ThomC

I just love him, this strange green guy from Bogart. It is displaced because it stands between the chairs of different style-forming perfume decades: 70s soap, 80s shoulder pad brachiality, 90s modernity. A hermaphrodite, and yet so strikingly masculine, austere and forbidding. One that doesn't know where it belongs - and neither do those at Bogart, I suppose, but let it go on under the radar, as a few scattered individualists faithfully stand by Force Majeure. But such a fragrance tells me stories, and I like that.

The bottle alone: an ugly duckling in forest green. The cheap-looking plastic cap in silver reinforces the visual first impression - a confused style mix, the decades stylistically hardly assignable, but so likeable that he may pass as retro chabby chicler the barriers of the style police benevolently. A bit like the old VW Beetle: it wasn't beautiful by classic standards either, but offered a timeless concept with endearing simplicity that you just had to like.

Force Majeure is on today's perfume streets a rare but cheap youngtimer from France, which was probably never popular in Germany. And looking back already to its birth year 1998 on anachronistic paths was - had he been thrown in this style twenty years earlier on the market, one would have seen him as a typical thing of the late 70s. But so?

It remains a typical French niche product and reminds like cars of Talbot in its time: hardly visible, but silently cherished. (just saw a small garage the other day that still had a rotten TALBOT brand sign on the front - just beautiful!)

The scent, however, has it all: angular, with clear rectangular lines and delightfully uncontemporary. Insanely striking, dense, without caring about broad consensus. Broad-legged and gently coarse. It's the slaying moss, the forest floor, the hint of woodruff laced with chords of old leather. Lots of wet black pepper in the foundation. Topped with a sillage that is a stunner. If it weren't for that, it wouldn't be a real Bogart. Fits, then.

Cliché head images come up and such fragrance clouds I assume the aging village macho of the 70s, black leatherette jackets and iron crease in the mousy fabric pants, Gitanes fluppe handy, the red Mittagsburgunder in the glass, bussi here, ça va bien there. This attitude towards life is force majeure. The force majeure.

It also reminds me of Gaultier's long-running Le Male. which is a little older. Both I insinuate with their coarse spicy-green mint a distant kindred spirit. Still, the Bogart seems stylistically older in everything, is more unpolished and lick-my-mouth.

The "Le Male" acts like the distant dazzling uncle from America, related by a thousand corners but not seen for at least 25 years. While the one in the striped torso flacon made international career as an eccentric clubbing fragrance, the other remained with both feet on the ground of the French province and pulls his show in the simple café in the village square.

Yes, the Force Majeure is - I just noticed - the Le Male for the people, which does not make it worse because of that. Quite the opposite, in fact. While the Le Male likes to drift into the pretentious with a touch of Parisian international haute couture, the Force Majeure remains a deliberately coarse fine spirit with sausage fingers right from the start. A Gérard Depardieu of fragrance. Boozy, wild, and freedom-loving with anti-opportunistic traits - cheap on the outside, striking on the inside. Its conspicuousness is its merit, because rarely have I had a perfume of this price range, which is so loaded with emotion anchors, as this.

*the music to the fragrance "Force Majeure" by Tangerine Dream (1979)

Admittedly, I should have been suspicious of scents like green apple x bergamot. Do I need this? Doesn't this smell like a whiff of one of the most successful men's perfumes of the last decade? After all, hindsight is the better part of valor and curiosity conquered my inner badass after a three month battle. Again. So blind purchase.

Everything was initially promising according to my standards: MAUBOUSSINs fragrances are me mostly grundsympathisch, this timeless-aesthetic design of the original "Homme" flacon of 2003 is and remains ingenious. And also otherwise Mauboussins makes small fragrance beauties for little money, which admittedly all fly under the German-speaking radar - like the whole brand itself. So an underdog without niche attitudes. Why not?

So now the brand new Discovery from January 2021, all in olive green. Presumably, the younger audience should address. Looks quite nice anyway - the design does it. Unfortunately, he has sobered me the first spray in the direction of white cardboard strip: Kennste yet, fuck!!! Without a doubt. Yes, it's the Aventus DNA. And that's exactly what I "broke" from Topp into Flopp within a year. Saturation level immeasurable (as of March 2021).

Intermediate conclusion: 2021 the end customers with an Aventus double to want to make happy. does not exactly testify to impressive creativity. (Okay, excessive creativity has never been Mauboussin's hobbyhorse) I've had enough of Aventus clones and its excesses, and they're slowly disturbing my aesthetic sensibilities. Even ZARA is currently mercilessly milking its initially quite nice Vibrant Leather cow dry with what feels like billions of flankers. So what? Who buys it! Do I want it? Nope and yawn.

Yet Mauboussins Discovery has rather inspired by Aventus, I feel it fresher, lighter and more suitable for summer, less brute. Let's put it this way: more fresh green apple, significantly less pineapple. The Aventus smokiness is barely detectable. It all stays on the breezy green line. In drydown, the Aventus DNA comes out all the more - it's that subtly pungent bergamot that sticks stubbornly to skin like old sticking plaster residue. I can live with, and I even find quite good.

Ultimately, I have decided that the Discovery remains on my collector's shelf. If only to complete the few Mauboussins bottles - on the other hand, to reconcile me again a little with Aventus. No more war footing. Maybe peace? At least truce.

