Armani Code Ultimate (Giorgio Armani)

The German brand, Joop!, is known for infusing its masculine range with a very synthetic heliotrope note that is equal parts rich and fresh, like having an over-ripe bouquet shoved in your face. It's hard to manage in Joop! Homme, somewhat easier to use in Joop! Homme Wild, and given true artistic treatment in Joop! Jump (my favorite Joop! frag). It's a very late eighties and nineties style, that tonka-heavy breeze of plastic-flower sweetness, something that filled the halls of my high school and wafted off every girl and guy at my prom. Hindsight is twenty twenty: had I known then what I know now, I might've enjoyed myself more. I always took the nineties to be a wussy follow-up to the eighties, a decade of neutered rock (Goo Goo Dolls, Collective Soul), piss-poor pop (Puff Daddy, Madonna's ill-advised comeback), and unforgivably stupid styles (oversized flannels, baggy jeans, the Ceasar haircut).

Turns out the decade was actually better than I gave it credit for. As I reference the landmark scents of the decade, I find that it was another powerhouse era, only this time the fragrances were more overtly synthetic, less representative of anything in nature, disarmingly affable, and very, very sweet. It was a time where sweet was done LOUD. Le Male, A*Men, and for the Joop! fans, Joop! Homme (original), along with my beloved Tommy, these are just a few of the trendsetters of the era, and all shared a common trait - sweetness. For some reason Armani figured men hadn't had enough sugar, and released the first Code in 2004, by which time I'd become a disciple of Allure Homme. I never wore Code, but I remember smelling it here and there, in malls, perhaps on the occasional bloke, and it reminded me of the nineties. It was cut from that cloth, a sweet, powdery, friendly scent with good sillage, and a remarkable tendency to remain in the room several minutes after its wearer had left.

Armani Code Ultimate is merely Code with a massive heliotrope note, and a heavier, tonka-rich amber. The heliotrope is sweet, synthetic, in your face, but there are some crisp fougère elements in the mix as well, with a brusque lavender on top, and a subtler woody amber lurking under the sweetness. As a whole, the fragrance resembles Joop! Jump the closest, which by a few degrees of separation makes it somewhat similar to Allure Homme, though I'd rather wear Jump and Allure than Code. Armani's take on this genre is a little too faceless and "safe," and feels rather tired. It's a faded rerun of sweet fougèrientals, and many of the originals were better. Even the original Code handles powdery amber in a more full-throated, unconventional manner. Comparatives like Jump and Allure Homme have much more memorable accords also, like the coriander/vodka notes in the former, and the labdanum/rosewood bit in the latter.

Despite my personal preference, I recommend Code Ultimate as a middle-shelf, everyday work scent for the young man (or woman) who admired its more daring nineties progenitors, but never found one tame enough to wear. You'll certainly smell good wearing this. Just don't expect to smell exciting, or original.

Acqua di Gioia (Giorgio Armani)

If any fault can be found with the masculine Acqua di Giò, it's that it's overloaded with Hedione (25% of the formula), to the point where it lacks some necessary definition and becomes a bit chemical and raspy. That's not to say AdG smells terrible or anything, because it doesn't. But it's quite easy to identify its imbalances, and for that matter its plagiarism of Creed's Millésime Impérial, a far superior fragrance. Whenever I wear AdG, I feel the Hedione issue is part of why I can't enjoy it. I also feel like it has a story to tell that falls flat due to a lack of enthusiasm from the narrator. The dialogue is loaded with anecdotal citruses, melons, white flowers, and Mediterranean herbs, all wafting on a sea breeze across my beach-toweled cheeks. But those are just anecdotes; the main plot happens in a locker room, with misogynistic wisecracks ricocheting off sweaty jockstraps and freshly Speed-Sticked armpits. The feeling of a hastily-composed synthetic heart accord works against the integrity of AdG. This really is the "Water of Joe."

