Quickies

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.

Alien

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)

Pon Farr and Red Shirt

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.