La Petite Robe Noire Black Perfecto EDP (Guerlain)

This is a short review because there's really only one thing I can say about Black Perfecto that doesn't bear much in descriptive excess. I think you know where I'm going with this. For everyone out there who likes Creed's original 2008 Love in Black (LiB), but can't afford it, well, here's your fragrance. Guerlain's 2017 release in the seemingly endless La Petite Robe Noire (LPRN) line is very affordable these days at roughly $45 per 50 mL bottle, and it is 99.9% Love in Black. And, like '08 LiB, it's discontinued. 

The only difference between the Creed and the Guerlain is in the choice of fruit. Love in Black contains a somewhat abstract blackcurrant and cranberry accord that doesn't quite elucidate either fruit. Guerlain opts for a black cherry accord that smells perhaps a tick sweeter and a few ticks clearer, but which basically does the same thing. The rest? Virtually identical to LiB. I mean, these two are really, really close to each other. But the kicker is that Black Perfecto actually smells more natural, and thus feels a bit more luxe, and I can't believe I'm writing this, but I actually prefer it. 

The niche for this scent profile is hard to pin down. Guerlain's PR pushes Black Perfecto as the LPRN line's "rock chick" flanker, with supposedly clear accents of leather. I don't really get any leather. Instead, I get violet, iris—a ton of iris—and that dry, powdery, gothic gloaming of wilted roses and cedar chests. A haunted mansion somewhere in the hills, with a gorgeous widow forever grieving, still wearing the funeral dress from when her beloved died 140 years ago. Her dress, her hair, and her breath, all reek. 

But her perfume? To die for.

La Petite Robe Noire Eau de Parfum Absolue (Guerlain)

At the age of 44, I've finally developed a full appreciation for Guerlain. It took a while. For many years there, I wasn't convinced of the supposed quality behind their perfumes and was perhaps a bit blinded by the outrageous quality of 2000s vintage Creeds. We can't expect people to spend ungodly amounts of time macerating micro-batches, nor can we demand that they spend insane amounts of money on unnecessarily premium materials to make said micro-batches, so a little maturing on my part was in order.

I came around to the La Petite Robe Noire (LPRN) line when I realized that my bottle of Love in Black (LiB) was running low and I didn't feel like coughing up $140 for another one. If you're familiar with LiB, you know that it's a gloriously synthetic concoction of cheap-smelling violet ionones and all the sweet musks required to achieve an intense violet/iris accord, and that this unmitigated trashiness is the appeal. It's so cartoonishly "goth" and dark in its brooding floral sweetness that it works perfectly on a guy. No Guerlains promise that exact vibe . . . but a few come pretty close. La Petite Robe Noire Eau de Parfum Absolue, released in 2023, is one such Guerlain. (There's another that actually comes even closer to LiB, but that one is for a future review.)

LPRN EDP Absolue is "rich college chick" juice. She's 20 years old. She's working toward her psych major. Gorgeous, not because of any inherent qualities, but because rich people can afford to be genetically choosy. And she bathes in LPRN fragrances. The EDP Absolue is just her latest love, and she gushes about it to all her girlfriends and wears it to class religiously. But here's the thing: this fragrance is complex and really well made. Like LiB, it uses the Biolandes orris extract to render its slightly bready iris accord. But unlike LiB, it elicits a wide array of comments from people around the wearer, ranging from "a nice fruity smell" to "smells like pancakes and syrup."

I even had someone tell me it smells like Axe body spray. This speaks to the loudness of the fragrance more than to any deficits it may have. While I wouldn't call it "top tier" Guerlain, Absolue inhabits the Made-for-American-Girls category of dumb-reach fruity-florals that influencers can correctly characterize as "elevated." Yes, it's just another casual mall juice, something best worn for weekend errands. Yet Guerlain manages to infuse it with a level of material quality and blending that puts it in femme Creed territory. You'll get the same mileage out of this as you'd get out of Love in Black. It opens with bright, juicy cherry. Smells stunning. Laced through the juiciness is violet, which balances the tanginess with some floral sharpness. I also get the orris and a pleasant pink rose that doesn't smack you over the head. It slides like fine silk along steampunk sugared-cherry curves, a floral texture more than a living bloom.

There's a freshness that lifts the composition into another hemisphere, and that freshness is black tea. It's a touch tannic and smoky, even a little aquatic, in a freshwater way. There are subtle hints of licorice and not-so-subtle hints of marzipan, but then the heliotropin takes over, and a slightly leathery cherry-almond heliotrope accord carries the fragrance through the rest of the day. While not quite as pitch-black as Love in Black, Absolue feels sophisticated and sexually moody, sort of the way an indie French film from the '90s starring Juliette Binoche feels. Men can manage this fragrance thanks to its eerie aloofness, but wear with caution—this stuff fills large rooms.

Jicky EDP (Guerlain/Les Légendaires Collection)

Let's talk about Jicky. 

Here's the thing.

Jicky's reputation precedes it, and there have been approximately 889,000 internet reviews of Jicky written in the past 26 years. I don't need to get into how Aimé Guerlain created the world's first abstract perfume in 1889 using more than one entirely synthetic material (De Laire's coumarin and vanillin). I don't need to mention that up until very recently, Jicky was the oldest preserved (not hugely fucked with) perfume still available to buy new. Guerlain has apparently discontinued it, but hey, it had a good run. And I really don't need to mention that Jicky holds the original "Guerlinade" that the house would infuse into nearly every major release thereafter. It's an "oriental fougère," the very first of that breed. 

Since I don't need to mention any of that, let's get into the issue I have with Jicky in its latest, and probably last incarnation. I own a bottle of the "Les Légendaires" heart-stoppered EDP, pictured above. This version is, according to Thierry Wasser, Guerlain's master perfumer, a faithful reconstruction of the original 1889 formula, as it would have smelled, vs. how subsequent 20th century reformulations of Jicky smelled. Wasser's angle is that Jicky was animalic, but not that animalic, and was really more about showcasing the two synthetics pioneered by Aimé. Indeed, the fragrance reads to my nose as more fresh than fierce; I'm pleased by the brisk but delicate sunshine-in-the-morning lavender accord that introduces this fragrance, and impressed by how it's couched in gentle brushings of basil and rosemary, the former of which is shockingly evident throughout Jicky's considerable 14+ hour lifespan on skin and fabric. (Was Aimé Italian?)

This all dries very gradually into the base, with barely any heart notes, save for a whisper of nondescript florals that literally breeze into a foundational and everlasting civetone-laced coumarin and vanillin. The coumarin is gentle, hay-like, semisweet and balsamic, the finest and possibly best balanced coumarin that I've ever smelled. Wedded to that is the cushy sweetness of the vanillin, but conjoining the two is that infamous animalic rasp. I'm puzzled by the rasp, because more than a few reviewers seem to find Jicky, even in this formula, borderline unwearable for having too much civet. I, however, sense barely any. It could be my nose, or perhaps it's simply a musk component that jumps out at some noses and not at others, and I'm one of the lucky chosen who can happily wear Jicky. 

Whatever the case may be, it's a tremendously pleasant and enduring fragrance, but my issue with it is that I want the animalic component to be more pronounced. For that matter, I want everything to be more pronounced. "But Bryan," you shout, "This is Jicky, so take it or leave it!" Well, not so fast. It may be that Jicky is set in stone, and it's unreasonable to expect anything but what I get from it. If I want an even brighter, smoother, and more penetrating lavender, I'm out of luck, right? If I find the sedate blush of barnyard hay in its base too evanescent, I can kick rocks, correct? Wrong. I have a fragrance that delivers in these departments, and yet smells about 95% similar to Wasser's Jicky: Ungaro pour L'Homme II (1992). 

