A Quick Note On Cheap Scents

Sometimes I get asked about whether a "cheap" scent that by all measures smells good is worth buying in the place of something similar but more expensive.

Ninety-nine percent of the time I recommend the better fragrance. I know, you're wondering what I mean by "better." It's not difficult to define the term: the fragrance that smells better is the one you should consider first. If cost is a concern but not a deal-breaker, why not wait and save for it? A few weeks, or even months can't hurt. I firmly believe that price should only be factored in when there's indisputable parity in both quality of construction and legibility of performance.

Many cheap fragrances that can be purchased for fifteen dollars or less per 100 ml are solidly constructed and very good performers. But beware. Always keep this phrase in the back of your mind: "cologney baloney."

We've all done it. We spot a cheapie, 50 or 100 ml bottles of some obscure drugstore thing that samples nicely and seems to be an apt addition to the wardrobe as a "novelty purchase."

We wear the frag and enjoy it, but in the back of our minds wonder, what's the catch? Did I really just get a fresh-fruity cheapie that I like? Or am I paying for its cheapness somehow, in some manner less obvious to me, but not others?

It's what I call the "headspace test."

Always have a large fruit handy, like a smooth melon or even just a large apple. Spritz it with your new find, and let its skin simulate yours. Sit several feet away from it. Walk past it quickly.

Is what you're smelling on the fruit the same as what was on your hand in the store?

With very cheap fragrances, there's a higher chance that the headspace off the fruit will emit something bland, clean, and nondescript. Close up, with your nose mere millimeters from where you sprayed, you may get a very complex blend of lucid accords and individual notes.

But from a natural social distance of four to six feet, you may get a very blobby, washed-out "cologney baloney" chemical smell, as faceless as a Swedish guy at the Winter Olympics. All of those perky green-woods and musk notes may become Bounce dryer sheets. A few ounces of extra air between the scent and your nose may reveal where the fragrance company's budget fell short.

Cheapies like Caron Yatagan and Krizia Uomo don't suffer this fate because their profit margin is modest. In fairness though, Caron charges premium prices for their scents at retail, and only grey market prices are reasonable. Ditto for Krizia.

This fact makes typical internet sales for them excellent deals, and the kind of "cheapie" one can buy without second guessing their judgment.

Stuff by Jovan, Playboy, Nautica, and Avon are not as likely to fare well in the headspace test. This isn't to say that all scents by these brands are "cologney baloney" in nature. But some are. If you want a super cheap "cologney" effect, and don't mind smelling like ivory-white laundry, you may as well just wear 4711. For that effect, the fault is exclusively found in any and all pretense.

What Does Tobacco Smell Like? And Would A Great Tobacco Perfume Change Our Uptight World For The Better?

Tobacco, or 90% dark chocolate?

Tobacco has been justifiably under attack in most developed nations for a while now, for obvious reasons that directly relate to nicotine addiction and various types of cancer. I can’t help but feel though that there comes a point during the anti-smoking spiels being rattled off by health advocates where you have to shrug a lot of the histrionic condemnation off, and reassess the actual danger quotient for yourself.

We all know whatever feels, tastes, or smells good carries health risks. That chocolate cake you lust after can clog your arteries pretty quickly if you eat too much of it too often. Casual sex can bring all sorts of unexpected and unpleasant consequences if you’re not careful, and even sometimes when you are careful. Playing video games for hours on end can degrade your body’s stamina and circulatory system, raising the risk of heart attack and stroke. Too many brewskies can kill your liver. And smoking can lead to lung cancer and a handful of other health problems. Is it wise to completely eliminate these things, or is the enjoyment of the occasional vice a vital part of living life to the fullest?

I often think of this when I wear Versace’s The Dreamer. Here’s a fragrance that took a type of person and bottled him, representing him as a perfume. He's someone we’ve all known. He's artistic, a little flaky, prone to wanting “quiet time,” or even “alone time.” You’ll sometimes catch him out back smoking a cigarette and gazing off at nothing in particular. He's literally a dreamer, and Gianni Versace knew this guy well – perhaps he was a dreamer himself. America is losing this facet of its culture, its league of dreamers, as we incrementally chip away at the casual carelessness we used to live by, and replace it with hollow platitudes about how to be “successful” and “healthy.” As always, moderation is key. We shouldn’t demonize the occasional cigarette, because some of the best things can happen when we're able to detach from reality in a puff of smoke.

I spent half a year in Prague, Czech Republic, back in 2007. People ask me what living there was like. I often tell them that traveling to Prague was more like traveling to a different time than to a different place. People there smoke and drink a lot. I mean, a lot. Restaurants, bars, clubs, and even people’s homes are usually filled with cigarette smoke and the clink clink of beer mugs and shot glasses. I indirectly worked for a major tobacco company there by providing educational services to its staff, and I recall my student being a very friendly, mild-mannered, almost innocuous young woman, who seemed oblivious to any moral implications that her position at the firm held.

Looking back at it, I now realize that there was no concrete reason for her to be worried about where she worked. When she went out at night with friends, every other person had a cigarette in their hand. In Prague, people aren’t as worried about cancer and death as Americans are. They believe in living life, and living it hard. Work hard, play hard. They work fourteen hour days, commute four hours round trip, consume liters of alcohol and packs of cigarettes a day, and some solicit prostitutes, some spend hours in hazy underground nightclubs, and they sleep fine, because Prague, in many incredible ways, still lives in the 1950s. The girl I went with chain-smoked Djarum Blacks. My friends frequented Hookah bars. People drank beer and wine and vodka and whiskey like it was water. I was experiencing a portal to the past.

Say what you will about tobacco, but it has its charms. Yes, it’s a nicotine bomb, and yes, there’s nothing beneficial to your health about indulging in any tobacco product, but reality check: few things on the planet smell or taste as good as tobacco. I have some experience with this. When I was in high school, I occasionally smoked cigars. These ranged from cheap Swisher Sweets (what a morally reprehensible company Swisher is, by the way, with their flavored cigarillos clearly aimed at youngsters, and I’m not being sarcastic here), to Cuban Partagas cigars, which would drip tobacco tar down my shirt and take hours to finish. Both ends of the quality spectrum were olfactory treats, although cigar tobacco is admittedly the most difficult to appreciate. I smell its analog in Quorum, which has the tobacco note found in real Cubans, an incredibly deep and rich smell.

Then there’s cigarettes. I don’t smoke cigarettes, and never really smoked them in the past, mainly because I never inhaled them. Cigarettes are a smell/taste experience for me. An unlit, midgrade, Virginia-cut cigarette, like any of the Marlboros, has a dry, semi-sweet, raisin-like aroma. It's the scent that Versace captured beautifully in The Dreamer, which showcases a lucid analog of a freshly-opened pack of Marlboro Lights, although come to think of it, Marlboro Lights have probably been discontinued.

Things change a bit when you shift to a slightly higher quality cigarette, like the original unfiltered Camels pictured above, which are nicknamed “studs.” This is Humphrey Bogart stuff. These have a markedly better, richer aroma out of the pack. They smell very dry, woody, and rather like unsweetened dark chocolate. The blend of Turkish and American tobacco is responsible for the scent, with Turkish cuts being a bit richer and mellower than standard Virginian fare. All cigarette tobaccos are “treated,” and laced with wildly unhealthy additives, so if you’re interested in experiencing the smell and a bit of the flavor of these things, I can only recommend proceeding with caution. Don’t get into the habit of “enjoying” them. Just have them around for reference and the rare toke for a flavor idea. If you like the smell of cigarette smoke as much as I do, you can appreciate it by lighting up and just letting the thing burn itself out.

Unsurprisingly though, most fragrances bypass cigar and cigarette tobaccos, and take the pipe tobacco route instead. This is a double-edged sword. Yeah, pipe tobacco arguably smells the best out of all the varieties, mainly because it’s treated like potpourri by its manufacturers, with a number of flavors infused in the blends. And yeah, pipe tobacco’s aroma usually works in tandem with the naturally woody, bitter flavor of an old-fashioned wood pipe. My grandfather had a wood pipe, and he passed it down to my dad, who let me play with it as a kid. By the time it got to me, it had been retired for a decade. I’d stick it in my mouth and pretend to smoke, and all the years of dry tobacco particles that had crumbled and powdered into the thing would gradually filter through the old cherry stem and into my taste buds, registering as a weirdly serene, smoky flavor.

