Following the Herd, Part One

"“It is optimal for an individual, having observed the actions of others ahead of him, to follow the behavior of the preceding individual without regard to his own information.” - Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo Welch (UCLA)

Sometimes it's better to ignore popular opinion, to eschew the running narrative in favor of one that walks instead. Consider the recent uproar over the Monsieur Guerlain blog's temporary suspension; dozens cried foul over circumstances known only through hearsay, while logic about the nature of corporate practices and publicized conflicts of interest were sidelined. Was the crowd willing to acknowledge that an author headlining Guerlain's name would be wise to omit unsubstantiated corporate rumors about the re-bottling of old fragrances under new titles? No, it was far more romantic to defend Monsieur's honor by declaring LVMH to be violators of free speech and free press, despite the obvious: his content was problematic enough to edit, not completely erase.

When he reappeared a few days later, almost nobody acknowledged it. The romance was not only over, but one-sided; for Monsieur G to actually return relatively unscathed would expose the truth (Monsieur G was never in danger of being destroyed) and contradict the narrative (corporations assassinate blogs), making many wrong in their reactionary assertions about corporate power, and ironically unresponsive to the very thing they claimed to want. Such revelations leave certain people clutching their balls with delusional "updates" to the false narrative, not the real one. When it came to light that a temporary suspension occurred, one blameable on hosting services working on behalf of LVMH, the romantics had nothing left to say.

The whole thing reminded me of something that happened to me a year ago. I received an email from Blogger informing me that:

"In the coming weeks, we'll no longer allow blogs that contain sexually explicit or graphic nude images or video. We'll still allow nudity presented in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts, or where there are other substantial benefits to the public from not taking action on the content . . . Our records indicate that your account may be affected by this policy change. Please refrain from creating new content that would violate this policy. Also, we ask that you make any necessary changes to your existing blog to comply as soon as possible, so that you won't experience any interruptions in service."

You didn't see me hurling myself off a cliff in protest, mainly because Blogger clearly reserves the right to edit any content it hosts, regardless of authors' wishes. I simply hopped on my dashboard and deleted nudity from my blog. Shortly afterward, Blogger updated the notice, informing everyone that because of a sensitivity to people who use nudity to "express their identities," they had reversed their position. So I am free to post nudity again. Reason to get in a huff? Clearly, no.

Any hosting service reserves this right, even to the extent that content on URLS purchased by their authors may be subject to termination by their hosting platform for any serious business-related reason. This is reality. Obviously a secure platform like Blogger isn't in danger of going out of business, but how do we know Monsieur Guerlain's hosting service wasn't compelled to act in its own best interest and heed LVMH? I would guess it did heed them, and I'd say they were smart to do so.

In my opinion, this event was the perfect illustration of why it's intellectually dangerous to assume a "herd mentality" in the blogosphere. Think for yourself. Don't cowtail to the confused reactions of others. It'll wind up making you frustrated with empty arguments, and can often be expensive emotionally and financially. Just look at the oud trend, which has been going on for the last twelve years, and shows little sign of letting up. Years ago oud was new, and its novelty understandably reigned. Years later, it makes less sense to subscribe to the the "all things oud" mentality. First, oud was never intended to be "mainstream." No designer brands were headlining oud in 2004. The only perfume to have done that was YSL's M7 from 2002, which was a commercial flop and quickly discontinued. Yet somehow the Middle Eastern market extended into European sensibilities, and the niche market took to oud.

The result was one oud scent after another. Nothing wrong with that of course, as long as you don't mind oud. I don't, but I also have little desire to wear it in any form. It doesn't smell bad, per say, but I never thought it smelled good, either. At their best, oud isolates resemble patchouli, adding a spicy/herbal earthiness with licks of burnt sweetness to whatever composition they are in. Great, but why bother with oud when patchouli has been doing it to more wearable effect for decades? If I want something earthy and pungent and a little ambery, I'll reach for a patchouli scent like Giorgio for Men, Sex Appeal, or Rive Gauche, none of which cost more than most niche ouds. Why should I spend significantly more for a similar effect elsewhere?

I would argue that this is a foolish stance if I didn't already know what oud smelled like, or hadn't tried and compared expensive and inexpensive oud scents. But I have tried, and I have compared. Dirty English is a good inexpensive oud scent. Dark Rose by Czech & Speake has a prominent oud note paired with a velvety, rather feminine rose. Very nice, but Tea Rose is better and cheaper, and oud adds nothing to the rose in Dark Rose, so why bother with it? Some Amouage perfumes contain prominent oud notes. Jubilation XXV is a good, modern, fougeriental composition with a prominent oud note, but I'm not drawn to XXV for its oud. I'm drawn to it for its use of more pedestrian aromatics. Without oud, I'd still like like XXV. But since I like it for its commonplace notes, I might as well enjoy those same notes in more inexpensive fragrances like Feeling Man and XS Pour Homme, which lack that pesky oud.

I'm not saying that Feeling Man and XS smell like XXV. But they share notes that get prominent billing in their compositions, and if I want to experience these notes, I enjoy them in the former compositions more than the latter. You can generalize this thinking to whole perfumes, but this only works when there are obvious comparatives to them. Accurate comparisons are usually repeated in forums, enough to make the route of travel clear, but sometimes this doesn't happen, as with Dior's Sauvage, where people cite dozens of different perfumes as comparatives, with no unanimous consensus on what the thing actually resembles. In these cases the only sensible thing to do is to try the perfume for yourself. Only then can you discern whether it's something you will enjoy, or find worthwhile to purchase.

But I'm ahead of myself - what is the downside of subscribing to the oud craze? Well, let's look at the upside first. It's probably not a bad thing to wear good oud perfumes. If you have vintage M7 and it still smells good, why not rock it? Very few people will smell like you, and whoever encounters this scent will likely not encounter it again. You have a uniqueness in both style and taste. You certainly don't need to defend your pick. Anything that puts oud to good use is worth wearing, simply because it's another material that deserves exploitation. If you live in Europe or the Middle East, you're just average, but if you're in a Western country, you're sophisticated. Good for you.

But this comes at a price. First, there's the recognizability factor. Perhaps vintage M7 from an early batch (vintage vintage) is the best example of how to use the material. But who will actually recognize it as oud? If you're only vaguely accustomed to old-school woody aromatic fragrances, you'll probably mistake oud for patchouli, or perhaps even an accord of notes like patchouli, artemisia, sage, and coumarin. Most bystanders will not smell you and think, "Oh, he's wearing that lovely oud scent again."

They'll smell the oud in trace amounts and wonder if you're a closet hippie. No harm there, but the reality is that you're living in a fantasy if you think your oud scent is impressing anyone for being what it is. The truth is probably more mundane. You're impressing people for smelling good and a little strange, maybe memorable, but at your expense alone. That oud scent probably cost more than the dirt cheap patchouli composition that achieves the same effect.

Then there's the collectibility factor. How many oud scents does a man need? If you're a Montale fan, and not constrained by financial considerations, you may own several dozen oud perfumes of considerable strength. After a while, it's sort of like hearing the same note played on different keyboards. Does repetition make sense? Or is your affinity really insanity, the repetition of something, expecting different results?

The worst aspect of the oud craze is the attempt to "mainstream" oud. Ralph Lauren comes out with an oud frag - story at eleven. At this point, you're spending niche prices on designer imitations of already recycled themes from several years ago. These fragrances are guaranteed to be discontinued, not because they're awful, but because they're overpriced and not good enough to make up for it. Thus, their sales quickly flag, it's clear buyers aren't impressed, and the result are hoards of leftovers on eBay at ridiculous mark-ups. Thanks, oud lovers! Your allegiance to one material has spawned a GIT-to-Cool Water equivalent niche implosion.

By the way, the whole eBay mark-up phenomenon will be addressed in depth in part two of this post. Try talking about insane prices on eBay, and you hear about capitalism and more "buyers set the price" garbage. Apparently the Labour Theory of Value eludes people who make that argument. They choose to believe the myths of the Subjective Theory instead. Good for them. They ought not believe they understand what they're talking about if they have to Google "LTV vs. STV" right after reading this.