Jacques Polge's 1990s entry in the Ungaro masculine line says, "I'm like Jicky, only more so." Bigger, more lucid lavender. Heavier civet, right from the outset. A bold, coumarinic-ambery quality that speaks to more recent contemporaries like Brut, while also nodding to Guerlain. Vanilla, just as restrained, and folded into more tangible wood accords, i.e., rosewood and sandalwood. Ungaro II is the logical reconfiguration of Aimé's 19th century masterpiece. Take all the good ideas, blow them up, rebalance everything to scale, and voila! If you want what Jicky actually smelled like when it was first released, you can now have it. Just don't tell anyone. For all intents and purposes, this is just another in a long line of "fougèriental" masculines pushed into department stores for mass consumption. (Except it's actually an educated remake of the original Jicky . . . don't tell anyone.) 

Wasser can claim that his formula is closest to what Jicky once was, but I'm not entirely buying it. Sure, the fragrance is gorgeous. The lavender is crystalline, the herbal notes are like fine porcelain accords brushed with tender love and care, and the "purr" of animalism in the semisweet base is fun to wear. But the 19th century formulas used more naturals, and probably more real musks. The early forms of coumarin and vanillin were, from what I've read, a bit cruder and louder than the stuff being used today. And if Guerlain wanted people to notice this very first abstract composition—as in, not just representing literal flowers—he would want it to sing. People were stinky in the years before deodorant soap. Perfume was the answer, but it was, by sheer necessity, stern about it.

I encourage you to grab a bottle of Jicky while you still can. It doesn't show up on Guerlain's website, and the rumor is that it's been canned. Who knows if that's true. But I'd also warn you, if you're looking to drop $150+ on a vintage bottle of Jicky: Perhaps take a moment to reconsider. You can spend the same big dollars and buy Ungaro II, and I promise you, you're essentially getting the same fragrance with more balls, and also frankly more dynamism. Ungaro II smells like it contains real civet, although I doubt it does. The current Guerlain does not, that is certain. If you're looking for something like Jicky, but richer, then you're looking for Polge's fragrance. Just be ready to pay for it.

Of course, you could always just buy a vintage, or even "deep" vintage bottle of Jicky, which by many accounts has a much more fecal civet note in it. I could do the same, but my issue there is with Guerlain's unpredictability. This stuff isn't available to sample, especially in vintage form. Finding a truly satisfying vintage means picking through 137 years of formulas, spanning literally dozens of different bottle types, with all sorts of concentrations, and I'd probably have better luck playing lotto tickets. 

Jicky has a superior lavender note, of that there's no doubt. But Ungaro's lavender is pretty damn close, and as I mentioned before, it's brighter, louder, and richer. So, if you're a vintage hound, and you're not sure where to start with Jicky, Ungaro is your one-and-done shortcut. No multiple formulas (Ungaro II had one run), no weird bottles and concentrations to pick through (Ungaro comes only in EDT concentration), and no b.s. with the civet (Ungaro's civet is no joke). I'll let you decide which road to take.  

Habit Rouge and the Grim Reaper

     

                                                                               

   A Guest Post By Luna_J

                                                                               

Recently Fragrantica published a piece asking some of its editors to name a fragrance that they would relate to one of the "Seven Deadly Sins." John Biebel named Habit Rouge for the sin of "wrath," because he found it impossible to like despite its celebrated reputation; not just "Meh," not "It's great, but not for me," but the kind of extravagant airing of grievance that makes me question whether the reviewer was so caught up in nursing his feelings that he hazarded accuracy (not to mention readability) for impact. It's worth quoting at length: 

“It's not often that I put on a fragrance in a store, fall in love, put it on again at home, and then recoil in confusion. Yet there the dark rider looms on the horizon. He's supposed to be dressed in red (we are speaking about Habit Rouge, after all...) but no, this is more like a silhouetted figure from Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal traipsing with Death across the horizon. What has happened here? The beloved, historic, storied, elegant, treasured Habit Rouge, one of Guerlain's jewels in the crown from 1965, turns out to be sticky, acrid lemon candies strewn atop plastic carnation blossoms, and then the whole lot soaked in imitation vanilla extract. After a few hours: powder, then more powder. Dusting powder to the extent that I began sneezing. Again I asked, what on earth happened here?”

The thought of a critic, one who is a perfumer no less, losing his composure like this is heartening; It gives me a lot of faith in the long-term prospects of perfume writing (it’s hard to write – or read – novel prose about universally approved experiences). A scenery-chewing critique that asks unreasonable questions should be considered for its contrarian verve, if nothing else. Just what on Earth has happened here?

First, some background... You can find this on the internet, so I’ll be brief. The year is 1965. Twenty eight year-old fragrance house heir and all-round wonder boy, Jean Paul Guerlain, is riding high after coming up with the house’s now iconic Vétiver four years earlier. The notion is to take Guerlain’s famously seductive perfume Shalimar and make a version suitable for men. This was not a huge stretch; the ad copy acknowledged that men were probably already dipping into their wives’ Shalimar. They had certainly done so with Jicky several generations earlier, with the result that that composition was made over in male drag as Mouchoir de Monsieur. Sniffing the bottle of any version of Shalimar, you will smell a huge dose of citrusy eau de cologne married to smoky vanilla with some incense in the mix. Wafting off of someone’s skin, it’s more like leathery lemon pudding, with a touch of what some people call a ‘dirty diaper’ accord. Am I scaring you yet? It’s fantastic, actually. I gave my teenage daughter Shalimar one Christmas, and her room became saturated with it; I now know this signature all too well.

Habit Rouge is not Shalimar. Vintage fans insist that the original HR was (wait for it), fuller, rounder, deeper, and more natural, but also more decadent in the civet-whispering manner of Shalimar. Today’s Habit Rouge rides lightly through the air despite its persistent density on skin. It was reformulated by JPG himself in 2003, and then tinkered with by new house nose Thierry Wasser sometime later. If you are the kind of person who assumes that a new bottle style necessarily means a new reformulation, you might imagine yet more tweaking taking place a few years back, when Guerlain switched all of its masculine fragrances to the handsomely bevelled ‘briefcase bottle,’ first designed by Robert Granai especially for Habit Rouge. Personally, I don’t believe Habit Rouge benefits from being pigeonholed as some kind of angularly handsome Shalimar – I think the experience is more complex than that.

Though perfume guides characterize it using the cringy term ‘oriental,’ this is not a fragrance based on near-lethal doses of spices and sticky resins; Opium it’s not.  It is helpful to understand that Habit Rouge, at least since Wasser’s intervention, is a ‘transparent’ pyramid, which is to say that in its classically constructed top-heart-base progression, you can smell (or sense) the entire composition from the outset, as if looking through pale layers of caramelized sugar. The whole thing feels meticulously proportioned: cinnamon and patchouli create a delightfully stimulating tingle of incense, but never quite veer into Nag Champa territory. Luca Turin described Habit Rouge as ‘sweet dust’. Though biased by having first spilled a sample of it on myself while roaming the arts section of Powell’s Books, I mostly agree, adding ‘sweet dust in a clean, well-lit bookstore, stocking new and used editions while wearing a brand new tan leather blazer.’ The blazer is invented; don’t ask me why tan, but it goes with the blond shelves of vanilla-scented money I associate with big bookstores.

So... what’s not to like? That traditional eau de cologne splash of Mediterranean fruit notes – lemon, bergamot, mandarin orange, plus a big hit of neroli, is almost universally refreshing; orange blossom and orris add a deliciously soft, chalky breeze, lifting the acidity of the citrus into a pale pastel sweetness before paving the way for a waft of airy lavender. The classical floral and clove-like aspects of carnation are right there with a berry-red rose, and a hint of green vetiver to stop it all from becoming too rich. A gilded ‘praline’ effect produced by supple resins of labdanum and benzoin combined with accords of tonka and vanilla draws a diplomatic line between palatable pleasure and intimations of gourmand excess. A rigid accord of synthetic woods rests at the base, adding a popsicle-stick/tongue depressor-like dryness; it’s a little distracting if you focus on it, but I appreciate its technical role, and note how it helps along my impression of crisp, bound pages. As I said earlier, this is not an exotic Byzantine church smell, but a light, talc-y santal with a friendly earthiness at its base (mostly from the well-behaved patchouli note) that eases into a skin scent in an extraordinarily well-staged way. One of the secrets of Habit Rouge revealed only upon repeat wearing is that, despite its lively opening, its long ‘legs’ (i.e., tenaciously lovely heart and base note progressions) are what make it so rewarding to wear.