In college, two of my professors had handlebar moustaches and smoked pipes. I shit you not. They’d stand outside on their lunch break and puff away, looking like a pair of Edwardian politicians. It was pretty anachronistic and surreal. The smell was incredible. Very rich, mellow, with a papery quality adjacent to a light sweetness that no other tobacco cut replicates. These guys were probably packing cheaper blends, and that familiar “cherry” nuance that often accompanies pipe smoke was present, but I can’t deny that pipe tobacco, lit and unlit, smells good.

But there’s one problem with all of this, at least in my opinion. The smell of pipe tobacco is a holistic olfactory meditation on both the treated tobacco, AND the pipe it gets smoked in, with too many non-tobacco elements in the mix. The flavorings that usually accompany pipe tobacco have nothing to do with tobacco. The materials of pipes also have nothing to do with tobacco. And you really can’t get a good sense of how pipe tobacco smells unless you’re smoking it through a high-quality wood pipe. So sure, it’s a great smell, but for a tobacco purist, there are some red flags. Of all the tobacco aromas, pipe tobacco is the most embellished. (Cigar tobacco is the least.) It’s also the strongest, and in many cases the most complex.

I guess this is why it’s so popular in perfumes. I have one fragrance in my collection that seems to be a close-up study of pipe tobacco, and that’s Vermeil for Men. Here’s a list of the rest of the tobacco scents in my collection, along with some descriptions of their tobacco notes. If you notice, most of them eschew the pipe tobacco theme and opt for less conventional cigarette and cigar motifs:

Ungaro Pour L’Homme II – ashy cigarette tobacco, very noticeable

Cigarillo (Rémy Latour) – fruity pipe tobacco, easy to miss

Lagerfeld Classic (Karl Lagerfeld) – smooth unlit cigar, noticeable

Joint Pour Homme (Roccobarocco) – musty pipe tobacco, blatant

VC&A Pour Homme – burnt tobacco, a lit cigarillo, easy to miss

Boss Number One (Hugo Boss) – light cigarette tobacco, easy to miss

Furyo (Jacques Bogart) – pipe tobacco, closely blended with patchouli

Sung Homme (Alfred Sung) – cigarette ash, very noticeable

Cool Water (Davidoff) – “blonde” cigarillo tobacco, easy to miss

Versace L’Homme – miniature of The Dreamer, noticeable

The Dreamer (Versace) – standard cigarette tobacco, blatant

Some of you might be wondering why Tabac cologne isn't on the list. I have a bottle, but I've honestly never detected a tobacco note in its composition. I have an older bottle that dates back at least six or seven years, and it's the eau de cologne concentration, which I sometimes use as an aftershave. It's beautiful stuff, but I get no tobacco out of it. Instead it smells like talc, dried herbs and flowers, and animalic musks, with a huge aldehyde and citrus top note introducing everything.

In closing, I’d like to say that I was inspired to write this post by a recent basenotes thread, in which members ponder the varying scents of tobacco. There were some interesting points made. I think member "Tmoran" summed it up best:

"It really depends on whether its pipe tobacco, flavored pipe tobacco, blonde tobacco or any other of the endless varieties. It would be impossible for me to sit and describe the smell of something to you without you having ever smelled it or something similar. It would be like trying to explain color to a blind man who has always been blind. I think your ability to like it may hinge on whether the scent is intending to portray smoked tobacco or unburned tobacco. Some scents do try and mimic the smell of a burnt cigar or cigarette but most of the mainstream tobacco scents are mimicking the smell of processed pipe tobacco. Which many find extremely pleasant."

This really describes the situation well. Right now we’re faced with a fragrance market that is seldom attracted to tobacco notes, and when it is, it focuses on pipe tobacco, and sometimes on fruity Hookah tobacco. It’s likely that many perfume brands have boardroom meetings where some uptight suit invariably shoots down the rare suggestion of a tobacco-themed scent on the absurd grounds that it would "negatively influence brand image and consumer market share." Yes, I can literally hear these corporate-speak phrases being tossed around by people who have never touched a pack of cigarettes in their lives.

It would be nice for a brand, niche or designer, to give us a tobacco scent as a comprehensive celebration of every variety of tobacco I’ve discussed here. Perhaps something with a top note of fresh green tobacco leaf, followed by the raisin-like mellowing of sun-cured leaves, treated cigarette tobacco, the dark chocolatey nature of high-grade studs, the floral spiciness of a lit pipe, the sophistication of a cigar, ending on an ashy base. Maybe not in that exact order, but something like it. I'd name it "Bogart's Break" for fun. Seriously, how awesome would that be? I don't know why it hasn't been done yet.

My takeaway with tobacco in perfumery is that the note is very difficult to render, and even harder to use in a composition. Perfumers can't use straight absolutes in their formulas because of the nicotine issue (nicotine seeps through skin, which is why the patch exists). They can use certain tobacco molecules in isolation, and they can "reconstruct" tobacco by other means, and sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. Lately, with fragrances like Tom Ford's Tobacco Vanille, the note is rendered as a semi-gourmand element, very sweet and aromatic, with light hints of vanilla and other edibles. The burlier, woodier, smokier nature of real tobacco seems relegated to the forgotten classics found in discount bins, and that’s a shame.

Kouros Silver (Yves Saint Laurent)

Himalaya wants its packaging back.

Roughly one year after its release, I finally find the time to convey my definitive impressions of Kouros Silver. I say "definitive" because it's taken me a long time to decide how I feel about this fragrance, and why I feel the way I do. There has been some waffling, some head-scratching, some more waffling, some chin rubbing, and I may have ground a millimeter from my molars trying to put this into words, but as the Bee Gees once said, "words are all I have," so here it goes. Bear with me.

I want to hate this fragrance without any reason for it, other than a personal dislike for the scent alone, but it's more complicated than that. You see, when you smell and wear as many fragrances as I have, you reach a point where your response to things can't be summed up by the Yes/No sign behind Robert De Niro in Casino, but not because a simple "yes" or "no" fails for you personally. It just gets, well, a little deeper than that, or maybe a better way to put it is to say it gets a little more technical.

Kouros Silver, in my personal opinion, is a terrible fragrance, but if we're going to dwell on the personal for more than a sentence or two, I'd add that I dislike this "type" of fragrance more than any individual scent representing it. I can't stand the "sweet," the "sticky," the blatantly "chemical," and all the motherfucking Aryan Nations musks that are both front AND backloaded into these things. What scares me is that the lineage for Kouros Silver traces back in the short term to equally terrible fragrances, which is bad enough, but when you continue to follow the bloodline, you actually get to some truly great perfumes that every hardcore enthusiast loves, and that's what changes the tone from a Sesame Street bedtime story into something the Brothers Grimm crept themselves out with and didn't even want to publish.

In the short term, the fragrance that started this madness was Versace's Eros, back in 2012, when someone decided to sweeten a stock formula woody amber accord with some vaguely fruity ester, and called it "apple." Between Eros and Silver are minor travesties like Joop! Homme Wild (which I actually don't dislike), Man.Aubusson Intense, and Cool Water Night Dive, with the latter two being circular reasonings on why vaguely synthy-fruity woody ambers buttressed between shitloads of laundry musks are "youthful" and "contemporary," as if these terms mean the same thing.

So yeah, a big yawn. And if we go back further than Eros, we touch on - oh hey, wait, WAIT A MINUTE HERE! Wait just ONE FUCKING MINUTE. Fruit? Woody ambers? White musks? Weird, synthy, gourmand-ish olfactory illusions using wood notes and musks that are so sweet they almost smell edible? Individuel? Witness? Aubusson Pour Homme? Feeling Man? Joop! Homme? Balenciaga Pour Homme? SKIN BRACER???? How did we get here? This can't be right. No, break out the map again, we gotta double-check. There must be a mistake. I must've - wait, no, no, no, no, no. No. STFU. WTF? And any other letter combo that annoyingly turns a foul-language phrase into an awkward acronym.

