What do you get when an ancient and distinguished house of couture parfumerie belies its distinguished heritage and puts out crap? …My Insolence.. (ba-da-bump crash!) No, seriously folks, a 250-year-old perfume house, Creed, a family business handed down father to son since 1760 (1760!!!!1!!) provider of perfumes to royalty, many famous and well-loved perfumes, managed to make… a fabric softener sheet. Seriously… seriously folks, it’s a #@!%&* sheet of fabric softener! Strong generic-blah flowers, unidentifiable fruit salad, some detergenty musk soapy smell… it comes screaming at you all at once and suddenly disappears. Shoulda known by the packaging, it’s a cheezy pink bottle, fake metal cap… Classy, real classy there, Creed.

I Am King by Sean John, 2008

I realized much much later that I referenced this one in my Star Trek Scents post, but didn’t actually give a review. Much as I said about Red Shirt, this is generic to the extreme. The juice is freshclean melonwater skyblue airbreeze calibrated precisely and scientifically using only the best market research polling, PowerPointing, and seven-point-of-difference-to-avoid-lawsuits documenting available. The feats of marketing that went into its making are brilliant, precise, and laserpointer-accurate. The bankroll for this level of professionalism is impressive. It achieves what it sets out to accomplish, be perfectly poised to appeal to everyone and no one, to suit every taste, style, and function, yet be so perfect a distillation of current mens’ scents it transcends them all thru perfect ubiquity. It doesn’t achieve more thru less, it attains, finally, the sought-after, perfect state of  …meh.

Lily of the Valley by Penhaligon’s 1976

A basic lily-of-the-valley analog, lacks the soapiness some other LOTV scents. Has a light musk base, with a tiny bit of an oakmossy note added, which leans it towards a chypre scent. The musk base turns it into a masculine scent for me, although it was meant to be a feminine. Definitely not meant for a hot-young-thing in a party dress, this is a mature feminine scent, or a good masculine for a dapper dressing man.

by Geoffrey Beene, 1976

Lavender & mothballs. Violet leaf & oakmoss. Astringent. It’s a theme that’s been done to death in men’s colognes and aftershaves. Some consider this classic combo of scents to be comforting, a reminder of paternal figures in their lives, and it does say “quintessential classic masculine”, but it’s also acrid, sharp, and constantly on the edge of setting off my nasal allergies. As classic a combo as it may be, oakmoss mixed with lavender does a disservice to the oakmoss, and is practically a waste of a substance that’s already endangered in perfumery. Lavender is notably tricky to work with, being so camphoraceous and strong, so making it the center of a composition, instead of a supporting character in miniscule quantities, automatically means the star of the show will be LAVENDER! (–and some other players hanging around– don’t mind us…) If you’re feeling creative and trying to find a nominally novel way of presenting lavender, go right ahead, knock yerself out! I bet you won’t succeed. Lavender-centric scents have been a staple of perfumery since, well, lavender was discovered, and mixed with absolutely everything available at one time or another. And you know what they got? LAVENDER! (…and some other stuff, nothing to see here… move along, move along…) Better to stick to the well known presentations which have a track record of success. Sharp and boring as it is, you could do worse than the showcase for lavender that is Grey Flannel, much worse… you could try to formulate your own.

This is a discontinued fragrance that I was lucky enough to buy before it disappeared forever (Note: Basenotes lists it as still in production. Where?!), most likely discontinued due to supply problems. Sandalwood from India is now so rare & expensive it probably became cost-prohibitive to have a line of mere toiletries based upon it. Sandalwood from Mysore, India in particular is now extremely rare, overharvested, poached, and is now threatened. There’s sandalwood from Australia, but it smells differently, a little more astringent and lacking the fruity undercurrent that Mysore sandalwood has. There are unrelated trees called “sandalwood” whose oil is marketed as “sandalwood oil” but the scent only bears a passing resemblance to sandalwood. Also, one if the ingredients listed on the bottle is diethyl phthalate, used to denature the alcohol (no making cocktails out of your cologne!). Due to the current hysteria concerns about phthalates lately, I suppose they couldn’t bring that back, either.