But it’s polarizing. I love the fact that when this was first released it was a worrisome flop. Nineteen sixty-five feels too early for the gender-bending powderiness, the playing up of gilded-age cologne-splash dandiness, and the heady floralcy that make Habit Rouge special. It made questionable sense at the outset of the decade of industrial recovery in Europe (and clean-cut, jet-age Camelot stateside) to release a men’s version of what had by then become an iconic but venerable feminine fragrance, and to advertise it with aristocrats on horseback for Christ’s sake. Of course, just a little later its anachronistic affectations, flower-power fruitiness, and hippy incense vibes would all be right at home when “the sixties'' really arrived, sometime around 1967. Keith Richards once mentioned that his switch from Old Spice to Habit Rouge made life “a lot more interesting,” and I like to picture its rosy odour floating around the basement of that French villa he used as a makeshift studio while arranging Exile on Main Street. I think a little too much is made of the Richards connection (decades later he was photographed in a salubrious den with a big bottle of Fahrenheit behind him, a fragrance I can more readily relate to his current incarnation of weather-beaten buccaneer). But it’s fun to imagine Richards in Habit Rouge, and Mick Jagger in his own favourite at the time, Chanel’s Cuir de Russie, leaving trails of tar and flowers behind them as they rolled through London.

Habit Rouge remains tricky because it smells good - really good, even beautiful – but it’s a beauty unstuck from a solid set of reference points. It’s not really ‘unisex,’ so much as both butch and femme; it belongs to a heritage nameplate, but feels fresh and niche if you think of niche (as I tend to) as overdetermined, single-minded, and weird. It feels right with a tailored suit, but one being worn by an actor, impersonator, or lovable fraud.

With that said, I just don't quite get Biebel's dance of death accusations - why so dire? Consider though The Seventh Seal: yet another of Bergman's films in which troubled characters seek meaning in a bleak universe. In the midst of it all the story's protagonist, a knight fated to face death, finds his life's best moments summed up in a bowl of strawberries and milk. What could be more Habit Rouge than that? For Bergman, strawberries represented an underrated gem, a home of memory and sentiment, which sounds about right. At the moment, as debates about identity politics that first caught fire in the sixties and seventies continue to burn, we are experiencing a fashion moment that, pandemic sweatpants notwithstanding, is reviving that era, not only by way of color and vibrancy, but also by the mingled feelings of creative play and societal malaise. What on Earth has happened here? Perhaps Habit Rouge remains both polarizing and relevant for being distinctively itself: a gem keeping life in sentimental perspective.

Vetiver, 2015 (Guerlain)

I reviewed this fragrance years ago in the "ribbed bottle" formula, which came in the post-2007 green box design with the tiny Guerlain G's in that itty-bitty circle (called the "plain box" style on the superlative blog Raiders of the Lost Scent). At the time I thought it was very French and well made, sturdy in summer heat, yet only slightly marred by an unpleasant "bug-spray" quality to the bergamot top note, a demerit heavily commented on at the time. I thought it was quite good, albeit a bit shy of "great." 

According to Andre, Vetiver was reformulated in 2015. According to basenoter "Andy the Frenchy," it was repackaged in its current green-cap bottle in 2016, sans reformulation. The code on my bottle/box is 7Q01, dating it to March of 2017, and thus I consider my bottle to be the 2015 formula. With that said, Guerlain fragrances are notoriously difficult to keep straight. The house has issued countless perfumes in as many different creative packagings bearing endlessly complicated batch codes. Accurately chronicling them is a Herculean task. Such is the way with older French perfumery firms.

I should mention that the "ribbed bottle" version is a unicorn among vintage enthusiasts, although you can buy it on eBay for an average price of $175. That's no bueno for me. If you want the truth, I wore about two ounces of that formula, and wantonly sprayed the other two on my old leather jacket. I enjoyed how rain resurrected it from the cow hide weeks after application, and preferred to smell it that way. I just wasn't "wowed" by the fragrance on my skin. There's something I can't pinpoint in the ribbed version (I suspect the synthetic citrus) that feels off-kilter and a little wrong. 

Personal quibble aside, Vetiver is still an enduringly popular fragrance. In his interesting 2008 book, The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris & New York, journalist and art museum curator Chandler Burr famously extracted from actress Sarah Jessica Parker the confession that she regularly wears the Parisian trademark vetiver. Eighties supermodel Elle Macpherson stated in her 2018 New York Magazine article that she has worn it for over thirty years, and considers it her signature. Eddie Roschi, co-founder of Le Labo, said in a 2011 NY Times article by Michael Walker that "In some countries you can smell it in the subways because everyone wears it." In a pithy 2013 New York Post article, Kelly Killoran Bensimon, American celebrity real estate agent and television personality, described her Vetiver-wearing hubby as the antithesis of a "loser"- an indirect plug for the fragrance. This year marks its 60th anniversary, and it would be a mistake to say that this iconic cologne has missed its twenty-first century target buyer: the woman who prizes strength and individualism in herself and others. 

Released in 1961, Vetiver showcases a note that was ahead of its time in masculine perfumery. It had been framed previously in floral bouquets and the rich, vanilla-laden orientalism of midcentury feminines. But according to Perfume author Lizzie Ostrom, it was "Newly appropriated as a masculine." In her 2016 book she wrote:

"It is as though, in trying to fence off some territory for the guys, anything remotely woody was grabbed and de-feminised. There is nothing particularly manly about vetiver, aside from being told it is so, to which end all female readers are encouraged to have a go with Guerlain's Vetiver. Since its release, the Guerlain version has become the most famous of the three main vetivers, designed, according to the house, with reference to the smell of a gardener, complete with soil under his fingernails . . . Vetiver has a really chewy smell. It is often described using terms like wood, liquorice, smoke and amber. In this scent its greenness is brought out with bergamot, its aromatic qualities with nutmeg and coriander, and its sweet smokiness from tobacco."

What a good description of the current formula, which has seen some improvement on the fidelity of its citrus notes, and a re-pouching of the extra pinches of snuff found in the 2000s version. I'd add freshly-squeezed lime as another prominent "green" catalyst in the scent, its crisp (and woody) essence enduring until the far dry-down. An almost animalistic coriander/black pepper accord, with emphasis on the sweaty-lemon facet of pulverized coriander seed, is balanced on the relaxed interplay of tobacco, vetiver root, and cedar, which rounds everything off. It's linear on my skin, with the morning sunlight of its fizzy top drifting slowly under a cool vetiver horizon by day's end. 

I'll end with this: to wear a vetiver fragrance of any kind is an exercise in sophistication. Despite its ubiquity in the tropics, most North Americans have no idea what vetiver is. Everyone's eyes glaze over when I tell them what I'm wearing. Guerlain's latest Vetiver is a frag I can get into. It's interesting to trial it in the winter, and I'll likely repurchase a bottle for the summer to see how it does in high heat. Good on Guerlain for keeping it going! On to Habit Rouge . . . 

L'Homme Ideal Cologne (Guerlain)

Nothing says "buy me" like a panicked man fleeing a hundred bridezillas.

I can't remember the last time I had such mixed feelings about a fragrance.

I recall reading Perfumes: The Guide for the first time in 2009, and thinking that its authors' credibility was shot because they found Guerlain, at least generally speaking, to be pretty amazing, and Creed to be mostly crap. In my years of exploring fragrance, I've yet to fully get on board the Guerlain hype train.

