I smell a rat in men's fragrance

Alexis Petridis
Saturday November 25, 2006
The Guardian

I'm not sure that metrosexuality isn't a figment of the media's imagination, along with public interest in Kerry Katona's private life. You read that demand for the back, sack and crack wax is so high you have to put your name down for one years in advance, but you never meet anyone who's had their bumhole professionally denuded. Most men I know view moisturising as equivalent to flossing after every meal: you're meant to do it, but in reality you never manage it.

And then there's fragrance, in theory a beloved part of the metrosexual male's arsenal, but in practice not a topic men like to dwell on. At one extreme, aftershave is the province of suburban lotharios expressing their virility by bathing in Instinct by David Beckham. At the other, it's impossible to discuss seriously without sounding like a cross between Nathan Barley and Larry Grayson's friend Everard. "A delinquent lavender led astray by cinnamon and cumin," one men's fashion mag said recently of a Gaultier aftershave. Then it became even more offputting: "A lewdly resinous vegetal amber, headily redolent of female arousal, utterly intriguing when worn by a man."

That's the problem with men's fragrance: it's either Swiss Toni stinking out the room with 21st-century Blue Stratos or it's freaks suggesting you go around smelling like a woman's privates. We need a middle ground, something to steer us away from slapping on whatever they got for Christmas and instead thinking about what they smell like without mentioning delinquent lavenders.

Which is where basenotes.com comes in, with its admirably prosaic reviews of men's fragrances. I was won over when I read someone call a Thierry Mugler aftershave "evil, must-be-destroyed demon juice", and then offer a sane assessment of Gaultier's eau-de-delinquent-lavender: "Gave me a headache."