Givenchy Gentleman (Givenchy)

Released in EDT concentration in 1974, Givenchy Gentleman was almost anachronistic at that point in time, when modern aromatic fougères were at long last threatening to usurp the reign of bitter-mossy midcentury chypres. Technical marvels like Paco Rabanne pour Homme, Grey Flannel, and Blue Stratos had begun to poke holes in the stuffy citrus-leathers of the 1950s and '60s, and so another olfactory brown study might have seemed passé. Hard to know what saved Gentleman from the fate of, say, Lancôme Balafre, or the original Drakkar, but I have a theory: maybe it was the patchouli. 

After all, patchouli was decidedly in with both the hippie and glitterati of the era, and if there's one thing Gentleman has in spades, it's patchouli. I've read a few dozen reviews of this fragrance, and everyone waxes poetic about its nuances, mentioning things like vetiver, and tarragon, and Russian leather, blah, blah. Perhaps those notes are there, but patchouli, with its myriad facets, is a magical material, capable of replicating an entire accord of subtle seasons. A quality patchouli oil will read as minty, cedar-like, chocolatey, leathery, grassy, and floral before it even begins to dry down, and the patchouli in Gentleman shows it all before you put the bottle away after spraying.

It’s essentially a citrus-herbal chypre, with a soft hint of bergamot and a tart, green note like tarragon—I don’t get much cinnamon—followed by an unfurling garrison flag of patchouli. There’s also something dry, bitter, and smoky, possibly vetiver or just patchouli’s darker side. A small touch of semisweet amber sits in the base, though it could be an early version of Paul Léger’s honeyed carnation from Anaïs Anaïs, or simply patchouli’s sugared finish. Either way, the materials feel top shelf; the fragrance is radiant yet modest, and if you love patchouli, this might be as good as it gets. Beautiful stuff.

Green Energy (Givenchy)

I first learned about this fragrance in 2008, the year I became interested in perfumes, and had wanted to buy a bottle ever since, but somehow never got around to it until now. It was discontinued even then, and eBay prices were exorbitant, but they’ve since come back down to a respectable twenty dollars an ounce or so. This must have been a duty-free, airports-only release, as most bottles are the smaller 50 ml size. I grabbed one, half-expecting it to be semi-spoiled and underwhelming, but it turned out to be brand new and unsprayed, with an unprimed atomizer. I totally lucked out. A perfectly fresh bottle of a 25-year-old unisex Givenchy that I never see in brick and mortar shops. 

Many reviewers describe the fragrance as a “disappointing” green, lacking in true green notes and leaning instead on fruity and floral hues. Green fragrances generally fall into two categories: bitter-vegetal or sweet-floral (sometimes fruity-floral), and the consensus here points to the latter. Indeed, Green Energy -- aka the portmanteau “Greenergy” -- opens like a synthetic spin on Green Irish Tweed, with a lush accord of basil, cardamom, mandarin orange, lavender, Iris pallida, violet leaf, spearmint, and dihydromyrcenol, accented by traces of natural galbanum for sweetness. It smells surprisingly crisp and rich for the style, and promises great things. Also, the smoothness of the blend is somewhat reminiscent of the also-discontinued and now impossible to find Xeryus (1986). At this stage of the fragrance, it is without argument utterly and entirely "green" in smell. 

Within three hours, most of these green notes have stepped back, bridged by an unusual French marigold accord -- uniquely resinous-green and bittersweet, with spicy and ambery nuances. This is where I find Green Energy most interesting. Alberto Morillas and Ilias Ermenidis built a fairly simple base of synthetic sandalwood, cardamom seed, and coriander, with faint traces of basil and vanilla for herbal sweetness. To my nose, the coriander dominates. It reminds me somewhat of Paul Smith, but the fragrance as a whole also recalls Pino Silvestre Green Generation Him, itself distantly related to GIT by way of a more herbal take on the lavender/orange blossom of Eternity for Men. For this type of green fragrance, the dihydromyrcenol, violet leaf, and iris accord is everywhere.