My problem with the brand is that it issues great fragrances made of subpar materials. Their Vetiver smells good, but its top notes are chemical enough to draw comparisons to bug spray. Shalimar is nice, but boring. It smells like high quality citrus blended with mediocre vanilla and an even more mediocre musk. Mitsouko is impressive mostly in how it handles oakmoss. I can't say I was ever blown away by the supposed "peach" that I've yet to find in its abstract (and ancient) composition. Habit Rouge is a decent powdery dandy fragrance, but isn't worth fifty dollars when Pinaud Clubman achieves the same effect for seven. I've only put my nose on two or three in the Aqua Allegoria line, but those I've smelled were good, competently made, and instantly forgettable. What's the deal with them? And why so many?

The L'Homme Ideal line has people abuzz about how "fresh" its frags are. Lately there's complaints about Guerlain's discontinuation of L'Homme Ideal Cologne. Majority sentiment declares it an excellent summer fragrance, with an unusual and memorable accord of grapefruit and "almond" that will be sorely missed a couple of years from now when bottle supplies dry up.

I'll preface my opinion by stating that one should be wary of buying into company-issued note pyramids. While Guerlain might say there's "almond" in this fragrance, I smell none at all. Of course, the fact that almond is in the pyramid is enough to make dozens of reviewers on both basenotes and fragrantica remark on how good the almond note is. Why Guerlain felt the need to relabel the massive vetiver in this fragrance is beyond me.

Vetiver can possess a dry, nutty quality, and it can lend a composition an austere earthiness when used well. That element is very much at the heart of this "cologne" (really an EDT). It is preceded by a burst of synthetic pink pepper and citrus, mostly grapefruit, and while it smells overtly fake, it nonetheless smells very, very good.

The citrus and pepper accord smells so good that I'm tempted to say it's the best use of these notes I've encountered in years, except there's a niggling feeling about the grapefruit I just can't shake. And then - a lightbulb flickers - I've smelled this note elsewhere: this is the same grapefruit found in Bleu de Chanel, only at a much higher volume. Thierry Wasser's orchestration of intense citrus in these modern Guerlains is here made possible by tying it to terpenic notes that whisper through the fruity fizz and tug its longevity into the unreal after hours of the day -- I get fifteen hours out of this grapefruit note, which is only possible if the perfumer disguised pine and called it grapefruit. This realization made me smell L'Homme Ideal Cologne as a mini Bleu with more grapefruit on top, with perhaps the ghost of Pino Silvestre under its designer sheets, and quite a bit of vetiver in the base. When you think of L'Homme as its own fragrance, it seems generic and affable enough. But when you consider it the offspring of Bleu de Chanel, pangs for Bleu overshadow the experience. If I'm gonna go nightclub playa, I'd rather reach for the Chanel.

That said, it's still a pretty good scent. Yes, the ingredients are disappointing as usual, and yes the composition isn't as original as it could be, especially with citrus playing a central role, but it still works. The blend is smooth, gentle, soft. The balance is pitch-perfect, with the ghost of sulfur following the citrus fizz to remind me of real grapefruit, and the sweetness of pink pepper providing piquant contrast. The vetiver is shaded into the background with detail rarely experienced in mainstream perfumery. The freshness lasts an epic eternity, no small feat. And the overall effect is simple, clean, and inviting, a laundered white T-shirt in a spring morning breeze.

Fragrances like L'Homme Ideal Cologne are made for flirting. In 2020, that's the truth. Once upon a time they were made to denote hygiene, to complement a "type," but these days they're made for dates, for intimate gatherings, for getting closer to someone of interest. Women have been exposed to a multitude of masculine clichés over the decades, and at this point their collective opinion is firm. Clean smells are the winners.

So while guys like Luca Turin bemoan the "fresh" culture, guys who want to get laid wear stuff like this because it works. But is a fragrance that is guaranteed to attract women merely a functional tool for the proletariat? Are the reasons for preferring stuff like Lapidus Pour Homme and Giorgio for Men automatically contrarian? Is it bad that this fragrance bores me? Is it even worse that it seemed to find favor with a beautiful woman that I met in passing the other day?

Guerlain really aggravates me.

"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?

Eight Young Co-Workers Confirm What I've Always Suspected: The Real World Isn't Losing Sleep Over the Death of the Classic Chypre

Mitsouko, down and out.

If you think the title of this post is heralding the death of the classic chypre as a "good" development in our postmodern culture, think again. The fact that few wear these old classics, things like Coty's Chypre, Mitsouko, Antaeus, Grey Flannel (and many others), is very distressing. It signals our cultural decline. That beautiful fragrances based on the timeless beauty of bergamot, labdanum, and oakmoss are pushed aside for nonsense like Neroli Portofino Acqua and Miss Dior "Parfum pour Cheveux" is sad. But I've always believed there's a simple reason for the chypre's grim fate: people just don't like it anymore.

In all my years of discreetly wearing Geoffrey Beene's Grey Flannel, I've noticed I've never received a single compliment on it. For a while I figured it was because people didn't notice it (I try to go light on the Flannel for obvious reasons), but as the years march on, and I continue wearing it day in/day out, the silence from others begins to reflect more than indifference. I've begun to think that most simply don't care for it, at least not enough to say anything to me.

That doesn't mean I care enough to stop wearing it. I love Grey Flannel. I'll always wear it. It's in my current rotation, in several vintages. And it's one of the few vintages that smells gorgeous, even if it has gone a bit flat. I think of it as the only true template for Creed's Green Irish Tweed. With a lick of green apple and real sandalwood, it would probably smell more like GIT than Aspen and Cool Water do. To me, it's a masterpiece. I'll never tire of it.

But even my most prized Jacqueline Cochran vintage Grey Flannel, which smells the most Green Irish Tweedy, fails to elicit a single comment from casual bystanders. GIT recently garnered an impressive "Ooh, that cologne is really beautiful," from a woman not given to such outbursts. Two days later I wore JC Grey Flannel in her close proximity, and got nothing. Zero. Zippo. Zilch. I thought for certain she would at least ask me if it was the same stuff, and maybe even say something about how similar it is, but no. Does this suggest that I'm mistaken in my GF/GIT comparison? Maybe. But still. Come on.

Fast forward to what happened to me today. This morning I showered, dressed, and donned vintage Mitsouko EDP, the one with oakmoss in the base (and lots of it). I drove to work, and arrived early. I sat waiting for others to show up. There are eight co-workers in my department, and they all had the same reaction when they walked in: "What's that smell?"

The sentence "What's that smell" is never, ever to be construed as something positive. When people like how something smells, they say things like, "Oh, that's nice, what is it?" Or, "Mmm, something smells good." But "What's that smell?" Sorry, you have somehow inadvertently fucked up. Perhaps the dosage is wrong. Maybe your skin chemistry and SOTD are having a spat. Or maybe your SOTD just doesn't smell good to anyone but you. In the first two cases, the problem is fixable. Use less scent, or try bathing with a different soap prior to applying your fragrance.

But in the third scenario, you're dealing with a different issue altogether. Your dosage probably doesn't matter, or matters little. And you've bathed adequately. So that whittles it down to the simple fact that people just don't care for your fragrance. In my case today, I was a bit incredulous. It was the first time I'd exposed this group of people to vintage Mitsy. I figured, what the heck. They've tolerated pretty much everything else (mostly fougères and orientals), so why not give my lovely oakmossy decant of this classic Guerlain a spin?

The instant negative feedback was functioning off the fulcrum of two teetering questions: What the fuck smells so bad? and Where is it coming from? I strategically sat closer to my supervisor, who is given to slathering strange skin products on herself, and hoped that this would throw them off the trail. Also in my favor was the presence of a few "off" smells in the building today. But the reactions were pretty visceral.

One man, thirty years of age, said, "I have no idea where it's coming from, but it's pretty bad. It smells like old hotel soap, the shit you're not supposed to use."

Another young woman, twenty-four years old, said, "Yeah, it's almost like that, and the smell of stale urine. Eew."

