar, an oily-green mélange of lavender, lemon verbena, and pine, with a dash of bitter herbs and a smidge of jasmine. This bottle smells brighter and more lemon-forward than the actual vintage from the nineties that I smelled ten years ago. That vintage was darker, drier, with less lemon and more basil, an imbalance likely due to age. But it smelled generally the same as this new one.

Bowling Green is compared to Drakkar Noir, which is the reason it annoys me. Grey Flannel was groundbreaking and original, but BG is derivative. It's yet another fresh aromatic fougère, but it doesn't rely heavily on soapy dihydromyrcenol, relegating that material to a minor supporting role instead. It redeems itself by smelling overwhelmingly natural in an herbal fashion reminiscent of Italian fougères like Acqua di Selva and Pino Silvestre, with rich woody nuances and a lemon verbena note that dwarfs the one in Green Irish Tweed, and dwarfs the Empire State Building. If you like lemon verbena, this is a fragrance you should stock up on. It's lemon verbena heaven. 

Drakkar Noir waded from the Precambrian ooze of midcentury Italian fougères, a unique brew from which fougères pushed past their citrus/musky traits and evolved into more complex woody-evergreen ensembles, without losing the connective tissues of clean fruit (lemon analogs instead of straight lemon) and floral musks (honey, juniper, mint). Stuffy Anglo-centric forms of triangular lavender/musks/mosses were reinterpreted, and rudimentary blueprints for postmodern ferns were issued to western five-and-dimes in square-shouldered bottles of emerald glass.

Pierre Wargnye followed that blueprint in '82 by fusing the bushels of herbs and cypress needles in those Mediterranean classics with a huge splash of dihydroyouknowhat, creating a new breed. Four years later, an unidentified perfumer gave us Bowling Green, using a lighter hand and a much larger bushel of the same herbs and cypress notes favored thirty years prior. When everyone was cloning and reinterpreting Drakkar Noir, Beene only nodded to Wargnye's creation before breaking for the Amalfi Coast.

I loosely connect the dots from Acqua di Selva to Drakkar Noir to Bowling Green, and I think few observe the connection as I do. Some think it's crazy to suggest that AdS is a proto-Drakkar, but I submit that precious few companies have revisited the ferns of the 1950s - even the pricey niche firms have sidestepped the genre - and Bowling Green might be the only homage to them that remains.

"You Smell Like Powder"

"And so do you."

I work with a young woman who greets me, on many mornings, with a backhanded compliment, saying with a laugh, "You smell like powder." Now, it should be noted that many masculine fragrances do in fact smell like powder, and that I own and occasionally wear a few of them. If I were to wear Royal Copenhagen, and she were to tell me that I smelled like powder, I would say she has an astute sniffer. Ditto for Tabac, Old Spice, Caron's Third Man, Brut, Canoe, KL Homme, Lagerfeld Classic, and Rive Gauche Pour Homme.

But she rarely mentions the powder thing when I wear those scents. (Granted, some I rarely wear.) No, she mentions the powder thing every single time I wear Grey Flannel. That's right, Grey Flannel. Green, mossy, flowery, earthy, woody, dark, somber Grey Flannel. The greenest old school masculine I've ever encountered. And it doesn't matter if I'm wearing vintage or new; her reaction is always the same. It actually makes her laugh: "Bryan, you're wearing baby powder again."

That this girl should associate Grey Flannel, even Jacqueline Cochran Grey Flannel, in all its Green Irish Tweedy glory, with baby powder, is simply a testament to how differently our minds interpret things. And is she wrong? I've always felt that GIT has a bit of a talc-like powder element in its far drydown, and I've also noted a mild powder element in Grey Flannel's heart, so her comments aren't obviously "wrong."

However, I rarely think of Grey Flannel as being a "powdery" scent. If I want powder, I don't reach for anything Beene. I reach for any of the others mentioned here. I reach for Grey Flannel when I want dry, green, floral, mossy. I wear it thinking "soapy" and "woody" and "bitter" and "fresh." Galbanum has a powdery aspect to it, and this burst of hazy greenness greets me every time, but it is soon followed by rich citrus esters, and the brisk snap of violet leaf. So what's up with this powder thing?

