Hajuvana

New York is, in a way, a skillfully executed study on certain facets of Guerlain's Habit Rouge. I feel as if both the citrus opening as well as the oriental-like dry-down have been reinterpreted, while constructing a completely different heart, resulting in a completely different perfume altogether, even genre-wise.
Both New York and Habit Rouge open with strong, lemony citrus not unlike e.g. Chanel's Pour Monsieur. Imagine a burp through your nose after having a sip of 7UP. Out of the three, New York somehow maintains that soda-like feel along its development. It doesn't turn into a bouquet of christmassy spices like HR, nor turns itself into a chypre as Chanel's PM does. Instead, the heart is dominated with sweet pepper (capsicum) and cloves. Call me silly, but I like like to think of NY's pepper note specifically as yellow sweet pepper.
Like said, I find the dry-down somewhat similar to Habit Rouge's. However, an autobiographical reference smell with even more accurate resemblance would be something we used to buy from a prank shop when I was a kid. I doubt anyone's familiar with the product, but there used to be a sort of putty or plasticine used for make-up, which had very distinctive powdery-vanillic smell. That's pretty much exactly the smell of de Nicolaï's New York after a couple of hours' skin time.
As I've lately grown into Habit Rouge, I've grown out of New York.

...oh yeah, my current bottle was purchased in 2011 - I don't know when the supposed reformulation has taken place, but mine smells great nevertheless.

When Calvin Klein released CK One in 1994, someone at the house of Creed wasn't sleeping, but instead came up with Silver Mountain Water merely a year after. I think Creed did a brilliant job in reinterpreting that enormously influential 'transparent' feel without imitating any specific accord. Instead they came up with a nice fruity-metallic tone of their own, which, like said, shares the overall feel but no detail in particular.
Choosing SMW over CK's One was always an easy choice for me. Unfortunately, choosing a bunch of other things over SMW wasn't difficult either, due to Creeds being whoppingly overpriced.

How does all this bring us to White Tag? I think it's fair to say that Zara has either commissioned a SMW clone or at least Puig, the manufacturer, provided them with one.

Is it an accurate clone? No, but it's close enough to be a good one and too damn close to be an accident.

White Tag works best if applied on skin and after the quickly evading salty-fizzy bergamot opening (not unlike Aqua Quorum's) you're gonna get a couple of hours' fun with fairly linear and surprisingly solid performance. Funny enough, every now and then I get whiffs that actually remind me of CK One. Even more so, if I've sprayed some on fabric. This is most likely due to some shared synthetic ingredient I can't quite put my nose on.

It's hard to give any artistic credit to Zara for releasing something like this, but nevertheless a good stunt from Puig - technically speaking, that is.

After it struck me, all I can think about is a lawnmower.

It has got the rubber tires, the petroleum, the freshly cut grass - everything to make an olfactory picture of a lawnmower, really.
Or imagine Bvlgari's Black and Grey Flannel having a child.

Either way, it's too bad I was only looking for a good, simple contemporary vetiver. While I definitely keep looking, I should honestly say, though, that Exhale seems to be composed using top-quality ingredients in generous concentrations. It has exquisite longevity and its dry-down gets better by the hour (which is a polite way of saying that I'm not a huge fan of its opening). It's lack of classical structure bothers me a bit, but I guess it's just silly old restricted me. I'm guessing it's perfectly suitable to compose a perfume more in a manner of an impressionist sketch these days.