These comments garnered chuckles from the others, who all agreed. Another woman, thirty-eight, said, "I thought it was my imagination, but yeah, it's kind of weird. Where's it coming from?"

My supervisor, a thirty year-old woman who literally has stress seeping out of her pores on a twenty-four hour basis (her mouth twitches nervously while she's doing something as mundane and snooze-worthy as filing old paperwork away), immediately assumed that the cause of "The Smell" was her recent use of a rather vulgar hand lotion, and began incessantly apologizing for it, even though it was clear that most of my peers did not believe she was the cause of their olfactory distress. I just chuckled along and realized that some of the building's "off" notes were actually a bit worse than I'd realized, which made it that much easier to hide my festering embarrassment.

But I could kind of see their point. If taken wrongly, Mitsouko could be compared to "old soap." Its bone dry "peach" note (I've always felt the fruit idea was overstated in reviews of Mitsouko) combined with the astringent bergamot could certainly make an inexperienced sniffer recoil in fright. Then there's the oakmoss - oh, the oakmoss - which in plain English always smells musty and bitter, even in the loveliest of scents. And the weird, musky, piney, resinous darkness of good labdanum, which in many chypres just translates to an "earthy green" sort of note, isn't representative of today's trends. Not by a long shot.

I'm constantly reading threads and articles that lament the "death of the chypre." These conversations almost always revolve around reformulations of vintage greats, and inevitably the matter of oakmoss gets discussed. Unfortunately, IFRA regulations have strongly recommended that oakmoss and treemoss be used in very small quantities, with the mandate existing for European companies in particular. But in truth, even if the IFRA had minded its business and left oakmoss alone, the note would have died a slow and certain death anyway.

Look at things like Bleu de Chanel and Sauvage. Neither scent relies on oakmoss, yet both are descendents of the classic chypre, especially Bleu. Chanel decided to let the fruity/minty idea play out in a modern interpretation of the "fresh" but "earthy" theme, and the result is something that smells like a fancy deodorant, or perhaps a cheap aftershave. Sauvage got the bergamot part down, and used "earthy" accords to segue into a semi-sweet leather scent. A little labdanum and oakmoss would have put the composition in another league entirely. Sauvage would have smelled incredible. But Dior didn't want that angle. They wanted the Calvin Klein "suede cologne" idea of the last sixteen years.

The kicker is that I've worn reformulated Mitsouko to work on more than one occasion, and though it never elicited compliments, it never generated outright negativity, either. The newer stuff has no oakmoss at all, and thus isn't really a chypre in the technical sense of the term. I wear the old stuff, and what happens? People blanche.

The implications are clear. While by no means a reason to shy away from wearing the classics, our culture has moved away from these dusky, autumnal fragrances. Everyone I work with is under the age of forty. That they all found vintage Mitsouko distressing says something about their taste, sure, but it also says something about the perfume. The reality is that people don't really want to smell these things anymore. They're not interested in catching whiffs of bergamot (actual bitter orange distillate, not the fake shit found in current designer citrus frags), or labdanum, dried fruits, and bitter, acrid, Bavarian Forest oakmoss.

Earthy, woody, citrusy scents are compelling when put through the filter of "Fake." Today's nose wants to smell the idea of bergamot, the vague suggestion of something as oddball as labdanum, and maybe a soapy, semi-sweet analog of moss. Calvin Klein Man is an example of what happens when focus groups do a chypre. Sure, it smells good, and I wear it now and then, but I don't expect it to come close to the quality and uniqueness of an actual chypre.

Instead of "oohs" and "aaahs," vintage Mitsouko generated "Ughs" and "Eews." I know, I know. I live in America. We're a bunch of rubes. We don't know any better. We're one click away from making an orange, wig-wearing narcissist our president. How smart can we be? Maybe we're dumber than dirt, but that really doesn't matter. We still have to coexist. We must still go forth. We can do it the easy way, or the hard way. And unfortunately, wearing vintage Mitsouko means that today's under-forties wrinkle their noses around you. Guess that's not the easiest way forward. Guess it's why things like vintage Mitsouko are going extinct.

The Dust Collectors: Why No Sales?

In the previous post, I wrote at length about the odd nature of Patou Pour Homme's "legacy" among collectors and would-be collectors. My thesis here is simple: if people didn't buy it then, there's no reason to believe they'll buy it now. Defenders of those astronomical Ebay prices like to roll out the usual arguments about the normalcy of capitalism in these matters, and how "fans" of discontinued fragrances are the ones contributing to their posthumus commercial success. But as I pointed out, those arguments, while semantically feasible, are purely examples of stupidity in action. These arguments, when transposed upon the filaments of 2014's fragrance economics, simply don't align. The "Capitalism Explains The Price" argument is a "one size fits all" contention that is entirely impossible to generalize into all markets.

To recap what I mean by this, just look at the car market. Remember the Yugo, also known as the Zastava Koral? When it was first released in 1978, it was handmade by the classier brand Fiat as the Fiat 127, and was intended to be a bold new low-cost, low-maintenance town car (with sport potential). The joke was on Fiat; Americans created their own catchphrase for it: "Yugo Nowhere." This was followed by, "It's a good hand-warmer." Yugos broke down a lot and had to be pushed, but hey, at least the rear windows were heated! Despite its many commercial issues, the Fiat namesake had a following, the car sold just well enough to survive in the American market until 1991 or 1992, and it even has an actual fan club. Like perfume, cars are a technologically designed commodity, a product of commercial innovation, with most of their working parts invisible, yet their benefits serving a specific social function.

Although foreign production is still in progress, Yugo ceased being imported into the United States over twenty years ago, and Western models are no longer manufactured. The car we knew back then is essentially extinct. If we apply some of the false tenets of perfume economics to the Yugo, we immediately see problems. First, and like Patou PH, the car came from an esteemed lineage, a very competent background of means. It had commercial viability. It was released. It was briefly embraced by Westerners as something that might be worthy of use, but they tried it, disliked it, and rejected it. It was discontinued. It now has a fanclub. There's even talk by its manufacturers of bringing it back someday.

Yet old Yugos do not command even a 100% price increase, not even by dollar inflation standards (1987 - 2010). This article is a beautiful example of how people react to a lame attempt at tripling the inflationary value of a 1987 Yugo. The writer posits that "America's cult love-affair with the cheapest car in the market quickly dried out after customers realized that they got what they paid for with sales plundering to just under 4,000 units in 1991, the last year the Yugo was imported to the States." He also points out that this model could be purchased new back in '87 for $3,990, but now the asking price is $14,500!

As you can see in the comments, there are some reluctant defenders of this sort of price inflation, but they don't even bother to come right out and state their position clearly. They simply try to cut through the backlash, and the backlash is pretty succinct in its overall tone. One person writes:

"The dude is asking $14500! That awful garbage is worth $800 at most. Not the price of a brand new Chrysler."

That's an interesting point, because here the quality of the car can be clearly seen in the pictures, and yet this person is seeing past them, recalling that the vehicle's quality was far below average. Another person writes:

"Owned an 85 Yugo GV. First car right out of college. Had it 4 years, took care of it, and did the maintenance when it was due. Had 56000 miles on it and it never broke down. Other than tires and brakes I had no issues. Would love to find one I can work on with my son. But not for $14,000!"

This is an even better perspective, because it's clear this person owned and really liked the vehicle, and would actually purchase it again if he had the chance. Yet he feels the asking price is not reasonable. This is sanity talking. And then there's this comment:

"I want to buy this car, but it's nowhere near worth $14,500, my older brother had one brand new and only payed $1000 for it. So now I wouldn't even pay that, I would only pay like $300 for it, maybe $500.

This comment gets to the core of the issue. When a designed article is appropriated by society, and then recycled through its shelf-life, its value should remain relative to its usefulness. There is sizable depreciation. That is, of course, based on usability, being that these are DESIGNED products.

