Carmina
Creed (2023)

Before I talk about this fragrance, I am still amazed that anyone in the online fragrance community still lists anyone in the Creed family as perfumers in their scent-of-the-day posts in forum threads or on social media; I guess the power of Creed's gaslighting is such that they may need years of mental deprogramming in order to stop, which is sad. On that note, we absolutely do not know who the perfumer for this fragrance is, as Creed still lives in la-la land, even under Kering ownership, even if right before the Blackrock sale, the father/son charlatan pair tried to come clean in a book on the house by naming themselves creative directors rather than perfumers. I guess that little revelation was under-rug-swept by Blackrock, then subsequently Kering, so the efforts of Gabe Oppenheim now seem more like apostasy than revelation. All that blissfully delusional revisionist history aside (something American politics seems eager to engage in as well), Carmina by Creed is every bit as you might expect a fragrance coming directly from Kering to be; it is massively mass-appealing, shrill and cheap-smelling, full of status virtue signalling. I was hoping they'd do better with their first in-house owned brand, as they themselves bemoaned the watering down of their other properties at the hands of cosmetic licensees Coty and L'Oréal.

Hoping against hope got me exactly nowhere, and it will get you nowhere too if you blind-buy a bottle of Carmina. In the brand's own market copy, Carmina "...draws inspiration from the pages of fashion sketchbooks handed down through the Creed family for generations..." and it "...is a fragrance that pays homage to the audacious and spirited women depicted in these sketches, who are always poised for their next escapade..." as it were. How it accomplishes all this is uncertain, as Creed was never a fashion house, only a leather maker, then a haberdasher, and finally a men's tailor before Olivier had the keys handed over to him by Charles Henry. What you're really getting here is an overpriced distribution of what is likely an unused mod from Claude Dir made during his assignment to create Dark Cherry & Amber by Banana Republic (2019). There is a bit of rose here lifted from the toolset of Maison Francis Kurkdjian, and a bit of candy-sweetness which reminds me of a Tom Ford or Parfums de Marly feminine-market rose, but that's it. The rest is cherries, pralines, saffron, cashmeran, the usual norlimbanol scratchiness for "incense", and a peony note lifted from from a Glade Angel Whispers candle, which isn't the first time I've encountered it in a luxury perfume. Performance is nagging, and I'll leave it at that.

Any self-respecting woman with enough money to shop a brand like Creed at retail owes it to themselves to stop in a Safeway or Albertson's grocery store and smell that Glade candle before buying this perfume, and then sniffing a $60 bottle of Dark Cherry & Amber from a local TJ Maxx or Ross while they're at it; just make sure to dress down for the occasion so you don't feel out of place among us commoners, and then report back to me about your findings. Chances are I will have saved you the painful shame of spending almost $500 for 75ml/2.5oz of perfume that could have come right off a Bath & Body Works shelf, from a perfume brand that only in 2023 - after three owners in less than 2 years - finally decides to use a properly-fitting metal cap on their bottles, and still is not honest about their legacy. If Carmina and the men's launch of Absolu Aventus by Creed (2023) is any indication of the brand's future, it will continue to be the Sideshow Bob of the luxury perfume market segment, a segment it helped create after seguing away from proper niche perfume in the early 2000's, by having perfumes that were still expensive, but struck a nice middleground between mass appeal and a true perception of elite quality. Granted, most of that was on the back of an uncompensated Pierre Bourdon, and the brand no longer had such genius with low self-esteem to exploit, Thumbs down