RIP Yves Saint Laurent

One of the great leaders of fragrance (along with fashion and design), Yves Saint Laurent is gone at the age of 71.  He will be missed by the fragrance community. Wearing Kouros today in honor of the man.

Tommy Bahama Set Sail St. Barts – Laid Back

One of the bigger enablers for a perfume enthusiast is the semi-ghetto establishment known as TJ Maxx.  Unfortunately for me (and my wallet), for the past year I’ve worked next door to one.  Normally it’s a bunch of crap inside, Colors, Wings, Adidas Rehash 7,652.  The usual bargain bin stuff.  But ours gets some more [...]

Clinique Happy – Perfume For Ninjas

Happy was one of the initial three fragrances that started me on this journey (along with Unforgivable and Armani Code). Happy and Code were on the Amazon Top 20 in men’s fragrance and me, not knowing where else to start, took that list and started hitting up stores and crossing fragrances off the list. My [...]

YSL Kouros – Handle With Care

In the fragrance world few scents are as hotly debated as Yves Saint Laurent’s 1981 classic, Kouros. On Basenotes it’s more or less a constant stream of asinine chatter. People repeat what they’ve heard, or take a mindset going in to smelling a cologne before actually trying it. For Kouros, the buzzword is “urinal cakes”. [...]

Aramis Havana – The Legend & The Tragedy

A sad truth in the fragrance world is that the public, by and large, has awful taste. Mainstream garbage like Acqua di Gio is regurgitated endlessly by the media, the marketing teams, and the public itself. A fellow Basenoter once commented on the fact that he was once locked in a meeting with 10 Indian [...]

Dunhill Pursuit Revisited

My initial review of Dunhill Pursuit reads something like so: This stuff is great. I got a spray on paper yesterday at Sephora and decided to leave with a 1mL sample spray of the stuff. Wore three sprays, one to the neck, one to the belly, one to the back of the wrist. The four [...]

Just One More Level, Just One More Level, Just One More Level

So some of you did in fact notice that I’ve dropped off the face of the earth over the past few days. It’s cool guys, I’m back with an old love. That is to say, I’m playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion again. I remember playing it on my laptop and clocking about 160 hours [...]

Versace Man Eau Fraiche

I have a confession to make. I like women’s perfume. Well, just one. Dolce & Gabanna Light Blue Pour Femme. Of course, they also make a Pour Homme version, but it’s a bunch of crap. The women’s version is definitely unisex, damn whatever their marketing department says. I was considering buying it. That is, buy [...]

Usher He: *vomit*

Let me say before I go any further that I remain steadfastly neutral with regards to celebrity perfumes. I think equating a complex fragrance with many ingredients to one particular person is pretty much dumb. I own Sean John Unforgivable on the merits of it being an excellent fragrance, and honestly don’t give a damn [...]

Mugler Cologne: The Muse

I just got stuff straight with the University of Louisville. That doesn’t sound like much but it’s taken about a month of steady correspondence with UofL to assure that I could go back; indeed today I was on the phone with 5 different departments for about 2 hours, trying to figure out why I could [...]