This is why chairs, plates, silverware, some articles of furniture and houseware, all appreciate in value over the years. Few moving parts. Often very little wear and tear. So time is, literally, on their side. But things like cars, which have two hundred thousand moving parts, and perfumes, with millions of volatile molecules in perpetual motion, suffer with age, and rightly their value should depreciate. If the value does increase, it should be at pace with inflation alone - the '87 Yugo in 2010 dollars would have been $7,658 new, half of what the Vegas dealer in the article was asking. Search for Yugos on Craigslist, and you'll see that the average asking price is around $1,000. Those prices are well explained by everything we know about Yugos. The Vegas dealer's $14,500 price? Inexplicable.

I find that the notion that vintage perfumes should be privy to price inflations by hundreds of percentage points contradicts two aspects of classic capitalism, the first being supply and demand, and the second being product value. In the first instance, discontinued perfumes went largely unsold, as their audience failed to warm to them, hence the supply should be inordinately large compared to the demand, which would be relatively small. In the second instance, with perfume being a volatile example of product design, the quality should dictate diminishing returns with every passing year, in any commercial setting, be it internet or brick and mortar sales. Obviously a citrus fragrance that is forty-three years old is not going to have the same quality and performance as a citrus fragrance that is three years old. So why pay three times as much for the forty-three year-old scent? Its usability is highly questionable, and its collectibility only extends to the cosmetic preservation of the bottle the fragrance is housed in (a skunked bottle can be refilled with colored water).

Why were people not buying certain perfumes to begin with? What was the reason that people rejected them? What drove them to discontinuation? What made them rare in the first place? And why are people assigning absurd values to them now?

Examining possible answers to these questions is not an exact science by any means, and probably isn't a science at all. This just comes down to being brutally frank with what we're smelling, and not romanticizing things and blowing them out of proportion. I've comprised a short list of discontinued fragrances that have become very expensive on Ebay and elsewhere, yet have never been brought back by their manufacturer, and remain extinct. Here's my take on them.

1. Relax, Davidoff (1990) This is my favorite discontinued posher, a fragrance which today only the well-funded are allowed to enjoy, it seems. Released 24 years ago, it was an almost instant commercial failure, and in some ways that actually pulls its current high prices closer to the breast of reason. One can argue that Relax never had a chance for people to embrace its beauty, as it was pulled too soon. Sometimes brands do that, pull a product because they didn't do adequate market research on it, and can no longer justify the distribution costs. Unfortunately though I think Relax was out long enough to catch on, simply because there's such a preponderance of bottles out there still, which tells me that the world's stock was extensive enough for at least one or two large countries to shine to it. That simply did not happen. It was not moving units. But why? The answer is in the scent itself. Davidoff, like Joop! and many other designer brands, has a signature synthetic accord that is reminiscent of rosewood and pipe tobacco, a very burly little number that is quite nice. Zino has it, even Cool Water has a hint of it. Relax had it too, but that was all Relax had, the basic two-chord aroma wafting gently from under a sweet mint top. What does that amount to? A good perfume, certainly, but rather like an overdone Skin Bracer. Was it worth $20 an ounce back then? Not to consumers. So should it be worth $125 an ounce now? Regrettably not. Pretty bottle, though.

2. Zino, Davidoff (1986) Davidoff discontinued most of their older scents, and Zino may have been a victim of overproduction. I would guess that what happened in the middle of the 1980s, here in the States and in Europe, was symptomatic of most problems with these oldies. Zino was an excellent fragrance in its own right, a very brisk lavender/rosewood extravaganza that smelled dark, mysterious, sexy, a little dirty. All good things, but look out! Here it comes: it's dated. I wore Zino on a weekend in Prague with a woman very dear to my heart, and she hated it. She didn't have the heart to tell me. She wasn't one of these "I Love Pink" bubbleheads, either. She loved the darker things in life, and she was extremely intelligent, and a very modest dresser. But this fragrance made her wrinkle her nose and walk out of the room every time I put it on. One has to wonder what she would have said if she hadn't been more polite, but I think it would have gone something like this: "Bryan, your cologne is not good. I mean, okay, it smells like maybe good for an older cologne, but today? No. Just wanted to tell you that, dear." Ouch. I've included Zino in this list not as an example of a perfume that now commands ridiculous prices, but to show that even a decent, inexpensive oldie had a reason for being axed, and that reason applies to many of the old ones that are now gone.

Updated thoughts, 2/15/15: I may have been a bit harsh on Zino here, as I personally think it's lovely, but I still believe it is dated - people around me tend to react negatively to it. When I read that it's discontinued, it doesn't surprise me at all. However, when I say it's dated, I'm beginning to wonder about the date in question. Is Zino still being manufactured and distributed by Coty? Are they operating under the pretense of "Lancaster," a long-defunct brand association from the nineties? Is this another "By Mennen" situation, as with Skin Bracer? In any case, pending further evidence, I'll have to keep this filed as a discontinued classic, but if availability continues to be as good as it's been for another year or two, I may have to remove this from the list. Right now the confusing aspect to Zino is that it's been, by all appearances, cut loose by Coty. Yet it continues to swamp Amazon search results at ridiculously reasonable prices. Very strange.

3. Derby, Guerlain (1985) Maybe it's my opinion of Derby. Maybe it's the fact that I don't cow to other people's bullshit when it comes to how "great" certain perfumes supposedly are. Maybe it's just that Derby really doesn't smell all that good. To this day, I'm mystified by how anyone could think this perfume is worth hundreds of today's dollars. There's one on Ebay right now, a 3.4 ounce square-bottle, for $800. This is an okay perfume. It smells fine, in a very safe, conventional, no-frills guy sort of way. The nutmeg was done before by Cacharel. The woody citrus thing? Done by many others, and most of them better. Guerlain's own Vetiver, in the older formulation, is but one example. But it's Guerlain, so shouldn't it be worth a gazillion dollars? Guerlain is notorious for having been mismanaged over the decades, as many of these older French concerns seem to be. Perhaps the discontinuation of Derby was one of those bad managerial decisions, but I think people really didn't like it. I'm amenable to this sort of breezy, Warren Beatty-esque old-school masculine, but I don't like Derby. Why don't I like it? I don't think it's very good. If I had to guess - and with its discontinuation in my corner - I'd say I wasn't alone in my assessment. Even the reissued version smells better. If not enough people were buying it in the eighties, and old stock doesn't smell very good now, why in the living fuck would I shell out $800 for it? You tell me.

4. Jules, Dior (1980) Reading the reviews of this one tells me all I need to know (I've never smelled it). People can't mention Jules without mentioning Kouros by YSL. A common meme in the world of vintage perfume fantasy is that the extinct species closely resembles a living specimen. In this case, the survivor was clearly the better perfume. Why does the world need a proto-Kouros? Every pre-war wetshaver masculine had already filled those shoes, but Jules tried and failed to win hearts with nostalgia. The Kouros family resemblance continues to bear out in the survivors with the lowest price tags, things like Lapidus PH and even smaller bottles of Balenciaga PH. Jules was always pricy, originally just under Kouros' price-point, before Ebayers ratcheted the costs up to $270, $350, and $500, as can be seen on there today. You'd be better off buying vintage Kouros for the same amount. At least you're getting the genes that nature perfected in that one, all of which are traceable to Creed's Orange Spice, if Bourdon is the author of that scent as well.

