Lomani Pour Homme, A Review of the Latest Reformulation (Parfums Parour)

New and Improved Package, New and Improved Contents

I don't know when it happened, but sometime in the last three years, Parfums Parour reformulated Lomani Pour Homme, and significantly changed its packaging. I reviewed this fragrance many years ago on basenotes and Badger & Blade, and pointed out that its "fresh" dihydromyrcenol and slightly fruity top notes were more a progenitor to Cool Water than anything else, but here on this blog I aligned my opinion more with its being on the Drakkar Noir axis.

At this point, in late 2018, the Year of the Barbershop, I found myself wondering if Lomani PH was worth revisiting. Again, to recap prior opinions, I found its structure classically fougere, but also remarkably cheap in both concept and execution. It smelled like the perfumer put dihydromyrcenol through an olfactory amplifier, and had dialed its synthetic facets to eleven in the top and early drydown stages, but then ran out of money. To close out the show, Parfums Parour settled on a very lonely tree moss note in the base, which made Lomani smell like a handful of stale wood chips after ninety minutes of wear.

I think this reformulation is a good opportunity for me to point out the key differences between oak moss and tree moss. Some fragrances benefit more from tree moss than oak moss, and some are the opposite. Two examples are Z-14 and Lomani Pour Homme. Z-14 belongs in the former camp; Lomani belongs in the latter.

Tree moss is dry, and aids in streamlining woody accords. It works beautifully in Z-14, among dry woods and woody citrus. Oak moss is much more diffusive, and amplifies any "fresh" chemical in its vicinity. It works like iso E Super, as a fixative and texturizing agent. Good fougeres marry aromatics to coumarin, and benefit from oak moss. Tree moss flattens aromatics and coumarin, leaving a one-dimensional drydown (Lomani circa 2010), but oak moss activates the aromatic connectivity between top and base, allowing crisp herbal notes to powder into a pleasantly clean shaving foam effect.

Thus the reformulation of Lomani PH is a more successful fougere than its earlier iteration from several years back, and for one reason alone: they replaced the tree moss with oak moss. No longer does Lomani PH dry to a hollow tree moss note of no distinction. It now dries down to a powdery, talc-like, vaguely herbal shaving foam effect. Lomani PH is arguably the cheapest fougere you can buy, now yours for literally $6.98 if you can catch Fragrancenet's 30% discount offer. That's actually cheaper than Pinaud Clubman.

That means you can be utterly broke, and still possess a modern aromatic barbershop fougere in Lomani PH, which I also still consider an unheralded entry in the Drakkar Noir axis of barbershop ferns. Will you smell sophisticated? No, you will smell like you shaved, and applied some mixture of aftershave and witch hazel.

Lomani PH is a celebration of synthetic barbershop chemicals. They even colored it the same as Barbacide. P-Parour isn't going for broke here. They're just putting out the most basic Reagan era fougere imaginable on a shoestring budget. The hilarious thing is that they tout its "new look" on the box with a red imprint (something no classy brand does), and yet the box and bottle are almost identical to their former selves. The box is still drab grey with 1980s font; the bottle is still clear glass with an elliptical cap. Except now it has a silver plastic atomizer, and silver shoulders separating cap from bottle. Great. It looks better than it did, but not by much.

I often read about how Lomani is such a great clone of Drakkar Noir. I'm not sure it's "great." Drakkar's use of dihydromyrcenol is clever, taking its freshness and using it to amplify pine, wood, leather, and lavender. Lomani has a hint of apple-like fruitiness, a hint of soapy lavender, a very vague hint of pine. Yet nothing materializes into an accord. Instead it smells like dihydromyrcenol is an ingredient in a shave soap from a dollar store. It smells good for the money, and you got a superb deal.

What more needs to be said?

Lomani Pour Homme (Parfums Parour)

There was a time during the 1980s when, stylistically speaking, masculine fougères straddled Drakkar Noir and Cool Water. Of these, my favorites are Molto Smalto and Lomani Pour Homme. The former is a punchy herbal/lavender concoction with a fresh indigo flavor. The latter is a fougère grafted onto a chypre, yet is lesser. It's less compelling than Drakkar and Cool Water, perhaps a topic for another post altogether.

Today I'll stick to the basic rundown on Lomani - it's dirt cheap, of Parisian origin, and very utilitarian, extremely functional. I can see how it managed to survive for 25 years in an ever-changing market: it found in broad strokes a categorically desirable scent profile, entered the stage when this profile was nascent to the perfume world, and stayed within the budget buyer's reach at all times, hovering just under the unaffordable Cool Water and Drakkar. It became the plausible alternative to plausible alternatives.

My issue with Lomani PH is that it only smells like a plausible alternative to its pricier brethren for about ten minutes. After that it turns into an unlikable one-note wonder, and that note is oakmoss. Let me say a word about oakmoss - it strikes me as somewhat odd that this component is so revered in perfume circles. Every time someone on basenotes gripes about how oakmoss was stripped from a classic, or neglected in something new, I shake my head in wonder. Sure, oakmoss is an excellent component for a wide variety of scent types, but I can certainly live without it, and fail to see why it deserves automatic love. Unlike dozens of other notes, oakmoss isn't something that works very well on its own. Isolated and ungarnished, oakmoss is simply a flat and bitter moss smell. 

Speaking of lavender, Lomani is all about lavender at first, a very aromatic lavender as potent and sweet as it is fake. This blatantly synthetic note is paired with a refreshingly realistic lemon note, but rather than form an accord, the two notes remain disparate, creating a sort of duo-tone opening that's both astringent and classical. Nature has its own way of freshening the air, and nothing cleans up better than a cool wind through rows of lavender, or the mist of lemon juice expelled by a knife in fruit. The nose behind Lomani decided to reinterpret these effects on a budget, and wisely embraced his limitations. 

Then, presto! The amazing technicolor dreamcoat is dropped, and there stands oakmoss, stark naked and shivering. The air goes out of the room. The allure is all but gone. I'm left with something better left in the bowels of some forgotten 1950s chypre, a hard-pressed fleck white green that ruins everything it touches. Lomani's budget constraints boiled down to funding one lonely aromachemical. A shame. This really coulda been a contender.