Pipe Dream: Perry Ellis 360 Black for Men

If you've ever used one of the bath products in a fragrance line, you've probably noticed that the smell is never quite the same as the original scent. The oil in lotions, body creams, and after-shave balms tend to put a damper on the top notes, weighing down the lighter molecules and allowing the middle and base notes to take precedence. Shower gels and deodorants add their own manufactured aromas to the scent, altering it in unpredictable ways. And soap always smells, yes, soapy.
Perry Ellis 360 Black for Men is almost a terrific scent, but it's hard to tell what it's supposed to smell like from the set I have. There are four products; a deodorant, an after-shave balm, a 100-mL spray bottle of eau de toilette, and a quarter-ounce travel spray of the same EDT, and all four of them smell different.

The deodorant hardly registers at all as a scent. (No, I didn't jam my nose into my own armpit: I spread a little on my arm.) I don't really know what the point of it is, except as a deodorant, which role it fills very well. The after-shave balm, as I expected, completely buries the top notes: for all I know, the manufacturers might not even have bothered to put any in. What it smells like instead is the middle of the scent, which--as I will get to, I promise--is pretty nice.

I'm guessing that the quarter-ounce is the real deal, or closest to what was intended. It starts with a bright freshness that isn't quite the usual clean-ozonic smell we expect from modern perfumery (and, I would imagine, are all righteously sick of). Instead, it has a starched crispness to it: it makes me think of fresh laundry. I don't love it madly, but it's better than it could have been, which is a relief. Alongside it is a batch of prickly spices. The core of the scent is essentially anise-scented pipe tobacco, which sounds as if it could become cloying but which never descends into mere warmth, because the spiciness (and a bit of the freshness) remain well into the middle.

For some reason, the 100-mL bottle smells different. It could be from a (very) different batch, or maybe it's gone subtly off, but it clearly isn't the same as the tiny bottle. The top notes are attenuated so much that they hardly even register; that bright synthetic laundry-detergent is pretty much absent. More or less unimpeded by that artificial freshness, brilliant specks of spice and of anise--that sambuca note--fly up like sparks and then recede into the dark leathery tobacco. This is the one I like.

The notes are, according to the manufacturer and if you care, Cardamom, Sambuca, Barbados Ginger Spice, Nutmeg Extract, Tamarind Vine, Black Basil, Tobacco Leaf, Suede Accord and Liquid Amber. I don't know what half these things smell like (black basil?), but I do know that Perry Ellis 360 Black for Men--the one in the big bottle, anyway--suits me well. It isn't art, but it's pretty good.

The bottle is the usual tall slender column topped by a sphere, all, in this case, in black. The manufacturers have a very bad habit of putting on the bottles in their gift sets stickers reading "NOT FOR INDIVIDUAL SALE", which would be fine if these stickers were removable, but they aren't. I tried scraping one off with a knife after everything else I could think of to try had failed; I ended scraping off some of the black lacquer with which the bottle is coloured, but the label remained firmly attached. Not nice, manufacturers! (If the label doesn't bother you, you can buy the set from the usual online discounters.)

Afterwards: Perry Ellis 360 Red Men

The Perry Ellis scents are a real mixed bag. Some of them are really good; some of them are dreadful. Most of them, as you might expect, are middle-of-the-road: commercial scents which aren't intended to express a point of view or an artistic statement, but to appeal to as many people as possible and make a lot of money.

Here are the notes.

Top: Italian bergamot, lime zest, mandarin, ruby orange, nutmeg, red cinnamon, clove bud. Middle: parsley, coriander seeds, lavender. Base: Mysore sandalwood, red cedar, vetiver, patchouli, oakmoss, musk.

The top is a jumble of citrus notes, permeated--polluted, really--with something like calone, a note which is in just about everything nowadays: it gives that ozonic seaside smell that is the universal (in North American fragrances, anyway) signifier for "fresh". Whenever you smell a men's deodorant with a name containing "thunder", "rain", "wild", or anything of the sort, whenever you read of a new fragrance that's "clean", "fresh", "outdoorsy", you're probably getting a snootful of calone or something homologous to it.

Do they have to put it in everything? It seems like ninety per cent of new men's fragrances these days--no, make that ninety-five--are fresh scents (just as the huge majority of women's scents, even from established houses that should know better, are fruity florals aimed at a very young market). It's crazy. There are hundreds and hundreds of them on the market right now; is it really impossible to sell people a good oriental, a well-thought-out pure floral, a subtle chypre? Are people such sheep that everyone has to smell exactly like everyone else?

I guess I'm done ranting.

Once you get past the top of 360 Red, you have a not-bad scent. The synthetic freshness lingers longer that I'd want it to (I'd rather it weren't there at all, of course), but a sneaky warmth begins to emerge as the ozonated citrus notes stop screaming at you. It's a warm, herbaceous scent grounded in lavender, and it smells masculine without being aggressive; it's stripped-down, almost minimalist. The base notes sound like a powerhouse, but they're surprisingly understated; nothing makes a dramatic entrance or dominates the endgame. Just more subtle masculinity, really very pleasant. It's a shame about that horrible top note, which was almost enough to turn me away from the scent altogether.