I get a full workday out of Green Energy, and its base of “cool” spices is simple yet distinctive enough to satisfy my yen for abstract greens. Paul Smith is simpler and more cardamom-forward, with more vegetal, grassy-green facets in the top and middle, while Bowling Green and the original Pino Silvestre aim for a more rustic herbal take. Green Energy, like many of these, is entirely unisex, though women tend to opt for even more overtly floral or fruity compositions instead, which is kind of a shame. I’m happy to nurse my 1.7 oz bottle while it lasts; the supply will likely dry up, and prices could again soar into the upper ozone, but I’ll probably reach for the other scents I’ve mentioned before the Givenchy when I want a true green-out.

Pi (Givenchy)

"A Little Further Than Infiniti." Far Out, Man!

To understand Pi, it helps to be more than a mathematician; you have to remember the nineties, and what cultural changes occurred after the 1980s. Following the conservative Reagan era, when masculine fragrances were either loud "cigar box" ferns and orientals, or loud "musky" compositions with borderline femme floral elements, and downright funereal moss notes (as found in Antaeus and Tsar), people were attracted to fresher, friendlier ideas.

Ferns became sweet and playful (Cool Water, Aqua Quorum, Polo Sport), chypres were hybridized and sunnier than ever (Red for Men, Acqua di Gio, Green Valley), and orientals were divested of unnecessary accords, stripped and compacted and simplified, until only the basics of "amber" and "vanilla" were left. Fragrances like Pasha, Angel, and Givenchy's now Classic Pi were the result. Interested in "fresh" orientals? Try Cartier's idea. Want something "gourmand?" Here's an overdose of Ethyl Maltol and some cheap patchouli, ala Mugler. Need a more traditional citrus-amber fragrance? Pi was the way to go. It is essentially a basic mandarin orange and toasted vanilla accord, and little else. There's a smidgen of cedar and synthetic musk in the base, and that's about it. It smells rich, smooth, almost edible, very warm, and oddly "fresh." It's a nineties frag to the hilt. I hear Gin Blossoms and Sheryl Crow songs whenever I spray it.

But there is perhaps one other aspect to Pi that goes a little deeper than just writing it off as a dull nineties scent. The decade was in many ways a throwback to the seventies. Big cars were momentarily back in style, the economy enjoyed a brief but luminous revival, thanks to the Dot-Com Boom, the President was plagued by scandals that had nothing to do with his political policies, and which threatened to undermine his office, and recent wars had caused an undercurrent of social discomfort and political dissent not felt since Vietnam. Perfume was fresh and sweet, but it was also loud, and very raucous in character, even conservatively speaking. Mugler and CK and yes, Givenchy, were putting noise into the air, competing with grunge music and Nicolas Cage movies to see which could be more obnoxious.

I was a teenager in the nineties, and remember it well. So to me, Pi smells not like a conservative gourmand, but like a boisterous vanilla crossover feminine, geared toward guys with Ceasar haircuts and subwoofed Iroc Zs. There's nothing demure about how one dimensional and fatuous this fragrance is. You can't wear more than two sprays and expect reactions to differ from the snickers and half-assed compliments elicited by Joop! Homme. In its original formula, Pi filled rooms, preceded wearers by ten minutes, and made coffee houses smell like whore houses. Is it an exciting fragrance? No, not by a long shot. But is there more to it than meets the casual nose? You bet. It's the Brut of the nineties, but it was never offered at Brut's price-point, fitting for the inflated ethos of 1998.

I'm not a wearer of Pi, and I don't personally know anyone who wears it, but the stuff is still being made, and still selling, so there must be stragglers from my generation keeping it alive. It wouldn't surprise me if it won over a few next-gen fans as well. Meanwhile, wearing KL Homme, with its crisp balsamic citrus top and warm, vanillic base, it feels like the twelve year interval between Lagerfeld's oriental and Givenchy's gourmand was lost entirely, and I want it back.