Eventually, the realization crystallizes: yes, unfortunately yes, there are classic underpinnings to these grotesque chemical designers. From deep within terpene-laden green-woods accords, found in things like Yatagan and Quorum, were coumarin-tinged musks that whispered sweet whimsies on winds that grew ever muskier with time. By the late eighties and early nineties, the musks had become so animalic and multi-faceted that their interaction with piney notes, incense, and woods developed illusory fruity aspects, with apple and pineapple effects in Balenciaga and Feeling Man, apple pie hallucinations in Aubusson PH and Witness, and sweeter, violet-like heliotrope in Joop! Homme and Individuel, all perfumes that smell incredible on their own terms.

This is how my mind shifted through its gears with Kouros Silver wafting from my collar. All of my personal experiences with fragrances, both new and old, somehow connected to this oddball contemporary style of masculine perfumery that I've grown to detest. It's as if, after all the wonderful experiments with truly skanky musk molecules ceased, the perfumers decided to pare everything down to two adjectives, "sweet," and "clean." The result is something that smells, to me anyway, very thick, unpleasant, blob-like, chemical, and unbearable after five minutes.

And yet, despite that, some objectivity kicks in. I consider the qualities of this style, gleaned from various frags, that appeal to me in even the most fleeting way. The clarity of the green apple in Man.aubusson Intense. The synthetic, Skin-Bracery fougères in Joop! Homme Wild and Night Dive. The ghost of animalism in that extra layer of musk that baaarely makes it into the first ten seconds of Kouros Silver. Despite all its repulsiveness, I can kinda, sorta get why the youngsters like this sort of thing. It's generational. This fragrance really erupted four years ago, and now it's becoming its own thing, and guys a lot younger than me are wearing it. I don't really understand why they prefer Kouros Silver to something like Balenciaga Pour Homme, but maybe that doesn't matter. Maybe I'm not supposed to get it. Maybe it's enough that I just acknowledge that someone, somewhere, likes this shit.

I don't like it, and I'd never wear it, and I could get into how, for me, this style is better found on drugstore shelves in aftershaves in much lower concentrations, or how sad it is that L'Oréal is stooping to this kind of boardroom-tested "safe" formula approach with a brand as gargantuan and legendary as YSL, but that's what Fragrantica and basenotes are for. On my blog, I'm satisfied with telling you that I understand Kouros Silver's existence, and maybe even its appeal to a certain demographic. But between you and me, with everything I know and understand about perfume fully in check, I don't approve of it at all.

The "Sauvage S**t Show" Goes On. What Fun!

Still A Stupid Game.

In the last few months, Sauvage's price has become a hot topic for some folks in the blogosphere. The fact that Dior's new scent is a "designer" fragrance isn't the least bit alarming to most. Dior has been around for decades, and its pricing decisions have rarely been a subject of conversation. Yet it seems that a few can't help but talk around the issue of Sauvage's price, which in some ways is being equated with its "worth."

Fragrantica's veteran master troll has been repeatedly using the review section for Sauvage as a "discussion thread," which of course it was never meant to be, to badger other members for having certain opinions of Sauvage. This is the same troll who has spent years contending that nothing I say makes any sense, that I'm mentally ill, and more recently (on basenotes) that he's "bested" me on all debate fronts, despite a considerable numerical difference in the sizes of our devoted readerships, which count 88 here, and only 51 there. (If this is "besting" me, keep it coming.)

This character read the following comment by Fragrantica member "Gazza97":

"It's almost impossible to dislike this fragrance. Yes it may be slightly 'generic', but come on, this just smells amazing. The performance is really good too. I got a solid 7 hours from this and it was still projecting pretty well from the 4 hour mark! This surpasses Bleu de Chanel IMO."

And responded to it with his usual, near-indecipherable histrionics:

"@Gazza97: What I don't understand is all the reviews saying it's a great performer and it smells good. There are thousands of other 'masculine' scents that have excellent longevity and projection, and smelling good is obviously subjective (Sauvage uses a lot of ambroxan, so if you find that aroma chemical irritating, it's highly likely you will dislike the scent, perhaps intensely!). I have several Playboy scents that cost me $5 or less per 100 ml and I enjoy them (and they are also excellent 'performers'), and I don't have to deal with a lot of ambroxan with those. So, if you really enjoy Sauvage, that's great for you and I'm glad to hear it, but to act like it's the only scent that is an excellent 'performer' or that smells 'nice' is ridiculous, IMO."

This is called, conservatively, "framing the debate with straw." I won't delve into how unhinged and bizarre it reads. At no point in his brief review did "Gazza97" suggest that Sauvage is "the only scent that is an excellent performer." Nor did he ever suggest that it's the only one that "smells nice." So why is "Gazza97"'s review - and it is a review - under attack?

"Gazza97" responded with clarity:

"@Bigsly: Once again people are taking my review out of context. I never stated that it is a unique, one of a kind fragrance. There may well be fragrances out there that have the same vibe and performance as Sauvage, albeit at less the price. I haven't smelt those ones that you mentioned because they are less well known than something that comes from the house of Dior, and I'm allowed to voice my opinion on the latter. So please read my review thoroughly before you accuse me. Thank you."

What I like about Fragrantica is that the merits of member comments are "voted on" by others in the forum, with general consensus indicated via "balloons" that accumulate next to content. "Gazza97"'s review, and his response to an unwarranted attack, hold full clutches of balloons, while his attacker's comment hold none at all. A lack of balloons should not be considered a searing indictment of one's opinion, but it gives a vague idea of where people in the forum stand on a subject. In this case, I'd hazard to say that other members felt the same way as "Gazza97" when it came to his ideas on Sauvage being "unique" and "nice."

His attacker has taken to conflating Sauvage's price with its worth, for some reason. Playboy scents, usually Berlin, are frequently mentioned in this context, with statements like "Why should I pay for Sauvage when I can get Berlin for five dollars?" floating around rather freely. My guess is he thinks Berlin smells like Sauvage, which I suppose is fair, although you should note that this is the same person who once suggested that Amouage's Memoir Man smells like Burberry Brit, so if you're interested in heeding his comparison skills, do so at your own risk! But I can't help wondering what his point is here? If you like Playboy's Berlin, fine. If you can't afford Sauvage at retail, no biggie. But these factors have absolutely nothing to do with other people liking Sauvage.

If I had to guess, I'd say that maybe the idea being "sold" here is this: pricy designer scents like Sauvage are being undermined by inexpensive drugstore scents like Playboy Berlin because of vast price differences, without commensurate differences in quality. That is, Sauvage and Berlin's quality are almost entirely on par, while their prices are wildly different. There is some merit to this argument, if it is indeed the argument being made. (Because of how poorly the main champion for this idea writes, I can't verify that this is definitely what he's saying, but it's what I've pieced together thus far.) It's fair enough, but there are also a few problems.

The main merit here is that Playboy scents are relatively high quality for their price-point, although I doubt anyone can acquire a Playboy scent for five dollars or less, contrary to what Berlin's number one spokesman constantly says. A 1.7 oz bottle of any Playboy scent retails in stores at about sixteen dollars. This isn't "expensive" by most measures, but it's hardly a "dollar store" price point. You can get things by Italian-imported Krizia for less on Amazon.

To be fair, you can get 1.7 oz bottles of Playboy scents on Amazon for about ten dollars without shipping included, maybe nine if you trust the more obscure sellers. I haven't seen any deals for the brand at under six dollars, and don't know why anyone would suggest Playboy scents can be had for five dollars or less. Usually merchants asking under ten dollars want at least six dollars for shipping, so these tend to be pointless purchases in my opinion. Show me a five dollar Playboy scent (shipping included) and I'm in! I suspect this deal does not and never did exist, and is a product of a certain someone's imagination, being conveniently used to support whatever the position of the day is. When I make certain surprising purchases, I post pictures of my receipts to prove the prices I paid exist. So far the troll hasn't posted any of his receipts, and I simply don't believe him when he talks about "five dollar or less Playboy scents."

