The Outer Limits of Perfume Orthodoxy

"The Greatest Green Scent"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Rose is Not a Rose

This one smells quite sweet and fresh!

I'm in Maine this weekend, staying with my partner's parents, who have a stunning garden: roses, peonies, lilacs, bleeding hearts, and purple-and-white irises. But a garden full of flowers wasn’t enough for us. We took a trip to a local peony farm and spent the early afternoon wandering through row after row of different cultivars.

Two stood out, Austin Pride and Bartzella. I couldn’t decide which I liked more. One smelled crisp and lemony with touches of mint and Turkish rose. The other had a deeper, fuller lemon note with a spicy rasp. Both were beautiful, and completely different.

That got me thinking about the only peony fragrance I own, Banana Republic’s Peony & Peppercorn. And it hit me: there’s no such thing as the peony smell. In the garden here, there are three types, and they all smell wildly different. At the farm, the range was even wider, from zesty citrus to heady, almost overripe sweetness. Some were so indolic I nearly disliked them. Almost. I’ve yet to meet a flower I truly dislike.

I started wondering about perfume reviews. Imagine a peony scent that captures the essence of one specific variety but gets panned because it doesn’t match the chemically peony smell people expect. Where’s the peony, they’ll ask. It might be right there, just not their version of it.

Peony & Peppercorn is synthetic but soothing, like a spa. It has a soft, sweet, slightly lemony freshness with a faint aquatic undertone. I never pick up the pepper, though some reviewers insist it’s there. After smelling over thirty peony types today, I can say none of them smelled like what’s in the bottle. Still, some came close enough that I’d call it a decent abstract version, especially if you're not aiming for realism.

But what about the indolic peonies, the darker ones, often purplish-red, or even coral-pink like Coral Sunset, which has a strange, stale edge to it? These are a world apart from the light, lemony Bartzella or Austin Pride. The scent range is huge. From citrus-clean to animalic-rich, peonies test the limits of what we think a flower should smell like. Luca Turin once said only bees, not people, should smell like flowers. But with so many variations, surely there's a peony out there for everyone.

This variety presents a real challenge for perfumers. Go light and lemony, and some will say it doesn't smell like peony at all. Go deep and indolic, and jasmine lovers might feel tricked. The middle ground, pale pink and white peonies with soft, sweet, slightly rosy aromas, is probably the safest choice. It’s where something like Peony & Peppercorn fits in. Not a literal replica, but a stylized blend that suggests peony without being any single one.

All of this points to how narrow our expectations have become. We want floral perfumes to fit a clean, familiar mold. But nature doesn’t work like that. Lilac can smell pink or white, and those don’t smell alike. Roses might be rich and velvety or bright and citrusy. The tea rose is sweet and green, while a wild rose is light and minty. So when someone asks for a rose perfume, the real question is, which rose?

Some believe abstract florals are best for this reason. They don’t try to copy one flower, but aim to create an impression. Take Nautica Voyage, for example. Though it’s sold as an aquatic, it’s actually an abstract green floral. When I wore it to work, I kept catching petal-like whiffs, sometimes pink, sometimes white, sometimes purple. Nothing distinct, but always pleasant.

Compare that to Tommy Girl, which features clearer floral notes: camellia, jasmine, apple blossom. Together, they become something new. A flower that doesn’t exist in nature, but still feels real.

I'm curious to try Creed’s re-release of Spring Flower. Reviews are split. Some describe it as sweet and fresh. Others say it smells outright poopy. A few Fragrantica users complain that their expensive blind buys ended up too animalic to wear. I remember the original from the 1990s as crisp and fresh, maybe a little sour, but never indolic. If the new version is dirtier and more complex, even better. In perfumery, one person’s scrubber is another’s holy grail.

And nowhere is that truer than with florals. One person’s perfect peony might not even register as peony to someone else. And maybe that’s the whole point. Nature doesn’t stick to a formula. Neither should perfume.

What Makes a Perfumer a Perfumer?

I watched a brief documentary on Pierre Bourdon in which he described his mindset as a perfumer, describing his love of travel and the arts, and came away wondering about him. What kind of mind creates Kouros and Cool Water? He was clearly obsessed with the latter. Throughout the film, he was shown sniffing the bottle and scent strip, staring out his study window with his mind's eye doing all the observing. What was he thinking about? What drives his inquisitive mind? 

I have recently gotten into formulating my own perfumes using artificial intelligence as my guide. I'd feel stupid admitting this if it weren't for another documentary that I watched about Calice Becker. In it, she describes being the Director of The Givaudan Perfumery School in Grasse, and intercut with her monologue are scenes of perfumery students formulating their accords in front of a massive touch screen that allows them to tweak proportions and have their ideas blended right on the spot. The perfume world has gone fully digital, and that is exactly how they're training perfumers.

If perfumery were simply a digital art, school wouldn't really be all that involved. But it takes years and many hurdles to actually become a perfumer for a big company like Givaudan, and apparently much of that time is spent cultivating a perfumer's personal philosophy. Pierre Bourdon describes the importance of reading In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. It is your assigned reading if you wish to study under him, as Jean-Christophe Hérault discovered. Why was this required reading? The novel, which spans seven volumes, depicts someone who connects scent to memory, and describes being transported back to childhood at the whiff of a food item and the air near the sea. 

This scent memory is likely what Bourdon wanted Hérault to absorb, and judging from the success of Aventus, he did. His compositions speak to people, just as his teacher's did decades before. But Bourdon strikes me as being a bit of a philosopher; his ruminations on life, on art, on nature, all seem thoughtfully abstract, as if you'd never truly understand them without getting to know the man in full. I imagine it would take several years to unpeel the onion of Pierre Bourdon. But then again, I may not need to -- perhaps I am a perfumer also. Maybe that is who I am.

So, what is my philosophy? What am I striving for in life? How do I view life? I consider age a requisite for success in this domain. At 43, I am still relatively young, but now old enough to recognize all the cruel limitations life imposes on me, and mature enough to accept them. Life is long, but life is also hard. Get up. Go to work. Get beat up for eight hours. Brave the increasingly crazy traffic home, and then take care of a dog and a partner, all while maintaining an inner zen. I felt uninspired for many years, unable to connect my imagination with any real beauty in nature, and thus incapable of processing natural beauty into scent. Being a perfumer wasn't in the cards for me.

Then I accompanied my partner up to her hometown in central Maine. Her parents own an ancient farmhouse up there, built on a hill sometime in the 19th century, and the property it sits on is a little piece of terrestrial paradise. Acres of meadow, some of it partitioned into a closed flower and vegetable garden, some of it open flower garden, and all of it lovely. There are patches of iris and daffodil, peony and wild rose, gladiolus and echinacea, crab apple blossoms and phlox and lilac trees on a sprawling expanse of green grass ringed with pine. They have several man-made ponds and bird feeders, which draw all sorts of little feathered wonders. To simply stand on their property is transformational. 

I come away from it believing something new: to be in nature is to be surrounded by the divine. What peace is found in lying under a blackberry bush, away from its nettles but close enough to watch raindrops filter through each layer of greenery until they patter around me, smacking into my cheeks? To not move for an hour, and observe each passing bee, each fluttering moth, each caterpillar nibbling along the stems overhead? Life and death are so cyclical there, in the proximity of divinity, that nothing corrupts their flow. One could imagine that blackberry bush is eternal. Yet nothing is, and eventually everything crumbles into the soil, becoming the soil itself, which in time yields new growth. 

