Joop! Homme Absolute Joop! 2019

In view of the perfume accidents that appeared after Nightflight under the brand name JOOP!, which can only be understood as the cheapest ingratiation to the public, a perfume has finally come onto the market again that does NOT belong to the infinite series of modern aqua-intense-black-night-summer-invictus-olympea- sugarfloss-ozone-amber xtreme trifles. Well, you shouldn't be misled by the name, it's as grotesque as it is wrong, as the packaging is cheap. But the shape of the bottle and the content, with its peppery, dry, spicy, powdery, ambry scent, are a clear and successful reminiscence of the early JOOP! perfumes. Perfumes that, however controversial they may have been, must today be counted among the "classics". Products which, in contrast to today's "fragrances", still have the right to be called perfumes. JOOP! Homme Absolute stands out pleasantly from the usual mainstream, because it was understood to tie in with the (JOOP!) tradition to take up the topic again in a modernized form. That's gratifying and amazing. And very courageous, because the commitment and the risk are very high in today's saturated market. No one wants to take responsibility, so everything has to be trimmed for maximum mass compatibility. A process in which the end result is an individual and uniform product that corresponds to the mass taste. So everyone wants to like it. What remains is an absolute insignificance liberated from every soul and spirit. Then even the "niche" becomes just a flimsy paint that suggests the supposedly other. And therefore, in the age of post-capitalist absolute abundance, in which every last product is only more trivial and unnecessary than the penultimate one, a product falling out of Scheme F like JOOP! Homme Absolute is something to be celebrated and therefore worth a note.