But I digress - yes, if you like inexpensive fragrances, and respect the Playboy brand (i.e., you're not turned off by its being a soft-core porn name), Playboy's Berlin is probably a good purchase. I've never tried it, and can't vouch for it personally, but I don't doubt that it's a decent scent, especially for the money. I happen to have VIP in my collection, and it's a very nice little wetshaver fern with a slight gourmand aspect to it, and its quality is solidly "good." It was well worth the sixteen or so bucks I paid for it.

One could also argue that the aroma chemicals used in pricy designer scents like Sauvage are also being used to varying degrees in things like Berlin. This is a fair assessment, although it's hardly enlightening. It's like saying dihydromyrcenol is used in both Green Irish Tweed and Cool Water. Wow, you don't say?

That's where the merits stop, in my opinion. The logic gets shakier when I start to consider what is actually being argued here: that for some people, owning and wearing "five dollar" Playboy scents like Berlin make owning and wearing eighty-five dollar scents like Sauvage pointless. Why, exactly, would that be? Playboy scents smell much "cheaper" at a distance than more expensive designer scents by YSL, Chanel, and Dior in my collection, and my bottle of VIP is nowhere near as complex as my bottles of Antaeus and Bleu de Chanel, for example. The "quality" test for these things isn't hard to conduct. "Cheaper" often relates to lower concentration of scent by volume, so you'll smell a relatively close degree of complexity between Playboy and designer for the first ten minutes, and then the budget differences rapidly come to light.

Also, Sauvage is unique in that it gets compared to dozens of other fragrances all the time, yet really only smells like itself - not unlike Bleu de Chanel. Does this make Sauvage "great?" No, but it makes it unique. Few fragrances in recent memory have caused men and women to speculate so wildly about its comparatives. Few have managed to generate such heated discussion, for that matter.

Likewise, Sauvage's quality is at least close to where it should be, if not a bit above average. My experience with it yielded a surprisingly clear and durable bergamot note, absolutely no "marine" or "aquatic" elements (which at this point I consider trite), and a distinct (if unexciting) woody-amber base that at least was not "cheap." It registers as a Dior-funded suede leather scent to my nose. I certainly don't consider Sauvage anything great, and my personal feelings for it are pretty limited in that regard, as it's not something I seek to buy and wear. But I'm not confused by the enthusiasm it generates in others. I understand their view. It's a very good fragrance, rather "safe" in the same way that Bleu de Chanel is, and it smells clearly of a few things, so it's not like the scent is overly "abstract" or difficult to rate.

If you want to wear Sauvage, you buy it and wear it. You can't reliably look to the comparisons made by other people and use them as a substitute for Sauvage, because thus far no consensus has been reached as to which scent is closest to Sauvage. This isn't Paco Rabanne's One Million. This isn't Le Male. This isn't Allure Homme. This is a fragrance that has created some "camps" of people who feel certain things smell closer than others, and there are certainly some comparatives that are more accurate than others, but ultimately Dior has sired something that raises more lineage questions than it answers.

With this taken into account, what's the point of suggesting that anything else is a spoiler here? If anything, Sauvage should be generating discussions about how nothing is an apt substitute for it!

People also get hung up on specific aroma chemicals, as if they could ever identify these chemicals in isolated blind tests. When Terre d'Hermes was popular, Iso E was inexplicably the "bad chemical," despite its being one of the gentlest materials in the organ. Now with Sauvage, everyone is suddenly down on Ambroxan. They weren't down on Ambroxan when it was used in Green Irish Tweed, and at least with GIT it's been confirmed by people like Luca Turin that the material is present. Having worn Sauvage, the last thing I worried about was that it contained Ambroxan.

Fragrantica member "Josh839" responded to the troll with his own thoughts, which I think sum up the true nature of both arguments pretty well:

"@Bigsly: I respect your point of view about variety and price. My budget for fragrances is not unlimited either. I have read some of your reviews that I have truly appreciated. It shows clearly that you are an experienced amateur . . . Sauvage is commercial? Yes! But 'commercial' is not synonymous with 'cheap' or devoid of creative content . . . "

"Creative content" is a term that some folks openly deride, as if perfumers' intentions in the creation of perfumes are irrelevant. That's hard to fathom, because they're the only things that are relevant. I'll write more about that another time, but I'll finish here by saying that any hypothetical five dollar fragrance, if held against an existing eighty-five dollar fragrance for comparison, ought to achieve the same level of popular enthusiasm if it's to be considered a genuine comparative. Thus far, for reasons that are not a mystery to me, things like Playboy's Berlin are simply "scents other than Sauvage." And if you don't want to spend the money on Sauvage, and don't want to wear Sauvage, by all means, don't!

It's helpful to understand though that this means you don't want to smell like Sauvage. It means that you want to smell like whatever you've chosen to wear instead. Any argument that places one scent over the other in the context of price conjures an "apples and oranges" scenario that isn't worth exploring. So I ask you, can we finally bring this ridiculous show to a close? If you like Sauvage, and you can afford it, buy it, wear it, enjoy it. More power to you.

If you don't like Sauvage, and your reasons range from the practical (it's too expensive), to the pedantic (too much Ambroxan), fine, but do we really need to keep talking about it? Enough already. Dior created and issued Sauvage. Some people like it, and others don't. The world continues to turn. Call me crazy if you must, but I think this discussion has gone far enough.

Update 6/21/16: Apparently the troll was incensed by my article, and he wrote up a rambling blog post that addresses yet another Fragrantica review of Sauvage. He seems to ponder not whether it bears any accuracy for others, but whether it accounts for (drumroll please) price differences between Sauvage and other fragrances.

"The reviewer seems to think it is good for garnering compliments, but that it is repulsive if smelled close up on the skin, though this is true of a large number of scents, so the question is, why spend $90 or thereabouts on it when there are other options? For example, a three ounce bottle of Cuba Prestige (which is similar to A*Men but without much if any of the tar note) cost me less than $10 total., and it has excellent performance! Wouldn’t such a scent garner compliments too?"

You could say the same of Animale Animale for men, which is similar to A*Men without the tar, and 100 ml can be had for less than twenty dollars. By why in the name of Grace would I even bring up an A*Men comparative when discussing Sauvage? And how does the fact that an $85 designer fragrance costs more than cheaper "off-brand" fragrances mean anything in particular here?

He really "goes down the rabbit hole" in his next paragraph:

"There seems to be an interesting psycho-social element to the 'Sauvage debate,' and so that’s why I’ve spent more time on a scent that I have no interest in wearing than on many others (that probably deserve more attention). It seems to function like this; someone tries Sauvage after reading a bunch of bad reviews, then says to himself, 'it’s not that bad, and I did get a compliment, so there must be a group of irrational haters out there!' Then he goes on a site like Fragrantica and makes such points in the review section, totally ignoring some of the points made, such as what I’ve said about there being thousands of other scents to choose from at lower prices! . . . Obviously, there is no other scent exactly like Sauvage, but that can be said of nearly every scent on the market too!"

Try to figure on what is being said here, if you can: because people are ignoring this person, and claiming that Sauvage is garnering compliments (and craziest of things, smelling good), they are falsely identifying "haters" who think what he thinks, whatever that is. This is followed by the grossly inaccurate statement about there being countless fragrances with no exact comparatives.

Of course there are very few fragrances out there that smell exactly like something else. But that's not what was being argued by anyone - certainly not me! What has been clearly stated here is that Sauvage is exceptional because it has no comparatives at all. No one comparative can be gleaned with any accuracy from the majority of preexisting perfumes. At least with many other designer fragrances, you can point to something else that smells similar. Le Male has dozens of comparatives, Perry Ellis 360 White among them. Drakkar Noir has so many comparatives that it has become its own genre of fragrance. Allure Homme has things like Joop! Jump and at least a half dozen other similar fragrances to match it.

But Sauvage, thus far, has little to no accurate comparative. So to argue that "every scent on the market" lacks an "exact" twin is beside the point. We're talking about things that are "similar," not "exact."

Well, I'm talking about that, anyway. To round it all off, we get back to the "unhinged" nature of this person's thinking:

"Getting back to the review, I don’t understand why someone would think that $90 for 100 ml of such a scent is 'the going rate.' How could someone not know about ebay, discounters, and the fact that a large number of new scents are put on the market each year?"

