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Elysium
ChicoRoch1
Charilaos77
BrianBuchanan
Syed12/28/2014
GothicHeart
86 Reviews
GothicHeart
Top Review
8
Stopping at 3...
My best friend since high school has become unintentionally the cause of both one of the best and one of the worst moments in my perfume life. Here's why...
During the '80s he moved to London to study optometry. When I saw him again some six moths later, I was blown away by the fragrance he was wearing.
"Gee man! This is absolutely breathtaking! What on earth is it?"
"These are exactly the words I used the other day." he replied. "It's Halston 1-12."
As it turned out, he had encountered a fellow student wearing it, and he was as flabbergasted too.
And when he showed me its gorgeous bottle, I was about 95% sure that this was going to be the one.
Cause 1-12 was everything I could wish for.
Green, earthy, warm, absolutely heady and overly masculine. All in all a stunning fragrance in a bottle so beautiful that I couldn't get enough of handling it.
Oh, and girls loved it.
What else could a twentysomething ask for?
And so, 1-12 became a staple in our perfume wardrobe for a few years, until for some reason we couldn't find it anymore. And thus it was gone but not forgotten.
...
A couple of months ago my friend dropped by my house for an afternoon coffee, as he does regularly. Only this time he had something special in his pockets. Two brand new 125ml bottles of 1-12 having been just delivered to him. One of them was a gift for me. Excited beyond words, we made our coffee and sat on the couch in full anticipation, ready to enter the memory lane, with the two bottles about to serve as our time machine. We sprayed our wrists and waited for the miracle. It never happened. We stood in silence exchanging long stares. What we were sniffing was a ghost, a pale remnant of an once mighty presence. As if the bottles contained 25ml of the 1-12 we remembered, with the remaining 100ml being water. But even the quality of the fragrance seemed to have been dramatically changed for the worse. If 1-12 was to be considered a scale, what we were sniffing would hardly reach 3, and even reaching that low would have it panting. We gradually turned from disappointed to angry. It was such a letdown, that for a couple of minutes my friend tried to convince us that it was Z-14 the one we remembered and not 1-12. But then I reminded him of the little debate we had back in the days, about whether its name was 1-12 or I-12, and thus stopped him from flogging this long dead horse and gave his remaining futile hopes a coup de grâce. To say that we nearly mourned as if someone had died that evening, would not be an overstatement. Cause something had died indeed. Wows, originality, forwardness and balls. Along with a piece of our past. And this kind of loss is always a great one, no matter how often it's suffered.
So all I can do after this fiasco, is to stay true to my perfume guerilla tactics and try to spare you the frustration by shouting it from the rooftops. "Good people of the '80s, don't let this swindler fool you! Go for the vintage splash!"
...
I guess I owe a huge thanks to the "luminaries" running Elizabeth Arden, Inc. for being so full of inspiration and love about perfumes. Great work guys, please do keep doing it. Oh, and if you feel like sinking some other vessel of our memories with all hands, please go ahead and sink it. After all who needs memories when cash is flowing, right?
During the '80s he moved to London to study optometry. When I saw him again some six moths later, I was blown away by the fragrance he was wearing.
"Gee man! This is absolutely breathtaking! What on earth is it?"
"These are exactly the words I used the other day." he replied. "It's Halston 1-12."
As it turned out, he had encountered a fellow student wearing it, and he was as flabbergasted too.
And when he showed me its gorgeous bottle, I was about 95% sure that this was going to be the one.
Cause 1-12 was everything I could wish for.
Green, earthy, warm, absolutely heady and overly masculine. All in all a stunning fragrance in a bottle so beautiful that I couldn't get enough of handling it.
Oh, and girls loved it.
What else could a twentysomething ask for?
And so, 1-12 became a staple in our perfume wardrobe for a few years, until for some reason we couldn't find it anymore. And thus it was gone but not forgotten.
...
A couple of months ago my friend dropped by my house for an afternoon coffee, as he does regularly. Only this time he had something special in his pockets. Two brand new 125ml bottles of 1-12 having been just delivered to him. One of them was a gift for me. Excited beyond words, we made our coffee and sat on the couch in full anticipation, ready to enter the memory lane, with the two bottles about to serve as our time machine. We sprayed our wrists and waited for the miracle. It never happened. We stood in silence exchanging long stares. What we were sniffing was a ghost, a pale remnant of an once mighty presence. As if the bottles contained 25ml of the 1-12 we remembered, with the remaining 100ml being water. But even the quality of the fragrance seemed to have been dramatically changed for the worse. If 1-12 was to be considered a scale, what we were sniffing would hardly reach 3, and even reaching that low would have it panting. We gradually turned from disappointed to angry. It was such a letdown, that for a couple of minutes my friend tried to convince us that it was Z-14 the one we remembered and not 1-12. But then I reminded him of the little debate we had back in the days, about whether its name was 1-12 or I-12, and thus stopped him from flogging this long dead horse and gave his remaining futile hopes a coup de grâce. To say that we nearly mourned as if someone had died that evening, would not be an overstatement. Cause something had died indeed. Wows, originality, forwardness and balls. Along with a piece of our past. And this kind of loss is always a great one, no matter how often it's suffered.
So all I can do after this fiasco, is to stay true to my perfume guerilla tactics and try to spare you the frustration by shouting it from the rooftops. "Good people of the '80s, don't let this swindler fool you! Go for the vintage splash!"
...
I guess I owe a huge thanks to the "luminaries" running Elizabeth Arden, Inc. for being so full of inspiration and love about perfumes. Great work guys, please do keep doing it. Oh, and if you feel like sinking some other vessel of our memories with all hands, please go ahead and sink it. After all who needs memories when cash is flowing, right?
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