Systemshock

Alfred Sung was Canada's Halston of sorts, a fashion leader in a country that needed one. Oh, you may not have heard of him, but have you heard of Club Monaco? That's his thing. And Sung clothing is still out there in 2026!

Fitting, then, that a very old-school fougere (note: I have the blue one) from a Canadian developer, made here in the United States, would give me 80s-style soap, a little bit of creamy suedey stuff, and some piney, cedary greenery. What, you've despised the sugar-bomb trends in both men's and unisex scents over the past decade? Welcome to the forest! But you’ll notice at first that there's *some sweetness* in here. It's the sweetness that comes with that darker leather-substitute stuff, but not too much. Plus a bit of sweetness from the soap (the white musk). And there's a sparkle, a cleanliness that could only result from those aldehydes. The sweetness emerges a bit as the highest topnotes move out.

Maybe too much. We'll get to that later.

Of course, that 80s-style soap I mentioned earlier is absolutely Irish Spring. It's a more photorealistic take on it that's distinctly different from what you might have heard about Green Irish Tweed - less woods, less earthiness, less iris than GIT; more needles, more leather.

But the oldest-school thing about this scent is that pine. If you're not used to an Aspen for Men Cologne style scent, you might be in for a surprise if you *only* expect Irish Spring out of this. "Oh, that sounds like The Cut , right?" No. I love The Cut, but The Cut's more like Luxurious Barbershop Balsamic conifers. This is hiking through notches pine, Zap Rowsdower pine.

Also, regarding the strength, *be careful.* You might see an EdT category and think "well, I'm sure eight sprays will do me." Hold on. I don't tend to give off much sillage at all, my skin isn't much for it, but this absolutely does jump off my skin for those first two hours - pine, soap, musk, all of it. We're talking Ganymede Eau de Parfum levels, N°06 Elegantly Tokyo Elixir levels of "Like it or not, I sure do smell like this" for a city block- but it does ease off into a more moderate thing at the two-hour mark... with one spray. So spray cautiously!

Surprisingly enough, I'd liken the later drydown more to the opening of B-612: green and clean, mossy and musky, finished off with more sweetness than you’d expect - but the Nishane has a bit of extra resin - I think frankincense - in there. B-612 dries out more like your typical Amouage by the end. Sung Homme does not.

Okay. Here’s the bad news. When the drydown happens, the pine backs off, and things get sweet with Sung Homme: soapy sweet. Soap - like a straight-up bar of soap - is a comforting scent, but in soap, that sweetness is decidedly a white-musk-esque thing. Our current formulations that we call white musk usually come across to us Americans as "soap," as "clean," alongside aldehydes. But it doesn't come across that way to everyone: mention "soap" in Europe and you're going to get different impressions of what that means. And not everyone goes this particular soap route for good reason: too much musky sweetness and you cross a cosmic-horror line into the sweet, cloying smell of death itself. What is soap, historically, but the cleanliness brought on by the death of animals anyway? Sung Homme, dried out, skirts that line. But my skin and my olfaction and, well, my wife, they all get sick off this kind of sweetness. It doesn’t work for me at all. I’m bummed. I hope you, dear reader, can pull this off.

Hey, as a northern US guy displaced out in the piedmont, it's nice to have this kind of expression of the northern deep woods- no matter how beastly it is up there. If there's a little bit of death to it, so be it - have you seen The Revenant, after all? This really is a scent you'd only get from a Canadian designer and an American manufacturer 40 years ago: old school, fistful of pine needles, green bars of Irish Spring, and the clean scent of soap. Or death. Soap or death. Unfortunately, for me and my skin, it’s death. Well, dang.

[sidenote: what the heck are people talking about mentioning "cigarettes" with this? I don't get any of that. Maybe there's some menthol in here? Genuinely confused.]

I'm in a part of the United States where it's tough to get anywhere near a good tester bottle of the niche, the luxury/prive/exclusifs, the indie, the... well, expensive. It's a voyage to get to a good place. A 50-minute drive and a parking migraine if you're lucky; far longer if there's normal traffic. (I'm not even getting into the world of sales associates; I worked the retail floor at one point too.) It's not very often that I could stroll into a store with MFK ready to go. If you want to know why I wind up trying out all the Penhaligon's and trying, but not even posting because it's so incompatible with me, Guerlain, AdP, and Bvlgari, it's because I wind up in Disney some times and that stuff is in Epcot. Anyway, all said, it was a while before I wound up doing the cost-ineffective but affordable thing of ordering a decant and waiting for it to arrive. I did, eventually, try Baccarat Rouge 540 Eau de Parfum.