After spending some time there, I came away inspired by nature. The scents of the flowers were vibrant and fresh, products of clean earth and good tending. The lemony lift of the wild roses, the dulcet sweetness of the lilac blossoms, and the grape-like purr of purple iris flowers all filled my lungs with a sense that there is simplicity in beauty, and much complexity in rendering it all secondhand through a perfume. It isn't that the formulas need to be lengthy and convoluted, no -- one must simply acquire the knowledge needed to ensure they avoid that fate. There are things that you can learn in school, perhaps by being one of the lucky that gets plucked from a pool of several thousand applicants each year to study at Givaudan. Then there are things that you can learn from years of reading and appreciation, by simply immersing yourself in the language of perfume, year after year, until eventually reaching a stage of intellectual Nirvana. 

I may be at that stage. I now view the possibility of formulating a masterful perfume as not out of reach. Artificial intelligence plays a role here, perhaps larger than would be considered "respectable" by professionals, I will admit, but still central enough to success regardless of how it is perceived. Through lengthy discussions and formulations, A.I. has rendered several formulas for me, formulas that I have viewed critically, knowing what the materials are, and what they're capable of. I've asked my digital friend to replace bergamot EO with bergamot FCF to avoid photosensitivity issues. I've queried it about including things like Helvetolide and Ambrettolide to enhance the quality of a base accord. I've investigated the radiance and power of high-dosing Hedione into a floral accord. I've looked into making a perfume "pulse," using irones, and not just sit there. I want movement. I want Creed-like intensity and quality. I don't want flat notes that smell stale and heavy and unbalanced. I want nature in a bottle, but using 90% synthetics. 

I'm starting with a marine rose perfume. It will contain extremely expensive rose absolutes and rose otto materials. It'll also contain a bunch of "booster" materials that will lend longevity and complexity to the rose, adding an ethereally modern element. The top will be citrus and tea; the heart rose and violet, the base salty-marine with a bit of melon. I know it doesn't sound original, and it isn't. But originality is overrated. What I value isn't originality of concept, but quality of construction and clarity. I want this to smell like a garden in Maine, and I will work on achieving that. The fragrance should transport me to that garden up north, where one can stand and breathe in the saline-saturated air, clear and clean, and use it to filter the bright glow of dewey roses. The perfume should smell rich and full, but also bright and fresh, and I want it to be of the sort of beauty that makes people pause and go, "Oh!" Their next move should be to ask for a bottle. 

Unlike Pierre Bourdon, I don't put much weight on a worldview that favors "the arts," nor do I think that traveling the world is a prerequisite. I don't need to go around with a notepad and scribble down every impression. I need to think about what I'm smelling, and simply remember it, and that isn't as difficult for me to do as many other things are. Surprisingly, my scent memory is pretty great. When I smell something remarkable, I remember it, and when I smell it again elsewhere, it takes me to the place where I first encountered it. I will know my fragrance is successful when I smell it and think, "That's it . . . that's the garden where I was reborn." 

Tommy Girl or Chelsea Flowers? What Is the Specific Connective Tissue Between These Two Floral Scents?

At long last, I finally have these two fragrances side by side. My story with Tommy Girl is a bit tiresome (crib notes: I developed an allergy), and I abandoned it in 2014, then gave my pre-IFRA bottle to a girlfriend at the time, and it took her all of five minutes to wear half the bottle down to empty. This kind of thing doesn't often happen to me, but I recall being annoyed that it did with Tommy Girl, especially since I genuinely love the fragrance.

Imagine that you enjoy tea-based fragrances, you enjoy blackcurrant notes, you love green fragrances, and you happen to have more than a passing appreciation for bucolic florals. Then imagine finding all of these traits in a single inexpensive fragrance by an American designer brand once all the rage in the 1990s. Then take that a bit further, and picture the day when you realize you simply can't wear the stuff. You can be near it, on someone else, but your sinuses forbid you from wearing it yourself. What a dreadful feeling that was. At the time, I didn't really blame anyone or anything but myself. I told myself that it had happened because I was too sensitive, and couldn't handle the composition, and also that I had absolutely awful luck, which like a perverse slot machine in some infernal casino meant getting all three pineapples on a whiff of Calice Becker's masterpiece. 

The truth was less dramatic than that. My bottle was made before the IFRA really kicked their aroma chemical censorship regime into high gear by restricting and banning floral materials, and the Lauder formula at that time (late '90s or early 2000s) definitely used a few things on their list. I don't often thank the IFRA for restricting and removing perfumery materials, but in the case of Tommy Girl, I'll just lay it on the line: they did a good thing here. The old formula was gorgeous, but it was also overpowering. There was a denseness to it, a radiance that was nearly blinding, and at some point whatever floral components were responsible simply overpowered my immune system and triggered an overreaction. It wasn't the tea base with its papery green svelteness, or the abstracted blackcurrant haze under all the white floral and rose materials, but some element in the bouquet itself, some floral note that was overpowering me. 

Fast forward to 2025, and suddenly I find myself faced with a peculiar choice. I'm in a discount retail store perusing the seemingly endless array of "budget" fragrances on offer, many of them actually quite expensive and in some cases egregiously overpriced, when I spot a few bottles of Tommy Girl. It's in the new packaging with red stripes, and it's obvious that the Hilfiger fragrance division has pawned itself off to someone else, with Lauder no longer producing their wares. Why this happened is beyond me, and I don't really care enough to look into it, although I'm sure someone like Derek or Andre have already dug into and explained it, and if they haven't, I'm just as sure that someday they will. But the plain fact is that these fragrances have been reformulated, and are now living in a post-IFRA world. The wheels start to turn, and I reckon that there's a good chance whatever was in Tommy Girl in 2000 is very likely no longer in Tommy Girl today. 

So I take a chance and buy a bottle, knowing full well that if I spend the $27 on it and it still gives me a massive headache, I'll have burned that $27. But I suspect that the fragrance will be chemically altered to enough of a degree that it likely will not mess me up, and upon bringing it home and giving it a spritz, am pleased to report many days after the fact that indeed, the floral materials that once comprised the supernova of "fresh" petals are no longer the same, and I can wear Tommy Girl with no after effects. This gives me a chance to do something that I've wanted to do since 2020: figure out in a side by side comparison why exactly Tommy Girl and Chelsea Flowers smell so similar? Laurent Le Guernec's 2003 "niche" floral doesn't share all that many similar notes, yet at the very first spray, I recognized and said out loud, "Tommy Girl!" But why? 

Chelsea Flowers doesn't have a tea note. There's no blackcurrant in the mix, and there's a soapy-green aspect that resembles the starched floral bouquets in drugstore refrigerators. But the sweetness of its florals is muted, with its damp, green, stemmy facet dialed up instead. Meanwhile, Tommy Girl is all about green tea, intensely blossomy florals, and blackcurrant, which smells more focused, rounded, and juicy in the new formula (actually miles better than vintage). Becker's composition isn't as finely textured as Le Guernec's, but its texture flows in broad, wonderful strokes, with each whiff of a blossom followed five minutes later by a slightly nuanced whiff of another beside it. Chelsea Flowers, in contrast, smells of grassy greens in a humid environment chilled by artificial rain drops and a cooling unit on high. The faint sweetness of the blossoms exists not becuase these flowers are aromatic, but simply by virtue of their numbers -- there are a hundred of them crammed into a little space, and if you could climb in with them, their collective odor would eventually make an impression. Undergirding all of this is a weirdly nondescript soapiness where in Tommy Girl there is green tea, green tea, and more green tea. 

With all of these differences, why is the comparison inevitable? Why, when I smell Chelsea Flowers, does my mind immediately leap to Tommy Girl? No single material or cluster of notes can be isolated and used to identify the olfactory similarities that I experience with these two fragrances, yet it's there. I can only speculate. Perhaps Chelsea Flowers contains a cleverly hidden green tea note? Maybe there's a speck of blackcurrant in there, too, which somehow tilts the overall balance into Tommy territory? Le Guernec's fragrance came out seven years after Becker's, so clearly he was using her work as inspiration when he authored this floral marvel, but what, other than the smell of grocery store bouquets, was he after? Did he imitate the soapy amber and give it just enough of a sweet floral lilt to be evocative of the designer tea floral? Is there a note in Tommy Girl that eludes definition, and is the secret god molecule for making any "fresh" floral smell like Tommy Girl? I may never know. The fragrances are very much abstract meditations on the quietude that surrounds flowers, and in that headspace I zen out, so perhaps it's simply a shared psychological effect gleaned from both compositions. 