Music to the fragrance ---> Federsen [2021] ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elror2r2yPU )

Sometimes it's a thing with fragrances - those that, according to the classic standards of all cut-away perfume fans, can't really be fantastic at all, because they don't live up to everything that is generally appreciated; zeitgeist, complexity, creativity, individuality. Ted Lapidus Pour Homme is such a blatant case. Here we have a fragrance that is only 5 years old, but looks as if it was conjured out of a hat in the mid-80s. Angular bottle with 8-bit lines in the Max Headroom inspired RoboCop design, simply color matched the grey 87 bottle of the original. Done! And already this annoying bad habit of throwing light versions on the market as sports flankers doesn't seem inviting to me with the Pour Homme Sport either, to want to dive in more with it, sports fragrances tend to scare me off! Which makes me wonder what this "sport" has to do with the grey '87 Origial, please, as I can't detect any basic sport DNA at all. For me this is a completely new fragrance, with the bottle and name as a common feature. That's all!
By such standards, "Sport" must not be good at all. And yet it is, surprisingly, moreover: With Kouros and consorts he has nothing to do, not even with all the masculine fragrances of the 70 / 80s. It's amazingly citrusy, fresh, bright and positive - and wonderfully old-fashioned and straightforward. I don't detect any more complex scent progression, but there's an overbearing assertiveness to it, something that immediately settles into the nose. A little wild, but not too much, and quite long lasting. A nice spring and summer scent for just going shopping. It certainly puts a smile on my face every time I suck it in. It's this down-to-earth simplicity in Sport that wins me over and reminds me that fragrances don't have to be complex and expensively niche to win my heart. Sport certainly has it when it's appropriate. Sometimes just crispy fried potatoes and fried egg can be a real goumet meal

What this idiosyncratic vintage Italian has made clear to me: how everything in perfume is connected! That the perception of a perfume is not only the fragrance alone, but also equally bottle, design, exterior and its feel and also the contemporary history and its fashions, which it has to tell. Which suits me just fine, because I can't do much with brand-new (niche) perfumes. Certainly, they all smell highly modern and sophisticated, and yet they often have surprisingly little to tell. The stark opposite of this is Soldanos Men Black. He has real association notes in stock that it cracks.
An unknown Italian. The whole brand itself will know in Germany with the exception of a few scattered Parfümnerds and Italian exiles no one. Online you can still buy it here. Thank God!
Its quirky exterior alone: it's pure contemporary history! I have never been allowed to marvel at such a strange as polarizing flacon: large and clunky. Made of black plastic that doesn't look high quality, the GDR sends its regards with a triple "Plaste und Elaste". You knock on it and get a hollow-sounding feedback. Wonderfully disturbing. That this plastic should be only a cover, which can be removed with a little fiddling, I have only afterwards realized. One English-language YouTuber aptly compared the Soldano's exterior to the dashboard of an '80s Fiat Ritmo - and his eyes glazed over because it beamed him back a little bit to the lifestyle of that weird decade. I can relate to that. If I were all the marketing departments of all the perfume companies, my first order of business would be to undo all the facelifts of the vintage fragrances in my portfolio and dig out the original look. A fragrance is, after all, a fragrance from that era - but so is its bottle!
At Soldano, they fortunately grasped that and left everything unchanged, no matter how quirky that may seem today.
Also, the fragrance as such has nothing ultra-modern about it, but also nothing stale: I say, here classic Italy meets timelessness. With "Black" as an attribute I do not agree, because he smells anything but "Black", neither dark nor very spicy. Rather bright, positive mood, after spring and departure, after blossom and what is still to come in the expected summer months. You know the feeling, right? I find it wonderfully simple and to the point to begin with. Forget-me-nots and lavender and lily of the valley last surprisingly long in the drydown. It gets more elegant and serious after an hour: it gives itself spicier and more austere, a hint of patchouli and the link between these states is the unique saline note, which I also consider a trademark of this fragrance. I like it because it is so honest. Down-to-earthness of the 80s kind.
Is Soldanos Black a masterpiece? By conservative standards, no. But as a real trashy experience with a huge portion of vintage feeling definitely. Because at this perfume in its entirety all standards grit their teeth. And that's good! Very much so.

The music to the fragrance - Righeira "Vamos a la playa" [1983]
The car to the scent - Fiat Ritmo [1978 - 1988]

It came out in 1980, and is thus in the grey zone between the dark and spicy 70s style and the upbeat and eye-catching 80s - although it would like to place it clearly stylistically in the 70s. In retrospect, releasing a fragrance like this in 1980 was not exactly innovative, let alone style-forming - it was simply made to play it safe, exploiting the olfactory zeitgeist of the past 70s. Olay, let's leave it at that, others were no better
I'm surprised by the rather high ratings here on Parfumo - the only thing I'm going along with is silliage and durability - which is kindly said to be room filling to flashy to annoying, but always worth the little money. It sticks to the skin like eagle owl. But what use is it to me if the scent is only moderately presentable to socially acceptable. Don't get me wrong: I really like these typical anachronistic 70s scents, these classic soapy oakmoss leather scents, which were so common and so rare for today's perfumes. Only they were and are available from other manufacturers more beautiful, better, more elegant. Probably reformulated a lot, but fuck it.
Pour Lui by Oscar de la Renta appears brute to clumsy, bordering on a headache in the top note, but this subsides. Only certain subtleties do not emerge here, it remains relatively one-dimensional. Others in this style can do this much better: the Bogart as an example, five years earlier and thus fitting in perfectly with the times. It has that certain something that the Renta always lacks in its rugged rumbliness. Or the Bogart One Man Show, which was also released in 1980, he can also do better, although more floral and accessible. And as a reference class of such fragrances, the 1978 Ted Lapidus Pour Homme shows where the soap-leather hammer hangs. Not to mention Caron's supernatural Yatagan. All of them - and some more - put Renta in its place. Not a fragrance from that time that you have to have, but you can if you want to go on a historical journey through time and have 20 loops too many on your account.

* for noses that also love Lagerfeld Classic
* the music to the fragrance ---> "Born to Be Alive" by Patrick Hernandez