Perfume / Cologne

those all seem beyond my ken so i can't comment. grossmith seems irretrievably rooted in archaic sensibilities, when i hear the name i think of the old-lady-scruchface from the bbc documentary. some of their offerings are original kfc recipe; some, including golden chypre, from what i read on the internets, are modern creations from a nose who is still alive. did you like it? i need to smell mitsouko because i need to, and gc gets compared to mitsouko extract.

lavs unum, how do you like it?

in downmarket news, i went into a banana repubublic to see if they had any casual linen or linen-blend shirts on sale. they did. i tried their new icon collection of fragrances and they weren't half-bad, which means they were also about half-bad. i got the 78 vintage green. i was going to get a guerlain homme l'eau boisee sample but this has a strong green note that works for me, tea and general green leaf and some bergamot and vetiver. the 06 black platinum has some stinky jasmine and patchouli, and the 17 oud mosaic has good enough funky oud and rose notes. i was surprised they'd let out some stank a bit considering their demographic. the cypress cedar and linen vetiver i thought were ok. the cypress cedar has some orangey, pink peppery top notes, and a vaguely woody base, so for a lot less you could replicate the new dior homme sport, with its blood orange and sandlewood. i mean, i think these are a pastiche of high-end designer or low-end niche, but dior and ysl and chanel are going wide, sauvage edp and y and another allure flanker, br is aiming high, and not getting there, but making gestures in that direction, which is something. i mean, when i'm in macy's and sniffing things all i get is accords, like generally sweet or citrus-fresh or powdery-fresh or powdery-sweet or spicy-sweet or whatnot; the icon series seemed primarily note-based, like i could make a half-decent guess at how the individual notes composed the resultant structure.

the first time i was there getting a shirt the young gentleman in attendance was more than willing to discuss the vaguaries and specifics of perfumery. as per usual i told him everything i had read off the internet and we agreed that br was doing god's work in the world. when i went back to get the 78 vintage green the young lady just coughed a lot when i was spraying test strips and didn't defer to my awesome backstock of knowledge. she asked me for my email and i assured her br still had it since i was getting a half-dozen sales updates a day.

in conclusion and in summary, br's new shit is pretty ok, in that you can skip the mall stuff because this is better, but if you want better, this is still not too bad for the price, unless price isn't an issue, in which case just ignore this because it's a lower-level approximation of what you were getting anyway.

really, though, the 78 vintage green isn't horrible, i like it about as much or more than the lalique white or diptyque philosykos, and about 80% as much as hermes' un jardin sur la nil which is all-conference honors, or tom ford grey vetiver, which is green af but also kinda straitlaced office-manager starched-shirt kind of thing.

Grossmith is absolutely old-lady-scrunchface but kind of fits with the Luca Turin quip along the lines of smart guys raid their grandmothers’ fragrances rather than their dad’s. Golden Chypre is good but tbh I find most expensive chypres redundant when I have Mitsouko, Habit Rouge, L’Heure Bleue, etc.

LAVS is nice but not an absolute knockout. I think I prefer Opus 1144, which is a big, gothic amber by the same house.

(small voice) I really want to like mitsouko since it is the kid of thing I would like but it just 100% disappears on me and I don't know if I just keep buying watered-down fakes or bad reformulations or what

(today I'm wearing delrae's bois de paradise which is kind of nice, maybe like something by serge lutens except with fresh rather than strong fruit)

azzaro chrome is the ne plus ultra of normcore scents. i don't know what to do with this information, but i'm assured of its veracity. natural's not in it. dare to be stupid.

and by that, i don't mean chrome is the best normal or mainstream scent (fahrenheit!), i mean it best embodies the early-mid teens normcore aesthetic, whatever the hell that was supposed to be. high-waisted jeans, nike golf caps, 90s nautica or hilfiger t-shirts, new balance running shoes, that sort of thing. whenever joey is onscreen during a friends episode, that's chrome. yahoo chat rooms smell like chrome.

I realise when you write that I have no idea what normcore 2010 fragrances would smell like.

got my partner fathom v by beaufort and we both love it -- heavy notes of flower stems, white florals, oceanic salt-laden air and wet earth

Excellent. Yes, it’s wonderful.