Anyway, I see this as a major issue with "note trends" of the past few years. Oud is one trend. Vetiver is another. Amber is yet another. Two or three ambers in a collection are sensible. Fifteen or twenty ambers are excessive. After a few iterations of the theme, it becomes pointless to pursue it further. Either you like what you're wearing, or you don't. If you like it, why seek an improvement where there isn't one? MPG's Ambre Precieux is likely one of the best ambers money can buy. Jovan Sex Appeal is likely one of the best cheap ambers money can buy. And take your pick of any soft oriental from the eighties, perhaps two or three will do.

If you like these, or any other ambers, what else could possibly make a different, worthwhile impression? Sure, you can explore other things once you've used what you've already invested in, but if you think you have to "keep up" with others by continually expanding your collection faster than you can enjoy what you already have, you're following the herd.

Now, I own almost a hundred perfumes, and I'll freely admit that this is excessive, but I own many of them for the sake of writing about them here - call it "blogger's privilege." Many out there who own a hundred or more perfumes do not write about any of them, and just own them because they want to. This may be fine for some, but when you get caught up in this "more is better" collector's addiction, you may wind up missing the forest for the trees. You also can't discern the endangered redwoods from the overabundant oaks. Have you noticed the recent excitement over Pure Tonka by Thierry Mugler? People are so excited to try it. They must, must try it. It's going to be great. It's going to be Mugler's magnificent A*Men spin on tonka. The redwood of redwoods, majestic, a new height in perfumery, and it must be had.

Or it could just be another modern pedestrian fougère disguised as something "cool." Strong lavender, followed by a burst of tonka (which is just coumarin) . . . well now. I guess the fact that the word "fougère" is excluded from the Mugler press releases means this is something "new," and not downright ancient. Like the fougère. If Pure Tonka is anything other than a fougère with exaggerated proportions, it'll be the first lavender and coumarin pairing to elude this classification. I'm very interested in trying Pure Tonka, but that's because I love A*Men, AND I love fougères. To just be interested in Pure Tonka because it's part of the Pure line is to be a zombie collector who doesn't even give a shit about what he's buying, as long as he can have it.

And what about the niche craze? This isn't an interest in certain olfactory niches. It usually isn't the search for which niche you fit into. "Niche" by definition is something that caters to an exclusively small group of people who desire a very specific smell from very few materials. Yet few niche hounds actually cling to one niche. They collect anywhere from tens to hundreds of niche fragrances. And many of them do this, enough to keep these niche companies in business year after year.

So the niche craze isn't really about hundreds of little cliques of people who are exclusively interested in a few hundred specific scents. It's about climbing another rung in the commercial ladder of perfume connoisseurship. Niche tends to be much more expensive than designer. Therefore, the love of niche reflects an interest in price point, not in perfume. What niche perfume can outmatch an excellent classic designer scent? I've worn all the recent "new classic" niches - French Lover, Invasion Barbare, L'Air du Desert Marocain, etc. All were nice, but none were better than things like Z-14, Yatagan, Kouros. I'll always try expensive fragrances whenever I have the chance, but in these cases I found no reason to trade "up." With money being a mere number in this game, I'll never let it stop me from trying things, but I'll also never be seduced by a big price tag if the fragrance it's attached to is underwhelming.

Then there's another insidious factor: "brand hype." Recently basenotes hosted a thread about L'Artisan Parfumeur, which asked whether L'Artisan is now passé. Apparently these once pricey perfumes have fallen out of favor in the face of newer trends, and can be had on Amazon for the price of inexpensive designer (some bottles are going for less than sixty dollars). If you're someone who bought into the L'Artisan hype of eight years ago, and purchased twenty or thirty of their frags, you might be a little pissed right now. Your collection cost hundreds of dollars. I could get a similar number of L'Artisans today for at least half of whatever you paid.

But conversely, there's little wisdom is ascribing value to anything without experiencing it first. I would never tell anyone who is sincerely fascinated by L'Artisan to not try L'Artisan perfumes. If that brand interests you, and you're serious about giving it a chance, then you should try as many L'Artisans as you want. Rendering your own judgments on the perfumes is all that matters. The narrative in that basenotes thread is that their scents are nice, but often too weak. That may be true for some people, but it might not apply to you. Never write off what you haven't tried. That's a self-limiting exercise, which shrinks your world and your experiences down to a feeble size.

I've mentioned some ways in which following the herd mentality can be a fool's errand, but I think it's important to note one way by which attempting to be "individualistic" in the face of certain issues is equally foolish, and actually just as herd-like. There are many ways to stand apart and be your own man, but there are also rare instances in which joining the crowd in the simple act of smelling a questionable perfume is wise, and possibly beneficial to your understanding of our times.

There's a lazy philosophy that one of my contemporaries has ascribed to himself (not necessarily to others): that it's pointless in the face of negative reviews to try recent designer phenomenons (emphasis on phenomenons, not common scents) like Sauvage and Bleu de Chanel EDP. These fragrances defy useful comparison by everyone, despite spawning imitations, "clones," and even disparaging comparisons to cheaper things that use similar (and sometimes the same) aroma chemicals.

Fragrances like Sauvage, BdC EDP, and even Eau Sauvage Parfum from a few years ago aren't just using common aroma chemicals. They're using them differently. They're finding that "Goldilocks Zone" where materials we've all smelled a few hundred times are blended in ways that create entirely new smells that are very difficult to compare. That's what makes them controversial. We all smell the same ingredients, but people don't know what to make of how they're composed.

I often wonder if this "newness" is what makes these scents so polarizing. Since it hasn't been established that these "types" of smells are accepted as "good," people attempt to make that call for the rest of us by either praising (and perhaps hyping) them, or downright slamming them.

Therefore it is false to say that something completely unrelated at a cheaper price point, like any Playboy or celebuscent, could really substitute for something like Sauvage. You could switch a Playboy scent with any piecemeal composition without raising many eyebrows, and by that I mean frags like Invictus, or Luna Rossa, or Gucci Guilty, as those aren't controversial, or even interesting. They're commonplace, much like the Playboy scents.

And it's also highly questionable to imply that price is a barrier to appreciating or even owning department store fragrances, as it costs little to just sample them, and but a few dollars to buy decants and minis from sites like The Perfumed Court, which is sometimes the best way to go if you think you'll only want a fragrance for reference, rather than regular wear.

While it may seem that I'm contradicting the very philosophy espoused earlier in this post, please note the difference: in many circumstances, broadening your horizons before following in step with certain opinions is the way to go. I have clearly said that in any case of popular comparison, one should think for themselves in order to draw their own conclusions, and act in a way that enables them to do so with accuracy. For example, when consensus comparisons are made between vaguely similar scents (like Kouros, Orange Spice, and Lapidus Pour Homme, for example), one should try at least two of them to judge the truth. It's the only way to place yourself inside or outside of the consensus (you may agree with nobody, only a few, or with everybody).

I've also clearly stated that if certain notes, like oud, are in question, then one should familiarize himself with a few scents using this note at different price points, and explore comparable notes in other scents before rendering a verdict. Don't just blindly subscribe to a note "trend" because others are crazy about that note.

But if there are no clear comparatives for certain perfumes, this makes trying (and only trying) such articles alone necessary to render any judgment. Without trying perfumes with no firm comparatives, you can't judge them against anything, because there are no reliable parallels outside of your own experience to go by.

To be disinterested in smelling isolated scents because of a perceived pointlessness in such efforts is simply laziness. If this feeling is predicated on negative opinions formed by others, you're not thinking for yourself. You're still following the herd. Arguing that price is a deciding factor makes it intellectual laziness, given that it costs little or nothing to sample. You won't know if qualms about price are justified until you try. To overemphasize feelings of satisfaction with cheaper but totally unrelated fragrances is your prerogative, but it's a bad choice if you want to stay informed about the ever-changing fragrance world.

Stay tuned for part two.

Versace L'Homme (Versace)

Going Old-School

If you have any doubt about the classification of Versace L'Homme, just look at its bottle. Its glass shoulders are sculpted to look like ferns! Yet this is one of the most chronically misidentified fragrances out there. How it could be called a chypre or an oriental is beyond me, although even the H&R Genealogie chart gets it wrong. This is the very definition of a traditional fougère, as old-school as it gets.

It's also an odd duck in that it's from Italy, and should represent an Italianate style after Krizia Uomo, yet smells impeccably French. It reminds me most of Rochas' underrated Moustache, a classic mossy fougère from the forties. It opens with a similar barrage of lucid citrus notes (lemon, bergamot, lime) with a seamlessly blended lavender chord, and rapidly dries into a spiced floral heart, very clean and bitter, with distinct jasmine and gardenia notes. After a few hours the green notes soften to a powdery tonka, with a pinch of mild tobacco to round it off.