5. KL Homme, Karl Lagerfeld (1986) Prices for this one have been steadily rising over the last twelve months, which tells me that people are beginning to weed through their perfume collections to find things they can "bank" on, and make room for the shit they'll actually wear on a regular basis. I paid less than $40 for my 2 oz bottle a little while ago at a store here in CT, but the same size is going for around $75 now on that awful Bay, and larger bottles are over $100. This is a clear case of a perfume existing for no reason, other than to make money. KL Homme is a very well made, very likable powdery oriental, with a robust amber accord and very competent citrus elements on top. Yet it does nothing new, truly adds nothing to conversations about orientals, and isn't very memorable. It's just a nice fragrance to wear. But $75 - $100 nice? No. There's no doubt in my mind that KL Homme lost market share to Calvin Klein's Obsession for Men, which used to be a very rich citrus/incense fragrance, made with materials that I find to be of equal, if not better quality. I still have my vintage bottle of Obsession, and though its notes are no longer separable (time has ravaged it), the basic premise serves memory well: exciting, sexy, worth owning. KL Homme? Smells nice, but not as complex, and more than a little dull. Did guys agree back in the day? Without a doubt. Does it smell more complex and interesting in 2014? Only barely. Hey, if you want to spend three or four times more than the perfume is worth because you think it's "aged well," I can't stop you. Personally I'd wait until I spot it at a real market price ($25 - $35) in a brick and mortar, but that's just me.

6. Joint Pour Homme, Roccobarocco (1993) I almost forgot to mention Joint! Funny story: once upon a time, as in a year ago, Joint was on Ebay for astronomical prices. You couldn't get an ounce without spending at least $100, and 3.4 ounces were priced at $200, easy. At least, that's what they were asking. Then a funny thing happened - nobody bought it. Why? Because nobody's ever fucking heard of Joint, that's why. So in round six of dumbass perfume economics, let's break it down. A perfume is made. A perfume is barely marketed, if at all, and then nobody buys it because nobody knows it exists, and the few who do only buy it once because once they wear it, they realize it's just another eighties clone holdover, this time mimicking Zino, but with civet and heavy, vanillic castoreum. It has an impressive dusky, burly, animalic/woody structure for about three hours, and then the cash runs out and it fuzzes into nothing, a surprising and disappointing end, even for a clone. Come full circle twenty years later, and for whatever reason a few guys on Ebay decide to try to put the chicken before the egg, and jack the prices on Joint. They hope that people will happen upon it, find it to be very expensive, research it, and think, "Okay, this one is for 'aficionados,' and I am an aficionado, because I will spend two hundred dollars on a three ounce bottle." But no, it doesn't happen. Why doesn't it happen? Because people in 1993 didn't know Joint existed, so why the hell would they know it exists in 2013? A year later, all those greedy buggers on the Bay realized that it's better to make a little money than no money at all, and the prices were corrected down to $38 an ounce, something that only happens with discontinued perfumes that LITERALLY NOBODY HAS EVER HEARD OF BEFORE, EXCEPT MAYBE SEVEN OR EIGHT GUYS ON BASENOTES. One or two of those guys might argue, "But Bryan, don't you think that what really happened is that a 'secret stash' of Joint was discovered and disseminated to the Ebay merchants somehow, and that's the reason for the price reductions?" My very wordy, drawn-out, Woody Allen-esquely intellectually stimulating answer? No. See the above.

7. Red for Men, Giorgio Beverly Hills (1991) Last but not least is my favorite old-school frag to criticize, and for good reason, as it's a very mediocre offering. Some have said they think it's a marvel, beautifully complex, relatively natural, and one of a kind. "Better than Niche." Yeah, right. First of all, the same people who say this often follow it by saying something like, "If you want something similar to vintage Red but without the synthetic aspect of the reformulation, try Preferred Stock by Coty." This comparison cracks me up. Actually, it's the statement that "Preferred Stock smells like vintage Red for Men" that cracks me up, to be specific. Why is that funny? Because it's exactly backwards: Red was released AFTER Preferred Stock. If anything, vintage Red smells like Preferred Stock, not the other way around. So why even bother with Red? Okay, I'll be fair enough and say that Red's older formula apparently smelled a bit more complex and textured than Preferred Stock ever did, but then why was it discontinued? This brings me back to the Jules/Kouros problem - fragrances competing with themselves. When two frags smell very similar, the better smell is bound to survive, even if it came second, as Kouros did. Red for Men was never worth any more than its standard retail price, but somewhere along the way people started thinking that its demand was sizable enough to warrant doubling, even tripling the asking price for 3.4 oz bottles. In recent years there was quite a bit of conversation about it on Fragrantica and Basenotes, and indeed I believe that there was a pool of consumers who remembered Red and wanted it back. Nostalgic pinings, one might say. That was enough for manufacturers to reissue the fragrance, but only at the hilariously discounted price of $20, roughly $6 an ounce. This makes it cheaper than its template, the still going, going, going energizer bunny Preferred Stock! The irony. In the end, I think the original Red was probably very nice, because Preferred Stock is very nice, and I'm sure it warrants its reissue, although the new version is not as nice as Preferred Stock ever was. The guy on Ebay right now asking $99 for a 3.4 oz bottle of the original formula can sit and spin, although I applaud him for taking a $50 fragrance and only trying to double his money, unlike the merchant blitz that went on five years ago, with guys trying to jack prices up to $500. Unlike Patou PH, you don't see those insanely-priced bottles of Red on Ebay anymore. Why? People bought the reissued Red, remembered why they stopped buying it in the nineties, and were "Reality-Checked." The fan club learned that it doesn't pay to view the past through Red-rosy colored glasses.

Before I close, I want to add one more thing. A friend of mine likes to point out that I'm unreasonable if I think that everyone values objects the same way, and therefore I should make concessions for those who actually do feel that the frags listed above are worth what they're being priced at. That's fair enough, and I concede that people are within the bounds of reason to spend whatever they want on whatever they want. But there's a name for the type of people who spend two, three, four, even five or six hundred percent more on something that was originally not valued enough to remain on the market. They're called suckers. I wouldn't be surprised if one was out there right now, wearing Patou Pour Homme while driving his $14,500 Yugo.

Derby (Guerlain, 2012)

It's been a long week of work and looking at houses. So far my home search is proving to be especially interesting, as I encounter pad after pad in serious need of "Home-Path" loan repairs. Except for one particular town, in which it's pad after pad in serious need of a guy wearing a pink robe, John Barrymore style. I intend to buy there. Connecticut, as it turns out, is chock full of shitty houses. If you come here, look for our fifties-styled ranches. People take good care of them, they're relatively inexpensive, and they're usually true to their period (which means cool bathrooms).

In all the hubbub, I managed to sneak in a few samplings and a full wearing of the "new" Derby, to contrast with my unpleasant "vintage" Derby experience. While significantly better in both fragrance and performance, the new stuff doesn't really wow me either. I guess I just don't care for Derby. Again, if Derby were a broadly appealing scent, it would likely have top billing from Guerlain, but instead it is relegated to the weird revival line and seems destined to remain the brand's back-up player for years to come. People do like it, and they buy it, but it's nobody's first choice. I imagine Vetiver and Habit Rouge have always outsold it by a comfortable margin.

What can I say about the new Derby? It smells like a standard spicy-vanillic oriental, which surprises me. In fact, the composition seems to be built around a massive carnation note, which in some ways makes it similar to Old Spice, of all things. Plus there's a smooth vanillic amber in its heart, also quite Old Spicy. I don't know how I feel about that. I actually compared Derby to P&G's Old Spice cologne, and it turns out there's a lot more nutmeg in that cheapo drugstore formula than I had originally thought. There's also a competitive citrus note, mostly orange, and the vanilla in the drydown is adequate enough to give "new" Derby a run for its money. There's a harder cedar/peppermint accord in the heart of "new" Derby, and that duo ties the peppery-floral top to a heavy woody-patchouli base.

I've included a Scent Prism of "vintage" and "new." As you can see, the older formula is more complex, boasts harder notes, and you'd think it's more interesting than the newer composition. That may or may not be the case, depending on how you interpret the structure, but despite its complexities, "vintage" Derby smells overly nutmeggy and dull. The new stuff is fresher, a little fruitier, with softer notes, and a simpler structure, but its cheap patchouli base note leaves something to be desired. I guess the touch of saltiness to the older Derby's musk is a good thing, because the new one is pretty standard and "blah" in the musk department. Otherwise I can't think of anything nice to say about the original, and I just don't care for it.