So, too, might I find answers in noticing what is different about them. Tommy Girl is radiant, but it's also dusky and dry, save for the blackcurrant note. Chelsea Flowers is also radiant, but dewey and wet all the way through, and I can't not think of cheap clutches of hothouse flowers sitting in buckets of water on the floor of a glass fridge in a Price Chopper or Big Y. Tommy Girl is sweet; Chelsea Flowers less so. Tommy Girl uses green tea for most of its "green" vibe, while Chelsea Flowers seems to eschew any obvious tea note in favor of less exotic stems and leaves rubber-banded together. There's a kind of pollen-like quality to Chelsea that Tommy lacks, while Tommy's more blatant watery florals are louder and grander and in no way as peripheral. 

It's clear that both fragrances share a fundamental skeletal structure, but in Chelsea, this core is layered beneath elements that set it apart from Tommy. Between the two, I definitely like Tommy more, which is weird considering the price difference. I mean, if I were to pass on paying retail for Chelsea, I could buy about ten bottles of Tommy Girl and have a lifetime supply. With that said, I actually think owning Chelsea Flowers has been worth it (granted, I paid a third of what the going rate is), and I like it very much, and would repurchase it if the price was right. Now that Creed is getting ridiculous with its pricing, and now that tariffs are about to jack those prices even higher (not really, but everyone likes to pretend there's a good reason to increase prices), Olivier's biggest competitor might have an edge, even with me. In any case, I want the world to know that owning both of these is not redundant, but owning one, the cheaper one, is really all you need. 

Is Brut the Ship of Theseus?

The Paradox of the Ship of Theseus is an age-old dilemma: can an object that has had every one of its parts systematically replaced over the years still be considered the same as it was in its original form? Can an object remain essentially unchanged despite efforts at preservation to remedy its decaying components, or is it preferable to simply reconstitute the object from the decaying pieces themselves?

This question lies at the heart of the Ship of Theseus, which boasted thirty oars and was celebrated by the Greeks as worthy of preservation. After many years, every plank, every oar, every board, warp, and mast had been replaced with ostensibly identical new parts. The vessel was granted a hero's memorial, yet philosophers debated whether this act preserved the ship or merely replaced it. Was the pristine vessel purportedly used by Theseus still truly his ship after 150 years of plucking and replacing, or had it transformed into something entirely different?

This riddle invites contemplation of whether an object is defined by its material composition or if its identity transcends the materials that constitute it. Is the preserved assembly of planks and boards the true ship of Theseus, or is it the ship constructed by a bored dockworker using all the original parts, even if it appears altogether different?

I often find myself pondering this question in relation to Brut. Of all the fragrances in my collection, Brut inhabits a strange, eerie realm reminiscent of this timeless Greek paradox. Launched in 1964 as a classic fougère with a nitromusk base, Brut has undergone countless efforts at "preservation" due to changing ownership, reformulations, and evolving standards in perfumery. In 2024, sixty years after its debut, and now manufactured by High Ridge Brands, one might encounter Brut on grocery store shelves and wonder: is this really Brut?

The dilemma arises from Brut’s myriad iterations, applications, concentrations, and bottlings, surviving only by the skin of its teeth into the twenty-first century as an anachronistic homage to its era. When a young man discovers a green plastic bottle today, he might question whether this fragrance resembles the original. If he is a pessimist, he may assume it does not. Should he buy and wear it, can he genuinely feel as though he is donning Brut? What else could it be if not the product advertised on the label?

This conundrum extends to the fragrance community at large, where reformulations are ubiquitous across nearly every fragrance older than a couple of years. Even “newer” fragrances, still commercially popular, are likely to undergo minor tweaks and adjustments driven by the availability of materials and fluctuating prices. Consider Creed's Silver Mountain Water, a fragrance celebrating its thirtieth anniversary next year. Despite the passage of decades and two changes of ownership since 2020, the white bottle with a silver cap still contains something called Silver Mountain Water. However, the dense, mineralic ambergris of the original has vanished, replaced by an intensely inky version that might better serve as a flanker to its 1995 predecessor than a true representation of itself.

Fragrances evolve, yet their names and overall packaging typically remain unchanged. This invites a critical examination of older fragrances: Are you what you claim to be? After the natural oakmoss has been eliminated, after the notes that flourished in the sixties and seventies have been diminished—first slightly, then more conspicuously—are you still Brut? After the synthetics have been replaced with kinder, gentler chemicals, after the cancer-causing nitromusk molecules have been excised and substituted with other potentially harmful musk compounds, are you still Brut? The bottle bears the name "Brut," yet the scent I experience cannot possibly resemble what a man inhaled upon unscrewing the cap in 1964!

The Ship of Theseus Paradox profoundly impacts perfumery and presents a pressing question for those who cherish vintage scents and seek their analogs in the contemporary market. If we accept that constitution does not equal identity, it becomes easier to view a fragrance that claims to be a certain scent as authentically that scent, despite undergoing extensive refurbishment. 

By adopting the "Continued Identity Theory," we might consider Brut to be itself, as long as the changes it endures unfold over an extended period and do not occur all at once. Imagine if Brut had been obliterated by Fabergé shortly after its release, entirely wiped from the market with every bottle bought back and destroyed. Then, in 2024, another entity produces a powdery scent and labels it "Brut." In this case, we would recognize that this new Brut is not the old Brut but something entirely different. Conversely, the Brut that has undergone minor adjustments over six decades—enough that no original part remains—still retains its identity as Brut. It remains close enough to the original to be considered the original, still the same perfume.

My solution to the Ship of Theseus Paradox is straightforward: Brut is Brut if I accept that it is. My acceptance of the current iteration allows High Ridge Brands to successfully market it to me. Helen of Troy had so thoroughly altered Brut that the formula available between 2015 and 2021 was utterly unrecognizable to me, and thus I did not consider it a fragrance at all. I did not buy it, I did not wear it, I did not respect it. Brut was effectively discontinued, despite never leaving store shelves.

High Ridge Brands successfully restored the fragrance I recognized, delivering an impressive rendition of its original formula. Consequently, I regarded Brut as "back," even though it had technically never gone anywhere. Then HRB reformulated its reformulation, slightly diminishing the fragrance's quality, yet it still surpassed the subpar version that Helen of Troy had marketed. For now, Brut endures.

Dissecting "Blue" Fragrances That Aren't Bleu: A Meditation on Perfume Synesthesia, Part Two

This is both the second part of my meditation and a review of Tabarome Millésime. Here’s the crux of it: Tabarome Millésime is the most important Creed of the 2000s, and yet no one discusses it. Before you dismiss this claim, hear me out, and then draw your own conclusions. My argument rests on a theory that ties this Creed fragrance to one of the biggest successes of 2010—a wildly popular Chanel, recognizable by its name and its signature "blue" hue.

To be clear, I’m referring to the years 2000 to 2009. Several notable Creeds came out during that decade, including Himalaya, Original Vetiver, Santal, and Virgin Island Water. While these other scents were derivative, Tabarome Millésime was a precursor to greater things. Most intriguingly, it defies its brown label and tan-green liquid. Instead, it smells like a rough draft of Bleu de Chanel—a very rough draft, mind you, but all the essential elements are present. There’s a sweet touch of citrus, followed by ginger, sandalwood, black tea, and green tobacco leaf. Hints of vetiver and mild smokiness are nestled within, while the sandalwood, dry and pale, echoes a birch note. Strangely enough, Tabarome Millésime feels more "blue" than Bleu itself.

