Perfume / Cologne

feel the Sephora regret... I got a bottle of terre hermes at Sephora a couple of years ago based on a sample I got with some other stuff but now I’m like “why did I buy this”

been alternating between Tom ford’s noir de noir + atelier’s cafe tuberose + maison margiela whispers in the library.. the first two are very similar but the TF is more deep dark intoxicating dreaminess whereas the atelier has more of a bright almost champagne thing going on. I don’t really know how to describe whispers.

maison margiela’s soul of the forest was my mainstay for a long time but after all the crazy wildfires near me this season it feels weird to put something on that smells kinda like burning wood.

I don't get Terre d'Hermès, it smells so thin and weedy to me yet it's the one they seem to promote the hardest. Saks just sent me some Hermès samples which included that. Rocabar and Bel Ami are much more interesting imo.

x-posts - yeah, the recent Miller Harris scents don't seem to hang around like their "classics" do.

I'm currently wearing Squid by Zoologist which is, as you might expect, an inky marine. It's a lot softer than many of their other fragrances and very pleasant but not one of my absolute favourites from them.

A new haul of decants today and i'm wearing Zoologist's Bee, which is lovely. It reminds me of the Russian and Ukrainian churches that make beeswax candles and sell honey - a warm, resinous, floral fug.

fyi "Smell Ya Later" hosted by Tynan Sinks & Sable Yong is a good new podcast about fragrances

i looked up confessions of a rebel and it's the scentbird house brand. hadn't heard of it before but i'm comparatively unacquainted with nichey things but also there isn't anything on fragrantica about them so i think that because they're exclusive to scentbird it means they're not widely discussed and not a thing on youtube and blogs and whatnot. it looks like they're going for a niche thing; if so, their price point seems reasonable. they have two main brand mission statement thingies, one being their fragrances are created from thouzillions of data points presumably culled from subscriber preferences and also that their scents are gender-fluid as opposed to being merely unisex. unisex i get, because culture says blue and pink when , but gender-fluid is a tall order; it means this thing has the potential to shift along the spectrum.

also the data driven thing: this is also an intersting notion but imo it's better to make something that's one in ten people's favorite than everybody's third favorite by averaging things out. otoh, this is a step towards my dream of achieving fragrances created by robots, for robots, so i dunno.

in summary and in conclusion, i hope these smell good, in which case, well done.

scents of wood get their scents of wood by being aged in wood caskets, like wine! i also hope this is a real thing and not just a selling point that most people can't tell the difference from anyway.

edit: the banana republic vintage 78 has a fig note, not mango. mea culpa. i don't know if it's all that in itself but i was kinda stoked that a mall outlet like br was making a stab at naturalism with its icon line, compared to their previous offerings. the vintage is a pretty good tea frag, i think, and for the price, what, who are you to complain? the only other mainstream tea things i know are the bvlgari thing by jean-claude ellena, the eau verte maybe, which is pricey, and bvlgari homme, which is just ok. i just wanted a decent tea thing for not so many denarii and this fits the bill.

i know caron mostly for their old things like 3rd man and yatagan and not so much of anything relatively recent. yuzu man sounds pretty ok and full of potential; i like petitgrain and/ or lemon leaf and/ or lemon verbena (lalique white, creed irish green tweedy thing, or at least the cheap armaf clone i have) and there's some green contrast with the basil and from what the internet says the yuzu is fuller and richer than that of the issey miyake which i think is fine so that seems like an entry in the plus column. like, if you were setting me up on a blind date and all you told me was petite, redhead with frackles, and vast pop-cultural knowledge i'd be, historically i like those attributes, but at the same time i don't want to contribute to a culture of generalization and objectification and fetishism, so i'll just say i'm looking forward to having a nice date.

also, i saw a review of geoffrey beene bowling green in which the opinion was proffered that it was a lemon verbena bomb. it's way cheap on the internets, and a classic old school scent although not really lauded, so it might be up someone's alley, if it works out that way.

i have terre d'hermes gifted because it seemed the thing to have, i assume. the initial blast is all "omg this is such a modern classic that any man should have as an integral part of his collection" but i am also ambivalent in that i don't love wearing it but it's jean-claude ellena's most popular thing and so representative of its era like grey flannel once was but god that's way too much vetiver tom for grey vetiver is way smoother, such a competent office manager scent, crisp and starched-shirt and forthright. too much goddam vetiver, to my nose, is terre.

