As I shopped for perfumes in Italy this past autumn, I searched for Dsquared2 He Wood; the fact that He Wood wouldn’t be available in the U.S. till the spring of 2008 made The Search intense — I wanted to smell He Wood before it arrived in the States. On the last day of my trip, I found a bottle of He Wood in a Venetian perfume shop and asked the shop owner if she had any samples of the fragrance. “No.” she said. I asked if there was a tester bottle. Flippantly, she explained: “It’s a new scent, Sir, so, no, no tester has been opened yet! It’s new!” Her “logic” was lost on me, and I left Venice and returned to the U.S. not knowing if He Wood was good, bad or boring.
In December, I discovered that He Wood is available in Canada, so off I went to finally sniff it…