The current Euroitalia version is good, and likely preferable to vintage, at least for me. Older vintages had heavy oakmoss, but frankly I think a preponderance of moss would be overbearing in this style, teasing it into being chypre-like. Euroitalia's version has no moss at all, yet it still smells adequately mossy. It also has delicate nuances of basil, cinnamon, patchouli, cedar, labdanum, castoreum, and petitgrain, all of which are easily separable in the top and heart, but none of which are loud enough for a vulgar "aromatic fougère" vibe. Their subtlety is exact, for L'Homme's sharp focus is on an orthodox three-tier ensemble of lavender, tonka, and mossy musk.

There has been quite a bit of talk about the reformulation of this fragrance, including conversations about how vintage L'Homme's color is darker than current. I suspect this is a fragrance that gets darker with age, but I'll have no way of knowing until I've had my bottle for a few years to compare. I can say that these kinds of "green" compositions are changeable, because my EA formulation of Grey Flannel has darkened noticeably in the last few years. Now, citrus-heavy fragrances are often criticized for smelling "synthetic" after reformulation. In my experience, vintage citrus notes smell very "perfumey" and deep, but that's not exactly a good thing.

The reformulation's citruses are crisp and bright, and the lemon note actually has that sour muskiness of real lemon rind, so I can't complain about the citrus smelling synthetic. However, if I were to give this bottle fifteen years of room temperature storage, I wonder if the citrus notes would blush out and get "perfumey" on me. Some guys like that. I'm not one of them.

Is this the best traditional fougère to come out of the eighties? I'm not sure I'd go that far, but it deserves fair praise. Its longevity is perfect (about six hours), its sillage is very limited, its construction is solid (nothing chemical or unbalanced here), and it has that dry, powdery afterglow of a classic masculine for fastidious men. My favorite part is its rather sheer green tobacco note, which lingers long after the citrus and floral notes have faded. This is a nice one.

Gillette Cool Wave Aftershave: What It Means to Be A Wet Shaver vs. Fragrance "Connoisseur"

Circle from left: Feather DE Travel Safety Razor, Pinaud Styptic Pencil, Speed Stick Power UnscentedAntiperspirant, Neutrogena Sensitive Skin Shave Cream, Dickinson's Original Witch Hazel Pore Toner,Gillette Cool Wave Aftershave, Bleu de Chanel EDT, Derby DE Razor Blades, Astra DE Razor Blades

If you smell like the products in the photo above, you look like them, too.

Members of both Basenotes and Badger & Blade know that they're two entirely different communities. Obviously one is primarily a fragrance site, while the other is an organization of men who call themselves "wet shavers." The former is focused on perfume, the latter on shaving, and all that it entails. Basenotes delves deeply into the subject of smelling "good," while B&B probes the meaning of manhood via the oldest ritual of manhood itself. It's a pleasure to be a member of B&B, and I am no longer a member of Grant's site. I can attest firsthand, however, to the incredible differences in the mentalities held by members of the two forums.

The biggest difference is in the attitude toward scent, and what it means to smell "good." Basenotes is a place where people are constantly in competition with each other. It's not about fragrance as much as it's about which camp of fragrance appreciation you fall into: the hoi polloi of designer scents, or the aristocracy of niche. Generally the tastes "trend up," as the Fragrance Bros on Youtube like to put it, which means expensive perfumes are more desirable than cheapies. This is not a unanimous attitude, as many members are also openly appreciative of relatively inexpensive products by houses like Mont Blanc, Caron, Krizia, and Davidoff.

B&B, on the other hand, is comprised of men who aren't as concerned about prices. They're more interested in smelling "like men" after shaving than they are in smelling "good." Clearly they want to smell "good" also, but it's a priority eclipsed by a stronger need to project manliness and bucketloads of testosterone. And the unspoken rule on the boards is that men don't fuss over perfume. Men splash on aftershave and maybe - just maybe - follow it with a little "cologne," in the more literal sense of the word (citrus, dry florals, sandalwood, musk). Aftershave, in both splash and balm forms, is more important than perfume. And aftershave, as we all know, is usually pretty cheap.

Granted, there are now plenty of high rent alternatives to the usual drugstore fare, stuff by Taylor of Old Bond Street, Truefitt and Hill, Myrsol, and Floid, to name a few. Some of these can cost a pretty penny. Then there's the added expense of stocking up on shaving soap and brushes (if you're a true wet shaver), or bottled shave creams (if you're a cheater like me), plus razors, toners, and talcs. But when it comes to how you smell, even the expensive aftershaves aren't aiming very high. Most are interpretations of the "Barbershop" concept, that fantastical, romantic ideal of powdery cleanliness achieved with minimal effort in every street corner barbershop of the nineteen fifties. Consider reviews of Myrsol's "Blue" aftershave compared to those of Aqua Velva Ice Blue, and you'll find many men prefer AV. Yet both are simply "barbershop" scents.

The other day I picked up a bottle of Gillette's Cool Wave aftershave. I've been familiar with it for a while, and never bothered with it, but out of boredom figured I'd give it a try. Interestingly, it's made in France, and housed in glass, which is nice. From the spout it smells like the nineties mixed with a little eighties, sort of a cross between Chrome and Lomani Pour Homme. Cool Wave was released in 1993, so its old-school vibe makes sense. The chemical properties of the stuff are bare bones: alcohol and fragrance. The smell is interesting, though. It's what is known on basenotes as a "grey citrus" scent, usually a derogatory term for a fragrance, as it alludes to a failed, overly metallic attempt at lemon, lime, and grapefruit notes. Typically "grey citrus" exists as a passing phase in a scent's evolution, such as in 4711 and Claiborne Sport, where the fruits are monochrome for a minute or two, and then blush back to color as more notes appear.

Cool Wave does something different - it embraces its "greyness." In fact, the citrus notes coalesce into what seems to be a blatant olfactory reconstruction of the smell of cold steel, not far removed from how my chromed razor and its blades smell. They could have called it "Cool Chrome," as it smells more metallic than Azzaro's take on this theme, and considerably cooler, with a fleeting hint of icy menthol (despite the formula containing no menthol at all). After ten minutes or so, it dries down to a mossy vetiver that actually smells pretty good. The fragrance's lifespan is extended by Gillette's use of hydrogenated castor oil as a carrier, instead of glycerin. If you use enough of it, Cool Wave will last a good three or four hours with some real projection. And its smell complements more sophisticated fare like Bleu de Chanel very well, making it the ideal "fresh" aftershave.

As I peruse the boards on B&B, I find generally favorable reviews of Gillette's aftershaves, including Cool Wave. This doesn't surprise me. B&B members embrace products like Clubman Aftershave-Lotion (and all Pinaud aftershaves), Old Spice, Skin Bracer, Aqua Velva and AV Ice Blue, Brut, Royal Copenhagen, Tabac, Royall Lyme (and all Royall products), various Florida Waters, Bay Rums, English Leather, Osage Rub, Jeris tonics, and dollar store Avon aftershaves. If I were to be objective about it, I'd have to say that most of these guys are walking around smelling like cheap cologne - i.e., smelling "bad." After all, who wants to smell plasticky dime store aroma chemicals wafting from the body of another person? When was the last time a woman told a guy (honestly) that his Florida Water smelled incredible?

But I can't be objective about it because I myself am a wet shaver. This is more than a grooming choice - it's a way of life. Wet shaving doesn't make sense until you start doing it. When I was a teenager and a young man in my early twenties, I used disposable and electric razors to shave. My shaves were adequate but clumsy. It was a joyless ritual, merely an exercise in shaving cream under a cheap skein of metal louvers that pulled on my hairs before chopping through them. It was a bumpy, irritating ride.

In my mid twenties (twenty-five or twenty-six), I realized that double-edged safety razors were a thing, and had been a thing for decades. They're far more approachable than straight razors, which in my opinion are the scariest things ever invented. Ever see the movie Drive, when Al Brooks kills Bryan Cranston's character? Yeah.

Furthermore, DE safety razors are so much better at what they do than those awful plastic disposables with five blades. Those things are terrible. Think about it - you execute one stroke on your face, and it's equal to five strokes, four of which are redundantly scraping into bare flesh. Sound good? Didn't think so. Whoever invented those things should be taken out back and shot.