what else? my brother has a recent formulation of paco rabanne pour homme. someone on the internets said something about the honey note it has because someone else alluded to a certain sweetness they detected in paco pabanne pour homme about which they couldn't be more specific and so the source of the sweetness was identified by the responding party. before this, i never noticed a honey note. so last time i was over at his place i sprayed it on my wrist and scanned the aforementioned wrist to try to discern the honey note. now, i can't not notice a honey note. i'm not going to need therapy but this really brings up issues of perception vs reality, and the construction thereof. they sat knowledge is power, but according to the law of conservation of energy, me gaining power means i sap that power from another source. in the 80s, i used to wear polo green. didn't love it (luv u armani pour homme, my boo, and grey flannel, you sexy bitch) but i respected that shit. it was FUCKING POLO. i saw a video of steve martin, who majored in philosophy in lol college, who said he didn't remember anything specific about philosophy later on but in general he remembered general concepts, and generally speaking he knew in his core that as a comedian, attempting to deconstruct comedy only resulted in killing the thing he loved. he were adverse to the notion. i hope i didn't kill paco rabanne over honey.

modern polo is lesser bobka because of ifra restrictions on oakmoss; a lot of classics also suck because of that, and also because of cheaper substitutes of aroma chemicals and so forth as certain fragrances become heritage and not big-time enough to warrant full monetary attention, i get that, whatever. it isn't even about polo, specifically. there was a gestalt, branding meant something. if i can pick a thing apart to its components then i lose that somehow. i had a red polo jacket that i wore with the collar turned up. a casual acquaintance really wanted to borrow it to wear out on the town. i declined; i feared the common circumstance of not getting it back ever. i hated to be a dick but it was the right thing to do. sorry, todd, you were a cool guy and i wished polo jacket upon you but not at my expense. that red polo jacket had valence; it was woven out of the same fabric as cameo's she strange and level 42's something about you. if i let it go it'd never come back. polo is dead because i now am aware of the colonialist aspect to the marketing appeal but those were the days. i remember thinking lacoste was the shit and then seeing the lo-life contingent sporting all these new combinations of striped polo shits i knew a new era had dawned and i was behind the times. so, polo. i forget my point but the scent smelled the way the clothes looked. now, i can only see pine needles, oakmoss or the lack thereof, and tobacco when i smell it.

life ain't really funky, unless it's got that pop, says prince, and i think i'm msissing the pop for the trees.

polo green is so i wonder if i take you home by lisa lisa and full force with cult jam in the proustian sense. not even my favorite but nothing else gets there so specifically, it can't be anything else. they say the universal is specific, but i'd like to submit, the specific is also pretty specific. lately, you've expressing to me, how much you've like to to make love. that's pretty damn specific. fuck timeless. and you know and i know if we get together emotions will get to work. polo green is right THERE, for me, if only in my memory.when i smell the current version i only get memories of memories.

conversely, you might have none of these associations.

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<3

some of the best writing on the internet in this thread.

^^ seconded.

Love this thread

I've ordered a sample of a fragrance inspired by Ilya Khrzhanovsky's magnificent 2004 film Chetyre (4) because, mystifyingly, it exists and i must know what it smells like.

I'm wearing Ormonde Jayne's Ormonde Man today, which has a fancy list of ingredients, like black hemlock and agarwood, but really just smells like a fairly generic cologne - albeit the kind of subtle, reassuringly expensive cologne they mist into the executive lounges of upmarket Abu Dhabi hotels to gently mask the smell of the buffet cheese counter.

l'air du desert marocain today - taking deep breaths of the coriander seed and trying to waft the spicier incense notes southward, like a spell

I like Ormonde Man but it is slightly mystifying why it's 2x as expensive as comparable products. But fwiw I once went to Aedes in Manhattan (a shop dedicated to boutique fragrances) and sampled about 50 different things before deciding that Ormonde Man and Ormonde Montabaco were about the most pleasing of the batch. It's probably not a great idea to sample that many at a time, I now realize.

I've ordered a sample of a fragrance inspired by Ilya Khrzhanovsky's magnificent 2004 film Chetyre (4) because, mystifyingly, it exists and i must know what it smells like.