Speaking of saltiness, I would take my scent prism with a grain of the white stuff, because your interpretation of the two structures may differ tremendously. However, I should warn you: don't let your impression of the original formula influence your take on the new one. There are some similarities in overall feel, and in the notes used, but all things considered these are two very different fragrances. It's just too bad neither of them strike my fancy.

Derby (Guerlain, 1985)

It is funny that I should wear Derby on the same day that I see a disappointing house. The real estate advert portrayed an expansive 1,700 sq ft ranch with a 600 sq ft finished basement and a nice yard. The reality was a run-down home with frayed flooring, an ugly kitchen, pointlessly small bedrooms, and a disturbingly makeshift "finish" to the basement. On the outside though, it seemed quite nice, the quintessential middle class Connecticut home, the sort of place many people go to die.

Vintage Derby is rather like the house in question. Unlike other reviewers, I think the vintage bottle is a very pretty package, with Art Deco glasswork and a charmingly over-sized crescent moon cap. I don't have the bottle personally, just a sample, but if I were blind-buying a Guerlain, Derby would have a good shot with me. Luca Turin attributes Derby's commercial difficulties to the ugly bottle, but I see no reason why the original bottle design would have held back sales. It is interesting, and suggests the perfume is equally interesting. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Derby is a boring cross between a cheap nutmeg-based masculine like British Sterling, and an equally cheap rose/jasmine powder-puff drugstore feminine (take your pick of any of Coty's or Dana's). What elevates it above this pedestrian terrain is its high quality ingredients. The moss, nutmeg, jasmine, and light, slightly smoky wood notes are all delicately and finely rendered with excellent raw materials. But I'd rather hear a good song played badly than a bad song played well, and Derby is unremittingly bad, the sort of nutmeg-driven foghorn that makes faster fading alternatives like Dana's putrid British Sterling more desirable, unless you're a staunch lover of nutmeg. I'm not.

Reader, always be suspicious of a perfume that people tout as being "an unnoticed gem," an "underrated masterpiece." Derby has been in and out of production for almost thirty years, and remains a tough sell for Guerlain. This is not by accident. Its commercial sales figures aren't reflective of the ignorant masses. Many people, likely millions of them over the course of three decades, have sampled Derby and found it to be an off-putting nutmeg composition with a fetid and forgettably woodsy drydown. It's a smell they've rejected, which is why its market share is under duress. The world never came around to it, because there's not much to come around to. It ain't the bottle we should be blaming here.

A review of the current reissued version is pending.

Mitsouko Eau de Parfum (Guerlain, In Case You Didn't Know / Winter Review)

A lot has changed since August. Before I get into it, let me reiterate what I wrote last summer. This isn't going to be an exhaustive note break-down and analysis of the EDP, nor is it going to be a romantic historical biography. There are literally a thousand of those sorts of posts already published on countless other blogs, far and wide. This is just an explanation of how I currently (and indefinitely) perceive the EDP concentration of this classic by the venerable Old World Parisian house of Guerlain. And yes, a lot about my Mitsouko situation has changed since August, both physically and spiritually. First, the physical. Then, I'll talk about my spirit.

Something strange occurred a little while ago. My Perfumed Court EDP sample was really bothering me. Even now, in twenty degree temperatures, it still doesn't smell very good. It doesn't smell right, so to speak. I still get an angular, angry, peach-lacquer effect, and the oakmoss sticks out like a sore thumb. The cinnamon is stale. The citrus smells like petroleum. There's the presence of elegance, but it lacks any and all of the requisite charisma and charm. So I chewed on that for a while, and realized that I hadn't read up enough on this fragrance, despite the thousands of available pieces written about it. I've read my fair share, mind you, but I had to go back to Monsieur Guerlain, and re-read his evaluation of the fragrance, and its history.

That's where I realized I had messed up big time in buying a sample online. It's likely that they wanted to be hip and chic in doing this, but the Perfumed Court sent me an oakmoss version of the EDP, very likely from a few years back, or a few years before Edouard Fléchier was hired to re-tool Mitsy for IFRA regs. This wouldn't qualify it as one of TPC's "vintage samples," because Mitsy is almost 100 years old, and I doubt anything after the late seventies or eighties would be considered true "vintage" in this case. But I think the ladies who run TPC are of the "older-is-better" school of thought, so whenever they can get something ten or fifteen years older, they feel it's better than getting bottles brand new.

There's a big issue with that, of course: the chemistry of the perfume may be damaged by time. If fifteen or twenty years have passed, and they're sending samples from this fifteen or twenty year-old "better" bottle with oakmoss, that would explain the inherent risk of buying a sample of Mitsouko from TPC. Some people appreciate receiving old stock. I don't. The fragrance will have inevitably changed, and what arrives in the sample sprayer will not be what went into the bottle in the factory all those years earlier.

This has been acknowledged elsewhere. As Andre Moreau so eloquently put it when discussing the vintage EDT version on his blog, Raiders Of The Lost Scent:

"Since perfumes 'mature' with age, the vintage EDT could have aged, and gotten even stronger."

Indeed, the same could have happened to the EDP, even one only a decade old. That could account for the shrieking strength of its bergamot and moss, and the unpleasant "shiny" aspect to its peach lactone. I'm inclined to think this sample was intentionally taken from the old stuff, which unintentionally gave me a bad impression of Mitsouko. Oh, the bitter irony.

Fast forward a few months, and I do something most people who are iffy about Mitsy would not do: I blindly purchase what I know to be a brand-new bottle, judging from the packaging and the ingredients list. Even though I'm expecting it, I'm still surprised to see there's no oakmoss listed on the box. This is the ultimate "reference chypre," but without oakmoss? What is the world coming to? And not only that - they put treemoss in its place! What is this, a cheapie from T.J. Maxx? I bought it anyway. As I was buying it, I thought to myself, "The oakmoss is what's annoying me in my sample, more than anything else. It's not the presence of oakmoss, but the fact that it smells unbalanced against the citrus and labdanum. This bottle has NO oakmoss, which means there is NO CHANCE that oakmoss will annoy me. The peach lactone might be integrated with a smoother, airier, sweeter construction. That's how treemoss smells, after all. I hope I'm right." I took my bottle home and did not use it for a few weeks. I was afraid to touch it, lest I find I should have spent $50 on 2.5 ounces of something I actually like. Then one day I said to myself, "What the fuck?" and made my move. I decided it was cool enough outside to wear Mitsouko, a new formula of Mitsouko, with renewed faith. I sprayed. I smelled. I fell in love.

Thierry Wasser's updating of the formula is, without any doubt, a triumph of postmodern perfumery. Everything I dislike about my sample is ironed out in his blend. There's a muted bergamot note, very high-pitched, but sniffed in the abstract, as if through a white veil, which makes it fresh, clean, but also ethereal, and softer than any other citrus note I've ever smelled. The peach lactone, the treemoss, the roses and jasmines, and even that difficult Biolandes iris synthetic, all smell unified, balanced, and pitch perfect. This is truly a soul-lifting chypre. I wore it again today to work. The ride to work was a happy one. The workday was frequently punctuated with Mitsouko, which made it a better day than it might have otherwise been. I sat through a very long and boring meeting with my arms crossed and my hands folded under them, up against my shirt. I went to scratch my nose, and caught a whiff of Mitsy's far drydown (nine hours in) on my wrist. Suddenly the meeting was a lot more bearable. I can't really describe just how wonderful this stuff smells, because words don't do it justice. Its template is from 1919, a template faithfully adhered to here, and yet it smells new.

See the quiet, and quietly depraved beauty of Catherine Deneuve above? Her flawless, peachy-soft skin is subject to a thousand imaginary whips and lashes in the auburn mood of Luis Buñuel's black tragicomedy, Belle du Jour. Watch that movie, and observe just how incredibly nonchalant she is in it. That's how my Mitsouko EDP smells, right from the nozzle. That's what I expected it to smell like all along.