Not My Type: O by BLOOD Concept

Be honest, now: if you were presented with a lineup of a dozen fragrances of which you knew nothing, each named after a sign of zodiac, even if you knew that astrology is a load of complete nonsense, wouldn't your first instinct be to reach for the bottle that corresponded to your own sign?

Maybe not you. But I would, and I think most other people would, too. And likewise, if you were confronted with a line of fragrances named after blood types, wouldn't you first want to try the one that matched your own blood type, just to see if it really suited you in some mysterious way?

So that's what I did. I have boring old type O-positive blood, the most usual in most parts of the world, at least here in Canada, but type O-positive is the universal donor, so anybody can get a transfusion from me, so there's that. Therefore, out of the four BLOOD Concept fragrances, I naturally chose O to try first.

Not two weeks ago I was writing about Bond No. 9's Bryant Park, which is dominated by raspberry, and a few years back I raved about Lacoste Elegance, a men's scent with what I thought was an unusually potent raspberry note. O, too, is dominated by raspberry, and in all three scents that note lasts an uncommonly long time. That is one hell of a synthetic.

O doesn't just smell of raspberry — there are other things in there, and if you just want that one thing there's always Demeter's enchanting but very short-lived Raspberry Jam — but raspberry is clearly the entire point of it in the end. Straight out of the bottle it's a mishmash of frankly unconnected things, an odd wild-mushroom-earthiness and a dab of synthetic rose (which allied with the raspberry calls to mind CdG's Rose but is weirder than that) and some cedar, all of which gradually drop away over the course of four hours or so to leave hardly anything but that durable raspberry. There's supposed to be a metallic note, because blood is full of iron and is said to have in quantity a metallic smell often compared to copper, but I don't smell anything particularly metally about it. O is very strange, and I can't say it's very good, but it isn't quite like anything I've ever smelled. It certainly isn't me, blood type or not.

The packaging, though, is splendid: an apparatus that wouldn't look out of place in any hospital, a frigidly clean-looking metal-and-glass bottle with a vaguely alarming spindle of red, like an automated phlebotomy from the future. (The eau de parfum is packaged as a 60-mL spray for $155: the parfum, as a 40-mL dropper for $185.)