BrianBuchanan

Along with the usual perfume categories of Floral, Fresh, Fruity etc we could include Abstract, but what about synthetic?
Not just as an adjective, could it be the name of a category proper?

If so, I would add it to the the feature list of Tommy Girl: and along with Black Tea, Bitter, Purple Fruity, Floral, Fresh - with an Aquatic feel, and Woody; we would have Synthetic.

There's a thin smoothness to proceedings that can be called synthetic.
More specifically: predominantly made of aroma chemicals or isolates, and having a feel characterised by a lack of 'natural' materials.
For a definition this is a bit subjective, but being based on sense impressions it's hard to give it a scientific basis. (Like many critics I'm not a scientist.)

Now, Synthetic is not a bad thing per sé, but it does lead to a certain type of perfume which - like Tommy Girl - is not to everyone's taste.

I once described Tommy Girl as a bitter chemical soup ... sterile and unfriendly.

On reflection I can see it's merits, but it still feels a bit skimpy and cheap - as well as venomous, which again could be a category, and not just an adjective.

A sweet and chewy Amber, and a fougère with a bitter note of contrast.
It's a hybrid of two styles - and it's quite old fashioned these days.

With a trigeminal sting, Carven Homme is proto Sauvage, which will be good for those who want to smell on trend, but to others who want something different this bitter-sweet fougère will seem a bit ordinary.

Jean-Paul Guerlain would have dismissed it as only fit for truck drivers, but it would still be fine if you were going to that mixture of train station on the outside and Turkish bath on the inside which is the Opéra Garnier.

This mix of bitter functionality and sweet opulence (which is the theme of Carven Homme) is the same formula Debussy criticised in the Neo-Wagnerian works of Chabrier and Chausson, which he viewed at said opera house and decried as sham Wotans in Hessian boots and Tristans in velvet jackets.

Carven Homme may be a diverting Pre Spiky Woods, but it clearly owes a debt to Envy for Men; and before that, the Wagnerian prototype of the Amber-Fougère, Pour un Homme de Caron.

A fashion student once told me green is the hardest colour to wear, it never looks natural she said.
And likewise, green is the most difficult genre to pull off, it rarely smells right.
But Panorama is better than most.
It's a green horseradish, dry and prickly, with fruity and citrus shades.
A nose tickling edition of that all too narrow coterie: Pamplelune, What about Adam, Lime, Basil & Mandarin etc,
A natural version of the Spiky Woods; a Green Spiky Cologne.
It's good.

It starts with a puckeringly tart fruity chypre - like an early Fruchouli, but unlike those modern things the quality is high class. It evolves into something like a powdery daughter of Femme de Rochas, who then mounts a milky woody green pedestal.

A curious mixture of punk and pedigree, it could be worn by those who don't care about codes and need to make a splash.

Colors was composed by Bernard Ellena, who is the son of Peter - a perfumer at Chiris.
Bernard is the uncle of Céline, who's done some twenty two perfumes in fifteen years, and he's the younger brother of Jean-Claude, you may have heard of him...

Whether Bernard's talent is derived from his genes alone (unlikely) or a perfumely privileged upbringing (more likely) he did a decent job on this tart fruity floral.