04.30.10
Posted in 1970s, 1990s, 2000s, Creed, Penhaligon's, Sean John, quickies
at 9:30 pm
Spring Flower by Creed, 1996
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.
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02.28.10
Posted in 2000s, Thierry Mugler, good
at 12:10 am
by Theirry Mugler, 2005
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and scent and sillage
My soul can reach, when feeling anosmic
For the ends smelling and ideal trace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most noisome need, by sun and iPod-light.
I love thee secretly, as men strive for gain.
I love thee obsessively, as they turn towards praise.
I love thee with the passion put to ill-use
In my old Giorgio, and with my teen-age’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to use
With my lost sense. I love thee with the breadth,
Scent, jasmine! Of all my life; and if Thierry choose,
I shall but love thee better after anaphylaxis!
Jasmine. Wood. Musk. Grape. Loud. Strong. Sublime. Allergenic. Beware.
(apologies to Liz Barrett Browning)
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01.02.10
Posted in 2000s, so-so
at 12:48 am
by the Star Trek franchise, 2009
Thanks to the magic of the holidays, and geeky friends, I accessed 2 of the Star Trek scents, Pon Farr and Red Shirt. The Star Trek line of scents (which also includes Tiberius, which my friends didn’t have for me to sample) are blatantly cashing in on the seemingly inexhaustible pockets of the Star Trek fanbase. Having such an obvious marketing ploy, and their drugstore price point, I had no expectations of either being good at all. I was pleasantly surprised, not at their originality, as neither had any, but of their subtlety. Actually engineered well, they have actual progression to their development, just the right amount of persistence, layering of notes, and some genuinely interesting scent materials other than dime-per-gallon air freshener mixes that other cheap perfumes descend into (Stetson and Charlie, I’m looking at you). This is still meant as a marketing phenomenon, not a luxury item, the limits to this I delineate below, and I further hairsplit on the marketing itself. Read boldly on….
Pon Farr
So subtle, arid, could it possibly be… pheromonal? Notes of peony, melon, the most identifiable pink pepper I’ve ever smelt in a perfume, white musk, and an unidentifiable candied red berry. Startlingly similar to Happy if it were made by Comme des Garcons instead of Clinique. Goes on insubstantially, I need 2 spritzes to get a read on it, then it brightens, the florals, fruits, and spice coming up. Then it fades again, everything disappears into a dryhot chemical odor that reminds me of Odeur 53, but much more similar to Bakelite bracelets left on a car’s dashboard in summer. Then it swings back to the unknown red berry candy scent, fading to just the white musk skinscent providing the constant undercurrent for the journey.
Marketed as the women’s perfume, it does try for a little imagination, its undercurrent of almost imperceptible musk providing a symbolic shorthand for the Vulcan mating-frenzy it’s named after. You could do much worse than this somewhat predictable floral-fruity number, you could try anything in the Britney Spears line, for example, and totally waste your money. For more on that, see below…
Red Shirt
Every single cleanfresh men’s scent of the past 20 years. Drakkar, Polo, Cool Water, yadda yadda yadda –but mostly Polo. Rotates thru the usual men’s scent notes: lavender, cedar, citrus, “freshclean”, melon, musk… Relentlessly generic, yet still better than I Am King by Sean John, which has a cynicism to its ruthless genericity that Red Shirt lacks. Both are generic mass-market-engineered inoffensive nothings which only sell because of their brand name; but I Am King sneers thru its megaphone “I suck, but you’ll buy me anyway because I’m a Sean John product, suckers!” Its smell is precisely, purposefully generic with a painful hollowness.
Red Shirt, on the other hand, much like the hapless extras sent to their doom each episode, is innocent of its true purpose in life. It thinks quietly to itself, “I have some good things going for me! I smell acceptable and nice, sorta like Ensign Aspen over there, who got laid last Shore Leave! If I do well in this away mission, maybe I’ll be promoted/get laid/live to see another day too…!” Its genericness is almost a direct copy of a successful scent archetype rather than an engineered amalgam of successful scent notes. As such, it’s an admiring ripoff rather than a careful corporate you-can’t-sue-us-we-stole-nothing clone. Usually I detest ripoffs, and one of the purposes of this blog is revealing the separated-at-birth scents ripping each other off, but in this case the cheerful naivete Red Shirt pulls off with its ripoff is almost admirable compared to the blatant corporate ripoff I Am King is pulling on its buyers.