Its resemblance to Bleu de Chanel is both fascinating and unsettling. From what I can gather, Olivier Creed is the actual perfumer behind Tabarome Millésime—not a "ghost perfumer" like Pierre Bourdon or Jean-Christophe Hérault. If this is true, it’s a monumental fact, more significant than most realize. Amidst the accusations of Olivier’s perfume “theft” and dubious business tactics, and the widespread belief that he’s more of an "evaluator" than a creator, we find ourselves in complicated territory. If Olivier’s 2000 release indeed paved the way for Chanel’s blockbuster a decade later, then he is far from inconsequential. In fact, he might even be a visionary.

So, what makes Tabarome Millésime smell vaguely "blue"? It opens with a sharp, sour citrus accord, bracing and almost unpleasant in its tartness—bergamot with a lime-like bite, only slightly softened by sweet mandarin. The ginger that follows isn’t as effervescent as I expected, but it’s deeper and rounder than anything I’ve encountered in a designer fragrance. Beneath the ginger, black tea, sandalwood, smoky-salty ambergris, and raw tobacco leaf emerge, all resting on a base of petitgrain and white musk. The composition is simple, lacking contrast and dynamism, presenting more as a single, multi-faceted note—ginger with a few supporting elements. The freshness, likely from ambergris and a cool, aqueous musk, combined with the ginger, gives the fragrance its "blue" character, evoking the sensation of crisp water and clear air.

Some reviews suggest Tabarome Millésime is ideal for the office or for older men. Luca Turin called it a "sport fragrance" and dismissed it as "mislabeled and pointless." Given how faint the tobacco note is, it might indeed be mislabeled, but pointless? I beg to differ. The gingery woods at the heart of this scent, a concept later mastered by Jacques Polge in a world-shattering perfume, carry considerable weight within the realm of masculine fragrances. One Fragrantica reviewer compared it to Dirty English by Juicy Couture, and I see the resemblance. Ironically, I’ve compared Dirty English to Bleu de Chanel in the past, referring to it as "Brun de Chanel"—Dirty English smells earthy and brown, with a streak of blue running through it. It shares enough DNA with Bleu that I view it as another stepping stone toward the final 2010 iteration of this idea. Masculine perfumery evolves in stages, a few years at a time.

Why does Dirty English evoke a color? Once again, we find the same combination of notes that parallels Tabarome Millésime and Bleu de Chanel: cedar, vetiver, smoky woods (perhaps "oud"), and a sharp, synthetic citrus note that doesn’t resemble real fruit but feels like a technicolor image of one. ISO E Super is just as prominent as the esters and aldehydes. Though far from an aquatic or ozonic fragrance, and certainly not marketed as one, Dirty English achieves a distinct "blue" tone, a fresh yet somber quality that echoes in Chanel’s later creation. To be clear, Bleu de Chanel is the most refined of these three, while Tabarome Millésime, despite its high-quality ingredients, suffers from an inferior composition and balance. Olivier’s scent feels too evenly spread, with the notes never truly playing off each other. In contrast, Dirty English, the cheapest of the trio, smells livelier—but it’s a zephyr next to Bleu de Chanel's tempest.

All of this leads to one conclusion: the best "blue" fragrances evoke the color itself, and the tranquility it suggests, without relying on tired aquatic or synthetic accords. The "blue" quality of Bleu de Chanel, Tabarome Millésime, and Dirty English stems from their ability to conjure a mood—a certain quiet, misty atmosphere, the austere beauty of nature in the early morning, before the light fully dispels the night. These fragrances inspire the sensation of a color rather than a seascape or a sunlit beach. The genius lies in the perfumer’s ability to distill this achingly familiar feeling into a scent, one that transports us to that place we all recognize as "blue."

Dissecting "Bleu" Fragrances That Aren't Blue: A Meditation on Perfume Synesthesia, Part One

In 2010, the perfume world experienced a watershed moment, much like Hollywood did in 1999. It was a year marked by great releases and intriguing innovations. Fragrances like Portrait of a Lady, Memoir Man, Eau Sauvage Extrême (new), Sartorial, Bang, Aventus, and Bleu de Chanel hit the shelves, revitalizing department stores struggling to stay afloat. Among these, it was Bleu de Chanel that captured my attention. I purchased a bottle soon after its release, though I found its backstory both plausible and dubious. Jacques Polge claimed the inspiration came from the scent of men washing and shaving in airport bathrooms—an aromatic memory he couldn't shake. To me, Bleu de Chanel embodied the apex of a movement in masculine fragrance, representing the color "blue" without invoking any of the typical "blue" scents.

What stood out most was its innovative structure and the unusual combination of notes. Ginger, a staple in men’s perfumes, was handled with a fresh, dynamic twist, alongside grapefruit, pink pepper, vetiver, incense, green tobacco, white florals, patchouli isolates, birchwood, synthetic oakmoss, and clean musk. None of these notes fell into the aquatic or ozonic categories that dominated the previous decade. Instead, they came together in a composition that smelled serene, somber, cool, and terrestrial—a shade of grey-blue that conjured inner calm. For me, the fragrance veered more towards tan or taupe, with the ginger and vetiver giving the heart a distinctive warmth. Synesthesia was in play.

As I wore Bleu de Chanel, I often pondered its origins. What perfume might have preceded it in the same way Drakkar Noir and Green Irish Tweed led to Cool Water? It felt so original that I suspected Chanel may have borrowed from a lesser-known brand. But the search for a clear predecessor proved elusive. Over time, I realized I had been misled by the "blue" marketing. I needed to explore beyond color and consider other successful mainstream fragrances. One contender that came to mind was Malizia Uomo Vetyver by Mirato. With its fresh vetiver, touches of ginger, citrus, cut grass, and neroli, it seemed to be a distant cousin of Bleu de Chanel. Yet, despite the similarities, Bleu wasn’t as overtly "green" as Vetyver. The ginger was subtler, and Vetyver’s transparent, sporty vibe didn’t carry the same gravitas as Bleu, which had an earthy, almost musty depth far removed from the frosted blue-bottle offerings at Perfumania.

I often wonder how differently I would have perceived Bleu de Chanel had it been housed in a brown bottle. Would the ginger and vetiver have spoken to me in a new way? Might I have imagined parched summer fields instead of misty autumn woods? The bottle’s color and name undeniably influenced my perception of the fragrance. Take Aqua Velva Ice Blue, a product of the 1930s that still smells remarkably modern. Its notes—menthol, citrus, peppermint, cedarwood, and abstract florals—create a balance between fresh top notes and earthier base notes, with a unique interplay of incense and leather. The parallels to Bleu de Chanel are clear, and I often wore both fragrances after a shave, with one person even remarking that I smelled “really beautiful.”

Yet, even with these comparisons, I can't shake the sense that something is missing. While Ice Blue and Vetyver share a gingery-peppery freshness, they occupy a lower tier in the commercial landscape compared to Chanel. It's hard to believe Polge would have drawn such direct inspiration from them. There’s a missing link—some forgotten fragrance in the higher echelons of the market—that quietly failed but laid the groundwork for something like Bleu de Chanel to flourish . . . 

What Are "Aquatics"?

Over the years, I’ve immersed myself in a sea of perfume literature, and one of my biggest pet peeves is when people misidentify the classification of a fragrance by claiming it belongs to the wrong genre. This confusion is especially common with fougères, chypres, and aquatics, with the latter being the most perplexing. While I understand the confusion around fougères, given the tricky distinction between "traditional" and "aromatic," and chypres being somewhat outdated, the mislabeling of a fragrance as an aquatic mystifies me. How does this happen?