There's a simple lesson here. No matter how well you think you know a fragrance, or how well you understand its effect on you, your interpretation of what you perceive upon smelling something will not be the same as someone else's. The other person will likely have a slightly different interpretation of what you're wearing, or an entirely different take altogether. If it's the latter, then this turns your perception upside down completely. Until I began working with Ms. Powder Nose, I always thought of Grey Flannel as "green."

Now I can't help but think of powder, specifically baby powder.

But it gets better. One day I wore Mitsouko to work, and again, the powder comment. "You always smell like powder!"

Does anyone think Mitsouko smells powdery? I don't. Of course, as with all scents, there may be an element of powder in the fragrance, and this is usually where the florals are. But to completely identify Mitsouko with "powder" is very strange.

Perceptions vary, and in the case of this person, I can only say that she apparently perceives many synthetic compositions as being powdery, or of having prominent powdery qualities, regardless of whether the fragrance is generally thought of that way. Grey Flannel and Mitsouko are two frags that I generally consider "mossy." But who am I to argue with her?

Geoffrey Beene's Bowling Green Is Back. The Question Is Why?

According to numerous internet sources, the long-discontinued sophomore effort by Beene has been reissued to commercial markets at steeply discounted prices. Whether they are new stock or "new old stock" is not entirely clear, but my understanding of Beene's extensive distribution history suggests that it's highly possible the frag has been rereleased by EA Fragrances. Apparently a few people have received bottles with EA stickers, although at least one person has received a vintage Sanofi Beaute bottle, so the situation remains unclear.

I'm not interested in purchasing a 4 ounce bottle from Amazon, even though they're going for about $19 a pop, but the feedback on them is interesting. I remember Bowling Green as being very herbal, spicy, and woody in character, with relatively little "fresh," and a whole lot of old-school eighties-styled "green." It smelled like grass clippings, dried basil, rosemary, pine, lemon, cedar chips, sour citrus, and stale joss sticks. There was a weird, oriental, fake incensey undercurrent, probably because the cardamom and juniper notes had lost clarity and balance. The bottle I used was twenty years old at least. BG's opening accord was spiky and very ruggedly herbal, with only a hint of synthetic lavender. Think Drakkar Noir dressed as a hippie for the first minute, but BG is not a Drakkar Noir clone. It's unique enough, and a very good scent, but nothing great.

Why is Bowling Green back? Recent reviews on Amazon are overwhelmingly positive, and it's safe to say people missed it. But Grey Flannel, which is ten years older, is resoundingly superior in quality and composition. In the late seventies and early eighties, Grey Flannel was Beene's sole creation, a conservative chypre loaded with dry citrus and rich oakmoss, its ruggedness softened by the world's greatest violet note. To suggest that Beene needed a "green" fragrance to follow it is like saying Lincoln needed to offer a "full-size" car after the Continental Mark V.

Yet in 1986, Beene inexplicacably released Bowling Green. The world seemed to like it enough to keep it alive for seven or eight years, but something odd happened. Despite being lighter, airier, and arguably more accessible than its older brother, sales for BG slumped, and Beene had to kill it. Grey Flannel marched on, but Bowling Green was benched. I suspect that things like Lacoste Original, Quorum, Tsar, and Red for Men devoured its market share, and BG just couldn't retain its identity in the face of so much competition, but I'm not sure. Another possibility is that the fragrance suffered from being too ambitious. Beene had a good but limited budget for perfume. Grey Flannel was relatively simple, a stark lemon, coumarin, ionones, and oakmoss affair, but Bowling Green had a conventional eighties pyramid of two hundred different notes.

It smells very nice, but also busy and a bit cheap. The money to properly render and balance all the superfluous herbs and florals wasn't really in play. Inexperienced noses give the scent ten minutes and declare it a grassier Drakkar Noir. Advanced sniffers appreciate its unique interplay of citrus and woods, but in thirty years nobody can say why this fragrance exists. Has it been thirty years already? Well now, I just stumbled on why it's back: EA is celebrating its thirty year anniversary!