But way before that thought, that transaction, the god darned shipping... I went to the store down the street, and that's a Bath & Body Works. They're the fragrance monarchs of the sprawl, and I live around the sprawl. I get some candles there, some room sprays. I care about scents, so I wind up with more than just the things I spray on myself. They had a new lineup in the store - one that I figured wouldn't last for too long, because it sure did seem like they were attempting to duplicate some more expensive, original stuff on the market. You know, that market I can't drive to without a headache. One of these was Glory Cologne, which I think fails as a dupe of anything but succeeds on its own lemony merits. A few of them were various blue things - a BDC dupe for sure, and it lasts all of 15 minutes on me. So, about 10 minutes longer than BDC, lol. One of these promised vetiver; I know vetiver, vetiver's a friend of mine, there was no vetiver in it. Many disappointments.

But Rouge Rebel was the one that was fairly obvious in what it wanted to copy title-wise. I tried that the second time I went there, and... well, my wife liked it. So now here I am considering a dupe of a thing I haven't actually tried yet, but she likes it. As you do, you wait for the sale, because that's the real price of a B&BW product, and then I got it.

Let's keep Baccarat Rouge 540 Eau de Parfum out of the conversation for a bit. Rouge Rebel is an interesting one- in a way, it's nothing but sweetness. Toasted sweetness, I've likened it to toasted cotton candy - somewhat of an impossibility, maybe, but you get the idea. I've been told this is largely the work of ethyl maltol, a chemical that's often used in candy. Ethyl maltol is something you shouldn't mess up if you're making a sweet: get that on you and it'll last for a long, long time, because it doesn't like to dissolve, it takes a while. Rouge Rebel, thankfully, doesn't do this: you don't have to commit to it, it'll last about an hour for projection and several on your skin, and that's all. Typical EDT behavior. It's slightly darker than straight ethyl maltol, but not much. This is a candy ingredient made for a candy scent. Just not one you'd immediately deem feminine for all its sweetness.

Okay, decant received, let's bring in Baccarat Rouge 540 Eau de Parfum. It's the same exact thing - rather, Rouge Rebel is the same exact thing as *it*, but for me chronologically that's how it works. BR540 lasts for a long, long, long time. It projects the frontend of that ethyl maltol like a confectionary cannon. My wife couldn't stand BR540 on me. It was just too *much.* I could see where you would want BR540 at a bar, at a nightclub, on a date in a crowded place. You want to make it known. You don't want it in an office, or at home with your wife watching Star Trek, and I'm that guy.

The difference between Rouge Rebel and BR540 isn't one of scent - they really are just about the same. For better or worse, Rouge Rebel is much weaker (I guess I could say "more subtle" but let's not be effusive about it). It's tolerable where BR540 isn't. But BR540 is detectable, and eternal, where Rouge Rebel isn't, especially in open, big, social environments. This is just a *little bit* of that Baccarat, for folks like me who don't have anything to project and largely close-quarters living. A little bit as a treat. On a sale - not at its full retail price - it's pretty good. (The bottle is standard B&BW, the atomizer is nothing special.)

From the first time Y Eau de Parfum broke me out of my “Axe Body Spray” stereotyping of men’s scents to my very recent Endymion Concentré discovery that I actually liked faux-leather, my favorite scents break my preconceptions. It’s always “I didn’t know I’d like this, and now I love it.” I thought maybe this applied to Tokyo Elegance Elixir for a while, and while I was wrong, I still deeply appreciate the audacity these folks have in making such a sharp, floral Spear of Longinus out of a nice, white bar of soap.

Akigalawood became a trend in the industry around the time I started picking up something in the scents worn by arrogant, overcompensating lunkheads around me. I thought the culprit, alongside Bisch, was that ingredient, but no- turned out it was some other "sorry, we didn't do leather correctly" woody dank accord they’ve thrown into things like Sauvage Elixir. Ganymede Eau de Parfum taught me that. Akigalawood, being the thing that lasted the longest in Ganymede, stood out as this round synthetic uniter of otherwise brash ingredients: the reason why a perfume that smelled like new cars and retail store clothing on the rack dried down to something pretty heavenly... if not for me.

On this trip to Zara, I also stopped by Jo Malone. (Yes, I know, plus Penhaligon’s. Tell me you went to Disney without telling me you went to Disney.) I tried the one Jo scent I hadn’t before, Hinoki & Cedarwood, and surprise surprise, it wasn’t for me. I apologetically told the salesperson that some day they’d make something I'd like. Oh well. But this is... a different thing entirely. Way more brash than anything you'd see in the store with her name on it, and yet she's the nose.

