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....
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...
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.