Alpha Ionone At Around 1% Concentration Responsible For Natural Sandalwood Effect In Grey Flannel

One of the many things I love about vintage Grey Flannel is its beautiful, smooth, natural-smelling sandalwood note, an effect one might surmise is attributable to high quality ingredients not found in today's iteration of the scent. I was fortunate enough to acquire from perfumer Jim Gehr a sample of Ionone Alpha at 1% concentration, something I requested, and I'm surprised to find after several days of scrutiny that this aroma chemical is in fact responsible for that velvety precious wood effect in the older vintage, although perhaps at a higher concentration.

What does this mean? Let's face it, ionones are not super expensive materials, and I doubt any perfumer would classify them as being exotic in any way. They're common to floral notes, with A and B ionones combining to make violet (B alone smells of roses). If it's a cheap material with a memorable aroma, why scale back on it in the newer version of Beene's perfume? In its pure form, Ionone Alpha smells of slightly spicy, violet-tinged sandalwood, albeit a rather soapy, creamy-smelling incarnation of it. Rich, buttery, and quite smooth, this element is obscured in Arden's Grey Flannel, which seems to contain a more textured and anisic cloud of galbanum.

Maybe the intense woodiness of Ionone Alpha was considered by the suits at EA to be dated. My suspicion with most reformulations of old masculines is that times change the scents more than executives, with new waves of young men favoring cleaner, sweeter concoctions than their fathers and grandfathers ever wore. Look at Green Irish Tweed and Cool Water - the former, while certainly classic and still sought after, smells rather loud in an eighties way, overly rich for today's blood, while the latter remains a throwback, but much crisper and cleaner. "Sheer" is the word I'd use to describe a key difference between them, because CW smells transparent compared to GIT.

Galbanum and spiced anise notes are lighter, and a touch closer to being "au courant" than dense, unremitting bergamot and violetty sandalwood, so unnecessary tweaks were made, and today's Grey Flannel is different and arguably more wearable for today's young men. Naturally most youngsters favor newer scents, but hey, they tried. The supposition that oakmoss is a factor here is something I've entertained in the past also, but to be honest the oakmoss concentration in this scent is better at a low dose for me, as I seem to be just a little sensitive to it. IFRA is on to something.

The moral of the story: ingredient quality in vintages is not necessarily better. Just the same at a higher concentration, or marginally different. No expensive sandalwood oils were used to make Jacqueline Cochran Grey Flannel the beauty it is. It was merely infused with a heady slog of Ionone Alpha, and of course the perfumer's talent in integrating other notes to yield a masterpiece of modern design.

Grey Flannel (French Fragrances Formula)

In the case of Grey Flannel, I've come to the conclusion that it has never been a trendy fragrance. There is too much about it that goes against its own zeitgeist. In the 1970s, back when people had long hair and worshipped Halston and YSL, it wasn't a big deal to release something mean, clean, and bitter-green. People were into raw olfactory textures, and the louder it smelled, the better it was. So Grey Flannel must have been a monster back then, right?

Wrong. Judging by the way my Jacqueline Cochran bottle performs, the earlier incarnations of the Flannel were suave, smooth, refined, and downright gentlemanly. This stuff does not conjure images of Warren Beatty with a bare chest and fluffy Shampoo hair. It is more evocative of Roger Moore in, well, a grey flannel suit. My surprise at the Cochran formula is tempered by my knowledge of all that came after it - beautiful fresh ferns that put dry-woody notes (via dihydromyrcenol) to great use. So even though it doesn't smell like a child of the seventies, the early-eighties formula was at least inspirational.