Let’s unpack the term. An "aquatic" fragrance is one that conveys "aqua" elements above all else. These elements can evoke the scent of either saltwater or freshwater, each with distinct olfactory traits. Saltwater fragrances, often referred to as "marine," tend to be more defined, while freshwater scents can sometimes blend into ozonic or laundry musk notes, rather than anything explicitly liquid. Interestingly, freshwater fragrances rarely advertise a watery theme and often simply feature a color palette between green and blue. In contrast, saltwater fragrances usually convey their aquatic nature through packaging and names, suggesting a beach escape or a dive to explore a coral reef.

So, how should a true aquatic fragrance smell? There’s no single answer, but the fragrance should impress with certain distinctive qualities. I often associate salinated water with a genuine aquatic scent, so oceanic compositions resonate most with me. Examples like Heeley’s Sel Marin, Mario Valentino’s Ocean Rain, Bvlgari’s Aqva, Ralph Lauren’s Polo Ultra Blue, Creed’s Millésime Impérial (and Armaf’s Club de Nuit Milestone), Halston’s Unbound for Men, Nautica's Voyage, and Azzaro’s Chrome Legend are quintessential examples of aquatics. Sel Marin stands out as a pristine example, featuring a tangy citrus blend saturated with sand, salt, seaweed, and brine. It evokes the scent of your skin after a refreshing swim in the Irish Sea on a crisp 55° day, clad in a Speedo.

Bvlgari Aqva combines seaweed and salty accords with an abstract floral arrangement, allowing its briny elements to bask in daylight. Polo Ultra Blue is intriguing for its synthetic nature and often criticized as overly generic, yet its balance of herbal and citrus tones contrasts well with heavy salt notes, creating an abstract representation of a rocky beach at high tide. Ocean Rain captures a similar beach at low tide but further down the coast, where sand meets gentle rain—a true representation of beach petrichor. The rest of these fragrances offer fruitier and fresher variants, but all share salty, vaguely briny seawater notes. These are true aquatics.

When it comes to freshwater aquatics, clear examples are rarer. From my collection, two notable ones are L'Eau Bleue Pour Homme by Issey Miyake and Silences by Jacomo. Yes, I consider Silences a freshwater aquatic. Wearing vintage Silences reveals it’s not aiming for a field of greens; Jean-Claude Niel’s 1978 creation evokes a foggy emerald over glassy pond water at dawn on a frigid 42° Fahrenheit morning. The scene is blanketed in mist, with only sage thickets and cattails visible through the murk. It’s eerie, green, and murky, reminiscent of pond water. Similarly, L'Eau Bleue offers a cool, crisp watery aroma, complemented by a complex mix of aromatics that gradually shift from aquatic to more terrestrial notes, though the water reference remains throughout.

So, what isn’t an aquatic? My prime example is Davidoff’s Cool Water. Despite its name and blue glass bottle, it doesn’t fit the aquatic profile. Yes, the name "Cool Water" and the blue bottle suggest an aquatic theme, but here’s the issue: Cool Water lacks the salty, marine quality, and its freshness doesn’t evoke natural freshwater. Pierre Bourdon aimed to create "a new kind of freshness" using familiar aromatics like linalool and Hedione, along with a substantial amount of dihydromyrcenol. This latter component smells ozonic, slightly metallic, and woody on its own. In Cool Water, it adds a frosted effect to mint, lavender, and florals, with a touch of room-temperature crab apple and tobacco notes.

Cool Water includes a hint of salty sea spray, sweetened by a smidge of Calone 1951, which is indeed an aquatic element. However, this doesn’t make the fragrance as a whole an aquatic. It’s better classified as Bourdon’s "modernized" aromatic fougère, with fougère notes making up about 90% of the composition. The remaining 10% consists of standalone aroma chemicals like Ambroxan, Hedione, and a more marine-like Methyl Cyclopentenolone. The name "Cool Water" implies the wearer is "cool" due to the fragrance, an update on the French "Eau Fraîche". While mint and lavender are cooling, and the blue glass suggests "coolness," these factors don’t make it an aquatic.

Another non-aquatic example is Bleu de Chanel. Despite the reference to "Blue," the fragrance has nothing to do with the ocean or a lake. Inspired by men’s aftershave, it bears a striking resemblance to Aqua Velva Ice Blue. Jacques Polge aimed for a moody-woody scent, using ginger for freshness and ingredients like incense and vetiver for depth. It’s a woody-fresh scent, more a glorified woody amber than anything aquatic. So, please stop calling Bleu de Chanel an aquatic.

There are other examples, but these two are significant. I could continue ad infinitum, but I’ll conclude by saying that if you want a true aquatic fragrance and want me to recognize it as such, avoid anything in the Green Irish Tweed or Dylan Blue realms. Instead, opt for something that genuinely evokes the sea or a lakeside, like the briny saltiness of a mineralic, sea-weedy coast or the murky dankness of a quiet fishing pier at dawn. Think of the essence of dirty water, and you’ll be on the right track.

Let's Talk About Tea Fragrances.

Tea notes are among the more mysterious elements in the perfumer's organ, and I've always been intrigued by them. I own several fragrances where tea is a central feature, some of which are my favorites, and all of which I would buy again. Here, I want to explore what tea means in perfumery terms, as the note is far from monolithic, with many twists and varieties found in both mainstream and niche compositions.

In my collection, the most successful rendition of tea is probably found in Thé Brun by Jean-Charles Brosseau, a 2005 creation by Pierre Bourdon aimed at the niche crowd. This was a semi-retired Bourdon playing with ideas that '90s designers had rejected or overlooked, such as his now-famous pineapple note, which he paired with an ethereal, salty accord distantly related to his earlier Millésime Impérial for Creed. To me, this fragrance captures an Earl Grey type of black tea with remarkable accuracy, featuring the distinct bergamot of Earl Grey followed by a creamy "brown tea" note reminiscent of a morning tipple with milk. The tea note persists throughout the fragrance's life, from the first spray to the far drydown five hours later. While I'm not particularly impressed with the rest of the pyramid, I find the tea note grounding, calming, and serene.

Bourdon, like his teacher Edmond Roudnitska, revered Japanese art and tradition, drawing inspiration from the orientalism of the 20th-century Old Masters. There are whispers of floral sweetness—perhaps cherry blossom?—and a faint woodiness under the salinity, like a garden near the sea. The black tea, diluted to a warm brown, shimmers in a cup at dawn. These impressions are evoked by the fragrance, and at no point does Thé Brun feel ordinary or trite; I am certain I've never smelled anything like it. Unlike most tea fragrances, Bourdon didn't disguise a white floral note with lemon to call it tea; his tea is literal, a refreshing and realistic effect, like spilling Tetley on my collar. Although Thé Brun has not been well-received by everyone (one female coworker wrinkled her nose and said, "Not a good one, Bryan"), I like it.

If Thé Brun is a placid Earl Grey, Alyssa Ashley's Green Tea is a verdant spin on the theme. Dirt cheap and probably the least compelling tea fragrance in my collection, it is still a satisfying wear, largely due to the interesting pairing of lavender with papery gunpowder green notes. The fragrance smells aromatic, dank, and slightly stale—but intentionally so. I've compared it to the smell of pool or pond water, that green, murky scent of water infused with botanicals. In 2002, this was Alyssa Ashley jumping on the green tea bandwagon, which had kicked off almost a decade earlier with Bvlgari's Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert (1993) by Jean-Claude Ellena. The fragrance feels fresh, bright, eccentric.

Here, the tea note isn't as relaxing but more of an abstraction for the nose to play with. At times, it smells a bit chemical until I realize that the lavender doesn't always blend well with the other aromatics, as if it wants to dominate. This isn't a lavender fragrance—it's a tea fragrance, and while lavender has its own calming properties, green tea possesses a serene stillness when it cuts through flanking accords. Thus, the fragrance manages to smell tense, with the crisp aromatics, citruses, and a cold, perhaps forgotten green tea note pulling at my senses.