Yes, Crabtree & Evelyn have a Sandalwood toilet water in production, but it’s not the same thing, believe me. The current C&E sandalwood scent is a wan, pale pretender to the throne of this magnificent original, it might even have a bit of real sandalwood (from Australia?) in it, but it’s so damn weak it’s unidentifiable. Hell, any scent in it is pretty much undetectable! I’ve sampled it twice and neither time did anything blossom from this Void of Nothingness, like it did from Kenzoair. They’re probably using some artificial sandalwood scent in the mix to save $$$$, which isn’t working. The artificial “sandalwood” scents always lack the depth of the real thing. Each chemical may capture one facet of the scent perfectly, but it’s only one facet, and very lackluster. Combine several and you may get a better approximation, but still the soul, the quintessence is missing.

But the original’s sandalwood scent is deep, mellow, and rich, and surprisingly sweet. That heavy hippie-deodorant spicy astringency sandalwood can fall into is expertly rounded with ylang-ylang and a touch of cedar and vetiver. When first applied, the top notes are a very sweet ylang-ylang, a bit of cedar, and the sandalwood slowly follows behind, blooming in about 20 minutes as the ylang wears off, then it’s smooth, polished sandalwood all the rest of the day. When my bottle was new, the sandalwood would leap out at you, pleasant and civilized, but insistently there. Now that it’s older, it’s mellowed like wine does, and makes a graceful appearance instead of announcing itself loudly. As much as I love this scent, I shouldn’t wear it on my skin, for some reason it goes sour and a little rotten on me in a few hours (perhaps the ylang aging like a gardenia?), if I apply it to my clothes it’s glorious all day.

I wore this as a teenager and into college. At the time, Giorgio, Polo, Drakkar Noir, and Aspen was all the rage, and though I have a special place in my heart for Giorgio & Drakkar (the snotty girls wore Aspen & Polo), this C&E scent is what really evokes my teenage years.

It’s now had it’s day in the limelight, (or been eulogized). Time to be tucked back into its bubblewrap and put back to bed…

Patou 1000 is the sibling of “the world’s most expensive perfume”, Joy, which I like to call the Emperor-Has-No-Clothes perfume as I’ve never been able to smell it. Oh, I can perch my nose at the edge of the bottle at the department store, and like a sound beyond the range of human hearing, you know it’s there, but you can’t hear it, just a fluttering of your eardrums. That’s what Joy does to my nose. Something quivers, my body is aware of the presence of something, but I only detect the faintest whiff of something floral, like a sound from a great distance. Perhaps the ingredients are so costly, Patou only uses the tiniest amounts? Is Joy the grand perfumer’s response to homeopathy? Is it a colossal corporate ripoff? Most likely. But this is a review of Patou 1000, not Patou Joy.

I put on 3 dabs of this stuff and almost fell over. Strong, musky, very powdery, the odor of “rich old lady” puffed from my skin. It took me a good half-hour figure out what it reminded me of –a drugstore perfume my mom was crazy about in the ’70s– Cachet! (Mom has since moved on to another sharp scent, Estée Lauder’s White Linen, the excoriation of which is for another day). The musky tones were mellow instead of sharp and harsh like Cachet’s, and there is actually something woody and a bit of a heavy floral added to round it further. There’s some chemicals, too, those damned aldehydes again. They show up more in the middle of the wear, after a lot of the musk wears off (about 5 hours later!). Then for about 3 hours I feel like I’m in the middle of a well made, but still very wrong, remake of Chanel #5. (As if the whole universe doesn’t have enough #5 knockoffs. Again. Oy.) Imagine you just watched The Godfather, then you watch Godfather II. You wonder if the universe would’ve been fine with just one or the other…?

However, the rest of the perfume blogosphere is coming all over itself about this scent. They fill comment pages with pap about its exquisite richness, the fineness of its expensive ingredients, they quibble a bit about whether it’s a true floral or really a woody chypre. They pooh-pooh any epithet that it’s an “old lady” perfume, saying any old lady who’d wear it would be very wise.. Ugh. It’s old-fashioned (a perfumery trend in the ’70s, when this was invented) in a bad way, it’s “big” (popular for perfumes in the ’80s) in a bad way, and it’s rich (corpulent, ostentatious) in all the wrong ways. It’s just another Patou agglomeration of the “costliest” ingredients they could get. Well, someone’s got to relieve the burden of all that money from the rich, I suppose. The scent equivalent of a (powerful, heavy, truculent) Rolls-Royce does the job nicely.