Metal DE razors are the way to go. They're classier looking. They're permanent, for they'll never break or wear out. And they're easy to use, once you get the hang of them. I was fortunate enough to get a snub-handled Feather before they were discontinued (Feather razors have since become rather expensive). Shaving with it has always been a pleasure. My skin's health has improved, and I have total control over my appearance. I admit that when I first started using it, shaving was something done on Saturdays, when I had the time to complete the ritual. My inexperience slowed the process down, and I was lucky if I could shave within an hour.

Now, nine years later, I'm able to get a close shave done in ten minutes or less. Once the hairs are gone, the fun starts. Bear in mind that the skin has been scraped by a piece of metal, probably the most irritating thing imaginable. So the strategy of restoring its vitality and soothing whatever injuries were sustained is essential to how the rest of my day goes. There are a few options: witch hazel, aloe, balm, or alcohol. Sometimes they're used together, and sometimes just one gets picked, depending on how successful and gentle the shave.

When aftershave is used, it is typically paired with something that complements its scent. If I use Clubman, I might wear Brut or Rive Gauche Pour Homme. If I use Aqua Velva, I may opt for Bleu de Chanel or Cool Water. Sometimes I spritz my face with Tabac cologne, or Royal Copenhagen. Skin Bracer, my favorite, is sometimes paired with Joop! Jump, Jeanne Arthes Cotton Club, or Playboy VIP. Rarely do I leave the house with just an aftershave on, because most aftershaves are undetectable after an hour, rendering null and void their viability as a personal scent. Yet whatever it's paired with seeks only to reinforce the sensory aftermath of my morning ablutions.

Notice the common bond between these products: they're all cheap. They smell cheap. Yet as a guy, that's how I want to smell. That's how the hundreds of guys on Badger & Blade want to smell, also. What gives?

I think it boils down to nostalgia. Men want to smell "the way real men used to smell." There's a scene early on in High Plains Drifter where Clint Eastwood visits a small town barber. He's about to get a shave, and the barber nervously asks if he wants it followed with lilac water. Eastwood's character isn't interested. But he does want the shave. And that entails being slathered in soap, and probably dusted with talc. The message is that the artifice of donning cologne is not as manly as the residual scents imparted by simply being shaved. It's these residual aromas that the cheap aftershaves attempt to simulate - the powders, the soaps, the whiffs of metal. These allude to real masculinity. These are "barbershop."

Shaving isn't something to be taken lightly. B&B members take it seriously because they enjoy it, but my best friend is someone who actually suffers from shaving. Without getting too specific about his personal identity, I'll just say that he suffers from OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) and is fixated on the "perfect" shave. To him, it's about symmetry. He shaves one side of his face. Then he shaves the other. Then he re-shaves the edges of his beard on the first side, followed with an equal touch-up effort on the other. That's fine, except his illness kicks in, and he's never satisfied with how his beard looks. So he shaves and re-shaves and re-shaves again, literally dragging the blades (inexplicably, he uses disposables) over hairless skin.

He does this a few dozen times before he's finally satisfied. Then he applies balms, or just keeps the aloe shave cream on his cheeks, and tries to return to normal life. Meanwhile, he just spent four hours in the bathroom engaged in a ritual that should have been completed in no more than fourteen minutes. Shaving is literally consuming his life. This is only possible because, for better or worse, shaving is an integral part of being a man. It's the reason the recent "lumberjack metrosexual," or "Lumbersexual" trend of being fastidiously groomed with a chest-length beard makes no sense. Most of these guys would look a thousand times better (and more convincingly masculine) if they eschewed their fuzzy jawlines and just got a decent shave.

Wet shaving brings with it a variety of aromas from a range of different products, and thus the wet shaver strives to emit the "aura" of having shaved, as if it is a scent of its own. Achieving this mood does not require the use of expensive perfumes, though it can if you want it to. Clean masculinity is easily projected via the use of cheap products that have their own complementary scents, their combined efforts working to project a specific historical idea of manliness.

Products like Gillette's accomplish this with minimal effort. In a wet shaver's mind, it's okay if he smells like cheap aftershave, as long as there's a functional reason for it to be wafting from his collar in the first place, and he looks the part. Unlike the fragrance connoisseur, the wet shaver needs his scent to directly correlate with his appearance.

Old Spice Original (Rubicon Formulations, Ltd.)

"Smell Like A Man" . . . A man from Mumbai.

Although I've always doubted the veracity of claims regarding the superiority of Indian Old Spice, labeled "Original," to the American Old Spice "Classic," I used the Indian version this week with an open mind. I truly love P&G's formula, and strongly feel that it represents the best version of Old Spice, at least in my experience with this scent, but I did my best to not let bias influence my opinion of the imported version.

I bought the aftershave by Rubicon Formulations, Ltd., now the only Indian manufacturer, and was pleased to find it housed in glass, not plastic. There's nothing wrong with plastic, but glass is classy (and ceramic is even classier). Rubicon's paint job is a little sloppy, but otherwise the presentation is decent. American bottles are throwbacks to the fifties, when inexpensive travel sets of Old Spice were introduced in market tests. Their kitsch factor makes them tolerable, but there's no denying glass feels better in hand.

P&G's foreign subsidiary makes a product that smells very good, but isn't as "serious" as OS Classic. It smells creamily effulgent in ways similar to Vi-Jon's dirt cheap and simplistic "Spice Scent." It's brighter and fresher, which is probably a plus in Bangalore's stifling heat, but what strikes me as particularly interesting is that it lacks the depth and darkness of the American formula. There's no clove, carnation, or cedar. No balsamic wisps or orange citrus nuances. No powder, even. It's mainly a shimmery aldehyde and allspice melange on a puff of musky vanilla, and little else.

Classic is dimensional, with subtle drydown stages. The soapiness of Original is not how I remember Shulton's version; Classic's duskiness is more evocative of vintage. Shulton had a strong cinnamon note, much like Classic, but Rubicon has relatively mild cinnamon. Shulton had an evanescent balsamic heart accord with hints of cedar and amber; Classic gets very woody in its mid. On fabric, Rubicon's scent performs better. It smells deeper, with a mellow, spicy-fresh drydown that lasts an hour longer.

You don't have to hunt for an Indian grocery store to buy and enjoy Old Spice. Just go to Rite-Aid and get the Classic version. You'll be fine. If you do happen to use the Rubicon Old Spice aftershave, a word of warning - it burns twice as much as the American stuff - more alcohol, or perhaps harsher alcohol is the culprit there. In the plus column, it leaves skin nicely toned, even a little better than the American version. For purely practical shaving purposes, it gets the job done very well.

Cigarillo (Rémy Latour)

"Cigarillo by Rémy Latour is an invitation to explore theWorld of precious wood essences from the tropics."

The above statement quotes the text imprinted on the inner side of the paper band surrounding the bottle for Cigarillo. It's translated into six other languages, Creed style, and oh yeah, the rest of the packaging for this strange little fragrance is extraordinarily beautiful, at least by Rémy Latour standards.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so I offer the above photo as a visual description of the outside of the box. I didn't take a picture of the back of the box, but there isn't much to see. There's just a small white sticker with a super short ingredients list and a barcode. Below is a photo of what you see when you open the box.

And here is a photo of the side of the bottle, which is sealed with a sticker that matches the one on the outside of the package.

And here is the bottle itself, heavy glass moulded into the shape of cigarillos, the trademark Rémy Latour style. It's really well made, with "Eau de Toilette" and "Cigarillo" embossed on the bottom (not shown).

Cigarillo was released in 1996 alongside Cigar, and that's all I know about it. I guess it was intended to be a promotional product. It's been discontinued, and I seriously doubt there are more than a hundred bottles in existence today. Packages like this aren't made on a large scale. There is absolutely no information about it on the internet, aside from one rather uninformed "review" on an otherwise bare basenotes page.

I can't say I'm very familiar with Rémy Latour's fragrances, but this is a cool place to start. I happened across it on the discount shelf of a local shop for a very good price. The place makes me laugh because its priorities are plainly askew - its owner prices weird trash like Cathy Carden's Space at $50, but asks about half as much for a more extravagant item like this. Go figure.