It comes down to this: if you buy Red Shirt, you can smell like one of the sheep led to slaughter; if you buy I Am King, you become one.
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06.21.09
Posted in 2000s, Thierry Mugler, good
at 8:44 pm
by Thierry Mugler, 2001
Thierry Mugler is an artist at the high-low fashion tightrope walk, because his Cologne is a real work of postmodern art. It starts by smelling like a better-made, more expensive version of 4711, all fresh and citrusy, and you’re thinking, “Hey, ok, highend 4711, dude!”. Then all of a sudden you’re wearing highway reststop bathroom soap, “Whoa! WTF?” (yes, my inner voice sounds like Keanu), which evolves into the barest hint of Nag Champa incense and aftershave lotion, then something fresh-herby starts morphing into Un Jardin en Méditerranée, suddenly zigs away from that luxe smell, zagging back into the reststop bathroom. All this in under 5 min. Then it starts all over again; or, really never went away, just revealed more of itself over time.
Sound complicated? It’s not, it’s very straightforward and simple smelling. Mugler’s scents tend to be rather direct and no-nonsense, hitting you upside the head with their obvious-yet-weird mashups of quotidian accords: Angel=chocolate-musk-vetiver-licorice, Alien=jasmine-wood-musk, and this? Citrus-pink public bathroom soap-incense-herbs. If fashion is the line between taste and trash, this is a work of genius.
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09.10.08
Posted in 2000s, Guerlain, so-so
at 9:23 pm
by Guerlain, 2000
Mahora was renamed Mayotte after its introductory ad campaign failed. This discontinued perfume is widely vilified as a horror, is it because something so unsophisticated came out of the haute House of Guerlain? I don’t know what the hot fuss is about, Mahora is only tuberose.
Saying Mahora is “only tuberose” is like saying Michael Phelps is “only a swimmer”; both are understatements of the year, and both are a simple truth. There is tuberose, the complete tuberose, and nothing but a tsunami of the tuberose in all its waxy, tropical glory. It’s heavy, and absolutely nothing is added to lighten it. To wear Mahora is to suffocate to death in a very specialized, very niche candle store (Tuberose Yankee Candle Co.?) Luckily, it isn’t a strong perfume, its sillage is minimal and wears off exponentially within 4 hours.
I cannot stress this enough, to enjoy this you have to like tuberose! It may have an incense-y edge, but this is essentially a soliflore of natural (or damn good artificial), full-spectrum, god-given, this-one-goes-to-11 . Despite the loud monotone, it isn’t a bad scent, it wouldn’t be so hated if it wasn’t from Guerlain; if it were a drugstore offering from Dana its sales would suffice and it might have become a beloved scent, a reminiscence of impoverished youth. Instead you embark on a failed safari in search of a nonexistant trace of Guerlinade.
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08.12.08
Posted in 2000s, Annick Goutal, Uncategorized, so-so
at 10:21 pm
by Annick Goutal, 2005
Mandragore is French for mandrake, a historical, Biblical, mythical plant, reputed to cure barrenness & poisoning, give visions, & preserve vigor & youth. Its root sometimes forks, giving it a homunculus-like appearance, which supposedly screams when pulled from the earth, the scream itself deadly if heard. So much a source of folklore & legend, this infamous plant’s nearest relative is… the tomato! Unlike the early tales about its cousin, the mandrake is actually poisonous if eaten.