Play (Givenchy)

It might look like 1953, but it's really just two hours ago.

Work on my living room is, after four months, finally nearing completion. My classic wingback got reupholstered and delivered on Saturday, I finally found time to add the third bookshelf (and my books), and a fern was gifted to me, an unexpected but somehow totally appropriate addition to the space. On Saturday I did some wandering through antique stores in Seymour, CT, which is actually a little mecca for antique collectors, as there are literally ten or eleven shops within a two block radius. In one of them I stumbled upon a decorative bowl (sort of a cross between a plate and a bowl, seen above on the coffee table), and was told it was heavily discounted because it had some kiln damage, which honestly wasn't very noticeable. It was eerie how well it complemented the room. When I bought it, I had my fingers crossed that it would at least look good on the bookshelf, but it turned out to have all the colors in the room swirled together into one piece. Really fun stuff.

When you look at the picture above, you're looking at my living room, and I hope it evokes the fifties, a bygone era. That was my goal. Bringing that time period back to life is a lot more difficult than you might think. I know it was harder than I thought it would be, and frankly I didn't do that good of a job, but it's at least in the ballpark. There was plenty of cheating, of course. The wingback chair, now dark reddish-brown leather, is actually an eighties piece directly from the Reagan years, and those aren't real Stiffel lamps in the corners, but that didn't matter to me as much as capturing a certain feel of the time, something that could be put into a few simple words. After extensive research, the words that came to mind were, "Classy as shit." The fifties were years with a polarized aesthetic, as there were either very campy colors (bright pinks, seafoam greens, platinum blondes), or very stuffy schemes (greys and taupes, rough-hewn wicker, Tom Ewell's apartment in The Seven Year Itch). I decided to go for stuffy, simply because it's easier to live with than campy. At least stuffiness, if done with attention to detail, can slip quietly into the realm of a classiness reserved for people with limited means, but good taste.

Givenchy's mall offerings are usually not my thing, but Play is, to me at least, a bit of a throwback scent. It took me three months to figure out what it smelled like, and then it hit me: Cotton Club. Play has the exact same fancy aftershave vibe, something only a wetshaver can truly appreciate for what it is (and what it isn't). The ergonomics of perfumers is hard to understand, but I don't think it's unrealistic to suppose that many of them resort to imitation to save time, and in this case Emilie Coppermann and Lucas Sieuzac were turning to the old-fashioned alchemical pizzaz of Barbasol-and-Styptic. Someone was thinking of their dad when they threw this together, and I say "threw" because it smells like an intentionally hackneyed scent, a handful of musky aroma chemicals with requisite notes of saccharine citrus, simplistic florals, and thin woods that were incrementally measured, mixed together by hand, and left to sit for forty-eight hours before being pushed off to the marketing department.

With Play, try to ignore the blurbs about its notes, and tune out the salesman. Ignore even the Basenotes and Fragrantica pyramids. There's no serious coffee note in this scent, nor is there "tobacco blossom," or "amyris." There's linalool (or something like it), literally a half dozen musks, a very faint woody amber, just enough citrus aldehyde to give it lift, and not much else. Its overall tonality is a couple shades darker than Cotton Club's, but otherwise they're both colors on the same paint strip. Despite its casual airiness, the old-school aftershave approach is always an unpretentious, no-bullshit, classy direction for a fragrance to go in, and I have to award a major thumbs up to Play for keeping it real. The only problem of course is that this sort of fragrance costs ten times as much as your average aftershave, but in this case you're paying for better longevity, and hopefully a firmer presence in this shameless world we live in.