Anyway, on to the scent: Cigarillo is a misleading name for this EDT. Its composition isn't really about tobacco, although it does have a teeny tobacco note. More prominent in the pyramid are dried fruit notes, and musky, nondescript aromatics, with smooth wood tones, mainly cedar. Conspicuously absent from the formula are any and all floral notes, as I detect nary a single petal in the entire evolution of this scent, on both skin and fabric.

I certainly wouldn't say this fragrance is sweet. Its only edible section resides at the top, which smells of a dessicated, prune-like, ambiguously "perfumey" fruit. Perhaps it's a musky citrus combed into the sugary rind of dehydrated pineapple? Hard to say, as there's no butyric element, but whatever it is, it borders on candy without crossing the line. These qualities are offset by a transparent bay note. It's a strange accord, unlike anything I've smelled before, and it lasts about fifteen minutes. Its dusky delectables draw me in; the grizzle of semi-animalic musks and sour bay hold me there.

Eventually this unique top segues into a ghost of treated snuff, wedded to a very dusty cedar and musk base. The "tobacco" effect is representative of an artificial flavoring, rather than actual tobacco leaf. Fragrances like Cigarillo and Vermeil for Men, which Latour's scent resembles for roughly an hour or so, are priced to mimic the synthetic aromatics of processed tobacco, not the burly radiance of the real stuff. With that in mind, the perfumer hit a homerun. Cigarillo smells like a cheap cigarillo. As a former cigar smoker, I can attest to this firsthand.

This all eventually becomes a relatively simple cedar fragrance. It isn't pencil shaving cedar, or woody amber. It's just a sooty cigar box smell. There's something "niche" about it. They were going for a concept: a perfume that smells of cheap tobacco aromatics at the start, with a little steer sweat baked into the middle, all resting in an Old World wooden container. And it actually comes in that very same container. Well done, Latour. Well done.

The packaging was obviously handmade, probably by a single craftsman, or maybe a very small team. The lettering on the box is a dead giveaway. When I caught sight of this fragrance, it resurrected dormant creative juices from my graphic design days.

I'm friends with a retired designer who was commissioned, thirty some-odd years ago, by Anheuser-Busch. They needed him to create a promotional line of wooden crates, to be filled with beer bottles and sold at company events. Each crate was constructed with plywood. Each had the company logo etched into it. All were hand packed with straw.

The order was overwhelmingly enormous for one person to manage, at ten thousand units. At the time, it wasn't cost effective to outsource, nor practical to fill within the U.S., but that didn't stop him from trying.

The same happened with Cigarillo. Someone at corporate headquarters was riding high on a Clintonian dotcom bubble, and decided to throw a little surplus pocket change at some small time commercial artist, either in Europe or North America. Three thousand man hours and several gallons of blood, sweat, and tears later, this magnificent faux cigar box with its colorful stickers and waxed parchment rolled off a basement assembly line and was shipped to Latour. Now, twenty years later, I'm enjoying it. Ain't life grand?

The "Confounding Factor"

Or maybe she put hers on twelve hours ago, and yours was just applied.

On this page of yet another very lengthy Badger & Blade thread about vintage Old Spice, member "GoneRetroInOH" writes:

"There is a lot of speculation as to whether any reformulation across time (old Shulton vis-à-vis new P&G) or distance (USA / India) ever occurred. IMHO the most confounding factor is aging on the shelf. I have Shulton bottles that I used from time to time. A little always went a long way and I used them only intermittently, so they have lasted 30-35 years. Your 1956 bottle has outlived a lot of people who were babies at the time. Even though the classic bottle stores well, the product still may have subtle changes with age. It is entirely possible that there were no formulation changes, yet the old would seem somewhat different from the new."

This statement nails it. The reason vintage lovers can't reconcile their appreciation of classic formulas with their feelings for reformulations rests simply with the issue of time. For whatever reason, they chronically ignore the issue mentioned above. Time can do incredible things to bottled fluids. Supposedly superior vintage formulas are credited with being "more natural," and "made of better quality materials," and "more complex," but are these traits the result of superior manufacturing weighed against the "cheapening" of classic brands, or are they attributable to their age alone?

Time is the inescapable third variable in comparisons between the qualities of old vs new. When it comes to judging something against its older self, you must consider the discrepancies between the two sets of conditions. On one side you have the "new" stuff, and on the other the "old," but theoretically they're still the same item. Despite this fact, something about the old stuff usually smells better or worse than the new stuff. Why?

Let's think about the "better" part first. Here we suppose that the vintage smells richer, more complex, and chemically superior to its counterpart, based on smell alone. Is this assessment objective? Unfortunately it can't be, because interpreting odors is subjective (smelling odors, on the other hand, is quite objective). You and your buddy will likely agree that the residual odor of the loaf he pinched in your bathroom is vile, but you may differ in opinion on just how good a particular vintage perfume smells. Perfume is harder to interpret than shit.

The reasons for this vary. You may have a broader frame of reference for perfume than he does. Your nose may be more sensitive than his. Your idea of what smells "good" may be, in an abstract sense, somewhat different. The social nature of the perfume may be an influencing factor. If you've had bad experiences with someone who wears the fragrance in question, your association with any version of it may be negatively biased. Conversely, positive associations are made with fragrances that correlate with positive experiences.

Now let's consider the "worse" part. What if you think the fragrance smells "spoiled," and he doesn't? What happened there? Apparently one basenotes member has decided that there are specific issues that preclude fragrance spoilage, and that these issues require consideration by people who might otherwise mistakenly suppose a perfume has spoiled on them. Of course, most of his points aren't based on anything factual. They are assumptions one should never make, and I'll get to them in a bit.

The criteria for assessing whether "spoilage" has truly occurred are simple: you must know what the same vintage of a perfume smells like when it is both new, and not new. If you can identify changes between new and old, and these changes detract from the experience of smelling the old, you have spoilage.

Though simple, this criteria is difficult for people to utilize. It's pretty common to have an isolated sample of a scent that you're generally unfamiliar with. This makes interpretation difficult. How do you know if what you're smelling is "spoiled" if you can't accurately interpret it?

And even if you are familiar with the fragrance, you can't compare accurately unless you have an infallible memory of the way a vintage smelled decades ago. Reformulations change how perfumes smell all the time, making it impossible to trust a direct comparison of vintage to today's formula (they're different vintages). Since you're not Marty McFly, you'll have to settle for an understanding of degrees of spoilage, and how they inhabit the "performance patterns" of vintage fragrances in general.

There are two degrees of spoilage: "extreme" spoilage, and "slight" spoilage. The first degree is very easy to recognize; the second is trickier because it relies on the employment of an inexact methodology to determine quality.

First, the "extreme" spoilage - in this instance, we're right back into objective olfactory territory, the same realm as your loaf-pinching friend. You spray the perfume, and wow! That stinks! Instead of Fahrenheit, your arm wafts extreme odors of sour florals, with a rapid drydown to burnt shoe. You have a recoil reaction, and instinctively recognize the odors as being inarguably bad.

Now, the "slight" spoilage - here the perfume seems wearable. It doesn't offend, but also doesn't impress, at least not as much as expected. There are fuzzy textural qualities, limited movements, and a surprising linearity. The sample appears to be fine, and projects fairly well, with some pleasant qualities, but something's off.

This is where the inexact methodology of recognizing "performance patterns," (otherwise known as the "drydown arc"), is necessary to determine the true nature of the beast. For example: your vintage Fahrenheit smells okay, but its excessively bitter floral top notes segue into a dry, hissy base within thirty seconds, and then this relatively flat accord remains static. You don't know Fahrenheit well enough to make a judgment as to whether or not this smells correct, and you have no other samples of this fragrance on hand. What do you do?

You may not know how to interpret what you smell, but you're trying to interpret the wrong thing. Forget about how your Fahrenheit smells. How does it perform? Make note of the transitions - super brief and unpleasant top, rapidly followed by clumsy base, with no heart to speak of. The fragrance seems very smooth, but also very linear.

Check out a bottle of vintage Cool Water. Does it perform similarly? Same short top, followed almost immediately by a droning, smooth base accord of barely distinguishable notes? How about vintage M7? Vintage Zino? Vintage Drakkar Noir? Do these exhibit the same performance patterns? Some vintages will seem to perform in distinct and measured triads of top, heart, and base, while others will collapse in on themselves within seconds. Those with triads are well preserved and minimally degraded; those that collapse are more severely compromised.