Interesting samples this month but probably wasted in 28 degree heat.

https://s15.postimg.cc/oicwj6mij/B6_E4_B986-4467-4_CBF-_AEBC-308_C7_C06_DADA.jpg

I realise when you write that I have no idea what normcore 2010 fragrances would smell like.

depends on what you mean by normcore, if you mean normcore mainstream probably like Flowerbomb or something, if you mean mainstream niche probably like molecule 01

All my Christmases have come at once:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07F2LWTZJ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1530163785&sr=8-1&keywords=perfumes+the+guide+2018

The Kindle edition of Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez’ new perfume guide is out. Paperback to follow shortly. 1200 new fragrances from the decade since they wrote the original guide.

nuclear take

I got a sample of Guerlain's Jicky, the oldest perfume still in production (1889), and every time I raise my wrist to my face a new and even more horrible thing happens.

— Dr Sex Dracula, M.D. (@dubsteppenwolf) July 6, 2018

It had never occurred to me how cats would respond to vintage civet fragrances until reading that thread. I can’t think of many things I’d like to smell of less in hot weather.

i got some things from online because i was bored.

first, aubusson homme. it's a little reminiscent of drakkar noir, but updated for the 90s. if drakkar is too dated for your tastes, try aubusson homme. the old-school guys say it's a good replacement for their beloved, late great balinciaga pour homme, but i don't know what that is. aubusson has a good juniper note and some fir which are things i like; it's half lol-90s i'm wearing and old thing and half i actually dig this.

second, guerlain homme l'eau boisee. guerlain homme l'eau is a flanker of guerlain homme, and guerlain homme l'eau boisee is a flanker of that flanker. the guerlain homme was a bit too boozy with the rum note but this one dials that down and is appreciably woodier/ vetiverier as per the name but the refreshing lime and mint are less pronounced. maybe i'll try layering them together and see if i can achieve a perfect ratio of this to that. anyway, it's a solid fragrance for a mature man of serious intent, who handles his business and brooks no frivolity. not as grassy as promoted, but nothing ever is. i'm on a mission. if i had a time machine i'd forego the killing baby hitler thing and just go back to 1995 and buy a buttload of gap grass.

third, i got carolina herrera chic. i blind bought because on sale and certain reviewers i used to trust who lead me to believe it's one of those hidden gems type of thing. like when you hear a really poppy unknown band and you think in an alternate universe they'd be a huge hit, that's what this was supposed to be. i'm as dumb as they come but i at least expect a fragrance to pass the spray it on and put yer nose to yer wrist test, in which you get decent note separation and it doessn't smell like chernobyl. this is only good if i forget about it and then get ambient whiffs on occasion, in which i can detect the fresh watermelon, contrasted with the spicy cardamom, pepper, and cinnamon, and hints of suede. it's one of those friggin magic-eye things that you used to see at the museum store in the mall that you could never focus in on. a good designer should POP!, not dick around and never achieve like it was tarrence trent d'arby. things that are similar in the fresh spicy mainstream category that get to it are ferragamo puor homme and ken\zo jungle.

also, my brother got samples and they're all ok but the standout is hermes rocabar. this shit is too good to be from a prestige house like hermes. if it were from a populist house like gucci or dolce and gabbana this would be the king of the world. sell your car and use the proceeds top buy all the bottles of this.

also the answer to 2010s normcore is dior sauvage.

so far this summer have been wearing etat libre d'orange cologne (fresh, bright neroli and jasmine), mitsouko edt and aramis

Eau de Cartier is my default in hot, humid weather. Of which we have a lot.

it's friday night, i'm full of maker's mark, and i've got nothin' new to go on about.

i sprayed on some of my brother's terre d'hermes and it's pretty good, as far as designers go. but hermes isn't a real designer, because i attribute cultural valence as integral to that calculus, and, while i admit we've crossed that rubicon where there is no more such a thing as a monoculture that collectively the sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, and dickheads all recognize and draw from, it behooves me to say that all these constituencies necessarily must come together to form a consensus in order to bestow hosannas and laurel wreaths upon deserving corporate offerings. where is the love for hermes? however you look it's clear to see that i love you more than you love me. if hermes loved me as much as i loved hermes, there'd be hermes logo t-shirts rocked by all the aidens and olivias all across the suburbican landscape. there is not that. terre d'hermes should be today's polo green, but that spot goes to dior sauvage, or maybe bleu de chanel, which is ok, but not really. i don't mind terre d'hermes coming here, and wasting all my time, because it's just what i needed, yeah, yeah. i feel like i went through this with rocabar. i don't particularly hate sauvage and invictus or one million, but they're all frosting and no cake. the grabbing hands grab all they can, but there's nothing to grab for. it's a competitive world; everything counts in large amounts. just sayin' tdh is pretty mainstream as far as it smells, but not nearly enough to matter as far as it sells.
i just wish that there was stuff that was both populist and zeitgeisty but also defensible.