This suggests that Dior Sauvage enthusiasts are possibly unaware of the existence of eBay, discount grey market sites, and the ever-rising tide of new perfumes that flood our shores each season, which is not a very realistic comment, in my opinion. But he continues to be hung up on price, price, price. He thinks it's absurd that anyone would accept Dior's asking price for Sauvage, at what he contends is $90 (I've seen it for $85 here in Connecticut, and can't comment on the rate elsewhere).

Eighty-five to ninety dollars for Sauvage is Dior's retail price for 100 ml, as far as I know. This is what Dior wants for it. Since you can get older Dior fragrances on Amazon for a bit less than retail (occasionally), one might be better off waiting a year or two to see if that happens. You could always hop onto eBay and see if someone is hawking their partially-used bottle on there for less than retail, but if so, they'd be taking a loss, which should raise red flags for any buyer. As for the grey market, you can hope to find things by Chanel and Dior on random sites for good prices, but you enter into the realm of counterfeit risk, particularly with these two brands. This is how they're able to maintain their retail department store rates without much competition.

It seems to me that any seasoned perfume enthusiast knows these things without having to go over them. They are the reason the current sticker price for Sauvage is the "going rate." If I want something else that smells nothing like Sauvage, and it only costs ten or fifteen dollars, so be it, but that does little to undermine Dior's asking price.

I really don't know what else to say. I'll leave you with one last entertaining "histrionic" from our friend, who apparently takes umbrage at being called a "troll":

"Some people seem to think they can call people 'trolls' because they state an opinion the person doesn’t like. This often appears to be a substitute for 'hater,' perhaps because the person realizes how silly the hater claim is when it involves someone stating an opinion about an olfactory concoction (and the supposed hater isn’t even saying anything hateful!). In fact, to know for sure if someone is trolling one would have to be a mind reader, and I’d guess that if Socrates were alive today many would call him a troll for saying the same kinds of things he said in ancient Greece!"

Ouch. You'd think he'd have the decency to leave poor Socrates out of this.

Further Update: At this point it's a dead horse being flogged to the bone, but there was this humorous anecdote added to the blog post in question:

"I am confident in my opinions, though I’m certainly not always correct, but what’s interesting to me is that some people seem to want to argue what one might call 'semi-facts' . . . I’m simply pointing some things out, which are either undeniably facts or probably should be regarded as such ('semi-facts')."

Semi-facts? Good grief.

Witness (Jacques Bogart)

"Another View Of The World"

Stylistically, Witness is an embodiment of early nineties poise, a complex structure replete with evergreen balsams, lavender aromatics, and a crisp cedar base. It bears similarities to Aubusson Pour Homme and Balenciaga Pour Homme, but unlike its congeners, which celebrate artful contrasts between green and musky notes, Bogart eschews pungent musks, favoring instead a more staid arrangement of cinnamon, fir, incense, and woods. The result is something that lacks animalism, and smells much darker and drier than expected, but is nonetheless quite good.

The nose for this scent is Dominique Preyssas, who according to Fragrantica authored Jaguar for Men, an aromatic fougère that preceded Witness by four years. I've heard that Thierry Wasser co-authored Witness, but can't confirm it, though the wonderful Art Deco bottle design is credited to Joel Desgrippes, the genius designer for Revillon's French Line and Kenzo's Jungle, both packaging masterpieces. It's interesting that the color scheme for Witness' bottle is identical to Aubusson's, and I wonder if Desgrippes did both. My personal feelings for Witness (the perfume) echo those for Balenciaga and Aubusson, and I'm certain that Bogart's interpretation of this theme is the most "oriental," and also the most "mature." The key is the incense.

Witness' mossy cedar base isn't far removed from that of Krizia Uomo, but a haze of cool, smoky incense focuses my nose on the lushness surrounding it. Gentle nuances of old-school lavender, basil, artemisia, geranium, sandalwood, and jasmine are lifted by quiet aldehydes, lending charm to what could have been a woefully dated formula. The blend is subtle and a bit sweet, the ingredient quality is high, and the balance between spice, greens, and woody amber is flawless. As with Aubusson, I briefly get an abstract apple pie effect in the first minute of Witness, but once the cinnamon segues into artemisia, the gourmand impression goes with it.

If (and only if) you enjoy this style of fragrance, Witness is something you should add to your collection. It's vintage Bogart, and thus is stylistically superlative and very well made. I have yet to encounter anything less by this brand. One should note that it's a bit of an acquired taste; nectarous accents are woven into heady classical accords in a manner that might, if you are unfamiliar with this approach, seem too unconventional and "out there." It may be difficult to determine the appropriate occasion for Witness.

To me, this sort of thing is good for casual Fridays at work, and weekend nights out on the town. It may not be suitable for black-tie dinner parties or first dates, but it's perfect for deal-closing phone conferences and gallery art shows, pairing well with wool sport coats and Chardonnay-fueled conversations about touch and form.

The Peculiar Reviews Of Vermeil For Men

Burning Questions

There's an unusual little trend in the ever-growing community of fragrance reviewers, and I thought I'd share my thoughts about it here. It seems that recent reviews for Vermeil's signature masculine all have something in common: they suggest the fragrance lacks a tobacco note. They are in stark contrast to earlier comments about this scent, most of which acknowledge a distinct tobacco note in the composition. I attribute these differences of opinion to a social trend in how people perceive certain fragrances, with another example found in a thread about Zino.

You can see in the thread that there are divergent opinions about the reformulation of Zino, with a few members claiming to smell no change in the scent, while others complain about extremely noticeable changes. Both parties acknowledge that the packaging of the formula in question is the same, but disagree on the fragrance itself. What makes for interesting discussion is how firmly both parties believe what they're saying. The participants feel their experiences are only relatable as self-evident truths.

With Vermeil for Men, the issue is a bit more vague, and raises a few more questions. First, let me quote the following reviews from Fragrantica members "Ray Achnioach," "Spankrabbit," and "Chicago Tony T," respectively, and please bear in mind that the original Davidoff scent is what Vermeil is usually compared to in the blogosphere:

"While this is supposed to be a 'tobacco' scent, the bottle looking like a classic lighter, I don't notice anything tobacco like here. It certainly isn't at all like the 'Cuba' type frags . . . It starts off just very 'perfumy' in a nice way but dries down to a balanced bittersweet, floral, herby scent."

"I didn't get any tobacco from this at all. Has this really been reformulated or is the bottle design making us think tobacco is a note? . . . What I do get is a lighter version of Salvador Dali Pour Homme with just a little more sweetness in the opening. The middle floral notes and the patchouli, sandalwood dry down are almost identical . . . but Vermeil Pour Homme isn't as heavy and the berry notes in the opening burn off quickly. Not a bad scent but you have to love patchouli to appreciate this one."

"There is a bunch of notes going on here. Tobacco is not one of them. I don't know which version I have but it's more floral than anything. Also some earthiness due to the [patchouli] and vetiver."

With these sentiments in mind, I turn your attention to these reviews by "Omar.melmo," "Rerik," and "NobleRoman," respectively:

"For the price, the natural rendition of tobacco and the [brilliance] of the composition are really stunning! . . . what I get is soft tobacco and flowers."

"Vermeil is a soft, sweet tobacco scent."

"[Vermeil for Men] is a semi-sweet tobacco scent with 7 hr longevity and medium projection. Linear, but I like it. I've read it has been discontinued, so if you enjoy tobacco scents, get it while you can."

In the "Vermeil Has No Tobacco" camp, three guys say they don't smell tobacco, and attempt to elaborate on what they smell instead. Ray Achnioach's description is pretty vague, but says he smells something "bittersweet, floral, herby." "Spankrabbit" says he smells a lighter Dali PH in Vermeil. I guess this means he isn't identifying similarities to the original Davidoff, or perhaps he hasn't smelled the Davidoff, since Dali PH is rarely compared to Davidoff, if at all. He also detects patchouli and sandalwood, which is interesting. "Chicago Tony T" mentions that he smells vetiver, but says nothing about sandalwood. Only one person out of the three uses the unusual (and inaccurate) descriptor of "herby," a word I would sooner associate with ferns like Aramis Tuscany and Francesco Smalto PH, or certain types of "fresh" scents, like L'Eau Bleue d'Issey and Agua Brava, but not with something as dry and musky as Vermeil.