The perfume starts out lemony-vinyly, quickly followed by plasticky ginseng. The lemonyfreshness soon starts fading and the ginsengy layer slowly loses its vinyl elements, receding into the naturally-occurring plastickyness of ginseng instead of the initial artificial plastic-vinyl elements. Wearing further, a savory black pepperlike note appears with some other background spices, adding itself to the ginseng center note. The lemon topnote very faintly persists, and the pepper & spices wander to the forefront then recede again with the ginseng a constant dying-ballast hum in the foreground. And that’s it. Ginseng obviously is supposed to stand in for the mandrake, but it was so aggressively GINSENG! just like the vials of extract from Chinese groceries, that I couldn’t recognize it for anything else. Since mandrake fruit looks like a tamarillo, which is another distant tomato relative, I expected anything of mandrake to taste/smell of tamarillo, at least a little.
That’s all folks. It’s essentially a 3-note composition, and a very light-airy one, too. It was barely there, and didn’t last more than half the day. I suspect the Annick Goutal empire is more concerned how it’ll play as a candle or air freshener than as perfume, despite calling itself a “High Perfumery House”. With a name like Mandragore you expect something more witchy, dark, mysterious, exotic, eeevviiillll! Not a sweet, ethereal, will-o-the-wisp. You expect Morgana le Fay, not Tinkerbell.
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06.03.08
Posted in 2000s, Elizabeth Arden, good
at 11:43 pm
by Elizabeth Arden
, 2006
This one is an unusual case, how it smells in the bottle or even on paper is absolutely nothing like its scent on skin. I usually go thru perfume aisles sniffing the bottles themselves (please don’t have a heart attack, it works for me!), stopping & spraying when I find something different than the usual. Badgley Mischka’s bottle smelled oily-coniferous and vaguely musty, not musky, with some unidentified fruit waving frantically on a desert island while the ocean liner bulk of rest of the perfume sailed past. On a paper strip it smelled a little more coniferous, a lot less musty, and the musk started to come out; the fruit caught the attention of several passengers on deck, even distracting some from a shuffleboard game (that they wanted find an excuse to end anyway).
When I put it on my skin, the ocean liner ran aground on the desert island (was the helmsman distracted by the frantic castaway?). The carved fruit displays on the 24-hour buffet splatted on the dinner theater floor, the showgirls in the Carmen Miranda Extravaganza! show lost their footing on the 100% more banana peels than was in their contract, adding the contents of their costumes to the total, now approaching 1000% tropical fruit in addition to the random explosions of pineapple when sliding audience members accidentally kicked them in a bid to rediscover “upright” due to the tilt of the run-aground ship. Meanwhile, on shore, the castaway gleefully boards, bringing his entire supply of fruit and the occasional coconut he scavenged to stay alive on the island. Saved at last!
So, I was a little surprised at the difference.
BIG FRUIT. Big! Reaaaallly big. Luscious, juicy, fruity… um, something… Heavenly pineapples? Rainforest peaches? Opium gooseberries? Not sure which fruit this would be… some designer’s idealized fruit punch. With musk. And something that smells (to me, anyway) of black locust tree blossoms. No matter, it ages rapidly, in one hour you’re left with a light powdery muskiness and one sweet unknown fruit note, the riot has disembarked and the cabin boys swept the mess over the side. At $90 for 100ml, it’s too expensive a ticket for a 3-hour tour (if you’re lucky). Bon voyage!
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05.27.08
Posted in 2000s, Estée Lauder, good
at 9:48 pm
by Estée Lauder, 2003
Yes, it is beyond paradise, off the plane, down the jetway, into the the shuttlebus, back to the car, up the highway, through the ‘hood, back home to my backyard and a flying leap into the brambles on my hillside… because that’s where my wild honeysuckle is! (I’m writing this right now on my deck, sniffing the blossoms in the air). Beyond Paradise is a white floral melange dominated by honeysuckle, and almost ruined by a touch too obvious artificial musks and too liberal an application of other white flower scents. Happily, it backs away from that cliff, showing off its excellent sense of balance. Estée Lauder has succeeded in bringing a classy yet casual white floral to the masses, it’s a popular, accessible scent, fairly affordable but not cheap, produced by a quality but not exclusive brand. One could almost say it could (or should) be this decade’s Giorgio, except for 1 thing, its lasting power.