fahrenheit! that was some shit. if michael hutchence even glanced sideways at you, it smelled like fahrenheit. terre d'hermes wants to emulate that but its tie is knotted too tight and it can't effect that louche and dissolute air. but it's dependable and will chop firewood for a romantic after-dinner wine-and-conversation moment by the fireplace so that's pretty good.

Hermes’ cache come from the perceived exclusivity of its world - from handbags to soft furnishing to horse bridles. It’s only the fragrances that are accessible. People rave about Twilly - which I should probably try again. I have a Russian drugstore dupe of Terre d’Hermes called Koldun, which smells close enough for $8.

I got a bottle of Idole by Lubin a while back. It smells like an upscale bar cocktail based on Kola Kubes. It’s good but fades incredibly fast, though hopefully will come more into its own as the weather gets colder.

I have been wearing Saint Julep by Imaginary Authors, which is a fairly literal sugary mint julep - thin but pleasant.

Io Non Ho Mani Che Mi Accarezzino Il Volto by UNUM has been my favourite new thing to wear, though not to remember how to spell, recently. It has cinnamon, incense and sage and smells like it could be used to cleanse cursed houses of their demons.

Zoologist has a new one out next week by the guy who runs Bogue Profumo, called T-Rex, which the perfume place I go let me try at the start of the month. First impressions were positive. Lots of champaca.

I will say I have a soft spot for Hermes’ absurd eighties dusty-rose oriental Rouge, which is overpowering in ‘Eau Delicat’ formulation and could probably bring down an elephant at perfume strength. I just dug out an old bottle of Hiris as well, and it’s pretty lovely.

I’ve not been enormously impressed by recent Hermes stuff but the older fragrances, or older formulas, were good.

I know I only ever appear on this thread to say "Miller Harris" but I treated myself to some of her Vetiver Insolent this week and it's a joy.

My "go to", work day "regime" is Musgo Real Cologne - no. 1 Orange Amber. But with the MH, there's something about how it *feels* expensive and stays for much of the day.

Despite having failed to buy anything in UAE earlier this year, I’ve started to take an interest in domestic Arabian fragrance houses like Rasasi recently. Outside of the Gulf, they seem to attract a higher than average proportion of the kind of people who do direct-to-camera YouTube reviews shouting about ‘BEAST MODE PROJECTION’ but that shouldn’t put anyone off.

A lot of European / American fragrances seem to have been formulated to smell great on the testing strip but disappear within about half an hour when worn (Imaginary Authors seems particularly bad at this) but perfumes designed for hot weather need to have more longevity, without necessarily being heavy or overpowering.

Rasasi’s La Yuqawam is a very good raspberry-leather with a smoky incense note underneath. It’s apparently suspiciously similar to Tom Ford’s Tuscan Leather. I’m keen to try some of their rose-oud ones as well.

Zoologist has a new one out next week by the guy who runs Bogue Profumo, called T-Rex, which the perfume place I go let me try at the start of the month. First impressions were positive. Lots of champaca.

I got a decant of this and have been wearing it today. It’s quite something. There is a heavy resinous frankincense bolted on to leather, rose, civet, geranium, black pepper, patchouli and that big champaca note. The longer it goes on (and it seemingly goes on forever) the smokier it gets but it never loses that spicy floral element or the slight suggestion of the stable. My favourite incense fragrances, like Zagorsk and Avignon, tend to be a little austere and churchy, Tyrannosaurus Rex is the absolute opposite. Luca Turin wrote that smelling one of Antonio Gardoni’s handful of other fragrances (Maai, I think) is akin to sitting in the front row of the Vienna Philharmonic after months of listening to ringtones and this is no different. It smells like it was designed to cover up the fact that it’s 1930 and your face cream is giving you low-key thallium poisoning. Gardoni is pretty interesting - he is an architect who seems to have started making fragrances as a hobby.

