warm Archive

Budget Options: Liz Claiborne Mambo for Men

Generally, my Budget Options pick will be a fragrance I like. This week, I review something that isn't a personal favorite: Mambo by Liz Claiborne.
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Review: Creed Royal Oud – Fashionably late to the party.

Creed Royal Oud comes fashionably late to the party, so it's time to explore what it offers that makes it both noteworthy and Creed-worthy.
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Budget Options: Tsar by Van Cleef and Arpels

For this week’s Budget Option, I’ve chosen Tsar by Van Cleef and Arpels, and in doing so there are a few reasons behind it. Foremost, you can find this on store shelves provided you do some looking. The fragrance has not been completely obsoleted by newer scents from the designer, so finding this doesn’t necessarily [...]
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Gucci Guilty Intense Pour Homme (Review)

I should mention from the top that I dislike the marketing implications of “intense” in a product name. It suggests an “ordinary version” and, provided you can handle it, an “intense version”, as if there’s something missing or weak about the regular (non-intensely named) product. Or that something must be so wrong about the standard [...]
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Le Labo Vetiver 46 (Review): If perfume were art…

Le Labo is a rarity among niche perfumers seeking to differentiate themselves from the crowd, something they do quite well and in several ways. One of those is a ‘just-in-time’ manufacturing model where your fragrance is bottled at the point of purchase. If you like, your bottle can be personalized within reason — your bottle [...]
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Bond No 9 New York Cooper Square: Review/Impressions

I often wonder whether the marketing types at Bond No 9 haven’t gone a bit far afield at times in their quest for the hip & trendy neighborhoods of New York. After all, these are the people who’ve tried to capture the sense of place in fragrance, and used such monikers as “Brooklyn”, “Coney Island”, “Chinatown” [...]
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