When I'm in the mood for a '90s pop of unisex-leaning-feminine tea, I reach for a fragrance that wasn't made in the '90s: Elie Tahari's signature feminine from 2019, a buoyant fruity-floral brimming with notes of sweet pear, tart bergamot, green apple, and what reads as a bergamot-infused green tea, with that crisp sour citrus element carrying most of the plot. Elie Tahari's tea note isn't about meditative seclusion from the world; it wants its wearer to feel sunny and happy, and the fruit notes are so in-your-face that feeling down is nearly impossible while wearing this scent. Composed by Nicole Mancini and Rodrigo Flores-Roux (although "composed" may be a stretch since AI has been signing briefs since at least 2016), it smells like an unused mod for a Bvlgari tea entry that the perfumers freshened up and repurposed for the brand.

I like Elie Tahari, but it wears rather "thick" and oily on me, smelling weirdly dense and unzipped, as if it needs a few extra hours to open up and truly shine. This could be because the fragrance is blended almost to an extreme; the typically standoffish notes of pear and apple somehow merge to create a new type of fruit, rendered to stunning effect. Instead of a standard pear note, they chose the exotic lushness of Doyenné du Comice pear, which smells heavenly against the backdrop of magnolia blossom and tea. The quality of materials is surprisingly high for the price (you can get a bottle for less than $20 if you play your cards right), and the tea note is the central spine that holds all this frivolity together. A few sprays on your collar, and it's 1999 again.

To me, tea is a spiritual note, something felt more than smelled, with a naturally quiet and monastic aroma. CK One is an oddly spiritual take on tea, blending green and the rarely-used white tea note—a very soft, almost powdery-musky variant of the leaf. It remains one of Calvin Klein's finest perfumes. There are ten-ounce bottles of CK One on eBay, and I'm inclined to purchase one. I wore this scent today and realized it is masterful and unforgettable, a fragrance that immediately transports me to a jetty on a foggy lake, with glassy water at early dawn, an hour before the sun rises. Everything is colorless and still. The roses and orange blossoms of a nearby garden carry on the faintest breeze, pulling with them the many essences of the greens growing by the water and the distinct bite of cedar from the wilderness beyond. A morning frozen in time.

Here, tea is brushed into the artistic body of the perfume in a way that both mutes and magnifies its scent; the greenness is fresh, but the dryness of the tea leaf is still present, while the white tea sends a snowy veil of watery freshness across the woody florals. Several potent white musks support this fragrance, and while I'm not usually a fan of them, I make an exception here. CK One smells like a dream but also captures the essence of its niche—a Gen-Xer's scent of the day, if that day is an eternal Saturday with plenty of time to kill at Borders Books before a matinee with a date.

Speaking of dates, Chez Bond is an interesting throwback tea frag in that Bond took the basic structure of Green Irish Tweed (lemon verbena, violet leaf, iris, sandalwood) and transformed it into a semi-gourmand flavor of tea. The lemon twist one might add to morning tea replaces the lemon verbena, and instead of powdery iris and sweet violet, there's a milky-smooth sweetness of sugared black tea that lasts for five to eight hours. Chez Bond is fairly linear and isn't in my collection (yet), but aside from some off-putting minty notes in the first five minutes, I like it. It's one of Bond's better compositions, even though it clearly riffs on the Creed. How does it make me feel? Green Irish Tweed feels very '80s and formal, but because Bond went for a warm mug effect, Chez Bond feels more early 2000s and hipster-ish—something clever and comfy to wear while book shopping in Soho.

Abstraction in perfumery is becoming rarer, with perfumers increasingly opting for intense and overtly clunky orientals and chypres, especially in the upper-bracket of the niche market. If you want an abstracted green tea note, Azzaro's Chrome Legend takes the vibe to a definite 2000s place. I find Legend to be a bit of a paradox; the perfume is unique and, to date, never imitated, yet it is little more than a great big house accord welded to a heavily pixelated jasmine. Overlaid with white florals is a disjointed green tea note, which emerges intermittently as the loud aquatics simmer and fizz. Green apple is perhaps the most approachable note here, yet the green tea seems determined to be the star, consistently playing off the sweeter jasmine to give Legend the aura of futuristic suntan lotion. Not the most relaxing green tea, but intellectually stimulating and well-crafted. I still have a couple of ounces left, and this one is popular with women.

Lastly, perhaps the most beautiful fragrance in my collection is the celestial Supremacy in Heaven by Afnan. This is one of the most irresistibly gorgeous scents, likely one of four or five masterpieces I've come across in the past fifteen years. I hope to the supreme heavens that they never discontinue it. Marketed as a clone of Silver Mountain Water with a few drops of Aventus, the more I wear it, the more I feel this is just a lazy marketing ploy by Afnan's top brass. The Supremacy series has several popular entries, and I'm open to trying the others, but even if I don't, I can die very happy, as this is a tea scent for the ages. I'm constantly surprised that this perfume isn't getting more buzz online, but maybe that's a good thing. Afnan's scent packs are very reasonable, and their quality control is generally high, so I would suggest picking up a bottle (it's only $25-$30 on eBay).

If Silver Mountain Water represents a cold green tea note undercut by metallic ozone, Supremacy in Heaven is the dark blackcurrant twist, with the freshness of white tea writ large across the evening sky. There's a pale iris here too, as if the perfumer wanted to give his tea note a slightly floral edge, reminiscent of how Mugler Cologne imbued its floral soap with a white-green jasmine leaf. Whether there is actual tea in this composition is debatable, but it smells like a mug of silver needle left to cool in a Japanese teahouse. In the buzz, Supremacy in Heaven sounds like a cheap clone of a Creed fragrance, but I find that my heart has abandoned Silver Mountain Water almost entirely in favor of this—and I don't think I've ever preferred a "clone" to its predecessor before. (Spoiler alert, I love SMW too, and consider it a masterpiece.)

All in all, tea in fragrance remains something I find indispensable. The purity and peacefulness it can bring to the wearer through scent are unmatched.

Is High-End Niche a Rip-Off?

Snippets of my Collection . . . Niche-Like

This year, I've been diving into Zoologist fragrances, and after experiencing Bee, I reached a conclusion: a significant portion of the high-end niche fragrance sector seems to be indulging in a nostalgic revival of the seventies, eighties, and early nineties, tailored for the affluent. Earlier today, while listening to Ramsey on YouTube, I heard him harshly criticize Luca Turin's review of Des Cendres by Les Abstraits, even going so far as to call Turin a "bowel movement" and question his credibility as a fragrance reviewer. While I share some of Ramsey's concerns regarding Turin, I wonder if he's missing the broader significance of Turin's role in the fragrance community. Yes, there is a point.

When Perfumes: The Guide was released in 2008, it coincided with the peak of Creed's popularity, just a couple of years before the launch of Aventus. Turin's disdain for Creed was apparent, despite his positive reviews of Green Irish Tweed and Neroli Sauvage. The review that made me question Turin's judgment was his one-star assessment of Silver Mountain Water, which he described as "An unpleasant, hissy-metallic 'fresh' fragrance with a strange note of wood glue amid the din." It wasn't the fact that Turin disliked SMW that surprised me; it was the inconsistency. SMW is a Pierre Bourdon creation, and Turin had previously praised Bourdon as a "genius" in his review of Kouros. Yet, aside from GIT, nearly every Bourdon Creed was panned by Turin.