You spray it on, wait for the alcohol to evaporate, and are subjected to those light artificial musks right away a second before the flowers hit, then the musks go away with the alcohol, and you’re treated to the white flowers framing the star of the show, honeysuckle. The musks reappear slowly about 2 hours later, and by then the flowers have faded into a sort of dead gardenia sourness. Reapply and it starts all over again. But 2 lousy hours?! Come on! Only Après l’Ondée is shorter lived than this! Lord knows the room deodorizer-esque B&BW version of honeysuckle will last as long as Twinkies (if you can stand to wear body splash with a half-life). Some would argue compared to Giorgio’s steroidal strength (…able to create corporate anti-fragrance policies in a single bound!….), this might be a blessing.
I love me some honeysuckle, but no commercial fragrance has got it quite right. So I’ll just sit on my porch and sniff the real thing, thankyouverymuch.
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05.20.08
Posted in 2000s, The Gap, good
at 10:57 pm
by The Gap, 2007
Walk into any Anthropologie store and the air is filled with light florals & fruitness, crisp paper, & a slight scent of wool & bark, all spelling out “eclectic girliness”. Walk into a Gap store and it smells like their men’s scent G7, a “personalized” line of bland, flat, boring pine/citrus/soapy men’s colognes, spelling out “hipness thru conformity”. So, it perplexes me that The Gap is condensing, bottling, and selling the air from their fancier, more fringey competitor on the upper level of the mall. Although Anthropologie sells many scents (from 3rd parties) themselves, and their scents add to the ambiance of the store, you still wouldn’t get Mandarin Jasmine if you bought a bottle of each and mixed them. You’d get a rottenfruit-stinking mess and a ruined $180 handknitted sweater. And possibly a very cute coffeetable book. And glassware you HAD to have (it was on sale!!)
Nevertheless, Mandarin Jasmine is another Gap scent from their GapBody line of eau de toilettes, and like its stable mates it’s a simple composition drawn from cheap chemicals; components you recognize from their uses in laundry detergent, air freshener, and dryer sheets, but formulated with subtlety, lacking the chemically assaultive edge that Bath & Body Works seems incapable of avoiding. Its notable predecessors, Dream and (the late, lamented) Grass are also fine examples of Gap Gets It Right. The former evoking Cheer laundry powder, but milder and less assaultive yet equally evocative; the latter is exactly like smelling a freshly mown, pure, damp lawn while on an acid trip (Exactly!).
Mandarin Jasmine’s not particularly orangey, nor are its artificial florals obviously jasminey, it’s a whispery fruity-floral. Thanks to the Magic of Chemistry, it conjures the scent of paper from a world where you can smell the materials each thing was made from. This clean, crisp paper scent smells of wood. The scent doesn’t evolve as you wear it. It isn’t sophisticated, nor seductive, nor strange. You put it on and feel like wearing a $150 petite floral cotton dress, listen to a random wispy-voiced singer/songwriter chick on your iPod, and go make cute tote bags out of your old socks…. but not like shopping at the Gap.
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02.20.08
Posted in 2000s, Stella McCartney, good
at 5:20 pm
by Stella McCartney, 2003
The starry packaging says disco, the scent says… rose? Is that actual, old-fashioned Bulgarian rose? Yep! And not a bit old-fashioned smelling, either. This is not your grandmother’s rose perfume. There’s woods and tea, a bit of white flowers too. Ok ok, the notes do in fact say “old-fashioned”, but I swear they’re formulated in a way that doesn’t add up to Grandma… but does it add up to your-name-in-lights DISCO? Nope.
I mean, come on… it’s still rose perfume! And boy is it! Rose & white flowers in the beginning, rose & tea & ambery stuff in the middle, rose & white cedar at the end. It finishes evocatively as a rose sachet in your mom’s (or Stella’s mom’s) cedar lingerie drawer, an almost universal scent from every girl’s childhood. Comfort & class, but definitely not disco.
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Spring Flower by Creed, 1996