To Be (The Illusionist) Police 2012

There it stands, the silvery-glossy, slightly transparent skull in all its tastefully misguided glory. Any deserved stone's throw at it is inappropriate here, as the bottle holds everything that the product photos promise: It looks just as much like a gimmick from a Gothic shop. It is not beautiful, but in a twisted way, it is charmingly trashy.

Equally charming is its price - with which I have already named the two purchase-deciding factors that, along with my sometimes slightly morbid desire for meaningless impulse buys, propelled this scent into my shopping cart.

Let's stick with the price: My nose does not care about bottles - and finds the content at best price-appropriate. In other words: one should not ask for more for this homage to mediocrity. Whether I am encountering a Fierce dupe here, I cannot judge; A&F's scent is simply unknown to me. If the assessments of the Parfumisti are correct, then I graciously forgo any encounter with Fierce (and admire the company's marketing...).

Interestingly, I also experience an olfactory déjà-vu in the heart note. However, I do not come across Abercrombie & Fitch; I unexpectedly encounter an old scent love from which I had to part ways with slight disgust at some point. More on that later.

In the paper test, not even the top note manages to deliver the slightest bit of charm: it does not smell fresh, but only biting - a confusingly aimless stench of deodorants digs into the incredulously sniffing nose. Was I beamed into the changing room of a McFit branch?

On the skin (and that's ultimately what counts), The Illusionist does not present itself as unpleasant: I smell a mixture of aquatic freshness and an aroma faintly reminiscent of lemon, along with another note that imitates fruitiness: That must be the orange. Not unexpectedly, a color joins in that is presumably meant to convey masculinity. Is that the ivy?

My interest wanes; I turn to other things. Approximately 90 minutes later, a thought unexpectedly shoots through my mind: Seattle.
Seattle? Right - Washington, Space Needle, Boeing, Puget Sound, etc. I am slightly disturbed: Where does that come from again?

At that moment, I remember my scent test. I consciously sniff my forearm - and smell exactly that rotten fruitiness that once made me turn away from Calvin Klein's Escape Men in the 90s. I had loved that scent so much. It goes without saying where we formed our friendship: I bought the first bottle in 1994 in Seattle. Afterwards, I remained loyal to the scent for a good 2 years. Perhaps I was too monogamous, because at some point I no longer smelled the fruity freshness that had initially excited me, but only rotten fruit. Nevertheless, Escape remains in my olfactory memory inseparably linked to Seattle, and that memory is - despite the dirty (scent) separation - extremely pleasant.

In the heart note, I find hardly anything of what the fragrance pyramid suggests; there I experience an Escape dupe, admittedly a bit more metallic in its impression and slightly synthetic - as if perfumers had played a somewhat successful game of Telephone with their formulas. The result - dupe or not - does not really convince me; the time travel is somewhat reconciling.

Theoretically, there should still be something going on in the dry down - I sniff out no more than a minimal woodiness of the scent. In any case, the liquid loses its air so early that the dry down begins just a few hours after the start. Its most notable feature is the gracious fading of the scent remnants. What remains is the mushy aroma of a slightly bolder scented drugstore body lotion.

So bad? No - but in contrast to Scentist, I note that the scent indeed smells cheap. Perhaps it can perform better on someone else's skin. It certainly smells more bearable than the arch-enemy of my nose - but it lacks almost everything necessary to start an affair with it. Even for a fling, it barely suffices - quite the opposite: Probably, The Illusionist is the ideal companion when it comes to bringing a hastily arranged date to a swift end - not because it triggers escape reflexes in the other person. It is rather the ambition-free arbitrariness that stifles any interest in its infancy.

Sorry, skull: in the end, you are just a taste-irritating decorative object in which a liquid happens to slosh around.

PS: One thought did occur to me: why on earth is the scent called Illusionist? Perhaps it is so faceless that it gives every wearer the illusion of an olfactory déjà-vu?