Surprise, Surprise: Classic 1920 by Bois 1920

We can't be expected to take fragrance advertising seriously, surely: the florid adjectives, the swooning allusions to temptation and desire, the sheer too-muchness of it. It's like a colossal joke and it's hard to tell on whom it's being played. Take this, from the sample card for Classic 1920:

SPICY-AMBER
Dulled feelings reawaken. Classic 1920 is a fragrance that sets desire and mystery to rhythm. The fragrance is built in the wake of harmonious spicy notes that are smoothed by a complex flowery bouquet and elegant fruity nuances. At the end, the green and boisé [woody] base notes of vetiver from Haiti and citron from China slide gently into the exotic enchantment of sandalwood from the Antilles.

After reading that, I was determined not to like Classic 1920, but damned if it didn't seduce me anyway. Plenty of amorphous spice in the citrusy top, a big indefinable and genderless floral mix sharpened with vetiver in the middle, woody amber in the base: not particularly original, but I enjoyed wearing it, and throughout the day little currents of it would waft up and make me smile, which is just about the best possible reason to wear a scent.

At $195 for 100 mL, though, I can't see that it's worth what they're asking, unless you were determined to make it your signature scent (which it would do admirably). It's nice, but it's not a couple hundred bucks' worth of nice. Hunt down some Perry Ellis Reserve (discontinued but widely available online) instead: it's the same basic idea, a big masculine floral wrapped in a spicy-green amber oriental, and it won't break the bank.

Who Are You: Bois 1920 Vetiver Ambrato

I think nowadays most people like to know what the notes to a scent are so they have an idea of what they're getting themselves into, so here they are:


Top notes are bergamot, lemon, petit grain, cloves, geranium and artemisia; middle notes are patchouli, vetiver, sandalwood, cedar and lavender; base notes are tobacco, vanilla, amber, musk, benzoin, french labdanum and galbanum.


Sure, whatever. Here's what Vetiver Ambrato smells like to me: a very brief whiff of vetiver cologne, and then a massive heap of sweet powder. It isn't bad — it calls to mind a number of other ambery-sweet men's scent's like Lagerfeld and Stetson — but it is very sweet, and it is very powdery, and that's practically all there is to it. The list of ingredients sounds like a men's scent, and at first, when those citrus-green notes are still in the air, it suggests being freshly shaven and powdered in a barbershop; but then the volatile notes disappear and all you're left with is sweet powder, though from time to time, not often enough, I thought I detected a bit of tobacco. At the end — a long time coming, since it's almost entirely base notes — there's a bit of that sourishness you sometimes get with ambers, and some vanilla.

Luckyscent, echoing the packaging of my sample, says that "Vetiver Ambrato is a decidedly masculine fragrance that embodies all the power and mystery of modern man," which is hilarious, because if you added a few drops of violet water after the top notes burn off, you would smell like a little old lady crocheting an antimacassar. The sample's text also calls it "virile" and "provocative", and I can't understand why the company is so obviously desperate to promote it as something it is not: it is as virile and provocative as a desk lamp.

Old-Style: Bois 1920 Sutra Ylang

Let's start with names. Apparently, Bois 1920 has nothing to do with wood ("bois" is the French word for wood), but instead is an acronym referring to creator Enzo Galardi's grandfather Guido, who opened a perfumery in Italy in 1920 called Bottega Italiana Spigo, "Italian Lavender Boutique". Sutra Ylang seems designed to make us think of, well, what exactly? "Sutra" is a Sanskrit word from India which brings to mind for most North Americans the Kama Sutra, which is not exactly the sex manual that most of us seem to think but more of a guide to sensual living; the word "sutra" more or less means "aphorism", but it literally means something like "connecting thread" and is the ancestor of the word "suture", a thread used to sew things together. "Ylang" is a Tagalog word from the Philippines which most of us known as "ylang-ylang" and is generally accepted to mean "flower of flowers", although the word "ylang" itself apparently means either "wilderness" or "rare", depending on which etymology you believe.