These guys all agree that they smell no tobacco in Vermeil. What they'd have a harder time agreeing on are the notes they do smell.

"Spankrabbit" thinks patchouli is what "you have to love" to wear Vermeil. But "Chicago Tony T" thinks it's "more floral than anything." Also strange is how "Spankrabbit" likens Vermeil to Dali. So is this just a case of "Spankrabbit" not knowing what he's talking about? If I read through, do I believe the Davidoff comparisons (having never smelled the Davidoff myself), or put stock into the Dali comparison (a scent I own)? Is it possible that Dali PH and Davidoff are similar in some way?

To me, these confusing descriptions are indicative of amateur noses. There's no shame in being an amateur nose. I'm an amateur nose. As far as perfumery goes, Luca Turin and Chandler Burr are amateur noses. Few of us who write about perfume actually make a living as perfumers, so the default setting here is decidedly that of "amateur." However, there are degrees of amateurism.

There are floral facets to Vermeil, although they're "compressed," and don't jump out at me as smelling green. I can't smell this scent and say, "Yes, there's the rose, there's the jasmine." These notes aren't separable in the blend. However, I detect clear floral accents in the woody-aromatic thrust of the overall composition. There are certainly deft suggestions of floral materials in Vermeil's drydown.

I'd also agree that there are strong musky elements, which I think are over-blended and nondescript. Dali is also quite musky. I'd say there's a very loose, threadbare similarity between them in this regard, but wouldn't suggest Vermeil is a "lighter" Dali PH. I don't think they're close at all. Vintage Dali PH is intensely musky and woody, a very dark, austere composition. It's difficult to wear, and feels dated.

Vermeil is also musky and woody, but it's much smoother, more inviting, a bit fruity, somewhat floral, and yeah, there's a definite tobacco vibe. Stylistically, it's a fragrance from the early nineties, but the subtle interplay of semi sweet fruits and bitter tobacco give it a timeless feel. Dali PH isn't fruity, and its wood notes are so burly and saturnine in nature that tobacco, if there, would be superfluous. To my knowledge, few if any reviewers mention tobacco in Dali PH. Not many mention any fruit at all in Dali, not even citrus, so that's also a non-starter.

I don't smell vetiver in Vermeil, and don't know why anyone would mention it. Perhaps there's a touch of Iso E in the mix, but I'd connect that to the cedar note in Vermeil's heart. It's a robust note, and maybe it smells darker and "rootier" on "Chicago Tony T," but I can't verify that. Then again, maybe there is vetiver, and I just don't smell it. Only one person makes note of it. It doesn't seem to jump out at anyone else. I think it got one vote in the Fragrantica pyramid. It's ranked pretty low on there, so I suppose this isn't a big deal, but it rounds out these disconcerting perceptions.

If we turn to the "Vermeil Is A Tobacco Frag" camp, there's a big difference in how the opinions are stated. They're clearly the impressions of amateurs, but these amateurs are not as ambitious as their counterparts. They're not trying as hard to impress the reader. They've kept it simple. There's continuity. There's a shared language. These three guys smell Vermeil as being "soft," and "sweet," and all detect tobacco. There's very little in the way of divergent remarks. You could draw a fairly straight line to connect these reviews, while the other camp is all over the map.

I wish I could sit down with the "tobacco doubters." I would have each of them sample Cigarillo by Rémy Latour. It's similar to Vermeil. Cigarillo is what they're describing when they cite a supposed tobacco frag with no tobacco. I suspect there's a very faint tobacco note beneath Cigarillo's musky fruits and dessicated woods, and I smell this element clearly for a few minutes, but if you put a gun to my head, I'd say Cigarillo is true to its packaging copy, and really just a woody cedar frag, with no emphasis on tobacco at any stage of its development.

I would then pass along my bottle of Vermeil - my bottle, as this is what I've been going on - and see if they can smell the biggest difference between it and Latour's scent. Both are conceptual fragrances. I've grown to think of them as being niche fragrances, actually. They appeal to a small subset of men who enjoy inexpensive tobacco scents, and are the kind of frags that highlight sweet, "treated" tobaccos, which are found in certain types of cigars. Both have highly suggestive packaging, and this aspect of the perfume "experience" is done beautifully with these two. Cigarillo is a masterpiece, and Vermeil is good fun to look at.

If these guys were to tell me that they still don't smell tobacco in Vermeil, even after smelling a similar frag that really doesn't have much (if any) tobacco, I'd focus on how they're smelling it. Are they burying their noses in their arms? Are they doing quick, close passes with their noses, where they're inhaling audibly, and then jerking their heads back? Or are they relaxing and "wafting" the scent up to their noses? Are they not doing anything, and simply letting the air carry the scent?

If they're burying their noses where they sprayed, that would explain why they're not smelling a tobacco note in Vermeil. You can't really "dig in" with this kind of scent. It's conceptual. The overall vibe has to come through, and one must allow that to happen on its own time. You could argue that there's no actual separable tobacco note, but Vermeil's fruits are a bit too dry, its "florals" too wilted and sour, and its wood notes smell somewhat burnt. To me, these three qualities create a tobacco reconstruction. Because the drydown arc is tight, almost linear, and each effect is experienced as one, they meld into a tobacco essence, and I smell it consistently with each wearing.

Just as I can't pinpoint a singular floral note, I can't find where, exactly, the tobacco resides. Still, I smell smoke. It pervades the experience of wearing Vermeil, filtering through its formulaic masculine elements, and imbuing them with a uniqueness and quality that you would never expect in something that costs five dollars per ounce.

Cigarillo, in contrast, simply smells like a bunch of non-tobacco notes that may have a very, very light (and singular) tobacco note accenting them for a few minutes, before disappearing. Latour's scent is accurately advertised as a "woody" experience.

In closing, I think the pattern in these reviews revolves around there being a common note that reviewers say they "can't smell," followed by a laundry list of other things they smell instead. It's problematic, as these "other things" rarely align across the different reviews. Meanwhile, those who buy into the concept generally agree on what they smell (tobacco), and how they smell it (softy). Sure, the packaging might plant the impression in our brains beforehand, and the power of suggestion might be overwhelming here. But what if Vermeil for Men really does have at least a detectable essence of smoky tobacco in it? If some reliably smell it, do they cancel out the impressions of those who don't? Or is every opinion equally valid here?

If you're interested in Vermeil for Men, and base your blind buys on internet reviews, these questions are food for thought.

"Niche" Is A Broken Concept. How To Fix It? Start By Ignoring Michael Edwards.

Milan

This year at Esxence, the Milan-based fragrance industry trade show, Michael Edwards gave his annual talk on the recent explosion of niche brands and perfumes, which by his account is almost too difficult to keep up with. He said that he catalogues perfumes because "all brands have their own language," which results in "a cacophony" that consumers are often confused by. He pointed out that among fragrance types, "shared," or unisex perfumes have risen from 17% of the market in 2006 to 37% in 2015, which is a staggering statistic. The "artisanal" fragrance industry has seen the number of perfumes quadruple in the last nine years, from 261 in '06, to 874 last year. This is mind blowing.

This explosive growth has resulted in "a generation of orphans," according to Edwards, with niche brands moving so quickly that they're passing their own creations by in the process. When executives push new products this rapidly, they unintentionally dilute their brands by intimidating consumers, many of whom refrain from making purchases. Buyers simply move on until they encounter a more accessible, user-friendly brand, presumably with fewer perfumes, or perfumes representing more mainstream ideas. This steady stream of "newness" in perfumery is a negative, in his eyes. Releasing a dozen perfumes within twelve or eighteen months does not denote quality, nor does it make buyers feel comfortable investing in a brand. Furthering the problem is that only 20% of American consumers wear perfume, meaning a huge swath of the market is untapped.