I approached the French Fragrances formula expecting a change-up in the scent. I have read Natasha's terrific comparison of the FF formula against the EA version, and figured my experience would mirror hers. I have to say though that my findings with the French Fragrances formula run quite contrary to hers. My 4 oz bottle of FF GF arrived a few days ago, and I've been trying to find the sharper, harsher notes that she detects in this version, particularly in the top accord. While the top is sharper, and smells very similar to the top of the current formula, it does not last long. Within five minutes it transitions into the same smooth, violet-sandalwood base of the Cochran formula. They are equal in richness and intensity. This is surprising, given the possible 15 year gap between them.

This vintage is problematic because it presages the EA version by only a few years, and is also made by the same concern that currently produces Grey Flannel (FF bought EA and assumed its name). Finding the place where the smoother Sanofi formula ends and the pre-EA formula begins is probably impossible. I'm sure there's that one evolutionary bottle floating around out there that exhibits a perfect personality split between the two, but it is not in my possession.

I'm guessing from how the contents of my FF bottle smells that it's an older bottle, perhaps from '95 or '96. Several characteristics of Cochran's style are blatantly evident here, with an attenuated sample of the EA formula-to-come lurking in the first few minutes of the top notes. It's obvious that either Sanofi or FF changed things a bit, but I don't get an acrid sharpness, or any "plant that kills" effect. I get a very well balanced galbanum/lemon/violet leaf accord, similar to EA's, but a bit softer. Then, an oily violet/sandalwood accord, which smells pretty much identical to Cochran's base. This endures for hours before fading away to a clean, green glow. This leaves but one conclusion for the FF formula: it's a moving target. If you see it on Ebay or elsewhere, keep your expectations at bay, because you don't know what you might get.

Which brings me to my opening statement about Grey Flannel going against its own grain. The French Fragrances formula (and anything that came before) would likely do very well on today's market. But EA reformulated it into a sharper, meaner fragrance, adding more galbanum, accentuating the dry citrus, with a more complex violet leaf and a noticeably louder drydown. What is unclear is why they chose to go this route at a time when people are into smooth, woody-sweet stuff. The FF formula would have been popular in today's market, but in-house issues led to the change.

Meanwhile the Grey Flannel of yesterday, a pleasant chap in a snappy suit, floats about in an internet netherworld, occasionally surfacing for the price of coffee and a sandwich. Keep an eye out for him. He's someone you'll want to take to lunch.

Grey Flannel (Jacqueline Cochran Formula)

I happened to see a small bottle of the early eighties vintage Jacqueline Cochran Grey Flannel on The Bay, and having worn it and sampled it relentlessly, I'm here to tell ya, this is an amazing fragrance. I like it better than the EA version. I like it a lot better. Anyone who smells Grey Flannel and wrinkles their nose in disgust has never made the connection between this fragrance and Creed's Green Irish Tweed, and it's possible they haven't made it because they've never smelled the J. Cochran formula. The drydown of this formula is about 75% the same as GIT's drydown, which I find astonishing, even as a believer in the lineage between these two scents. There are a few differences of course, and some of them are significant, but overall the majority of the movement in J. Cochran's formula captures the smoothness, the balance, and the depth of Creed's, and using mostly the same notes. For nine dollars, it's . . . astonishing. I can't think of another adjective.

The combination of blink-and-you-miss-it citrus and rich, violety-greens creates a crisp organic impression, the aroma of delicate leaves rustling against each other. My only gripe with this vintage formula is that the citrus doesn't last nearly as long as it should (or probably used to, twenty years ago). The current EA formula yields a better rendition of woody citrus, sort of the point of Grey Flannel - like Halston's Z-14, this chypre plays with lemon in an unconventional way. I wish the vintage held on to the dessicated citrus aldehyde effect of the new stuff. That aside, the dyrdown comes within a minute, and lingers for hours. It is noticeably warmer than EA's drydown. It is not as vegetal. It is woodier, with a definite sandalwood note, and it smells like the real deal is in there. The violet is soft, concise, and in perfect harmony with the wood. It's that dry, purple-sweet beauty that GIT boasts, here for nine dollars a bottle.

