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Gucci Made to Measure ~ fragrance review

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Gucci recently launched Made to Measure for men. “Made to measure” refers to an in-house tailoring service that allows Gucci clients to customize clothing with special textiles and other “details” (baby llama fabric anyone?…why baby llama, Gucci, why?)

The “painstaking attention” that Gucci claims “pours”1 into its Made to Measure service certainly never overflows to fill any Gucci fragrance bottles. Many companies, naming a new perfume after an exclusive and extremely expensive experience, would use that opportunity to make a costly fragrance, full of top-quality ingredients.

Not Gucci…

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Yohji Yamamoto Essential (2013 reissue) ~ fragrance review

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Yohji Yamamoto Essential

Excuses, excuses. I’ve recently returned to school for a year-long course (I’d forgotten what “homework” meant). This week I have the dreaded yearly physical exam to look forward to — so humiliating! I just started giving private tours of a new special exhibit at the museum where I volunteer. Oh, I’m also helping to plan a Day of the Dead event and wrapping up painting the outside of my house before Seattle’s six-month rainy season commences. And I’ve been frantically making jams, jellies, sauces and juice from quince; my quince tree produced so much fruit its branches are touching the ground (the yard smells sensational; my ripe quinces produce an aroma I’ll describe as “apples-on-steroids meet ripe pineapples”).

I’m not asking for pity, just patience. This week’s review will be short ’n sweet; but maybe that’s a good thing…

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Juniper Ridge Caruthers Canyon and Siskiyou Backpacker’s Colognes ~ fragrance reviews

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Siskiyou Mountains

In a Men’s Journal article this year, Juniper Ridge founder/perfumer Hall Newbegin said:

The fragrance industry is dictated by the narrow grammar set up by the French 200 years ago — floral equals feminine, musk equals masculine…. This idea that only 10 noses in Paris understand fragrance, it’s just smoke and mirrors.1

Newbegin thinks many of today’s colognes smell like crap2: “…thin, fake, grody, and turned up to 11.”

The contemporary perfume world is a big and varied place; and the women=flowers, men=musk idea is outdated; now, mainstream perfumes follow a formula that’s more women=candy and men=tonka beans and ozone. Today, musk is white (and decidedly unisex) — clean and redolent of the laundry room in full swing: dryer sheets swirling, detergent bubbling.

Juniper Ridge makes its perfumes “in the field”: collecting raw materials from a particular wild place using “machetes and chain saws and pickup trucks”3 and a whiskey still that’s been altered to process all manner of herbs, leaves, wildflowers, and bits of trees…

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Bois 1920 Sandalo e The & 1920 Extreme ~ fragrance reviews

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Villa medicea di Castello Lunette

It’s appropriate the Bois 1920 perfume line is created in Florence; that Italian city, compared to Rome or Naples (or anyplace in Sicily!), is formal. Florentine people seem more reserved, conservative (in dress at least), orderly, and quieter than other Italians; they are not show-offs or big-mouths — and I‘m not knocking show-offs or big-mouths (I’m one). Bois 1920 perfumes, likewise, do not seek attention: they are understated, beautifully composed, and ‘at ease’ in almost any setting.

I like almost every perfume Bois 1920 makes and was surprised when I realized I’ve only reviewed my least favorite from the line. Today, I’m making amends by reviewing two quintessential Bois 1920 fragrances — Sandalo e The and 1920 Extreme…

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Yohji Yamamoto Yohji Homme (2013 reissue) ~ fragrance review

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Yohji Yamamoto Yohji Homme advert

I’ll spare you the hand-wringing and damp eyes that often accompany discussions of the original 1999 version of Yohji Yamamoto Yohji Homme — there’ll be little talk of the dreaded, but inevitable, reformulation, and no repetition of the glowing reviews of yore. As they say: what’s done is done…what’s gone is gone. Anyway, I don’t think I ever smelled the original version of Yohji Homme; if I did, I probably dismissed it immediately (fourteen years ago, I was not a lover of spicy fragrances).

Perfumer Jean-Michel Duriez developed Yohji Homme; perfumer Olivier Pescheux was assigned the task of updating the defunct Yohji Yamamoto perfume line for re-release. I wonder if Pescheux was nervous, given the widespread love of original Yohji Homme?

Yohji Yamamoto said of Yohji Homme: “The scent follows the funny off-track and avant-garde image of my fashion.” Quirkiness was certainly present in one of my favorite Yohji Homme ads — an old dog hiding behind a slender tree. Unbelievably, Yohji Homme lives up to Yamamoto’s statement; it IS off-track and avant-garde…

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