Flankers and Phttt!

While I drum my fingers waiting for my Boxooooooses and the new Amouage Memoir, I pawed through my sample drawer to look at new releases and flankers that seemed interesting or should be interesting that I’ve ignored the last few months.

Estee Lauder Sensuous  Noir – flanker. Estee Lauder is like the High Priestess of flankers. They flank their flankers.  At some point, it’s like a olfactory nesting game. Flankers tend to make me yawn, with the exception a few, like J’Adore Absolu from Dior, which I think is just gorgeous and perfect for a mainstream scent. It makes J’Adore better without too much departure from the original.  So while not a fan of flankers, they do seem more honest than just making a similar perfume and slapping a new name on it, which happens still, but happened a lot more frequently before flanking started.

Estee Lauder’s Sensuous was a scent that I liked quite well, which led me to believe that I may like this noir’ish flanker, composed of notes of purple rose, jasmine, black pepper, melted woods nature print, creme noir accord, patchouli prisma, spiced lily, benzoin, vanilla, honey and amber.  They should have called it Sensuous Dessert instead of Noir.  Noir for me implies a darkness, less peppiness, some darker tonality.  Instead Sensuous Noir gives us a more sweet and gourmand version of Sensuous.  Huge disappointment for me – a darker Sensuous could have been great. Nothing really wrong with Sensuous Noir, but as a flanker, it doesn’t feel like an  improvement on the original, nor does it feel like it embraces the added word onto its name.  Poor little flanker. Having said that, I think it will sell really well for EL because the name and the sweetness will appeal to a demographic that the original didn’t.  Maybe they’re just smarter than I am?  Well, of course!

Chanel’s advance marketing hype for its new men’s scent, Bleu de Chanel was  nonexistent. I saw it featured on their website like a week before it was released – though it seems that there’s a big marketing blitz coming with Martin Scorcese now, so maybe there are just two marketing avenues at work:  the big buildup for the niche fragrances that get plenty of advance copy (the stuff we drool over) and the marketing avenue that is straight for the masses when the scent is released, centered much more around media hype and star personalities (the stuff we tend to not drool over, but sniff dismissively about).  Octavian notes that there was another cologne of this name in the ’30s.  I’ve never smelled the original, but I can’t imagine they bear any resemblance to each other beyond they are fragrance.  This one is all modern sporty fresh perfumery.  I do realize in saying that, most of you will read that as the pejorative that I think of it as.  There’s, again, nothing really wrong with this, it is constructed well for what it is, it’s got all the Chanel quality. It’s just more of the same of a whole lot of other stuff that’s been out there for a while. Maybe Chanel hadn’t mined this particular men’s throbbing vein (reference to March’s post from yesterday)?  I thought they had plenty of the sport scents, but maybe not. If not, then I guess it was necessary to put it in the lineup to get that customer.

But shouldn’t there be a rule – one for them and one for us?  They can release some mainstream thing they need to make to try and cover the market they are aiming for, but they have to give us something cool and unique around the same time, like Chanel doing a parfum version of 31 Rue Cambon or Beige.

That was a bust.

Have I mentioned Vero Kern’s EDP versions of her scents?  Wonderful!  I haven’t talked about them because I don’t think you can get them here yet, and I don’t know what the price point is, but I’m pretty excited about them because I love her fragrances, but the price tag on the extraits really takes them out of most people’s budget.  Of course, just in time for this post to come out, Luckyscent’s Fall Scents e-mail comes out with an announcement that her EDPs are there now!  $190 for 50 mls.

Can we talk about my new Droid X instead?  I need a Droid app for my perfumes, so I can catalog the perfumes I like and whether it’s mainstream (I define this by price point more than anything else, though availability is another big factor) or niche or just overpriced dreck in either category.  Because I’m sitting here thinking about a lot of mainstream stuff I do love, like the J’Adore Absolute and Coco Mademoiselle parfum and Sensuous and the Burberrys.  I mean, I never wear the Burberrys, but my niece does, and I always think she smells so great as she drifts by – perfection for young women.  I’d just like to dial up my little app and run through my list of mainstream things I love to give me some hope that there will be more coming, and I will find more to love there, it’s just having to sort through a lot of rocks in my Trick or Treat Bag.

Mainstream of the last 10 years, generally, what’s your favorites?  Do we get more depressed about it because there’s just more mainstream (this seems to have slowed down a bit) and a lot that smells the same, and it’s farther and farther between loves, or has mainstream really gotten that much worse and generic? I keep thinking it’s that much worse and generic, but I’d like to be convinced otherwise if anyone is inclined or up to that task.