EA's version is a different fragrance altogether. Put simply, the most recent version of Grey Flannel has more in common with Jacomo's Silences than it does with GIT. EA's has more bitter citrus, more galbanum, and colder galbanum - it's a broader note, and it's used a little differently. EA's has a peppery, slightly watery violet leaf, and a definite anise note; J. Cochran's boasts a smooth, soft violet leaf, which only gets peppery when you breathe on it. EA's formula lacks a strong sandalwood, and has more moss-like notes and musk. With the bitter galbanum, the sharp violet leaf, and an even drier citrus, the EA version is a colder, spookier fragrance. Vintage is warmer, woodier, sweeter, quieter, and not as overtly vegetal. I like both versions, but I definitely like the older stuff better.

Strangely enough, the newer version has more notes, and feels mossier, even though it contains less oakmoss. I'm surprised that vintage does not feel mossier. There's definitely oakmoss in there, but it doesn't smack you in the nose like the newer versions do. Even the EA formula that came before this current batch (which had a bit more oakmoss in it) contained IFRA-challenging degrees of natural moss, enough to make my throat tickle. Not so the vintage, but then again it doesn't need it. The sandalwood makes up for it.

Above are the scent prisms for the vintage formula and the second-to-last EA formula. Note the slight variances in galbanum quantity, citrus quality, and the different kinds of violet leaf, plus the additional anise note in the new version. Also note that I left oakmoss out of these prisms, because that note pervades the entire structure of any version of Grey Flannel from top to base, and I figure it's unnecessary to parse the subtle differences in moss-movement (just associate it with the galbanum and violet leaf, and you've got the fragrance structure pegged). Whenever I wear the EA formula, I feel like I'm wearing a fresh, clean, mean-green violet fragrance that projects nicely and skirts convention. Whenever I wear the vintage stuff, I'll definitely be thinking of Green Irish Tweed. The vintage will always project a soft, rich, woody-sweet violet, sans harshness. Jacqueline Cochran's formula, if faithful to Epocha's late-seventies formula, was a continuation of olfactory design that borders on being the finest of fine art. A review of the French Fragrances formula is pending, if my order gets processed sometime before the Second Coming.

The Corporate Distribution History of Geoffrey Beene's Grey Flannel: From Epocha to EA Fragrances, 1977 - Present

There's a lot of material to cover here, so I'm not going to spend time on a prologue, except to say that much of what is assumed about the different vintages of Grey Flannel is wrong. While bloggers opine on finding "vintage bottles" and Youtubers upload "Grey Flannel Sucks" videos to humor Dan Mickers (love that guy), I went ahead and did some research on the commercial distribution history of Geoffrey Beene's beautiful violet leaf chypre. What I learned was very, very interesting.

The story starts in New York City, 1976. There are two dates given on the internet for when Grey Flannel was released - 1975 and '76, but most bloggers seem to believe it was '76, and indeed it won the FIFI that year, so I'll defer to the time when it was most likely that commercial units had appeared en masse in department stores, and cite the later date. If any reader remembers differently, please comment, and I will research further and possibly make a correction.

Geoffrey Beene's prestigious fashion brand was by this time a thirteen year success story, having garnered several awards and extended itself into the distribution of accessories and housewares. Licensing with a fragrance distributor was inevitable, and the first to file a trademark for Grey Flannel was Epocha Distributors, Inc., a company located on Seventh Avenue in New York City. Jeffrey Dame, former VP of marketing for Sanofi Beauty Products, revealed in a comment under this article that Epocha was Beene's own in-house design brand, so essentially Epocha is Geoffrey Beene. Epocha filing below, dated 1977:

This filing suggests that even though Grey Flannel was released in 1976, it was not widely marketed until the year after, when paperwork for distribution rights had entered the appropriate channels. It also corresponds with the resume of Denise DeBaun, current founder and president of DeBaun Development, Inc. According to Ms. DeBaun's employment history, she was Director of Brand Operations for Epocha Distributors from 1978 to 1980.

During this period, the Epocha sticker was placed on the bottom of all Grey Flannel bottles.

Bottle labels bore only the words "New York" under the fragrance name. Though not apparent in the picture below, the fragrance was also labeled with the word "Cologne" and not "Eau de Toilette" or "Eau de Toilette Spray Vaporasiteur."