Compare the qualities of performances across a wide range of vintages to the performances of an equally wide range of new fragrances, and make mental (or literal) notes of your experiences. Remember, you're observing performance qualities, NOT material qualities. From this you can create some semblance of a "standard" to hold vintage fragrances against.

This methodology requires extensive experience with fragrances of all ages. You'll probably have to become familiar with at least a few hundred perfumes to really fine tune your nose into spotting degraded performance qualities. Once you've gained this experience, recognizing deterioration in perfumes that you are otherwise unfamiliar with becomes easier.

Most degraded vintages display attenuated or nonexistent top notes. You have vintage English Leather, and you're expecting citrus at the start. Instead you get a bitter epoxy effect, immediately followed by dry, smooth woods. The top notes are gone. With time, that nondescript and usually acidic top note characteristic becomes recognizable in itself, as you encounter it again and again in older perfumes. It gets to the point where you immediately recognize that a fragrance is missing its top notes.

Overly smooth, monochromatic base accords are also common in degraded vintages. These can be the most misleading, because they often smell good. However, they lack note separation, and tend to remain "frozen" on skin. Once this base arrives, it just stays there, unchanging, for hours. Good smell, but no distinct complexity, and very little evolution. In most of the vintages I've encountered, this effect is usually musky/woody, like an invisible finger smudged a handful of wood notes and a couple of sweet synthetic musks into one semi-sweet wood note, which usually resembles sandalwood. I've experienced this quality in vintage Feeling Man, Zino, Grey Flannel, etc.

Balance issues are also a recurring theme. This is really a question of compromised movement, not elemental deterioration. I once had a vintage bottle of Green Irish Tweed, dated to 2001. The crisp violet, powdery iris, warm amber, and clean sandalwood notes were offset by an unbalanced musk note, which had somehow pulled free of its tether and plowed its way to the front end of the drydown. The result was something that smelled like a musk scent with some light green nuances shimmering in the background.

When you employ the inexact methodology of performance patterns, don't miss the forest for the trees, as our friend on basenotes has. Sure, liquid in atomizer tubes could spoil sooner than the rest of the juice, but there's no evidence that this happens, nor is there any evidence people have recurringly had this issue. Sealed spray bottles are no more or less prone to spoilage than splash bottles, though the latter are easier to tamper with. I'm not sure where the idea that splash bottles should be excluded from these considerations came from, but suspect it's another instance of this particular basenotes member "moving the goalpost" of how to assess spoilage.*

In the end, weighing the merits of a vintage rests with how accurately you know a fragrance. Those who have smelled and compared fresh perfumes to aged perfumes of the same vintage can determine whether degradation has occurred with the greatest ease. But even then, they must account for changes. This brings us to the confounding factor in any study, scientific or otherwise, of vintage against new: the simple test of time.

If the supposition is that yesterday's perfumes are chemically superior to today's, I suppose a simple CG analysis could shed light on the veracity of this claim, but it wouldn't convey the nature of the drydown arc, or its variables. It wouldn't compare "performance patterns." As the B&B member quoted above aptly pointed out, time may very well explain why an illusion of higher quality persists with vintage fragrances like Old Spice. I hope that an improved understanding of this confounding factor will one day, with great irony, render condemnation of recent formulas obsolete.

* This particular basenotes member seems hell-bent on proving to the world that I'm wrong in my assertion that perfumes spoil. The thread he participates in (link here) is full of firsthand testimonies by people whose perfumes have spoiled.

Stick With Your Love Of Perfume: You'll Evolve

Scumville?

The flameouts continue. Apparently there has been a shift in public opinion, and the perfume house of Creed is now home to "scumbags" of the, ahem, highest order. (Get out your paypal accounts: Aventus! Wink, wink.)

This week I happened across this thread on basenotes. You can read all ten tedious pages of it yourself if you so please, for I shall abstain from detailing its unholy contents by its godless authors here. I'll stop at saying that it is indicative of all that remains troublesome about that forum, still a community of classless heathens with more money than brains. To sum it up in a few short words: Creed's fragrances are cheaper in France than they are in America, which makes its owners greedy scumbags who should be boycotted, 'cause that'll learn 'em real good, real fast.

Honestly, I couldn't make this shit up if I tried.

If you're world-weary and wise enough to avoid wading into this horrendously sludgy runoff of backwards logic from third-world brainage systems, you're sharp enough to imagine the word warriors pummeling each other senseless. You don't need me for that.

Instead, I'd like to suggest what Creed perfumes could mean to you as a budding fragrance collector, or even an established fumehead junkie with a few hundred bottles in your collection.

Creed is the twenty-first century mercury switch of your perfume maturity.

Let's look at it this way: when you first start out in this "hobby," you look for the hot shit brand that'll put you a few cuts above your friends in the wearing game. On their best nights, your pals will sport seventy or eighty dollar department store frags, but you're going to wear one better. Much better. You get what you pay for, right? Creed is popular, and it's very expensive. You have to try it. Then you have to have it. And for a while there, it's impressing you, and some of your friends, and you figure Creed is important.

Then you grow up a little. You try three or four hundred other perfumes. Most can be had for ten or fifteen dollars an ounce. Without realizing it, you lose interest in "fresh" and "modern" and "sexy," and gravitate towards things that are sophisticated. With sophistication comes pedigree: Dior's lesser known releases, defunct and endangered brands from thirty years ago like Balenciaga, Guy Laroche, and Jacques Bogart. You're following perfumers, not perfumes, and smelling good is never about money.

Eventually you reach a point where you've been through at least five hundred perfumes, and a light bulb goes on - Creed, oh yeah, Creed. What did I think of their latest perfume again? Shit, I can't even remember. It was good. I liked it. Fuck it. If I see it on Amazon for under two hundred dollars, I may grab a bottle. Maybe Fragrancenet has a good deal today - let's see what they have.

And that's how it actually goes. By this point you're far more interested in the idea of a good, honest, straight-up fougère, like Rive Gauche Pour Homme, than you are in the extravagant glitz of an over-developed hybrid like Silver Mountain Water. And if SMW really intrigues you, you want to explore the idea of SMW by smelling frags inspired by it, or otherwise related to it. But traditionalism has won the day. Things from the "old school," wafting dry florals and talcum powder, make you smell and feel good. EROLFA smells very good, but also has you wondering if you'd have been better off buying a few backup bottles of Caron's Third Man instead.

So that four-ouncer of Green Irish Tweed on Amazon (sold by Amazon) for a hundred and forty bucks makes the rotation, but it competes for its place there. You still love it, still enjoy it, but you don't have to wear it. The bottle will last you. Know what you can't keep in stock? Francesco Smalto Pour Homme. Furyo. Zino. Tsar. The last thing on your mind as you're rocking your favorite Edmond Roudnitska composition is that it's Creed's fault you can't pay full retail for their perfumes.

Kensington Garden (Royal Apothic)

Quite the ugly box.

Royal Apothic used to focus on room sprays and scented homecare products, until six years ago, when they adapted their line to include personal fragrance. Their affinity for feminine fruity-florals, leaning either citrusy or just plain green, becomes pretty obvious when you read their catalog. This company has Millennial women in their crosshairs.

I recently had an opportunity to give Sean O'Mara's Kensington Garden a good wearing, and had to keep an open mind in the process. This brand is rather pseudo-British (they boast of gaining commercial traction in the U.S.), and their website looks suspiciously similar to Creed's, but I guess their founder's "story" is honest enough. But is there any wow factor here? Why "Royal Apothic?" Am I to gather there's something "royal" about these products?

Contemporary feminines are either paradoxically daring and conservative (animalic musks and overripe woodsy florals) or ironically pretentious and cheap (haughty greens and nondescript laundry soap), and unfortunately the latter qualities very generously apply to this fragrance. This may or may not be a good thing, depending on your point of view.

On the one hand, the need for an uncomplicated and inexpensive mid-shelf "green" scent with crisp muguet and jasmine notes will be satisfied with this, at least enough to wear it to work a few times a week. It's inoffensive, competently made, and doesn't trail off as something uncouth. It'll go well with your lemon yellow pant suit and pearlescent ivory organza blouse. Just don't expect it to add anything to your sex appeal, which I'm assuming you have in spades anyway if you're wearing that outfit.