The bottle, of course, is genius. The original women's 360, launched way back in 1993, was packaged in two bottles: the perfume was in a glass sphere (it was divided around the equator, with the top half uncovering a stopper), and the eau de toilette was in a tall glass cylinder with a metal collar and a spherical cap. Yeah, it's unavoidably phallic, but it's also an icon of simplicity, and it pretty much became the house bottle for both men's and women's scents, used not only for the ever-expanding 360 line but also for the extraordinary Perry Ellis Reserve. In the 360 line (which now encompasses the original scent plus Red, White, Black, Blue, and finally, because they evidently ran out of colours, Pure), the men's bottles have a silver collar, the women's gold. The 360 Red bottle is, predictably, red glass, a colour not usually used in men's scents, and it's gorgeous and striking.

All Outdoors: Perry Ellis America

The gimmick, if it is one, of Perry Ellis America is that it's composed entirely of things that grow natively in the United States; no exotica like vanilla and myrrh here. It's clearly meant to be a fresh, clean, all-outdoors smell, and that's exactly what it is The notes are as follows:

Top Notes
Fresh Anise, Pineapple, Sage, Bergamot, Green Fern

Middle Notes
Juniper, Lavender, Geranium, Basil, Palma Rosa, Vetiver

Base Notes
Neroli, Cedar, Amber, Musk, Sandalwood, Napa Leather Tone.

The top does have a quick, juicy wham of pineapple, but it's dominated by a bright green fir-needle scent as an introduction to the overall fougere structure. The middle is straight fougere: lavender, vetivert, and green herbal notes. It fades very quickly: there's little left but base notes after two hours or so, mostly musk and sandalwood, and the whole thing has vanished in less than eight.

This sounds in many ways similar to yesterday's Perry Man--citrus, juniper, lavender, cedar, sandalwood--but the composition and the execution are so much better; Perry Ellis America has an honest, unsynthetic cleanliness about it. It's not a great scent, not a classic, but for the price (I paid $6.99 Canadian for a one-ounce bottle) and for the unselfconscious charm of it, it's worth having.

Snarl: Perry Man by Perry Ellis

There have been a couple of scents over the years that have literally made me lunge back from the tester in revulsion. Perry Man by Perry Ellis isn't one of them, but it is one that I can tell quickly isn't for me, and even when, as I usually do, I stubbornly try it two or three times anyway, my first impression is hardly ever wrong. (It has been; some scents you have to grow into, which is what happened with Hermes Bel Ami, a scent I have to write about sometime.)

The most unpleasant thing about Perry Man is the top note, which, according to the manufacturer's info, contains juniper berry, cypress, fennel, nutmeg, and citrus notes. It doesn't smell like fennel, an anisic smell I love, but it does smell bitingly synthetic--a piercing jangle of citrus notes alongside something that smells like artificial apple flavour and a few jabs of herbs and spices. The smell immediately announces itself as yet another entry in the already over-represented men's fresh scent category, most of which I find uninteresting; but few of them are as decidedly unpleasant as this one. The middle is meant to be cedar and lavender, but the top notes hang around for far too long (or perhaps they simply stick in my nose), muting anything that follows: the middle notes do eventually emerge, but they remain contaminated with that nasty top.

The whole thing smells like a tangle of aroma-chemicals, not so much constructed or composed as spilled together. It resembles one of those cheap body sprays they're hawking to teenage boys these days; it certainly doesn't smell like anything high-end, not from the house that produced the original Perry Ellis for men, Perry Ellis Reserve, or (tomorrow's topic) Perry Ellis America. They get credit for an interesting package, with a bottle that subtly fits together with the women's version and a smart-looking metal canister to tuck it into, but that's about it.

All Man: Perry Ellis Reserve

I am slavishly addicted to warm, oriental, ambery scents, but I still have a place in my heart for the classic men's fragrance: something fresh and hesperidic at the top, herbal or otherwise aromatic in the middle, and subdued and woody in the base. This is probably why I was instantly smitten by Perry Ellis Reserve, which is pretty much a perfect scent in a gorgeous, minimalist bottle (so gorgeous that it was originally used for Perry Ellis' 360 for Men and then again for 360 Blue, 360 Red, 360 White....).

The opener is a shock of grapefruit--probably my favourite citrus note--alongside bergamot, lavender, and something called "champagne lifescent", which is a silly name but may well contribute to the sparkle of the top notes. This burns away quickly, as citrus notes tend to do, leaving a luminous halo of muted floral notes (fresh carnation and a little rose, plus the jasmine derivative hedione) butched up with herbal notes, predominantly my beloved tarragon. The middle of the scent proves that even highly floral scents can be masculine if they're treated with respect and restraint; just look at the jasmine-saturated Rochas Man, which uses coffee and cedar to darken and subdue the jasmine. The base notes are, as expected, wood and amber notes, with just a little oakmoss, not enough to turn it into a chypre but enough to give the base a dark-brown honeyed undertone. It's just about the perfect office scent: it's subtle enough to avoid offending anyone, but it's there.

Some of the Perry Ellis scents are good, some are so-so, and some are absolutely heinous (more on that tomorrow), but Reserve is the real deal: a classically constructed scent that still manages to be distinctive.