Bois Blond (Parfumerie Generale, 2007, Pierre Guillaume)

The perfume opens with light early summer grass, hints of citrus and fresh wood shavings. There is a note of very green, sappy wood and a hint of spice. This is a heady mixture, it is much brighter than I had expected given the strong presence of cedar. The spice remains and is joined by musk and a more aged wood as the perfume really dries down and warms to skin temperature. The mixture of wood, spices and musk almost evoke old-fashioned wax furniture polish, a rich scent with a little astringent sharpness. This sharpness mellows after an hour or so though a certain spice element remains. Though it isn't actually an ingredient I perceive a coriander undertone: spicy and deep yet not too obviously comestible. This combines with the cedar and musk to create a warm, slightly sweaty skin scent, which for me epitomises the height of summer. The smell of my own skin on a long, hot summer day is a constant source of satisfaction and this perfume really captures the masculine aroma and the spice of drying sweat.

As the day and the season wear on the scent settles with wet hay. It still has a hint of sweat though this element no longer comes to the fore. The whole fragrance settles for the rest of the day and toys with that boundary between perfect ripeness and the onset of decay. Towards the end there is a hint of the sweetness of silage and hay barns. This scent gently fades out as the night itself draws in.

Celebrity fragrances

What a lot of celebrities we apparently want to smell like. Liz Taylor started it all with the hugely successful White Diamonds. Now, even the likes of Courtney and Ashley Peldon, Jade Goody and Kerry Katona get in on the act. And some of these things are gigantic sellers, despite being foetid.

I had a browse in a supermarket recently and entertained myself for minutes. There's Sean 'P. Diddy' Combs's Unforgivable, a topnote of watermelon on a drydown of watermelon with a base of some more watermelon. Naomi Campbell's Sunset reminds me of Ambre Solaire. J.Lo Glow, its biscuitty clean topnote mingled with citrus and pine, smells exactly like something you’d use to clean the hobs with. (Her Miami Glow is the same, but with bubblegum.) And, as we all know, Britney Spears smells Curious. Though I'm going to embed the commercial for another of her fragrances, Fantasy, here, because it fills me with nostalgia for the bright hope that was her life in 2005:



Awww. And, er, whoops.

Creating a perfume is an art and a science, requiring enormous sophistication and taste, years of training, subtlety, maturity, talent. Which is why the only celebrity perfume you should ever buy is Celine Dion's.

Yes, this entire post is an excuse to post an Onion article from four years ago. What of it?

Tom Ford For Men (Tom Ford, 2007)

Tom Ford For Men is Mr. Ford's company's first foray into the world of male perfumery. Together with knowledge of the perfume's title, the print ads (see above) suggest one of two things. One, this perfume smells of lady's undercarriage or, two, smelling of this scent will gain one access to a lady's undercarriage. Given the staggeringly nonsexual smell of the fragrance I must assume it is option two that Mr. Ford's advertising agency is attempting to persuade us is in prospect. That said, returning to the advertisement for a moment, quite who would like to spend any intimate time with a hairless, oiled up anorexic I cannot imagine, certainly no-one with a penchant for sensual delights. And perhaps that's just it, here is a perfume aimed at people who like to think of themselves as deeply sexual and sensual but actually aren't, they need to be explicitly sold a product which puts vagina and perfume in as close physical proximity as mainstream publishing will allow to get through their heads: "Oh this is the sexy one. This one will get me laid". They must lack the capacity (or interest perhaps) to smell the array of profoundly sexy smells that perfumers have created to delight our noses, summon our blood and stiffen our sinews. What kind of mind sees this advert and buys this scent I wonder? It can only be someone for whom the vapid objectification of women, the rendering of the act of sex itself in its most artificial manner combined with the removal of any passion or emotion appeals. There is no humanity, no warmth and no sensuality. I don't doubt that people exist who get their kicks from such empty idolatry but marketing to them makes me almost speechless with anger and disappointment at my fellow males.

Returning to the product itself I had personally hoped, given the photo (setting aside social and political objections for a moment), that it might smell of ladies' undercarriages but my disappointment in finding that it did not was as nothing compared to the disappointment that it did not stir the slightest twitch of excitement in my nether regions. There are so many scents competing in this perfume that it is almost as if the perfumer, unsure of what Mr. Ford wanted for his first masculine fragrance, decided to put them all in just in case. Allow me to list them for you: citrus, lemon leaf oil, bergamot, mandarin zest, basil, violet leaves, ginger, orange blossom, black pepper, tobacco leaf, grapefruit blossom, amber, cedar, patchouli, vetiver, oakmoss, leatherwood and cypriol. It is the latter that all the fuss is being made over. Mr. Ford has commented that cypriol, a root from India, is the vital ingredient that gives, "that slightly dirty, sensual, sexy smell...It's not the same as natural musk used to be, but it has a bit of something that some people would think slightly dirty...I think it's warm and sensual." I think it's insipid and weak: semi-skimmed musk at best. To be honest, to my nose the scent it recalls most is that cheap soap that Boots used to sell, the allegedly unperfumed sort that instead had a slightly soap flakes kind of pong to it, not acrid nor pine-fresh clean but still a long way from a dirty tussle in some damp sheets. This scent has no libido at all; I really can't find anything animalic in this fragrance. Actually looking back at the compendious list of ingredients, the reason I can't get any sexy animal scent is because there is indeed no sexy animal ingredient to be found. And here is where this fragrance falls apart for me given the pure sex hyperbole of the advertising.

There is nothing offensive about the perfume itself, it is quite clean and fresh smelling, there is a hint of Earl Grey in amongst the citrus and gentle spices. But musk? No sir, nary a hint. This is no perfume to widen the nostrils; it would suffice for meeting ,and not frightening, an elderly maiden aunt perhaps, but not one's paramour. The deliciously sexy Musc Ravageur from Editions de Parfums which, despite Mr. Ford's placement of musk in the past tense, is positively engorged with the stuff is described thus on their website, "No flowers, just a refined and exalted skin scent." And that's what you need to get you horny. Lemons, violets and bergamot all have their places (in a martini, the garden and Earl Grey tea for example) but it is the smell of sweat and human skin that is arousing and Tom Ford For Men lacks any sense of it.

Après L'Ondée (Guerlain, 1906)

No spice, no comestibles, no sweetness, no warmth: Après L'Ondée is a rarity and well worth getting your hands on, although that can be difficult. The parfum has been discontinued but the EDT is still available (in Europe, anyway); sadly I find this form rather weak on my skin. I still wear it but tear through the bottle at great speed.

It starts citric, giving way very quickly to cut grass, and then on to damp violets and wet earth. It's fresh and cold, and nothing like the 'Parma Violet'-style sweetness that comes with most violet scents. There's a very slight anise bitterness. It doesn't smell like anything else I wear and I only wish I didn't have to bathe myself in it quite so generously.