On the other, you'll literally smell like a walking Lyral bomb. Imagine the bleached florals of Tommy Girl, with the bleach effect dialed up to eleven and surrounded by foiled reflectors, and you have a good idea of Kensington Garden. It's bright, it's sweet, it's shrieking and shrill and squeaky clean/green, an indelicate interpretation of "delicate white floral." I think, in all honesty, that it's too much of a rather questionably good thing.

As for its unisex appeal, I'm afraid it's a bit too caricatured to have any. Then again, with the ridiculous flea circus beard trend going on here in the States, maybe an overdose of drugstore soap isn't a bad idea.

"I wear fragrances for ME. I really don't care what anyone else thinks."

Panties were dropped here. The nerve!

You're a professional, a young woman in her mid twenties with a good job, and you've only been employed there a week. It's Friday. Casual Friday. So that morning you decide to break out your old torn-shoulder Madonna throwback shirt and skintight ripped jeans, and you're extra careful to let your pink Victoria's Secret wire bra strap show. You douse yourself in some chinsy Body Shop body spray and head off.

By day's end, every woman in the office has given you looks so dirty, you'd swear they'd mistaken you for Melania Trump. Conversely, every married male has made it a point to stop in and hand you something pointless to "look over." But the only thing they're interested in looking over is sitting behind your desk, drinking your coffee, looking an awful lot like you.

You say to yourself as you drive home, "I wonder what it was? I mean, it's Friday. And I'm hot. I'm making as much as anyone else in that place. This shirt is my favorite. I wore it for ME. Ditto these jeans and high-heels. I really don't care what anyone else thinks."

Monday rolls around, and the first thing you see is an office letterhead on your desk, with a hand-signed message from the boss. The boss is, predictably, a cantankerous Republican bitch on her second marriage. It reads:

"It came to my attention Friday afternoon that your attire was offensive to your coworkers. Please be sure to adhere to our dress code policy and only wear attire that is professional and becoming of our company image. This is the only notification you will given on this matter. If this issue is not resolved, the board will take the appropriate measures to ensure that our office does not become a hostile environment.

You're shocked, but should you be? After all, "Casual Friday" isn't a license to dress like a Reagan-era hooker. But you were so comfortable, and you actually got work done! It feels outrageous. It feels wrong on every level. The week goes by, and Friday rolls around again. This time you stop and think before you dress. Frustrated and intimidated by your options, you decide that the spare pantsuit will have to do. It's a straight-laced, colorless thing that would make Carmella Bing look frumpy. But it's safe.

I can't tell you how many times I read internet comments about "why" people wear their fragrances that mimic the same basic message: "I wear fragrance for me, and I don't care what others think about how I smell."

This is an interesting approach to society. Wear clothing to look good for other people. Wear your hair in a way that doesn't make you look like a dirty slob or a bag lady. Wear your attitude, with or without pretense, so no one could ever accuse you of lacking personality. But your fragrance? Ah, that - that's easy: people don't exist. The only nose on the planet is yours. The olfactory world is like that lame Times Square scene in the movie Vanilla Sky. How you smell does not matter beyond your own nose. You don't care what other people think about your personal odor. It's all for you.

I'm probably guilty of this sentiment myself, and given how often the subject comes up, it's likely that I've said the same thing at least a half dozen times across as many forums.

But let's face it - is this the way to go about wearing perfume? Is it appropriate to not give a shit when you apply your signature? Is it a question of your selection, or how much you apply? Is it passive aggressive to not give two shits about either one? Or are other people too sensitive to be bothered with?

I think these are questions without clear answers. The scenario described above is fairly realistic for many workplaces (and not for many others), but it addresses personal appearance, which is often the first vantage point for being judged. Perfume raises the question of personal smell, a far more subjective topic, one that even excludes a certain percentage of the population (the anosmics among us). Do we perfume wearers have to treat it as seriously as we treat our clothing?

There is some passive aggression to the idea that we shouldn't care what others think of how we smell. It's not exactly the most considerate stance to take, particularly if you're in close quarters with others for extended periods of time. It also assumes that perfume has a very limited message to impart, one that does not reach beyond a basic olfactory summation of your style. Are you the "fresh prince" who smells like salty melons? Or are you the academic intellectual who finds solace in clove oil? Which stereotype does your scent make you?

I'm probably not going very far out on a limb in saying that it's likely you don't want your perfume to "sum you up." Gravestones sum us up, not perfumes. Isn't the marginalization of an outsider's opinion on your scent the same as saying your perfume is little more than a trite "impression" of you on that given day? Wouldn't you rather ascribe some meaning to that impression, abstract as it may be?

I'm certainly not a fashion icon by any measure. My clothing choices are so banal and forgettable that I could probably be the poster child for some futuristic anti-fashion movement. Yet I have a large rotation of fragrances, many of which are quite different from each other. Thus, my choices are reflective of my mood, and how I wish to carry the day. Perhaps there are times when it doesn't really matter "why" I chose something, and I simply threw something random on myself to smell "good." Full stop.

Then there are times when it's a more calculated choice. I'm wearing Tea Rose on the day after wearing Lapidus Pour Homme. What implications does this have for whoever smells me? If the same noses are sensing my presence on both days, they may infer from day one that I'm feeling "manly," and on day two "a bit femme." Or perhaps that my Lapidus day is me in a bad mood, while the Tea Rose day is me feeling cheerful. These could be the humorous musings they have about me, if they take all of five seconds to care. I'm sure it's happened many times.

So I can't say that how I smell doesn't convey a deeper message. With the "a bit femme" thought, there's a new line of questioning that comes up: "Is he gay? Maybe, but he smelled pretty straight and "frat-housey" yesterday. Is he bi? Perhaps. Is rose masculine these days? Or is he just a weirdo? I think he's that last one, for sure!" Judgments about my core self are being rendered, all because of what I'm sending through the airwaves.

Yet I carry on undeterred, blithely uncaring that coworkers are formulating relatively complex assessments and questions about me, little old me, the uncaring man who simply wears what he wears because he's wearing it for him, and no one else. Right? No, no, no. Wrong. I'm not an idiot. There's a message there for others to receive, and it means something, even if the message is mysterious, contradictory, or just plain unclear. My fragrances - all of them - are strung along together as one ongoing communication with the outside world, and this largely unspoken dialogue is borne out of care.

Granted, these perceptions are more likely to occur among people who don't know me, but are always around me, namely coworkers. Friends are privy to more information, but coworkers are all walking that fine line between familiarity and fired. Everyone is careful not to hit that wrong note. Let's not create a hostile work environment.

This includes me. I must try not to cause headaches, or whatever other form of fuck-all discomfort that could arise. I shouldn't advertise a symphony in D Minor and start playing punk, even though I'm dressed in a button-up shirt and blue jeans with Anaïs Anaïs in second gear.

And can I really honestly say that a comment from some equally unscrupulous asshole who is offended by my fragrance, or perhaps by its volume, isn't going to stay with me for a few years whenever I reach for that particular scent in my rotation? I'll be really as real as real can be here, and admit that the one that got an insufficiently hushed "Pee-yeew!" from the hot blonde at the front desk as I was walking away is the one I wear a bit less frequently than I used to.

I've seen the argument that if people are seriously offended by one's choices in fragrance, such people are "going out of their way to be offended." Most fragrances are designed to smell good, and most are hypo-allergenic, so what leg does anyone have to stand on by being "offended" by some perfume? They're reaching. They're looking for reasons to complain. They're Whoopi Goldberg.

I happen to agree with this, if we're talking about the random passer-by on the street. Strangers in a restaurant have no business being offended by your fragrance. For them to take offense, or to care in any negative way, is a major reach on their part, a blatant attempt to stir up trouble and waste your time. They're the ones who protested Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone, back in the nineties when they were making Basic Instinct. The protest was framed to show the public that it's offensive to "misrepresent" others, namely bisexual women and male rapists, with the implications being that Douglas and Stone were inaccurately portraying these two disparate minority groups.

These arguments were a colossal waste of time. Anyone with a sense of perspective could see that Basic Instinct was being directed by the reigning prince of schlock cinema at that time, none other than Paul Verhoeven. The flick was merely a B movie featuring two A-Listers, and Stone wasn't even really A-List at the time. Were Romanians offended in 1931 when Dracula was released? Maybe some were. But they were offended by a B movie, in a time when most B movies were being made to offend someone, somewhere, somehow. Studios hope a relatively small group of people will be screaming mad, and give them free press. They bank on them, really. There's always a group of screaming mad people, waiting for the next reason to get mad and scream.