Xeryus (Givenchy, Les Parfums Mythiques)

Fougères come in many forms, but every so often a brand makes one that smells simultaneously familiar and strange, an experience I liken to having a false memory. I'll smell an accord that I recognize, and think, "Oh yeah, I have others like this," but then in a direct comparison find that the different scents are not quite as similar as I thought. Such is the case with Givenchy's reissue of Xeryus, a "fougèriental" that was originally introduced in 1986. Every time I smell the "Les Parfums Mythiques" version, I smell a convergence of vintage Drakkar Noir and Francesco Smalto Pour Homme, with the spike lavender of the former gussied up with textured woody spices, and the latter's motor oil leather swallowed by an identical artemisia note and the hardest amber known to man. Drakkar came before Xeryus, and Smalto's scent came after, which in some ways suggests that Xeryus is a crossroads fragrance. It clearly draws from an aromatic fougère template that Pierre Wargnye put in place in 1982, but also looks forward to the complex orientals of the late eighties and early nineties. The historical reach of something like Xeryus is hard to measure, but for Givenchy to reissue it suggests it was something the brand was proud of the first time around.

I've never smelled vintage Xeryus. The man who sold me my bottle of "Les Mythiques" Xeryus told me that he has the vintage and the new version, and to him they smell identical. Perusals of threads online yield mixed opinions on this, with some feeling they're very close, and others lamenting the changing of the guard. My opinion of current Xeryus is that its strength alone is a testament to some degree of faithfulness to tradition. Its top notes are bright, garrulous, and sharp, very aromatic, a little sweet, and definitely fruity in a green/herbal way. Grapefruit, lavender, clary sage, and basil are pretty obvious from the get-go, and together they create a palpable veil of smells that settles across my face and becomes denser and heavier as the minutes tick by. An hour into wear, Xeryus becomes a powerful perfume-strength cloud, radiating a good four or five feet away from me. People notice it. I walk in and out of rooms, and my Xeryus is there to greet me when I return, like a big green puff of Bryan-shaped smoke. There are some vaguely floral notes, presumably some jasmine and just the faintest hint of violet sweetness, but I can't say Xeryus is a "floral fougère" like Joop! Jump, or even the iris-laden Green Irish Tweed. The fougère accord is simply very, very effusive, and the sweeter amber in the base is just as outgoing.

I like Xeryus, and I definitely don't get the bubblegum associations that some attribute to this reform. Its strength aside, I agree with those who think it's kind of ho-hum and unremarkable. I know that my Drakkar Noir feeling is due to an obvious use of Cypriol, a smoky, woody note that becomes increasingly obvious in the drydown, and the mixture of guaiac wood, cedar, sandalwood, pine needles, and artemisia is comparable to the lucid complexities of Francesco Smalto PH. Yet Xeryus is strange, an aggressive oriental framed by fougère elements that smell "retro" but unique, the kind of scent that might stop people in their tracks on the second pass, but not the first. I enjoy the fragrance, and I'm glad Givenchy made it their contribution to the chest-haired world of eighties aromatic fougères, but its beauty isn't quite "swoon-worthy" when taken in with its peers. People seem to feel that Xeryus is a cool weather fragrance, but cold weather flattens it for me and just makes it a vague, soapy aura. Warmer temps and humidity bring out the spicier, more textured wood notes in its heart, so I recommend trying it in spring and summer - in a very small dose (two or three sprays, max). The green notes are somewhat soapy, and definitely fresh enough to compensate for the sheer strength behind this thing.

Eau de Givenchy (Givenchy)

Spring is near. After what goes down as the mildest winter on record here in my neck of the woods, this fact meets with little fanfare. No one is expelling the sighs of relief one usually hears after a particularly brutal season. You know the kind - two solid months of nonstop snow, frigid rain, slush, icicles, 10°F days and -3°F nights. This week was 70°F two days in a row, and it's only the middle of March. Last week it was 50°F for a few days. Lately cold is anything under that. And snow? Haven't seen it since January. Well, there was that little snow squall toward the tail end of last month, when I think we may have seen a dusting here and there. But let's just say the winter of 2012 has been a godsend.