It’s possibly not something I would buy a bottle of, and probably shouldn’t have worn on a plane journey today, but idk, it’s certainly impressive and very enjoyable.

Anyone tried: Musgo Real Cologne No. 5 Lime Basil?

Update: it's *okay*. Not as nice as Orange Amber. One to wear for work rather than a special occasion.

a sample of amouage gold for women has shown up in the office lost and found. and while the owner is overwhelmingly likely to be me, I don't remember whether I actually brought it, and I don't want to steal someone's $300 perfume. (especially since I don't even particularly love Gold) this has gone on for like a week.

i got hermes rocabar, hermes eau d'orange verte, and varvatos vintage for christmas. the rocabar is probably better for fall rather than winter as it doesn't project enough in the cold, dry air but other than that it's a-ok and pretty damn good. i get the hay/ horse blanket vibe, so bring on the dancing horses, wherever they may roam. it's mostly benzoin and fir, so it's similar to the laura biagiotti roma, but less resionous. the verte, i dunno if that's a greenish orange that's not quite ripe or orange with green herbal notes, but it's jean-claude ellena all the way and wherever his dart lands is where he meant to throw it so i just wait for springtime so i can spray this shit on my carcass and revel in its sublime glory. it's precise and simple. i get orange and basil, with a bit of mint. i would have preferred the concentree version, as it lasts longer than the edc version, but a gift's a gift. the varvatos reminds me of that bit in the joy division movie where whatsisface tells stephen morris to speed it up and slow it down. varvatos goes way old skool and then way modern. varvatos puts some guts into his fragrances then dilutes them homeopathically so no one can smell the guts. you gutless bastard, john varvatos. it's still a pretty good designer fragrance. tobacco and fir, which seals the deal, and rhubarb pie.

i got my brother narciso rodriquez for him and comme des garcons 2 man. if fahrenheit is violet leaf in a kerosene fire then for him is violet leaf in an october rainstorm. yang, meet yin. the 2 man is prolly the apex of extant designer fragrances since gucci decided no one needs modern classics like envy, gucci ph, or rush anymore. so i've heard. i've never smelled those. i'm not angry, cause there's no such thing as original sin, says elvis costello. still, things suck in the designer realm.

also! i want to try the musgo real line, especially since my brother likes barbershoppy things, but i have no access. there's no online resource for samples and i'm not in a decent metro area that gives credence to basic human needs.

Is it fair to ask where you are?

Is it fair to ask where you are?

(Weird, don't know why that happened).

Anyway. I tend to wear two brands: Musgo Real (I love their Orange Amber but have recently bought Lime Basil) and Miller Harris (Etui Noir, Feuilles de Tabac, Vetiver Insolent).

I kind of think of the former as what I'd wear for work and the latter as more of a treat. The Miller Harris feels more expensive (and lasts longer) though there's a bit of a cross-over in price (Musgo Real can be bizarrely expensive, I only ever buy Miler Harris in the sale).

Barbershoppy is a good description of Musgo Real - you can kind of imagine it being worn by people modelling Portuguese Work Wear.

my wife and I had to go through contortions to get Antonia's Flowers for my mother in law as it appears to be discontinued and Barney's had one bottle. But that bottle came with a sample of Yin by The Harmonist which my wife loved, and I can stand as well. Surprise it costs $300 a fucking bottle. But I suppose that would last forever.

I should wear my Roma more.

i'm in sw ohio. the closest neiman marcus is in detroit and as far as i can tell and they're the only retailer that has it in a physical location, along with bergdorf goodman.