They're the same folks who made "Fragrance-Free Zones" a thing twenty-five years ago.

So yeah, random people have no business being offended. What do they care, anyway? I'd rather smell a questionable perfume than the stink of a New York subway car.

But people who are part of your life, whether it be your professional or personal life (or both), deserve a little more respect.

I'm always careful not to over-apply, and I'm embarrassed if someone can smell me from across the room, as I should be. I'm also careful about what sort of scent I wear on certain days. If there's going to be a building meeting, maybe Kouros is a bad choice, and Pour un Homme de Caron is a better one. If it's "Casual Friday," a fruity-floral like Chrome Legend is a nice, non-threatening sort of thing to enjoy at a light volume, but let's not have too much fun and apply fifty sprays. Your friend's grandmother's funeral is a Grey Flannel affair; you should shelve your bottles of Laguna and Joop! Homme.

In all actuality, saying "I wear fragrances for ME, I really don't care what anyone else thinks" is a little callous, and should only ever be half-true. Say it if it makes you feel good, but if someone challenges you on it, don't pretend it's a non-issue that shouldn't be discussed further.

There's one other element to this that bears mentioning: the "Panty Dropper" meme that keeps cropping up on forums. The idea, if you've been living under a rock for the last ten years, is that certain perfumes make sexual partners swoon, and drop their panties (or boxers). These fragrances are purportedly Love Potion No 9s with guaranteed results in the bedroom, as endorsed by countless brain-dead "bros" from here to Algiers.

And this offends some people, because it's "sexist," and it's "untrue on every level." Oddly enough, the suggestion that perfume is inherently sexy, and a tool useful for attracting sexual partners, is also considered offensive in some quarters.

Let me say this: If you're seriously offended by this term, and with the idea that some fragrances on some people could, and against all odds, elicit strong sexual responses from whomever they wind up with on Saturday night, you're an asshole. Find something worthwhile to be prissy about, like the fact that Donald Trump might actually become the leader of the free world next year. Huffing about a term like "panty dropper" is just as tacky as the term itself. Perfume goes on our bodies, our bodies have a way of going on other people's bodies, and it's no leap to associate perfume with sex. Unless you're on basenotes, where the sexiness of wearing perfume is apparently an alien concept.

For the rest of us, it's perfume. It's at least a little sexy to wear it.

To varying extents, we all care about it.

Let's find it within ourselves to lighten up and laugh about it.

Giorgio For Men (Giorgio Beverly Hills)

It feels quite fitting to follow my review of Touch for Men with one of Giorgio. Before the "hygienic" shower gel fragrances of the nineties took over everything, the mysterious world of masculine perfumery dwelled mostly on olfactory impressions from nature and natural materials, with compositions using the combined smells of woods, spices, flowers, and resins. The seventies and eighties gave us compositions devoid of "fantasy accords." Earthbound scents like Givenchy Gentleman, Z-14, Pierre Cardin Pour Monsieur, Grey Flannel, Quorum, Krizia Uomo, Derby, Caron's Third Man, Green Irish Tweed, Davidoff, Zino, Bowling Green, and Furyo were all the rage.

Giorgio for Men is of that ilk, a decadent, patchouli-centric woody chypre with strong oriental underpinnings, the kind of fragrance best used judiciously. Its premise is theoretically simple: to smell unmistakably masculine. Yet at some point it got lost in a haze of sweet gourmands and "fresh" aquatics, until EA revived it in the aughts as an eighties frag with enough swagger to make Charles Bronson seem effete. Giorgio's reputation precedes it, but to me the fragrance is unaffected by any external noise; from top to bottom, this scent smells inspired, unique, and refined.

This isn't to say that I'm not reminded of other things when I smell it. Three fragrances in particular come up - Arden's Sandalwood, Pierre Cardin Pour Monsieur, and Krizia Uomo. It shares Sandalwood's woodsy smoothness, Cardin's semi-sweet amber, and Krizia's moss/patchouli buzz, but I also get an overwhelmingly potent raw honey note in Giorgio's opening, similar to the viscous, urinous, and intense honey note that I encountered in vintage Lapidus Pour Homme (1987), and to a lesser (and more enjoyable) extent in Boss Number One. This note eventually relents, and segues into a milder blend of patchouli and coumarin. But the honey, oh the honey! Wow.

Now, this is important: if you read a review that neglects to mention honey, its author's nose and judgment can't be trusted. It should be the first thing anyone notices with this fragrance, aside from perhaps a transparent wisp of mandarin orange and aldehyde. Giorgio has the biggest, boldest honey note that I've ever smelled.

The drydown is very pleasant, its honest interplay of patchouli and soft precious wood notes given depth and duration by an herbal amber. There are even gentle touches of cinnamon, nutmeg, carnation, and jasmine in the blend. My bottle's code indicates that it was made in January of this year, yet nothing smells overtly synthetic or out of tune here. Oakmoss is even listed in the ingredients, and I can smell it quite clearly.

There's been talk on fragrance boards of a change in Giorgio's color. Apparently older bottles are a deep yellow-green, while the current stuff is much lighter. I've noticed that my relatively new bottle of EA Grey Flannel has darkened in the last few years; the perfume was transparent and colorless when I bought it. Vintage Jacqueline Cochran and French Fragrances Grey Flannel is indeed quite dark in appearance. I can't help but wonder if Giorgio's color will also darken with time and use, as air mixes with the fluid. Is this something some EA masculines do? I guess we'll see.

If you like honey and patchouli, and share my affinity for old-school woody chypres, then Giorgio for Men is something you should go for. Even sticklers for natural wood essences should be able to appreciate Giorgio's salubrious sandalwood reconstruction, abstract as it is. I only paid eight dollars for a 1.6 oz bottle, a real steal. Thanks, Mr. Hayman!

Soap Review: Rainbath (Neutrogena)

It seems that I can't read about Fred Hayman's Touch for Men without encountering comparisons to an old soap scent by Neutrogena called "Rainbath." I'm not sure when this product was introduced, but I'm guessing it's been in stores since at least the seventies, as there are scores of adult women out there who reminisce about growing up with this stuff. One gal even mentions her grandmother introducing it to her, so perhaps it has been around even longer. Judging from the fragrance, I'd say it's entirely possible.

Does it smell like Touch? Almost! It seems that between this, Touch, and Brut, I've discovered three variations of the same old-fashioned mid-century fougère theme. Brut is the traditional fougère, with mentholated lavender and musky coumarin comprising its soapy drydown. Touch spins the same basic scent profile into a warmer musk accord, with softer lavender effects, whispers of undefined fruit, and rich, vanilla-laden musks. Rainbath ups the ante on the fruit idea, with more distinct (and rather startling) cinnamon, mandarin peel, and mango notes peeking through the mist. Yet it is essentially the same sort of smell as the others, with a nearly identical musky amber "drydown," if you can call it that. Soap is usually wet, after all.

I also smell a lavender note in Rainbath that matches the one in Touch. It's intriguing to find a clear olfactory ensemble of notes and accords in a shower gel. These products typically possess flat smells with zero dynamism; they're mostly "fruity" or "aquatic" ideas that simply fade against water, but Rainbath is definitely different. It's complex, and blatantly retro. It smells Brutish, powdery, musky, and "fresh," but this last characteristic is conveyed warmly, with spiced fruit notes, which puts it in stark contrast to the Dial, Axe, and Irish Spring gels sitting beside it on store shelves. They advertise themselves as being "for men." Are they, though? Not when you consider Neutrogena's offering. Rainbath is the only one that truly smells manly.

I'm a little surprised it has such a loyal following with women, but imagine its quality accounts for that. Rainbath is the finest drugstore shower gel I've ever used. Its cleansing qualities are gentle (Sodium Laureth Sulfate), its lather is foamy, bubbly, satisfying. It rinses clean without any unpleasant menthol tingle or desiccating after effects, and its powder note lingers very lightly for an hour or so. It's not exactly like Touch, but it sure goes well with the EDT, and I've found that wearing Touch after using Rainbath enhances the experience. My only qualm is the price, for Rainbath is surprisingly expensive; I have yet to see an eight ounce bottle for under ten dollars.