CK One Summer Daze
Calvin Klein (2022)

Nice fresh scent… the kumquat note is fantastic. A nice citrus fragrance for Spring/Summer. The big drawback is the performance which sucks big time. A few hours max as a skin scent then gone. A pity as it’s a great scent let down by cologne strength longevity and silage. Age 15+. Leans slightly more male.

Calvin Klein cK One Summer Daze (2022) is pretty dazed in the head if you ask me, and if you didn't, I'm telling you anyway, so deal with it. The brand at least had some creative foresight to call this summer flanker something other than "Summer", so we don't have to remember which number of those we're on after 20 years of them, but then just went ahead and recycled one of the orange bottle motifs from summer editions past, negating that individuality. Scent-wise, the brand seems to be taking us back to a time when these were just mostly the original Calvin Klein cK One (1994) teased up with new top notes, so don't get too excited here if you don't like the dry down of the original seminal freshie masterpiece. Unfortunately, that original scent composed by Harry Freemont and Alberto Morillas still has much more staying power even in current form than this does, as performance is completely abysmal. If it didn't get any worse than that on the scent-side of things, the marketing for cK One Summer Daze is pretty tone-deaf, stating: ""CK One Summer Daze is inspired by the ultimate road trip with your tribe and the freedom felt on the open road." Excuse me? Have you seen gas prices for 2022? Not a damn person is doing a road trip anywhere this year, unless it's with a VR headset.

The star opening note here is supposed to be kumquat, and I guess I can see it, but this really just rubs me as a retread of Artisan by John Varvatos (2009) with an orange note. Boss has done plenty of orange-forward fragrances too at this price point, so the cK One Summer Daze has a lot of competition at better prices with better performance already, before we even get past the first sniff. The breakdown from there is mint and tea, although most of this read to me as bits of the fresh green tea notes from the original, with a lot of the white floral and hedione bits replaced with more-potent paradisone and other things that sharpen up the scent. I'm not a big fan of this because again, we already got something which does it better, from the cK One line itself in the form of Calvin Klein CK All (2017), which saw Freemont and Morillas return. The base here is the same white musk ambrox thing as Calvin Klein cK Everybody (2020), which is pretty okay, except its delivered at half-strength because "summer" so it fizzles into nothingness. Awful performance, lackluster chimera of regurgitated marketing-approved notes, and a really stupid ad campaign completely out of touch with the world at large, this should have been named cK Trashfire. Oh yeah, this has a new musk called sorbettolide. No, I'm not joking, this is "sorbet musk". Sigh.

I don't know what else to say, I love, or at least loved Calvin Klein for its rather unusual blend of commercialism and futurism, but now the cyberpunk dystopia thing is a little bit too cynical and therefore too on the nose for even me. After a really boring Calvin Klein Defy (2021), which only managed to defy expectations by smelling and looking like a Burberry fragrance but being packaged with a Calvin Klein logo on it, I've become a bit disillusioned with this brand. I've been on board with their commercial slickness channeled through novel materials and fun abstract accords for years, as it made them stand out from the other mainstream brands just looking for a single ace in the hole to abuse, but this is just warmed-over leftovers from last year's creative team tossed in an Osterizer and given a good frappe treatment. If you are a collector and somehow have room for all 1,001 limited flankers Calvin Klein has pumped out, this is one more on the pile for you; but I do not see how anyone could otherwise want this. Pure duty-free impulse buy tourist bait is this, and I think since people in Asia and elsewhere abroad like Calvin Klein more than their home market anymore, that's all they shoot for these days. Wake me up when summer's over. Thumbs down.