The short answer is 'Chanel - Cuir de Russie' - leather, birch, clary sage and all. It's good but not likely to shift ELdO's Rien as my smoky leather of choice. It's one of three samples composed by Prin Lomros i got. Kira Kira is pleasant but suffers from the same problem as every other green apple scent i've tried - being practically indistinguishable from the Body Shop's stalwart £6 Apple Blossom spray.

The most interesting was Zoologist's Sloth, which has an echo of Bat in the over-ripe jungle fruit base but layers a bunch of herbal notes on top. As a representation of a chill little dude covered in weird green muck, it seems spot-on.

Zoologist's Koala was composed by Spyros Drosopoulos of Baruti and has his hallmark photo-realism in the eucalyptus and pine but not a lot other than that going on.

Beaufort’s Terror and Magnificence starts like a softer, more complex take on Miller Harris’ classic Feuilles de Tabac but, within half an hour, morphs into the kind of inexpensive oud you can find in Arabian drugstores, which is fine but you might as well go for something by Al Rasasi that costs a fraction of the price and will probably clear your sinuses as well.

Their Rake and Ruin is a more polite take on the theme of 1805 Tonnerre – a Historical Reenactment Society version of Austerlitz with cap guns standing in for fire-breathing muskets.

I am going through my pile of 10 ml perfume samples, and lately have taken to Salvatore Ferragamo pour Femme. This one is really brashly feminine and all disco/Italian, with roses and carnations and spices and woods & a bit of soap...so basically it smells like my mom in the late 70's after she had her bath and put on her fur and went out for the night. It's really comforting now that I can't see my family or go anywhere.

my next purchase will be tom ford’s oud wood, i think.

My 10 ml of Confessions of a Rebel's Get a Room arrived, and it is surprisingly good, given my suspicion of trendy niche brands with silly names. It is an excellent composition - green apple, clary sage, vanilla, praline, mandarin and woods. In spite of the vanilla and praline - it is not too sweet, and the effect is creamy, not gourmand. Mainly smells like a creamy apple with citrus. Don't think it's particularly sexy, though. More a warm, comforting scent for day or night.

I’ve been testing out a le labo sampler for the last year and the only one I truly love is ambrette. I don’t get the hype around santal 33 - I smells nice if I press my nose right up against my skin but in the air it smells really sickly to me. I like bergamot, jasmine and another13 just fine but not enough to spend money on.

I just received a bunch of samples from scent split that I’m excited to test - mostly byredo and Comme des Garçons.

i'm always a bit unsure of L'Air du désert marocain on first application, but god the drydown is just divine.

My favorite perfume for the last couple years has been Eric Buterbaugh’s lily of the valley oud

I was rereading the intro to Perfumes the Guide and can’t stop thinking about this:

The fact is that this stuff is worth loving. As with the tawdriest pop melody, there is a base pleasure in perfume, in just about any perfume, even the cheapest and the most starved of ideas, that is better than no perfume at all. It decorates the day. It makes you feel as if the colors of the air have changed. It’s a substitute for having an orchestra follow you about playing the theme song of your choice. Think of what the functional fragrance industry calls the magic moment, when the smell of fabric softener billows out of your dryer and you can’t help but feel great. Perfume is wonderful. And it’s simply not true, as some people believe, that thinking about our pleasures ruins them. For example, few things are as wonderful as having a great meal and talking about it afterward, and remembering other great meals, and planning the next one. We have found, in writing this book, that the same holds for perfume. All pleasure is connected, and the endless ride we take between disappointment and satisfaction and back again is largely what keeps us interested in life. What more is there to talk about?

I have been steadily developing my own perfume organ of essential oils. Unfortunately some do not smell very good. Sandalwood proved a disappointed whiff.