Edwards suggested that brands look to a future of aligning perfume with everyday products, like clothing and other accessories, a suggestion that frankly made little sense to me. I have no interest in buying a pre-perfumed shirt, for example. I have something for that already. It's called perfume. Edwards also suggested that niche brands focus on flankers, instead of new perfumes. He pointed to J'Adore and its countless flankers, claiming they focus consumers on one Dior perfume, which thus lends the Dior brand a more coherent identity. That Dior's designer identity drives consumer interest in J'Adore seemed irrelevant to Edwards. Also, he said that niche brands usually use one bottle design for all their fragrances because "niche is an experience," and by focusing on scent alone and not packaging, buyers are getting the full "experience." He added that niche houses shouldn't market test anything, and should ignore marketing altogether. I'll touch on these points again a little later.

The most confusing thing he dwelled on was his contention that Giorgio, the original feminine by Giorgio Beverly Hills, was the first successful niche perfume. His facts are simply wrong there. Had I been in the audience, I would have called him out on that, and he would have argued with me in his irritating high-born accent (probably with an "I'm talking"), and I'd have insisted that, despite his best intentions, he's simply fucking wrong on that one. Giorgio Beverly Hills has always been a designer label, and their debut perfume was simply an underdog designer product that happened to catch on with savvy GBH customers. To call it niche is dumb, especially for Edwards. If anything, Tea Rose by The Perfumer's Workshop was the first successful niche fragrance, and it was released four years before Giorgio.

His suggestions that perfume be mated to products, that flankers are good, and that Giorgio was the first true niche phenomenon gave me pause in considering Edwards a credible authority on the subject. He carries himself as an authority, and he's certainly an invaluable part of perfume history, as both a fragrance historian and perfume evaluator, but at 72 years old, I wonder if he's past his prime, maybe even a little out of touch with the reality on the ground. The malls of New Jersey are worlds away from those of Milan, and I'll bet John F. Kennedy was in office the last time Edwards shopped in Hoboken. Still, it was interesting to hear him speak about this subject, and it led me to consider my own views on niche perfumery, and what I consider to be the main problem with niche.

First, let's remember what the word "niche" alludes to in this context. A "niche" in perfumery is a tiny corner of the market that is meant to appeal to an equally tiny corner of the consumer base, usually by appealing to a subset of people who seek a very specific experience. That's what makes Tea Rose so compelling as the "first" super successful niche frag. The Perfumer's Workshop was a relatively small, obscure company in 1977. They specialized in simple compositions that could be blended by buyers into whatever they wished. Tea Rose was intended to appeal to people who love the smell of fresh tea roses. It was a composition, not an oil. The perfumer behind it was a woman named Annie Buzantian, and her work appealed to a new generation of buyers, those coming of age in the late seventies and eighties. The mark of Tea Rose is that it took its brand global, which is essentially the only way niche companies find real success.

Designer perfumes embody the opposite effect; they are successful only after the designer becomes known, and designers specialize in clothing, not perfume. Giorgio Beverly Hills became an attractive new company to California fashionistas, with Fred Hayman's aesthetic gaining traction in fashion circles across Los Angeles. Eventually this visibility made his brand's first perfume a viable commercial effort, and after some struggle it paid off. But Giorgio appeals to millions of people. It has been available at department stores and discounters for decades. It has mass appeal, and always had mass appeal, especially in the bombastic eighties.

With this understanding of the difference between niche and designer, I must direct your attention to the paradoxical nature of a "successful" niche. For a niche fragrance to become "successful" means that it becomes a big seller. This in turn means that people outside the intended target demographic are buying the fragrance. When a niche fragrance is suddenly sought after by millions of buyers around the world, it is no longer by definition a "niche" fragrance. It's now a brand representative, much like Tea Rose is the flagship for The Perfumer's Workshop. Although TPW lacks a real follow-up for Ms. Buzantian's masterpiece, other niche brands are able to capitalize on the successes of one or two frags. Eventually, with enough exposure and cultural integration, a perfume that was originally created with less than 1% of the buying public in mind can make a fragrance company a household name.

This leads me to the state of the market today. Look at all these fucking niche perfumes. I look at The Different Company, and what do I see? I see a name (The "Different" Company), and about thirty bottles that all look the same, but have different names printed on them. I'm not getting a sense of difference, certainly no differentiation, in a range with "different" on its labels. And all I have to go on is whatever copy the company uses to describe each product. Maybe I have a few reviews on Fragrantica and basenotes. I certainly don't have any personal experience with the brand. So with no compelling image to attach to any one particular fragrance, and the hearsay of others, what reason could I possibly muster to buy, or even try?

The "niche is an experience" idea that Edwards touted in his presentation is the crux of the problem. A niche perfume is not an experience for anyone - not yet. In order for someone to experience a niche frag, they must be compelled to try it by something other than its scent. Its bottle is, for better or worse, the true representative of what resides inside. With their dull, uniform bottles, niche brands eschew this massive commercial ploy, one that is endlessly and advantageously exploited by designer brands. People experience perfume with their eyes first, and their noses second. It's no different with books. We initially judge them by their covers, and their contents either affirm or dispel these first impressions. Without covers, or with boring covers, books must rely on particularly inventive titles to gain any meaningful traction.

Right now, many niche houses rely on titles alone to draw buyers, and that's simply not enough. Perfumes are an experience, but part of the experience are the packages they come in. Show me why a perfume called "Adjatay" is any different from its older cousin "Oriental Lounge." I can read, so obviously that's one difference between them. But what else? Show me. They're in the same boring, colorless, rectangular glass bottle, for Christ's sakes. At a glance, I can't tell them apart on the shelf.

You can apply this issue to many other niche brands. Some have two or three stock bottle designs, which is better than having just one, but not by much. Look at Slumberhouse, Byredo, Lutens, Le Labo. Sure, there's a distinct company "look" for each, but that look merely says "we all come from the same place." If I'm a niche customer, I want something that doesn't come from the same place. That's the point of niche. I want something unique. Something specific. Something singular. Something that stands firmly and proudly alone. I want to see a bottle representative of a niche. If the bottle shouts that its contents are designed for me, and maybe a handful of others like me, then I'll be motivated to buy.

One might say, "But Bryan, obviously a brand can't tailor a bottle for you unless you're in the market for bespoke." Wrong. I'm a potential niche customer, and even though it isn't bespoke, a niche perfume should feel like it was made just for me. I love the smell of green, violet perfumes, loaded with galbanum, oakmoss, citrus, woods, and animalics. I just want a perfume that concentrates those qualities into something unwaveringly, menacingly green. The bottle doesn't have to appeal to my personal aesthetic bottle design tastes. It has to appeal to the idea that its contents smell intensely, without a shred of compromise, grrreeeeeen. But if the bottle is the same as eight or nine others, none of which contain anything that smells green, I'd have to be a bored, dawdling customer who accidentally stumbles on this unfairly closeted green monster. After all, it has nothing to outwardly differentiate itself as something green.

Does anyone suppose that Pierre Balmain made selling a green perfume that difficult for himself when his brand issued Vent Vert? Of course not. Balmain is a designer firm, and in the early twentieth century it was a highly esteemed haute couture designer label, with good commercial visibility, and the resources to release a few great perfumes. But these fragrances weren't issued in dull bottles. Vent Vert came in a beautiful bottle with green grass as a cap, tied by a cute green bow. It advertised itself as a grassy green perfume by looking like a grassy green perfume - literally. This is called "marketing," that other nasty word that Edwards stupidly denigrated in his presentation. Of all the hair-brained things to tell people who are getting into a commercial enterprise, "Don't market your product" might very well top the list.

Of course you have to market, and market aggressively. How else will your buyers know you exist? Without marketing, in a public that has thousands of choices competing with your product, and with a target demographic of maybe 1% of potential buyers, it's like trying to lance a flea by throwing a sewing pin at it. Good marketing switches the odds. If thousands of buyers become aware that one perfume is out there, one that might be appealing to them, you go from hurling a sewing pin to driving a Buick at eighty mph. I happen to drive a Buick. Every time I get home, I have to scrape dozens of dead insects off the grill. Like a good ad campaign, I'm hitting things that I had a one in a million chance of hitting, and hitting them again, and again, and again.