They do a box set, if it isn't prohibitively expensive by the time in reaches America?

https://clausporto.com/gl/gift-box-musgo-real-4x30ml

have been wearing:

azzaro chrome legend (soapy, ambroxan-heavy yet a polite work scent)
cartier declaration (citrus and funky spices initial, transparent newsprint-like vetiver on the drydown)
guerlain l'homme ideal edp (sweet cherry/amaretto and virgin leather) kinda like guerlain's answer to one million

i got 50 ml bottles of ysl rive gauche pour homme and kenzo tokyo from one of those mall kiosk places. the rive gauche is the discontinued tin can version, not the current la collection glass bottle re-issue, which itself has been re-issued in a new version. i was somewhat afeared of purchasing from one of these establishments because there's always some review when i do a google internet query (search engine, like ask jeeves) that tells me these places sell fakes, but who in their right mind is counterfeiting animale animale or liz claiborne mambo? nobody, that's who, or if the answer is somebody, then a really dumb somebody. the price of each was good. i paid $48 for the tokyo and $58 for the rive gauche in u.s. of american currencies. the rive, i saw the same size for $77 at the least on ebay, so it's a good deal; the tokyo, i could get the 3.4 oz for the same price i paid for the 1.6 oz up until it was recently discontinued and unavailable on discounters, at which point the price for the 1.6 oz went up to as much as $329.99 from one particular dickweed amazon seller, hand to god, and other sellers still want crazy stupid prices. so you can see why i had to get it.

the rive gauche, the convention wisdom is that it smells like shaving cream. it do! it do smell like shaving cream, except it's a cologne, so it's better than if you just spread barbasol all over your neck and went out like that.

the kenzo is a pretty good woody spicy thing. similar to azzaro visit, which i have, except the visit has this dense, oily bergamot thing in the opening which i suspect is used to tamp down on the heavy pepper and incense. the kenzo just shows up all put together so it has that going for it, which is nice. anyway, i got the last one.

i also got some samples from a popular discount website. what about adam, from joop! and encre noire sport from lalique. i got a mini size of the wba, which is from like 1992. i get bitter green tomato leaf and i guess cassia and then there's florals and other stuff but i mostly get green and florals. it really feels like an in-between interzone type of thing the way three strange days or right here right now or groove is in the heart belong to that time period.

encre noire sport is encre noire with grapefruit and lavender. it's more accessible and populist but if you like encre noire but feel you can't really pull it off on a daily basis then this is the answer for that, so why are you upset that it went in that direction? you have so much stuff that is good but difficult, get the thing that is good and uncomplicated, is how i see it.

I always get super excited when I see that this thread has new answers, and a slugbuggy post never disappoints. I will now have three strange days in my head for at least three days.

I just discovered the Ormonde Jayne line, which I think is really outstanding. Fortunately in NYC we have shops like Aedes or Osswald where you can go and sample 100 different chi chi fragrances if you want. Ormonde Jayne is from London, and they have a collection called Four Corners of the Earth inspired by the world travels of their founder, each fragrance specifically inspired by the indigenous flora she's encountered (so says their ad copy). My favorite of the batch is Montabaco, the one inspired by South America, which has some tobacco and leather/suede notes but blended well so you don't immediately peg it as one thing or another. You could imagine this on either an Argentine polo player or a sophisticated lady of means. It's crazy expensive though - $375/100ml! Ormonde Jayne also has a standard men's fragrance that - sorry if I lack the language - is a lovely powdery, slightly spicy, with flinty note blend that I suppose is reminiscent of Rocabar, of ones I'm familiar with. It's $220/100ml or $150/50ml.

One thing I've learned from visiting these fragrance shops is that there are far more scents I don't like than ones I do, even among the expensive ones. Certain notes are automatic turn-offs (like the bubble gum note many fragrances have, not sure what it is technically) and other notes ruin the fragrance if they're slightly too present. And then there's the complication of one's own body chemistry which may not take to a certain scent. That's why I tend to remember the few fragrances that pass all the tests.

Another one I thought I liked enough when trying it out in the store, but after taking home a sample and wearing it decided it was ever-so-slightly too sweet for me, was Amber Room by Thameen. I do appreciate its relative elegance though.

oddam, i wish i could just pop into a boutique and just smell all the things. on the other hand, where i live i can have the same house for 1/3 the price or whatever. life is a game of tradeoffs and percentages.

i ave the rive gauche a full wearing and it's gorgeous, but it still smells like barbasol thet dries down to azzaro ph with the anise and oakmoss and herbalness. it's like if the local diner shut down and in its stead was opened a hipster cusine experience that offered authentic diner fare for ten times the price, which is justified because the omelletes and hash browns are prepareded

didn't mean to do that. here be the full post:

goddam, i wish i could just pop into a boutique and just smell all the things. however, housing where i live is cheap so there's that tradeoff.