And then there’s Zara. I liked 800 Black, it’s a Tonka bomb you can wear in the one month a Southern state is actually cold and it works, but largely Zara was filled with “We tried to make this expensive scent more affordable,” and it was never something I liked, and you knew, quickly, that it wouldn’t last an hour. And hardly any scents stop me in my tracks, make me do a triple take, keep trying to figure out what it is - Sycomore (2016) Eau de Parfum did that to me at a Chanel - but here I was, transfixed about this unique scent in a store I thought was just for dupes.

This is daringly floral for something you’d put in a section already gender-segregated for men. Heck, it's murderously floral for something you'd put in a women's section and call "Daisy" or whatever. This thing, on my skin, which couldn't project two pixels of a god darned IMAX movie if it was burned directly into its epithelial layer, projected. Trailed. Annoyed my wife. Projected too much, like an Omnimax nature flick of jasmine. Leonard Nimoy amplified through a zillion planetarium speakers jasmine (yeah yeah, old Bostonians will get that, just you watch). It’s also woody, but not too woody. Just a bit of a light wooden core. White musky, which I wouldn’t expect out of anything featuring Akigalawood. Three hours later, still a Railgun Blast of jasmine in there. I can't actually pull this off, but it's so... weird and wild. Affordable enough that I could get it as a curiosity. But it ain't my 1957 Eau de Parfum . I trudge onward in search of a good musky soapy floral that's either A Little More Dude or Affordable Enough That It Doesn't Matter That I Can't Pull It Off.

So, apologies to Jo Malone, to Akigalawood, to Zara: you’re all pretty cool when you work together. Maybe you're not exactly *my* kind of pretty cool, but I still appreciate the bold, brash, jasmine-infused ion cannon this thing is.

When I started looking into fragrances and the industry and the Big Three Suppliers and all, I was under the impression that despite how much I loved good smells and smelling good, the business of it was a racket. Surely there isn’t much originality after all these years, and the ingredients are probably a high margin thing given how expensive a bottle is, et cetera et cetera. And in some instances this take’s right. Not every perfumer is giving it their all every time; not every creation is done for the sake of self-expression or art; maybe we’re being played by factories. I’m sure Ropion wasn’t putting all his time and energy into every Y Eau de Parfum variant. Sometimes an industry that’s putting out artistic expressions is just putting out the product they think the people want.

And yet here I am with my third bottle of Penhaligon’s: an expensive company owned by another company, making fragrances that don't usually break the mold so much as recreate vintage ideas, and also a niche house that fights similarly to Chanel to discourage reselling at lower prices. Surely I could find an affordable traditional fougere with some leather instead of a more leathery Endymion; that’s like an entire decade of men’s fragrances in a nutshell. Some of those are twenty bucks at any pharmacy. I could simply buy a bunch of cheap bottles, given samples aren't really available and decants are silly to order when they're nearly the price of the bottle to make and ship, and throw the bad ones out, maybe.

But here’s the thing: I haven’t liked just about any fake-leather fougere/fresh scent I’ve come across. "Paradigme | Prada" tried it with geranium and leather, and it dried down to Bad Aggressive Felt. Tuscan Leather Eau de Parfum, Ombré Leather (2018) Eau de Parfum: couldn’t even find what they meant by leather, it was just sweet. Same with Fahrenheit Eau de Toilette and Fahrenheit Parfum, two fragrances I was psyched to check out given the cries of "oh no, it smells like gasoline" (I would love that!), only to find a bit of mild fleeting sweetness on me. Sky almost does leather-fougere with some lower-grade labdanum, but it’s a bit harsh and the whole thing is fleeting. Speaking of fleeting, Spicebomb Dark Leather almost nails it, and it disappears so quickly, leaving you with pepper. You’d think Labdanum 18 Eau de Parfum would be a fresh leathery curiosity, but not really, it’s soft and sweet. Although I'd say 18 came closest to a good one for me. Not my thing, but close. I haven't gone out of my way to try Memo Paris' many leather variants like Irish Leather Eau de Parfum, or the bold Matiere Premiere Falcon Leather Eau de Parfum while we're at it. But we're in niche, pricey territory now anyway; what's the point? And oud and I don't get along, so there's no Leather Oud or Oud Stallion for me. I still have my eye on Attaquer Le Soleil - Marquis de Sade but I'm not optimistic about liking it given my cistus experience. The old 80s favorites don’t hit the same either; possibly because they haven’t been the same since the industry left animal products behind. This may be at my leather issue's core: the pleather chemicals and pleather incenses being used aren't for me. Usually. Like, 99% of the time. The "mostly vegetarian diet unless I'm too picky to get the one thing on the menu" part of me fights with the "I love the smell of a good leather jacket" part too often on this issue.