My issue is that this really takes the snap out of spring. We broke some temperature records here this week, yet nobody was marveling over the sun and heat. Usually you hear things like "can you believe this weather?" and "Shit, it's way too early for this," but instead there was only silence, broken by the occasional "nice day today." People aren't stunned by stunningly nice weather when it's been stunningly nice for weeks. But the problem isn't the presence of premature summer. The problem is the absence of coolness.

Coolness is what makes spring an interesting season to me. I tend to think of summer and winter as the "major" seasons; autumn and spring as "minor." They're transitional seasons, with markedly similar characteristics in stark contrast to their polar-opposite endpoints. October is about crisp, dry air. Spring is about cool, sometimes cold, humid air. Without the coolness, the rain, spring simply doesn't exist. If we go right from frigid winter to balmy Sundays, we've skipped a vital step in nature's ritual. With the truancy of spring's cold and wet, grey, bitter pallor, I'm a little disoriented. Even lost.

Fortunately there's a fragrance that captures the essence of fishing in the reeds on a foggy April morning. Eau de Givenchy is fresh, green, damp. It's coolness in a bottle. Released in 1980, ten years after the more classically-composed Givenchy III, but bearing some categorical similarities to its predecessor, EdG transports its wearer to the very soul of springtime without so much as lifting a dragonfly's wing. It conjures images of strong, dark, mythical femininity, average school girls whose inner beauty forces their skulls' plates to gradually realign into the countenances of ravishing women. 

Eau de Givenchy reminds me a bit of Jacomo's Silences in that it doesn't pander to common fruity floral trends, but rather rolls like cold water off mossy rocks and simply shimmers in a kaleidoscope of green, yellow, and white.

As a lover of green fragrances, I'm always excited when I find something that smells of dewey fields and unopened flowers. Eau de Givenchy comes pretty close to ticking off all of my "green" boxes. It opens with a brilliant and clean lemon, and swiftly transitions into an array of grassy notes and white florals, namely honeysuckle, muguet, and jasmine. Although strong hints of them abound, these florals never really take center stage, and as rapidly as they appear, are just as rapidly tinged with the same bitter green grassiness of the opening. Tuberose and oakmoss are present, but take a backseat to the greens. Eventually, as Eau de Givenchy settles, the contrast of green and floral finds a steady balance, leaving a very light, herbal skinscent in its wake.

I think this fragrance is almost perfect. I wish it were a little less floral, as those notes compromise the incredible greenness of the grass accords. It could also be a smidgen stronger in concentration, but we're talking an eau de cologne-style perfume here. Although marketed to women, I consider this to be utterly wearable as a man, and see some similarities to the equally scintillating Chevrefeuille Original by Creed. It certainly smells just as expensive, and it's just right for those April and May commutes. Wear it, and know the smell of winter's ghost.

Insensé Ultramarine (Givenchy)

I generally dislike aquatics, not because I dislike the concept of smelling like cool sea water on flowery tropical air, but because most aquatic fragrances come nowhere close to smelling like that. Insensé Ultramarine takes an unfortunate stab at it. 

The salty marine accord that spikes its top and middle notes is boldly pronounced against a dense and unpalatable mélange of fruit and flowers. A peachy rose, circumspect jasmine, and dewy magnolia/cardamom arrangement flesh out the heart accord, and all are brushed with Calone and ambergris. A bit synthetic, and more than a little saccharine, but it's within the bounds of the time of Ultramarine's release. 

This is a '90s fragrance, with all the bells and whistles that came with aromatic scents of that decade. My biggest gripe is that a chemical salt note in the top and middle of Insensé Ultramarine feels way too loud and unbalanced for regular wear. If you think you're getting a refreshingly sweet floral aquatic for men, you're in for disappointment. This is a bawdy floral that should be dyed pink and marketed as a feminine. I'm not a fan, but YMMV.