Sure, it's counterintuitive. But it works. Creed does it, and they do it ingeniously, by spreading fabulous lies about products housed in customized bottles (Himalaya looks distinctly different than Spring Flower, which looks different than Aventus, etc.), which are then slyly pushed in fashion magazines and general-interest internet publications. What would Creed be if they rested on the supposed laurels of "niche is an experience," with every bottle a dull, colorless clunk of square glass? They'd probably be almost as successful and sought-after as The Different Company's products. If I had to guess, I'd say Erwin doesn't envy Jean-Claude Ellena, Thierry de Baschmakoff, and Luc Gabriel. Their glory is split three ways; Erwin's, once his father goes, will be all his own, to the tune of about a hundred million dollars in annual sales.

To sum it all up, let me say that this blog post is not meant to impugn Michael Edwards' many contributions to our culture. The man has created a directory, an in-depth database of virtually every serious perfume in existence, and that is no small feat. But when it comes to following advice, if you're in the business of starting a niche perfumery, I suggest you ignore the wisdom of Mr. Edwards. His suggestions are in no way advantageous to heed.

The future of a "better" niche fragrance industry must see perfumers, bottle designers, marketers, and brand executives refocusing perfume lines on every conceivable niche audience, with improved aesthetics and marketing strategies pulling customers into boutiques. The distance between niche perfumes and customers' wrists is bridged by wedding company creations with the ever-changing nature of the public's imagination.

Who Pays Over $50 For This? (Hint: Nobody.)

Worth waiting for.

In recent months, Perry Ellis has been attracting unwarranted attention for one of their "luxe" fragrances, a little thing called Oud Black Vanilla Absolute. This thread wonders where one can acquire a bottle, as it's been impossible to find lately, while this one celebrates its temporary return to stock. Meanwhile, most people have never heard of this fragrance, not because Perry Ellis has poor visibility among consumers, but because their "luxe" frags are oxymoronic products with a more limited distribution than their usual bargain-basement fare.

I'm not saying OBVA isn't worth the extra money (it's not insanely priced at seventeen dollars an ounce), nor am I suggesting that wanting this fragrance is in any way absurd or foolish. I'm sure it's a decent fragrance. However, I have to point out a phenomenon that I've seen many times before. This fragrance garnered little to no attention prior to its disappearance from merchant sites. Yet within a few days of its disappearance, people were pining for it. It returned to Beautyspin this week, and within 48 hours it sold out again. It was priced at $50.89. Prices on eBay are currently in the $90 to $200 range. This is insanity.

This is also the definition of "hype" in the fragrance world. We saw this with Red for Men eight years ago when it was unavailable and "discontinued". Bottles of vintage Red were going for anywhere from $150 to $300 on eBay. Then it was reissued at five dollars an ounce, and suddenly those inflated internet prices plummeted. Today you can get a 1.7 oz vintage on eBay for $30. And then there was Claiborne Sport, which was usually found at discounters for ten to twelve dollars for 3.4 ounces. It was briefly unavailable a year ago, and Amazon/eBay prices shot up to $100 a bottle. It suddenly returned to shelves at its original price point, and those inflated prices vanished.

Now with Perry Ellis we see the exact same phenomenon. The problem with OBVA is that it's a Perry Ellis fragrance. Quality-wise, this brand might, when standing on its tippy-toes, brush the Chanel Allure line, and just barely at that. PE has never been a very good brand. Its 360 line is generally forgettable sneaker juice. Its signature frags are highly synthetic. There's just nothing "luxe" about Ellis, which is why I said their perfume line is oxymoronic in nature. Yet people have subscribed to the notion that this particular fragrance is worth these prices. Why? And why now?

There's little doubt that basenotes fuels these strange moments. Conversations in its forums often creates the illusion of quality. People are looking for a fragrance. Therefore, it must be excellent. But if it's so good, why aren't more experienced senior members raving about it? Is demand really high for this stuff? If so, why hasn't PE jacked up the price per bottle? It was gone for months, and then it returns at the same price it was going for before. Perhaps this was just a random palette of bottles leftover from the first release of OBVA, and PE hasn't actually reissued it, which might explain why prices remained static, but still. Beautyspin could have raised the cost on their end by as much as they wished. They didn't.

The other thing I've noticed is that people are usually only interested in something like this when it becomes unavailable. If OBVA were always available, there wouldn't be this sort of hysteria over it. But because it's hard to find, guys want it. It's about supply and demand, but instead of demand overtaking supply and making something scarce and more expensive, demand becomes high only after supply has gradually dwindled, and non-auction merchant prices remain unchanged. Welcome to the twilight zone.

But bottles have always been available at auction. I used to think that eBay was where people went to get the stuff they couldn't get elsewhere. Yet basenoters are "waiting" for OBVA to reappear on Beautyspin, and largely eschewing those wildly-inflated bottles on eBay. They'd rather just pay $50 for it, and they're willing to wait a few months to do so. Ebay prices have gone down, too. It can be had for $150 and less. People weren't sustaining those $200+ prices we were seeing back in January, or we'd still be seeing bottles moving around within that price range, or even over it.

Back then, as chronicled in the "Perry Ellis OBVA Now Selling For $300" thread, the inflated prices were fishy. It was noted that certain eBay accounts were repeatedly bidding up various bottles, which vaguely supported my longstanding theory that such prices represent a vacuum of interest between merchants that never actually connects with the general public, i.e., buyers that want to wear an item, not just buy and resell it. Having read through the thread in its entirety, I'm astonished by how difficult it was for people to answer the simple question as to just who, exactly, pays more for something like this. Despite the question being posed by a couple of members, the entire thread consisted of responses that failed to coherently connect the logic of paying $300 (or even $120) for something that days ago was available for a mere $50.

The fact that nobody could answer the question speaks volumes. The members defending the idea of OBVA at $120 - $300 all said that they would never buy it at that price, but could understand why others might. This makes no sense. One guy, a member who appears to enjoy a minimalist view of capitalism, stated that something is "worth whatever someone will pay for it." Perhaps, but in this case, who is "someone?" Based on these threads, I think "someone" is whoever requests "availability alerts" on Beautyspin so they can pay Beautyspin's price for OBVA. It's clear that buyers are more interested in keeping OBVA's price where Beautyspin has it, rather than where anonymous eBay merchants have it.

One member compared it to paying retail for Tom Ford fragrances, which makes no sense at all. Another compared it to "good deals" for discontinued Stetson Country and vintage Escada, suggesting the market isn't generally unreasonable, and only the occasional scent gets absurdly priced, which are moot points. (Stetson Country wasn't popular, and I've yet to see reasonable Escada prices.) Some suggested it's a factor for people with "discretionary income" to consider, which is as broad and meaningless a point as one can make. Nobody could make a convincing case for spending any more than $50.89 for OBVA.

Remember, when people buy Perry Ellis on Beautyspin, they're already paying grey market prices for it. In the grey market, prices fall. They don't rise. That's the point of the grey market. Internet sales of OBVA are all grey market. You can see for yourself that many basenotes members don't realize this. It's this fact alone that nullifies the assertion that buyers really "set the price" for something like this. The price is always driven by market utility first, with concern for subjective value a distant second.

This is the latest case of newbies basing a fragrance's value on its availability, rather than on what they know about the actual fragrance itself. And I believe most of the basenotes members who want this fragrance and missed out on it the first and second time will wait for the next time it's available on Beautyspin to buy it.

Update: One of the basenotes members, on his blog, attempted to answer the question posed in the title of this post with the following:

"Two people did recently, about $100 total per bottle (see ebay item number 381628715126). Presumably, this was prior to the temporary restocking, but it’s out of stock again, and people spend money on all kinds of 'frivolous' things every moment of the day . . ."

I would like to point out that if you search that eBay item number, you merely find a current listing, (even when you check "sold items"), with no evidence of the item actually having been sold for $100. When you click on the seller and review his feedback on items sold, you can see that at no point did he sell OBVA for that amount. Sloppy investigative blogging on his part? I'll let you decide. People may make frivolous purchases all the time, but not for this fragrance.

I want to thank the blogger for continuing to provide clear-cut examples of why eBay fragrance sales should sometimes be regarded with the utmost suspicion, and for fortifying the idea that no assumptions about their legitimacy should ever be made.