Ms. DeBaun's updated resume, a snippet of which is shown below, might be a little more accurate about her starting date than the LinkedIn document, because it cites her employment record with Epocha as beginning in 1977, the same year that the company filed for trademark. Nevertheless, the LinkedIn resume above suggests that Epocha was taken over in 1980 by Jacqueline Cochran, Inc., resulting in the personnel shakeup that forced DeBaun out. She went on to work for Oscar de la Renta and Parfums Stern, Inc.

This raises the question, where did Jacqueline Cochran, Inc., come from exactly? While Ms. DeBaun's career was taking off in New York, a corporate reorganization was happening in New Jersey. American Cyanamid, owner of Shulton and Jacquelin Cochran Inc., allowed Cochran to take over Contemporary Fragrance Group, and with it the manufacturing and distribution rights to all fine fragrances by CFG under American Cyanamid. Amazingly, someone saved a newspaper page from the end of 1978, which documents the transition, and also notes that esteemed entrepreneur and art collector Carlo Bilotti, the president of Cochran, would continue to head Cochran's division as an enterprise separate from CFG.

This suggests that Jacqueline Cochran, Inc. was well positioned to begin manufacturing and distributing Grey Flannel when it purchased the Epocha license in 1980. Cochran's cosmetics enterprise had been operating since the 1930s, and had also been bought out by Shulton pretty early on. Cochran herself was a famous racing pilot with an entrepreneurial spirit, and her marriage to Atlas Corp. founder Floyd Odlum proved fruitful in moving units of makeup, lipstick, and perfume.

Jacqueline Cochran, Inc. owned and distributed Grey Flannel for most of the 1980s. This is important to note for vintage Grey Flannel enthusiasts, as most of the older bottles still in circulation are from the nineties. Bottles of fragrance, aftershave, and balms bearing the Epocha sticker date from 1977 to 1980. From 1981 onward, Epocha's sticker was replaced by Cochran's.

The next chapter in Grey Flannel's life is intriguing. By 1987 American Cyanamid had decided to sell Jacqueline Cochran, Inc., along with another subsidiary, La Prairie. According to an 1990 affidavit from the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Cyanamid sold Cochran to Sanofi Inc., on March 30, 1987. The heading for what was presumably the last motion can be seen here:

The sale resulted in some legal issues for Sanofi. The affidavit contends that a man named Mario Ronzani wanted to buy La Prairie from Cyanamid, but was told that the corporation wanted to sell La Prairie and Jacqueline Cochran "in a single transaction." Ronzani was apparently disinterested in Cochran, and approached Sanofi to see if they would agree to a joint bid. Their communication, according to Ronzani, established that Sanofi was amenable to this idea because they were disinterested in La Prairie, but wanted Cochran and its holdings.

Ronzani claimed that Sanofi agreed to a joint bid, and thus entered into a bidding partnership with him. One party would get all the shares of one company, and the other party would get the shares of the other company. This is described in lines six and seven below (click on picture to enlarge):

Then Sanofi pulled the rug out from under Ronzani (see line eight below):

This appears to have angered Mr. Ronzani, and he filed the first of several complaints. The court struck down his main complaint, citing in legalese that Ronzani's agreement with Sanofi was invalid because he was not legally categorized as a legitimate "purchaser or seller of securities," as highlighted in lines eleven and twelve below:

Why am I bothering to tell you all of this? This legal wrangling over Sanofi's purchase may very well have delayed production of its newly-acquired product line. Note that on line twelve above, the cited court date of Ronzani's complaint dismissal is August 22, 1989, about two and a half years after Sanofi purchased American Cyanamid's holdings package. Because Sanofi bought a company and not just distribution rights, they did not have to file for trademark, and there is no record of Sanofi filing for Grey Flannel's trademark at that time. (There is a record of Sanofi owning the trademark, which can be found further on in this article.) Based on the affidavit, I think the earliest Sanofi could have begun producing and distributing Grey Flannel is 1988, assuming they ignored Ronzani's complaints and forged ahead with business as usual. It is possible that Cyanamid allowed production to continue during the transition, but I think that is unlikely, and doubt there are bottles of Grey Flannel from 1987.