Xp I feel that way about CK1. It was the height of teen sophistication when I was at school in the 90s and I adored it. Of course we were poor and I wasn’t allowed to spend any of the money I earned so I couldn’t afford it or any other perfume, cheap or not. Owning more than one bottle of perfume at a time feels like the height of luxury to me.

i got cartier roadster sport and z zegna milan for crimbus. the cartier smells like a designer, a high end designer. it's so great, it's like bryan ferry's slave to love, it's elegant and so pop at the same time. it's smooth, it's green, it's glossy, it's like glass. the green smells like mint but it's rosemary. the zegna i didn't know how it smelled but it's got a fig note so i wanted it. there's a prominent low-end designer mall accord initially, like a knockoff impression of aventus or encre noire, a burnt, synthetic smokiness that i assume signifies sexinessitude. but after that there's a dense figginess and some clary sage greenfullness, so it's all good. mall accord or not, it's pretty ok. by mall accord i mean what that sounds like it means. i have diptyque philosykos, which is fig but smells like fig wood, and ferragamo homme, which is fig leaf, and i had a hermes jardin au mediterranee sample or whatever which is also fig leaf. i had a l'artisan caligna sample which i think had the best fig fruit note to it. fuck it, i'll get all the figs.

i got my brother the roma, so now i can wear it. also lalique lion, which is straight class, and the armaf clone of creed imperial mellesime, which is supposedly really close to the creed. fuck creed prices, i say, unless you have the cash, then just get the creed. it's just money.

I hadn’t said so in here I think but I bought a bottle of Caldey Island lavender on the basis of its five star review in Perfumes the Guide and it being, idk, made by monks? Anyway it arrived a few weeks back and I really like it. Have always associated lavender with sleep/somnolence, but this is a sweet and summery thing. It lifts the mood and isn’t remotely soporific, quite the opposite. It’s a nice perfume for summer, sure, but worn in the dead grey of winter, it’s something harvested in brighter days bearing the promise that the sun and better days will return. Or something. It’s very good.

Slightly practical question: 19 year old nephew requested Nasomatto's Blamage for his birthday. It's £125 so he can jog on.

Fragrantica suggests:

leather
woody
smoky
musky
animalic
powdery.

What should he have? Not Lynx before someone suggests that. Bonus points if not tested on animals.

Reminded me of Bulgari Black, a gorgeous fragrance in its own right, however it’s not sold in the UK anymore so you have to order it online from fragrancex or similar (15% off though). Well worth his time. And yes, it’s legit, I’ve bought from there before and checked the batch codes.

Bulgari Black is an interesting fragrance to be sure, though it does have a burnt rubber note that might be a turnoff for some.

Thanks, both.

Sorry I couldn't think of a suggestion. L'Homme Ideal L'Intense by Guerlain has some of those characteristics but not the animalic or the musky. Chanel Antaeus would seem a good match, and is one I love personally, but it might smell too old-fashioned for a 19-year-old (after all it was introduced in 1981).

this thread inspired me to order a bunch of CdG samples and see which pleased me. i've been drawn to their line of fragrances for a long time but had never picked any up. finally ordered myself a bottle of Wonderoud as a birthday treat. i'm also a fan of Concrete, but found it barely detectable on my skin after a short while. maybe i just need a bigger supply.

so here's the thing, uh, how does one develop their sense of smell? i can smell things, and sometimes i like the things (like CdG's Oud for one), but i have NO IDEA what i am smelling. how do y'all learn how to detect different notes in a scent? i'd have a deeper appreciation for fragrances/parfums if i could build up a little more familiarity

hmm, i guess Concrete is a skin scent and not meant to project? neat.

if i like something i'll look up the notes on fragrantica or basenotes. usually i can then pick out a few of the prominent notes but most fragrances have so many notes that they're all jumbled up in an amorphous scent cloud. if i'm unsure of what a particular note smells like i'll try several fragrances that feature that note and just kinda eliminate the differences.

thank u for that, slugbuggy. fragranica is gonna be helpful. :)

after my last post i went crazy and bought bottles of CdG's (underappreciated) Concrete and (much praised) Copper, and i'd like to get more stuff from that house... i guess i'm a bit of a label whore.

anyway, this stuff is pretty fun and i get why people get into collecting perfumes/colognes. that last purchase it for me for a while, though—cutting myself off until i use most of what i've ordered and Luckyscent takes all my money.

that stuff all sounds great, Davey, wonderoud sounds like extremely my kind of thing

I have been wanting to splurge on a bunch of samples lately but I’m trying to be good and use the frags I have because they are really lovely.

I just want a sample of every Tom Ford fragrance please. I’m hopeless for Tom Ford.

my friend loves one of those Tom Ford scents... she says it smells exactly like cocaine.