And just like when Penhaligon’s made me like a rose scent with Much Ado About the Duke, here I am with Endymion Concentre, in all its costing-too-much glory, because it made me like this non-animal-product suede for the first time, proven wrong about my learned preconceptions. And like with my other "Well, guess I'm just going to empty my wallet" moments with Penhaligon's, I couldn’t tell you why; what's different, what proved me wrong. I can guess: I think their lavender is a kind that I'm into (there are different kinds!), blended well enough to balance the pungency of leather aromachemicals, I think their bergamot is exactly the kind of dry bergamot that I like and brightens the leather up (Penhaligon's seems to use a peel-derived bergamot frequently, where a lot of bergamot notes come across as "citrus juice"), I think the frankincense is super understated to bring just a bit of wood to it, the geranium isn’t forward enough to punch you in the face but enough to make the florals just a little prominent. And I love a good lavender, a good bergamot, and grew up with geraniums. So you’ve got me there.

It doesn't have the maximum sillage you'd need in a nightclub or a crowded city; I'm also someone who doesn't like announcing their arrival, loud noises, or crowds, so while that's fine with me, this isn't necessarily Hit The Clubs material for someone who loves that. And then the drydown is leather/suede, right? Like everything else! But I do really like *this* leather/suede. It’s got a particular personality that works for me. And that has to do with both sourcing and blend; human work that’s tough to come by. And expensive to keep on staff. Maybe that’s why this is expensive. Or maybe they make this stuff specifically for older men while others shoot for youth, for virality and virility. Or maybe I’m a mark. Either way, I now have 100ml of a great thing.

If there's one event that sent me on a scent-seeking voyage, it was a visit to a Chanel boutique. I was there to try out Les Eaux, especially Paris - Édimbourg, but instead Sycomore (2016) Eau de Parfum commanded my attention, lit up my eyes, and drained a substantial portion of my wallet. Such is life! But I got to take a couple samples home, and I took two of the same one - "1957 | Chanel". It made me consider something missing in my limited (by "take a look at my entire shelf of bottles" standards) lineup - a scent that primarily went for cleanliness. Yes, Y Eau de Parfum had a shower-gel feel, but I meant soap - laundry or bar - but better.

I run any scents by my wife because she's around me the most. "1957 | Chanel" came across as too feminine to her- not that men can't or shouldn't wear it, but subjectively it wasn't going to work here. That sweet spot between clean soap and something more in a traditionally-masculine category was surprisingly difficult to nail down or find. If only Book Loft had that warmth and fire you get from the candle! If only Musk Therapy Extrait de Parfum wasn't so fruity! If only You Eau de Parfum wasn't so sweet! Same with Not a Perfume Eau de Parfum! I just wasn't getting there.

And then my wife got me some samples for the holidays. Most of them were a miss (they usually are, we're picky), but I never expected "The Tragedy of Lord George | Penhaligon's" to hit this spot among the samples. They had the whole Portraits series to test out when I went to Epcot a couple years back, but Lord George was empty and the staff didn't have a backup. I had to look this up - I had heard this was *boozy*, why is this Really Nice Soap instead? And that's how it comes across for me - a classy as heck bar of castile soap, and if you stare at it a bit too closely, a cup of Earl Grey tea. Not "splashy citrus" bergamot - herbal, sharp, tea bergamot. Jean-Luc Picard would approve. The late, late drydown has a bit of leather, too. Just a little.

Given you're looking at a top-heavy distribution of notes there, you'd expect the longevity to be scarce, but on my skin, sillage and longevity did just fine. Not "Aromachemical of the Year" projection and 48 hours of scents, but "Fine for the office" performance.

This is one of those fragrances that will differ on everyone. If you look at reviews here or elsewhere, you get everything from "It's a booze bomb" to "It's very woody" to "There's so much vanilla/tonka" and I haven't experienced any of that here - maybe, just maybe, a bit of a balsamic wood on the drydown in the background that I also got from Much Ado About the Duke (and I was a fan of that drydown). I'd never want anyone to blind-buy stuff anyway, but sample this first if you're interested. The crowd isn't going to be able to tell you exactly how it's going to work on you. But if you're looking for a less traditionally-feminine but extremely clean and dressed-up scent, this is one of the greats in my book.

Now excuse me as I follow up my shower by telling the Replicator "Tea, Earl Grey, hot."