From 1988 to 1995, all Grey Flannel bottles bore the sticker of Sanofi Beaute, Inc.

A Sanofi Grey Flannel gift set.

Sanofi's tenure as Grey Flannel's manufacturer and distributor ended in 1995. French Fragrances, Inc. bought from Sanofi Beaute the license to manufacture and distribute Grey Flannel in March of that year, and their first batches appeared in 1996. From 1996 to 2000, all Grey Flannel bottles bore the sticker of French Fragrances, Inc. By this time Grey Flannel bore both "New York" and "Paris" on its label. The word "Cologne" had also been replaced by "Eau de Toilette," although that change supposedly happened during the Sanofi years.

A French Fragrances bottle.

French Fragrances bought Elizabeth Arden from Unilever in 2000, and changed its company name to Elizabeth Arden, Inc. This is interesting because it basically means that EA Fragrances is the same company as French Fragrances. According to The New York Times, about 1,500 of Arden's employees were expected to transfer to French Fragrances, which suggests that a segment of Arden's Unilever people were laid off.

Of note also is the trademark filing by French Fragrances, which had already assumed the EA moniker. It seems that in July of 2004, EA cancelled its original Grey Flannel trademark, and also owned all of Grey Flannel's previous trademarks. Note that the French Fragrances trademark is not listed.

From 2000 to the present time, Grey Flannel bottles have held the EA Fragrances sticker, and their labels have gone from saying "Eau de Toilette" to "Eau de Toilette Spray Vaporisateur." They also still say "New York" and "Paris."

The label for the current formula of Grey Flannel.

Below is a basic timeline of each of the corporate distribution transitions that were made in Grey Flannel's 37 year history. Click on the image to enlarge:

And that brings us up to speed. How do any of these vintages of Grey Flannel smell? I'm only familiar with EA's version, but I have a bottle of Jacqueline Cochran's version coming in the mail, so I'll have an opportunity to compare it to the current stuff soon. Finding certain vintages of Grey Flannel becomes increasingly difficult the further back you go. It seems that the most readily available "vintage" version is French Fragrance's, before their acquisition of EA. You can sometimes spot a bottle by Sanofi on Ebay, but those are fewer and further between. There are usually no bottles of Jacqueline Cochran Grey Flannel on the internet, and you can forget about finding Epocha's vintage. I have yet to spot a bottle of the Epocha cologne, although rarely an auxiliary product, like the aftershave balm, will randomly appear (and very quickly disappear again).

There seems to be a widely-held notion that the Sanofi vintages of Grey Flannel are "eighties vintages," and while that may just barely be true (assuming Sanofi picked up production slipstream in 1987), Jacqueline Cochran's bottles definitely comprise the bulk of eighties vintage. I think the soonest Sanofi was able to get production underway would have been 1988, and given that the final legal motion by Ronzani took place in 1990, who knows for certain? Most of the Sanofi bottles are from the first half of the nineties, and all of the French Fragrances bottles are from the late nineties. EA Fragrance's tenure is already thirteen years old.

UPDATE

I received a comment from Jeffrey Dame of Hypoluxe, Inc., formerly of Sanofi Beauty Products, and he revealed some very interesting information regarding Grey Flannel. He was VP of marketing in the men's fragrance division of Sanofi, and he clarified some points about safety regs, and the various crossovers in batches and bottlings during each transition that Grey Flannel made. He also mentioned that Epocha was Beene's own in-house design brand (it's all in his comment below). I'm hoping I can persuade Jeffrey to participate in a brief interview, in which he can field some insider questions about his years at Caron, Sanofi, and the other top brands he has worked for. His stories and insights would be of immeasurable value to us all.

My Favorite Fragrances

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

Pour un Homme de Caron

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

Kouros

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

Grey Flannel

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

Cool Water

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

Paco Rabanne Pour Homme

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

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