i gave the rive gauche a full wearing and it's gorgeous, but it still smells like barbasol that dries down to azzaro ph with the anise and oakmoss and herbalness. it's like if the local diner shut down and in its stead was opened a hipster-foodie cuisine experience that offered authentic diner fare for ten times the price, which is justified because the omelettes and hash browns are prepended in authentic diner style, except there's tarragon and because presentation. it's like when paul simon or david byrne do world music or when picasso did his thing with the damoiselles d'avignon. it's problematic, because i'm from the 80's and i'm used to the idea of someone going out and finding something that was always there and re-contextualizing something for me, like were basquiat or especially haring deep-culture aspirants who broke through or emissaries from the liminal boundaries who prospered from their ability to sherpa content from culture to culture? long story short, i had a bottle of pinaud clubman, the aromatic fougere of fougeres, and i never wore it because it was too fougere. the rive gauche is derivative of barbershop, but it's not from a real barbershop. there's still another bottle of rive gbauche at the place i got it and my brother was pondering whether he should get it or just get a bottle of brut because he reads all the old-school powerehouse blogs and imho he should get the fucking bottle of rive gauche.

what i could have just said, were it not for all the knob creek, is that the rive gauche feels very fancy for a barbershop fragrance. i felt like it references a different milieu than the one it inhabits. but then again, there are probably very fancy barbershops.

Being on a budget, I got a subscription to Scentbird. I think it's a good value, but the selection is patchy. Still I've got enough 15 ml bottles of expensive fragrances that I enjoy. One that sounded promising but which I hated was Black Tulip by Atelier Bloem. It's $195 for a bottle! But I can try it for sixteen bucks a month. Just as well, because it smells like an older woman at church. It's very well composed, just certainly not worth $200. But thanks to Scentbird I have a massive collection of expensive scents. Molinard Figue was my favorite so far. I got Pinrose's Gilded Fox, which had been a favorite, but the caramel wears on me. And Etat Libre d'Orange Tilda Swinton Like This was pretty good.

I'm teaching myself perfuming, though, and am mostly enjoying my own concoctions more. Been doing this for a couple of years and have about a thousand dollars worth of essential oils, attars and aroma chems. But the stuff is coming along nice. Wearing a cherry scent today that also has oud, pink lotus and jasmine.

Where ilm meets ile ...

https://www.filigreeandshadow.co/products/incurable

A Fetching Gentleman in Fragrance Form
Byron on May 10, 2018

Incurable exhumes those remote memories of that young, sophisticated uncle who was a professional illustrator and who smoked an English pipe and owned russet leather armchairs and a collection of antique mechanical coin banks. The one who knew how to properly wear a sport coat and who wielded a generous sense of erudite humor. The one who proved to be the only example of a debonair man to be found in the entire living family tree but who abandoned it once his wife died and he disappeared into someone else’s family never to be heard from again.

Incurable is warm and piquant, dreamy and urbane… like the ghost of someone you wanted to know but never got the chance to.

the bubblegum note can be strange -- a scent I like but never wear as often as I should is mirabella by dsh, which is a really-nice plum-oakmoss thing along the lines of femme/mitsouko/things trying to be either of those, but the beginning is straight-up unmistakable bubblicious

I've bought some of those indie / alt perfumes, but TBH, the branding on many of them is too precious or humorless goth. I mean, if you want to sell, you should broaden your market. Like I don't identify with the rich uncle at all! And then there are all of the perfumers who use Eurocentric and / or Victorian imagery, as if we all relate to or have those values. It's the same problem that plagues the DIY world in general, with all of its apothecary / homesteading nostalgia. A woman's perfume should respect all women, and sometimes the "mysterious magical witchy woman" crap is just plain sexist.

I am working on a fragrance inspired by Italian women in my family - the smell of the purses, like powdery makeup, rose, tobacco and candy. I didn't think it would work (I had the concept first), but I wear it all of the time, it really smells like my memories!

yeah, the branding slightly annoys me, but no more than, like, the porny tom ford/(k*l*an)-type branding does. but, like, deconstructing eden's melisande is a really pretty cinnamon-jasmine-amber thing that I could more or less live in a cloud of, and also is named after a character in a thoroughly embarrassing book series