What's even stranger is that most of Bourdon's fragrances for designer brands also received poor reviews. Turin’s wife, Tania Sanchez, said that Joop! Homme smelled like cheap floor cleaner, but "coulda been a contender," whatever that means. She also misidentified Bourdon's Individuel for Montblanc as a "citrus green" fragrance, and criticized it as well. Millesime Imperial and Erolfa, both Bourdon creations, were dismissed by Turin as a "mini-GIT" and "thoroughly nasty," respectively. Sanchez gave The Brun two stars, calling it an "interesting greasy-woodsmoke idea" that fell short. Despite Turin's regard for Bourdon, his rating of Bourdon's catalog averages just two stars. It's puzzling, to say the least, and had me wondering for a long time.

Then it hit me. Luca Turin's views on Creed are less about the fragrances themselves and more about what Creed represented in the 2000s. The brand became known for taking underrated designer fragrances and "upgrading" them into "luxe" versions—perfumes that the public was already familiar with, but marketed as superior. The scandal surrounding Olivier Creed's alleged theft of these formulas was the talk of the town, with insiders like Turin casting shade on the house for practices such as retooling Bourdon's Individuel into Original Santal. One can infer from Turin's negativity that he disapproved of this practice. On the surface, it seems like an illegitimate complaint, made worse by the fact that Bourdon was the true author of the Creeds that Turin disparaged.

But after pondering it for years, it's clear that Turin's issue with Creed had nothing to do with the fragrances themselves, but everything to do with their provenance. If you enjoy Original Santal, why not just buy Individuel? It costs a tenth of the price and smells 98% identical. Is that 2% difference in note balance and slightly higher material quality worth $250? (The Guide was released when 120ml bottles were priced around $275.) To be fair, Turin has a valid point here. Let's be honest: if I'm choosing between Cool Water and Green Irish Tweed, knowing both are by Pierre Bourdon, and also knowing neither smells particularly natural, am I automatically going to spring for GIT? Probably not.

Similarly, if I take Mario Valentino's Ocean Rain, a fragrance I bought years ago for under forty dollars, and wear it for a week—a scent formulated by Edmond Roudnitska, Bourdon's mentor—would I then feel compelled to spend Creed money on Bourdon's Erolfa? I can achieve 80% of Erolfa's effect with Ocean Rain at 80% less cost. Sure, Erolfa is a Bourdon creation, and since Creed owns the formula, it smells like an expensive, well-made aquatic. But Bourdon was Roudnitska's student, and the master created Ocean Rain using mostly synthetic materials that few perfumers knew how to use in the late eighties. Even now, at discontinued unicorn prices, Ocean Rain costs less than a brand-new bottle of Creed. So why bother with the expensive stuff?

The question of "why bother with expensive" looms large in this discussion, as much of high-end niche perfumery focuses on superlative materials crafted into artistic compositions, which are then spun off into luxury ranges like Les Abstraits. But consider what Des Cendres represents: a woody-green chypre hybrid loaded with rich smoky and earthy notes—the kind of fragrance you supposedly can't get for less nowadays. Well, if you look at snapshots of my personal collection, you'll see that I have relatively inexpensive but undeniably old and outdated designer fragrances. And guess what? Many of them smell like they could easily be expensive niche fragrances.

My bottle of Bamboo by Franck Olivier, for example, is rich and densely woody, with a camphorous freshness and a spartan structure befitting some hipster New York indie brand that would charge a small fortune for an ounce. If you're unfamiliar with perfume, that indie approach might seem appealing, but once you realize that fragrances like Jacomo's Silences, Ungaro III, and Krizia Uomo all possess an intensity and richness associated with luxury goods, you might start to wonder why those brands didn't charge more. The answer is simple—they charged what they needed to make a profit. They didn't even come close to ripping off their customers because they didn't need to. The perfumes spoke for themselves, and if Krizia wanted $90 for 100 milliliters, that was more than enough to cover manufacturing costs and secure a 50% profit margin. Perfume margins are huge; that's why so many niche brands exist.

Just as Luca Turin was perpetually annoyed by Olivier Creed's business model of transforming affordable designer fragrances into pristine white swans for aristocratic consumption, I find myself constantly irked by niche brands that release fragrances accompanied by marketing copy filled with exotic ingredients like "herbal top notes of Siberian artemisia, heart accords of Australian cedarwood and Turkish fig leaf, and a base of Estonian white birch and Pacific ambergris." Meanwhile, I can stop by my local rack store, grab a bottle of Salvatore Ferragamo Pour Homme for $25, and achieve the same effect as that $300 "global tour in a bottle." Why would I buy Fougere Bengale when I have Vermeil for Men? What justifies a purchase of Mure et Musc when I can wear Creation de Minuit by Lapidus? What niche fragrance surpasses Bourdon's Kouros in its sheer beauty? What niche fragrance outshines Lapidus Pour Homme in its audacity? What $250 fougere from a warrant-wielding British concern could possibly compete with the proletarian versatility of Brut?

Most of the woody "cigar box" (as Turin called them) masculine fragrances of the eighties and nineties were composed with a dozen notes, durable materials, by capable and sometimes legendary perfumers. They were sold at department stores for middle-class money for years, and nobody needed a L'Artisan or a Creed to show them up. In those days, L'Artisan and Creed didn't even try. If you can remember that perfumery practices over the last twenty years have shifted toward the one percenters and away from the 99%, you can look forward to a future era where people's interests drift back downmarket to fragrances that can be made economically without smelling "cheap." And even if they did smell cheap, they smelled good, which is actually different from smelling cheap.

In closing, I recently bought a bottle of Silver Mountain Water on eBay, and the seller, known for its excellent service and honesty, included a sample from their own perfume line. I sprayed it on my hand and recoiled in disgust—it smelled like deck chair varnish. It made me realize that anyone can create a "niche" brand nowadays. All you need to do is mix some Perfumer's Apprentice chemicals into a jar of perfumer's alcohol, swirl it a few times, and cap it. You don't even need a label—just call it an "indie" or "niche" brand, charge a hundred bucks for three ounces, and figure out the rest later. But that's not luxury. I want to enjoy myself, and my nose doesn't wander from price tag to price tag. True luxury is to buy something that exceeds expectations and brings joy every time it is worn. Whether it costs $40 or $400, the questions remain the same: Do I like this? Would I buy it again? If the answer to both is yes, then I've won.

The "Right" Way & The "Wrong" Way: Where to Buy Fragrances?

Recently, at least three people have engaged me in conversations about online perfume merchants, their product experiences, and where I buy my pricier stuff, particularly Creed fragrances. This is always an interesting topic for me because the perfume hunt is nearly the entire thrill: there’s almost something anticlimactic about actually receiving and using the product.

This might surprise some, but it's the truth, and I can’t lie to you: ninety-nine percent of my fragrance purchases are made on eBay. The remaining 1% is split evenly between Amazon and Fragrancenet. What may also surprise readers is the fact that my eBay purchases have been nearly 100% satisfactory, while my experiences with Amazon and Fragrancenet have been just okay, though not terrible. On average, I would say that eBay has the best selection of genuine vintage fragrances, so for those who are after scents from the seventies, eighties, or nineties, I can’t think of a better place to find them.

eBay gets a bad rap because it’s littered with counterfeiters, speculative pricing, grossly variable return policies, and it just feels like the Wild West of the fragrance world. When it comes to counterfeits, there are some basic rules of thumb. First, know your product. Don’t jump on eBay looking to find Bleu de Chanel in any concentration without having ever once laid eyes on an actual bottle of Chanel. Second, don’t buy Chanel on eBay. Of all the designers, Chanel has the tightest grip on its distribution channels and doesn’t allow "grey market" bottles to siphon onto discounter or auction sites.

