10.23.08
Posted in 1990s, Bulgari, good
at 9:39 pm
by Bulgari, 1998
I’ve read this is a blend of burning rubber, vanilla, and car exhaust contained in a rubber hockey puck bottle. Intrigued with the description, I hunted for it, and hunt I did. Department store perfume counters, perfume discounters, and even Nordstrom seemed barren of it. I found every other color of Bulgari scent (Jasmin Noir made me pause for awhile, tho), except for Black.
Just when I thought I’d have to flush it out online …lo and behold! I wandered over to the men’s side of the new Sephora at the mall… Eureka! Hidden behind a box of some vile Armani scent; there it was, Mr. Black Hockey Puck himself!
Spritzed on paper, it’s surprisingly sweet, musky, and vanilla. On skin the industrial odors materialize…. It isn’t burning rubber, it’s melting polystyrene! it’s the sweet scent of touching a soldering iron to a foam drinks cooler, a melting plastic scent that has nothing to do with the vinyl-plasticky aldehydes in most perfumery. There’s a resinous smell mixed in with the vanilla, a slight spicy-syrupiness –Styrax or Benzoin? Rosin or Retsina? Maybe…
So who wants to smell of melting (not burning) plastic and vanilla-retsina syrup?
I DO.
It’s magnificent, evocative, unique, inspired, and just plain weird. It’s a shared-custody weekend at my dad’s place, playing with his soldering iron by testing what it’ll burn thru and wasting his rosin-core solder, followed by grandiosly buffoonish pseudo-academic baking experiments we were fond of, (e.g. Confectionary, My Dear Watson: The Effects of Vanilla Extract Infusion upon Apple Pie… an Experiment in Six Parts).
This scent is fascinating, odd, jarring, and sentimental (ok, maybe just to me). It’s a post-industrial-waste barren racetrack rush-hour experiment gone wrong all the right ways. A polyharmonic Penderecki concerto kind of fragrance, a harmony of perfect dissonance.
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07.05.08
Posted in 1990s, Caron, so-so
at 9:42 am
by Caron, 1990
… is actually a blurry spice trapped in the chewy center of a flower-flavored pastille. A plasticky eugenol note glows from it, evoking my grandmother’s lipstick or some other old cosmetic.
The trapped spice in question is mysterious: A peppercorn? Dried pepper leaf? Smoked tea? Tobacco? Sumac powder? Who knows. The flower-flavored pastille it’s trapped inside definitely has rose, but the clove-ish cosmetic element defies the definition of any other flower it might contain. As it wears, the powdery element of the clove pretty much takes over, leaving only the candyrose and a vague spiciness behind.
Though it evokes a very specific reminiscence of my grandmother, it’s still not emotionally engaging. It’s an unusual mixture of notes that work together well; the candysweetness says “young contemporary”, the rose & clove says “old-fashioned classic”, the spice even suggests “masculine”, yet… I’m still disappointed it wasn’t formulated better. It smells like a draft on the way to a much better perfume, one with a stronger spice element, more definable flowers, and only a touch of clove to hold it together. Instead we get this promising but unfinished sketch that’s somehow gained entry into the holdings of a world-class museum. I wonder, who’s its uncle?
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04.23.08
Posted in 1990s, Carolina Herrera, good
at 9:22 pm
by Carolina Herrera, 1991
A “men’s fragrance” that’s fresh & airy, airy & fresh! If the bright, clear fields in an antihistamine ad have a scent, this is it. When first applied there’s some slight citrus, lemon or grapefruit –the mythical kind that juniper bushes produce. A tiny whiff of wild herbs follows: think heather & weeds, not cooking; but the central feature is a spectacularly bright-fresh post-rainstorm brisk aquatic smell. This fresh-airiness is most likely courtesy of Iso E Super, a chemical that reportedly smells like fresh air and conifer wood (I do not yet have my own sample of Iso E Super, available from Escentric Molecules, which packages it as Molecule 01 [UPDATE: Turns out this isn't a solo chemical, they blended Iso E Super with a few other scents to "round it out". Thanks. A. Lot.]).
Many, many perfumes use this chemical, but few as obviously as this one, and also Air by Kenzo (or Kenzoair, as Kenzo prefers). It presents an idealized, very very faint interpretation of a cedar forest in the clouds with a cool wind skimming thru….. so minimal there’s almost no there there. Herrera’s fragrance has fresh air from somewhere completely else, some place with fewer pine trees, and everyone there has already attained satori. Instead of the cedar cloudforest of Kenzoair, Herrera for Men has citrus-rain on the plain in Maine (perhaps, but definitely not in Spain). The Iso E Super adds an inspiring eye-opening happybrightness to this scent that Kenzoair bypasses on its way to its next zazen session. Comparing that to the post-rain plain in Maine (or maybe Heaven or Mars, whatever, it’s out of this world!) illustrates the very different moods one chemical can evoke by perfumers with skillz.
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