I almost laughed out loud with a mixture of delight/bemusement when I smelled Tom Ford’s Ombré Leather for the first time, it’s like “yea ok maybe I do want to smell like a brand new car!”

that's the one!

i think

I've very recently gotten into fragrance in my 30s by way of a late-breaking obsession with incense (file under hobbies/habits acquired under quarantine). Agree with all that Tom Ford frags are lovely. Beau de Jour is the one for me; it makes me feel like I've just walked out of a high-end neon barbershop freshly styled and shaven.

So far I've found the CdG Incense line resonates the strongest with me. Just got a bottle of Avignon last week and have my nose set on Kyoto next. Because I didn't grow up going to church--Catholic or otherwise--I don't associate frankincense and myrrh with any of that stuff. To me it just smells NICE in a way that directly activates my pleasure centers whenever I spray on Avignon or burn a stick of Fred Soll's Resin on a Stick Frankincense and Myyrh incense.

Xps I got a sample of CdG Concrete a few weeks ago. It is surprisingly light, sweet, and sandalwoody and I really like it. I also just really love the concrete bottle as an object, and the concept of the whole thing. So I'll probably cop a bottle when I have the funds. I tried Copper in-store and found it kind of off-putting, but I'll probably give it another shot. Has anyone tried any of their Olfactory Library stuff (Tar, Soda, Garage, etc)?

Even though I rarely leave the house much, I've taken to wearing the perfume from my old place of work, Aesop's Mystra, now discontinued. Labdanum, mastic, frankincense—. I had forgotten how much I love it. Wonder what I'll do when it's run out— it is rather expensive, and I'd much rather see what else is out there, since the world of perfume is so intriguing to me.

on the incense tip, i really like Tauer's incense-meets-desert stuff, L'Air du desert marocain or Au coeur du desert - which i realize i already mentioned too much above. Memo's African Leather smells v similar to my nose. It's not as eSoTeRiC and catholic as others i suppose but really beautiful. Personally I didn't love the Olfactory Library ones i've sniffed - someone like CB I Hate Perfume had better weird evocation scents for me, though i found they didn't last very long.

recently i bit the bullet and sprang for a whole bottle of Monocle/CDG's Hinoki perfume, which has a sharp cypress wood smell and then also this bloom of camphor that makes it at once "clarifying" and almost piney + at the same time sort of toxic, in a way i like. A nice alternative to some of the more sumptuous/incensey other things i wear. excited to try it in summer!

I really like the CdG Hinoki. Good to see others liking the same

terre d'hermes is one of those liminal perfumes. like, way too much vetiver to be kosher but if you apply it just so, it's sublime, but one step beyond and it's egregious. and so it goes. not enough is just enough. jean-claude elena, what was going on in your mind? this goes all the way to eleven. six or seven is where it should live, but that's not included in the instructions.

as a counter-reference, i spayed on some of my brother's vettiver guerlain. so brutish, so elegant. jesus howard christ! if you put this on your body in springtime conditions you will be a better person! too cold and it lays flat and too warm and it weighs you down, but at optimal conditions, you have superman powers! i am pure of heart and woe of all wrongdoers everywhere! i thought this was just ok for an old-timey thing but i have been transformed into a pillar of righteousness! i should know. i'm a medical doctor. i should know. you should quit. you should never, never know. you never know.

terre d'hermes is one of those liminal perfumes. like, way too much vetiver to be kosher but if you apply it just so, it's sublime, but one step beyond and it's egregious. and so it goes. not enough is just enough.

Yeah, I went back and forth between terre d'hermes and terre d'hermes eau intense vetiver on a couple sample vials. I ended up picking up a full bottle of the intense vetiver because I liked the scent better. It's one of those scents for me where the atmospheric conditions and temperature need to be perfect for it to work. Today is one of those days: light spring rain, lower 50s, lit a couple candles this morning, windows cracked, feeling mellow. Midway through the morning, I get the idea like "today. today is the day I wear some of that." One spray on the arm from a judicious distance and let me tell you it smells wonderful but damn I am practically cross-eyed with a headache now.

Maybe if I actually stepped outdoors to apply it or something. It's kinda ridiculous.

Tried that out back this fine, cloudy spring morning. One spray on the arm from over a foot away. Still headache-inducing. Swear it wasn't like this with the sample.