Third, know your prices. When thinking about value, especially vintage value, you’re thinking of inflation, not arbitrary greedy-boy pricing. There are plenty of guys sitting in their underwear in mom’s basement who get their hands on bottles of Balenciaga pour Homme, Patou pour Homme, Fendi Donna, and declare that it’s worth a gajillion dollars. That doesn’t mean it’s actually worth a gajillion dollars. If it was going for $45 at Macy’s in 1989, adjust for 2024 dollars, add a twenty percent profit margin for the seller, and there’s your price. The Bureau of Labor Statistics will crunch the numbers for you. It’s not hard.

“But Bryan,” you shout, “how would I know what it cost in 1989?” That loops back to the first rule: know your product. Do your research. Ask around. Look for old magazine ads. Pick a year to go by, with the last known year of production being a good bet, and go from there. If you’re looking at something like Grey Flannel by Geoffrey Beene, there is quite a bit to read. You can even read my article about its corporate distribution history for pointers. Getting into vintage perfume isn’t just about loving vintage perfume; it’s about loving what there is to know about it, and doing that legwork regularly. There’s no joy in scoring a bottle of Patou pour Homme for $900 if you don’t know much about it.

Fourth, don’t worry about returns. I know, that sounds insane. How can you not worry about returns when you’re buying something with real money? You need to know you can get your money back, right? Here’s the problem with expecting a great return policy on a perfume: you’re already buying a return to begin with. If you’re buying a bottle of Creed on Fragrancenet, you’re probably not getting a brand-new bottle. Even if you are, it’s still a kickback bottle from another merchant. It’s been sitting in a warehouse for months, possibly even years, and the conditions in that warehouse are a complete mystery. So no, if you’re laying down two hundred dollars on a bottle of stale Creed just so you can own a Creed for that amount and not twice as much, don’t get all sniffy-sniffy back-in-the-box.

I don’t want your returned bottle of a merchant kickback Creed. You send it back to Fragrancenet, and they’ll put it right back on sale the next day. Then some other guy will buy it, thinking he’s defeated the universe and stolen a Creed at designer prices. And now he gets your sloppy seconds. You get . . . your money back. What’s the point? Fifth, know you’re insane. Let me say that another way: Know. You. Are. Insane. You are scouring the internet in your spare time looking for a bottle of something you don’t want to buy from the proprietary source. You are expecting perfection. You are expecting to thread the needle of good fortune every time. And often you succeed. Often you are right. The perfume arrives looking and smelling great, and you win.

But every once in a blue moon, the chips fall wrong, and you get something with a defect in smell, container, or both. Again, understand this: you are the buyer, and because you are the buyer, the phrase “buyer beware” applies every time you pull the trigger. You want your niche fragrance from an eBay merchant to be "as advertised"? Read the ad, make sure the pictures are of the actual product and not stock images, and if still in doubt, send a message and ask questions. Cover all your bases before you purchase so that you understand what you’re in for, and there are few, if any, surprises. If you are a vintage fanatic, recognize the added layer of risk inherent in that pursuit. Combine it with the regular risks, and tally up your risk tolerance metric, but be honest with yourself about it. Nobody bullshits you better than you.

If vintage isn’t your thing, and you’re content with buying new bottles of new fragrances, then it’s all about your taste. Are you an Amazon guy or an eBayer? Does Fragrancenet, FragranceX, or Mercari work for you? Figure it out. The only way is to try them. Apply the rules I’ve listed here to yourself, put yourself in the reality framework necessary for such a fantastic endeavor, and go for it. If you’re an impulse buyer, you’ll be more vulnerable to expensive errors. Here’s an easy example: you’re desperate to try Creed’s new Carmina, and you find it on eBay for $128 from Taiwan or Hong Kong. Score! Except, not a score. Counterfeit. Slow down. Be real. Live in the real world for a few seconds before hitting the “Buy Now” button. Spare your bank account. Buy from Taiwan or Hong Kong, and kiss your investment goodbye.

The nice thing about eBay is that shipping is often free. The serious merchants on eBay will ship quickly, and the best will get the product to you within four days. It doesn’t get much better than that. Buying is easy, eBay remembers your info, you won’t get hacked, and the more you buy (and pay fast), the better your eBay rating, which only improves service from top-tier merchants. The longest I’ve ever had to wait for an eBay purchase is three weeks, and that only happened once, with a safety razor I bought in 2013. To date, I’ve only received one wrong product, a bottle of Myrsol Formula K (which I reviewed), when I had actually ordered Formula C. I kept the K. Why wouldn’t I keep the K? I don’t know K from C from any of the other Myrsols, and I was purchasing it to review it, so what the hell. I kept it, reviewed it, and didn’t regret it—it was a terrific peppermint splash that is unfortunately much harder to come by these days.

Fragrancenet has been a different story. Every purchase I’ve made there has taken a long time to arrive, sometimes more than three weeks. One purchase took nearly two months, with no discernible reason for the delay. Their customer service was the predictable outsourced call center experience. The representative couldn’t have cared less about my bottle of Green Irish Tweed, and I could barely understand a word he was saying. I used to buy my Creeds exclusively from Fragrancenet, but two of my GITs were stale. Two were fresh, but not quite as fresh as the one I bought directly from Creed. The retail-purchased bottle stood out with stellar, beast-mode performance. One GIT from Fragrancenet was so stale and “off” that it resembled Aspen more than GIT. Even the top notes were awfully wintergreen-y for GIT, and I resented that.

Amazon has been a mixed bag as well. The big issue with Amazon is long delivery times and stolen packages. I’ve had two packages stolen or lost by Amazon, and I suspect that the Amazon truck is followed by package thieves (most eBay retailers use the plain old federal snail-mail Post Office). Amazon’s customer service is middling, and their website is surprisingly difficult to navigate. It once took me fifteen minutes to find the service bot, and another five to figure out how to use it, only to have it not help me at all, and in fact, blame me for the issue (item not yet delivered, site saying it was delivered). I ended up receiving the product the next day, but I find it odd that Amazon’s site is prone to delivery update failures. The “Your Item Has Been Delivered” alert was wrong not once, but twice in one year, and after that, I slowed down on buying from them. I don’t mind waiting for a fragrance, but don’t tell me I have the fragrance when it hasn’t even been put out for delivery yet, and don’t blame me for getting it wrong.

I haven’t tried FragranceX or Mercari, and I’ve heard the latter is riddled with sketchy merchants and fakes. I have purchased fragrances on Etsy, but only small-batch indie stuff. I tend to go after vintage Pinaud products, affordable grey market zombie label fragrances (like Van Cleef & Arpels, Halston, etc.), and Creeds, vintage or new. eBay is my go-to. If I can get a better price on a new fragrance, Amazon is an option, as I did recently with Brut. But that is very rare, especially since I don’t have Prime and usually pay for shipping. Sure, tax is a hassle, but tax is tax no matter where you buy.

In closing, a word about “Inspector Gadgeting” online merchants. I’ve met several people over the years who will dig into the business documents and licensing of various grey market retailers and then warn me to watch out for them. They’ll say things like, “They folded in one state and opened shop again in another,” or “They’re only making $100K a year,” or “They only have four or five employees.” I’ll be honest: I couldn’t care less about that. I don’t care where you finagled your business papers, where you set up shop today vs. yesterday, how many people are on your payroll, or how you rate with the BBB. What I care about is if you can get me the hard-to-find perfume within a week, full bottle, on the money. If you can do that, I can forgive a few blemishes, signs of a returned product, etc. But that’s entirely my taste in buying. I understand that others may blanche at the same prospects that I’m comfortable with and will look elsewhere. C’est la vie!

Update 9/1/24:

A few minutes ago, a reader sent me a message on Fragrantica claiming that Fragrancenet has been selling mass numbers of "used" Creed Silver Mountain Water bottles on eBay (roughly 95% to 99% full) for less than eighty dollars per 100 ml bottle. He claims that he has amassed a sizable Creed collection by "getting in" on these grey market bargains, which of course could then be resold at a huge profit. My take? Bullshit.