India and the Philippines are a few thousand miles apart and neither is really the home of what Westerners think of as oriental perfumery, so I assume that Bois 1920 was going for some sort of generalized and far-flung orientalia or at least Asiatica in the name of their scent, and they succeeded. Sutra Ylang is a somewhat scaled-down version of a big ambery eighties-style floral oriental, and thank god for that, because there aren't nearly enough of them around, the market having been crowded with disgusting perfumes that smell like decomposing fruit salad or floor cleaner or automotive air freshener. A blissful shot of crisp fresh citrus in the opening stages; a rich carnation-rose middle; a big chunk of sandalwood and cedar; all tied together with tons of amber, which manages not to be cloying as it was in their Real Patchouly.

The bottle, of course, is gorgeous, and you men may safely ignore the apparent pinkishness of the box, because there is nothing girly about Sutra Ylang: there have been plenty of warm sweet men's scents over the years, and this one, with its woody-amber base, fits right in. Bois 1920 considered their first eight scents to be unisex (they later launched some scents aimed specifically at women, in extremely pinkified versions of their house bottle), and there's no reason on Earth a man couldn't wear this.

Scentroulette Day 17: Sandalo e The by Bois 1920

"Sandalo e The" means "Sandalwood and Tea", and that is pretty much what you get, except that there is a tobacco-ish quality to it that is quite nice, and a bristly, spiny quality that isn't. There is also purportedly a quantity of roses, but they must have missed the curtain call, because I can't spot them anywhere. The scent never smooths out or calms down as I kept hoping it would: it stays pointy and overly aggressive for a long time, because, predictably, the less you like a scent, the longer it is liable to stay on your skin. It isn't horrible or despicable, but it isn't very interesting or pleasant, either.

I did another Bois 1920 a couple of weeks ago and I didn't like that one, either. I have six more floating around that I'm sure I'll get to sooner or later, but I hope these first two aren't the beginning of a trend, especially since some of the other Bois 1920 scents have intriguing names like Sushi Imperiale (nothing to do with raw-fish sushi, apparently, though I don't know for sure) and Vetiver Ambrato ("ambered vetiver", which sounds like it ought to be really nice).

Scentroulette Day 4: Real Patchouly by Bois 1920

You know you can't trust the lists of notes you get, right?

First of all, they could be completely invented: the company, if it is telling you anything at all, is telling you what it thinks you would like to hear, which is why you get so much trendy balderdash these days about "frozen peach margarita accord" and "toasted meringue". Second, they could be wrong: if some blogger or perfume writer declared that a particular scent was composed of bergamot, strawberry leaves, wisteria, black rose, sandalwood, and patchouli (entirely plausible, by the way), and a few people copied that and posted it to their blogs, it could become established as the "list of notes" for that scent, regardless of its connection to reality. And third, they could be more or less accurate, but since they tell you nothing of proportion or composition, they could tell you nothing useful, or lead you completely astray.

Luckyscent lists the notes for Real Patchouly as

Texas citron, Indian sandalwood, vanilla, amber

which is nonsense, because there's no patchouli listed. Fragrantica lists the base notes thusly:

Top notes are lemon, mandarin orange, celery seeds, caraway, cedar, thyme and artemisia; middle notes are patchouli, sandalwood, eucalyptus and french labdanum; base notes are tobacco, vanilla, benzoin and musk.

All well and good, and probably much closer to the mark. But here is what I am smelling: little bit of herbal something BIG BLAST OF AMBER some patchouli but not really that much for a scent that calls itself "Real Patchouly" MORE AMBER AND SOME VANILLA OR POSSIBLY BENZOIN AND IS THAT LABDANUM I THINK IT IS. Oh, and AMBER AMBER AMBER.

It's the most ambery scent I've smelled since my beloved Ambre Précieux, and that's saying something. It is very reminiscent of that scent, but rougher, earthier. It's nice enough, but it gets on my nerves after a while, because it doesn't really develop past that first huge hit of amber, and it all seems a bit much. (I can't believe I'm saying that, because Ambre Précieux is pretty much definitionally "too much", but somehow it seems comforting and cozy, while Real Patchouly reads as aggressive.)

The bottle, though. Isn't that killer? The packaging of the Bois 1920 scents is uniformly gorgeous: see?