Interestingly enough, the feminine Acqua di Gioia smells a bit more successful in both concept and execution. Armani takes us off the beach and plops us into the humid, slightly fetid heart of a tropical rain forest. My positive opinion of this fragrance is tempered by the fact that it's a fresh, citrusy approach to an aquatic perfume, using sweet floral and woody notes to bolster its sunshiny luminescence. That sounds fine in theory, but in practice, even when done perfectly (as in Creed's MI), it's boring. Nevertheless, there's something rather Edmond Roudnistka-esque going on here. Acqua di Gioia's top note shimmers with a brisk tension of freshly-sliced lemons and chopped mint against an intensely sweet sugar cane and white floral accord. A saccharine edging of jasmine and the damp funk of cedar play against the fruitiness to form a pleasant unisex aquatic effect. If Hedione is used, it is used more sparingly than in its progenitor.

Things become dewier as it dries. It's more floral, and more "sugary" than most of the typical aquatics on the contemporary market. I wonder if Guy Laroche's Fidji was an inspiration, or even Roudnitska's Le Parfum de Thérèse. They may have been in the minds of Loc Dong, Anne Flipo, and Dominique Ropion, yet theirs is not exactly a "rich" composition - it's just playfully sweet. D&G's Light Blue may be a more apt comparison. Whatever your perspective, this 2010 update to the aquatic theme is more pleasantly vulgar than its male cousin. Acqua di Gioia is a reminder that the tired legacy of tropical goddess perfumes isn't necessarily a result of a banal structure, but of the perfumers' inability to recklessly embrace the boozy heat of their inspiration to create the stuff of a fevered mirage, and not just a teenager's day dream. If they'd intensified the sugar enough to create an ethyl maltol bomb, and let that fuzzy rush take starbursts of more than just lemon with it - say, lemon, mango, and pineapple, along with mint, jasmine, and every other indolic white floral possible - you might have masterpiece material. As it stands, it's just very nice. I guess there's nothing wrong with that.

Acqua di Giò (Giorgio Armani)

Just to summarize things, the prior posts are about Millésime Impérial by Creed and Unbound for Men by Halston, both of which lead up to Acqua di Giò, and all to illustrate one point: AdG is to Millésime Impérial what Cool Water is to Green Irish Tweed. Each are sets of popular designer clones and their niche originals. The difference between them is in spirit; Cool Water was the fresh fougère that defined the late 1980s, while Acqua di Giò was the fresh aquatic that defined the 1990s. Neither scent should have eclipsed their predecessors in the minds of perfume critics, but they have. Both scents are very good and likable on their own terms.

Smelling AdG is like smelling the fragrance arc of perfumery from 1990 to 1996, a period defined by this fragrance. But the nineties were stylistically divisible, with everything from 1996 to 1999 reflected by Chanel's Allure Homme, which is oddly a variant of none other than Cool Water. Allure's tonka-rich pegging point in the decade was 1995's super-sweet Le Male by Gaultier, a scent with resonance among its contemporaries. But sniffing AdG, one is pressed to find another match. Sniffing MI next to AdG yields an equally-bracing eau de cologne melon-citrus effect, with one flushing the sweetness of ambergris against a salty iris, and the other tempering cruder citruses and sweet jasmine against a base of cedar and musk. The use of fruits and white flowers in AdG is brilliant, and perfectly captures a feeling of warm Mediterranean sunshine. 

One can credit Armani with not intentionally over-exposing the AdG brand by strictly limiting its number of flankers. But really, how much more can one do with this theme? Successful aquatics inevitably spawn artless combinations of sweet fruits and flowers against salty and musky bases, with gallons of calone and Iso E Super carelessly employed to repeatedly deliver the same olfactory message. They wind up smelling generic, like soap and shampoo, and jade fans of the original into buying something else instead. Sometimes they even lead fans to blame the original for so many countless sub-par releases. It's a bad cycle to get into. I'm looking at you, Ck One.