Has designer fragrance been made obsolete?

sniffer64

Well-known member
Feb 3, 2011
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Guerlain, Lalique, Issey Miyake and Cartier are still putting out great stuff, but they don't hype it so you may not be aware. Brands like Habibi NYC are making fascinating creations with high quality materials for less than Chanel and a fraction of the cost of the conglomerate-niche brands like Creed, Tom Ford and PDM. And you can't dismiss the non-clone fragrances being produced by the many middle eastern brands, some of which are incredibly unique, even challenging.

Not picking on you, honestly, but there are probably 1000 new "designer" fragrances put out every year, and almost by definition, some of them will be creative and fascinating. Kind of like when my older friends say "there is no good music being made any more." There is, it's just a little harder to find it!
 

Olympe de Gouges

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Feb 26, 2022
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I personally feel designer will always be around for the simple reason that based on my anecdotal observations, designer perfumes sold at department store counters are for a very large segment of the population very much like the off the rack clothes sold in the same stores.

Like I have a colleague who compliments my perfumes sometimes, but has expressed that personally he always has just one bottle of “cologne” and he wears one or two sprays to the chest and he is ready to go.

I think the huge unseen mass of the iceberg underwater for the designer fragrance segment is people who buy perfume like they buy slacks and a blouse or button up + tie for the office. A bottle of Coco Mad or Sauvage is almost a utilitarian purchase like a belt to finish off a respectable-looking outfit. An understated, but classy perfume to match an understated, but classy pair of shoes.

For that the most important thing is to smell pleasant and agreeable. So laundry musks, shampoo, light citrus, lavender, body wash, and vanilla all sound like exactly what would fit the bill.

And for that segment I do not think they really think or care about it enough to bother looking for discounters or clones. They aren’t trying to fit 20 bottles into their budget, so even with the recent price gouging, for a 100ml bottle once every year or two it is not a huge difference if it is $100 vs $200. They probably are also not paying much attention to if something is reformulated or not since the objective is to smell “nice”. Even “catastrophic” reformulations from a BN perspective almost certainly still smell “nice” if you are just looking for the perfume equivalent of a mainstream, conservative cut navy business suit or something like that.
 

WarmJewel

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Oct 5, 2022
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Designers have gone into a bit of risk aversion/brain freeze that grinds on many of us in this world. A long philosophical discussion could probably be had about why this has become their strategy.
I don't think you need to have a philosophical discussion on this to figure out the likely answer.

They've become risk adverse because they are mostly (there are exceptions) owned and operated by large conglomerates whose only interest is profit and shareholder value. You don't maximise your profits by taking risks.
 

Stonecrop

Well-known member
Aug 28, 2019
151
102
^ All of that is hard if not impossible to prove.

There is no public information (from an independent third party company/organization) that shows what ingredients each company is using.

The only information we have go by is marketing materials and hearsay. And maybe our own intuition, though probably none of us are experts at making perfumes.


Quite a lot of important designer and niche fragrances have been GC-MS analyzed / interpreted and made available for purchase. Also other open source formulas by the industry give a good indication what materials are used in General. Except for common essential oils the lions share is synthetics. Many current fragrances are even > 50% of (different qualities of)hedione, iso e super and some ubiquitous synthetic musk combos. Then Linalool / Linalyl acetate or even the purely artificial substitutes for those like Coranol or sclareolate.

Quality of ingredients differ, EOs from different sources can differ greatly, but as said those are only a small part of perfumes.
 

PStoller

I’m not old, I’m vintage.
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Aug 1, 2019
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You don't maximise your profits by taking risks.

Actually, “the greater the risk, the greater the reward.” The problem is that heads roll when risks don’t pay off, and no one wants to grace the chopping block with their neck. It takes a visionary executive (and a supportive board) to gamble effectively.

Bernard Arnault is anything but risk-averse. However, people working for him apparently are.
 

Scentologist

Well-known member
Apr 17, 2007
12,773
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I think perhaps what needs to be done here is introspection, turning the mirror on oneself and asking is designer perfume obsolete, or am I no longer the target market for it anymore?
Bravo! I was thinking the same thing. It's not obsolete, but feel the target audience has changed. Few are targeted to mature audiences. Most are just bubble gum freshies making us that grew up with Jazz, kourous, Polo Green, Aramis, etc longing for a solid masculine release. Nowadays polo green is unrecognizable and the rest are but gone. I consider Dior Homme 2020 a good mature masculine as is Sauvage Elixir. Ysl got rid of all their truly masculine scents and don't get me wrong, I love the Y line, but they should have kept Jazz and Rive Gauche at least as part of their flagship heritage (kouros as well). IDk. What's the world coming to.
 

Ken_Russell

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Jan 21, 2006
58,635
26,670
Have never given up on the hope that somewhere there might still be great designer options-even if not formally/properly released, branded and/or crafted etc. as of now.

Maybe it's a quite personal, fairly nostalgic viewpoint on this (in part but not always and not fully) inspired by/dwelling on previous, often classic tier designer masterworks,
 

Varanis Ridari

The Scented Devil
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Oct 17, 2012
18,481
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(In all seriousness, the designer perfumes are wrong.)
They're wrong to us, but oh so right to the bottom line of shareholders, until they're not. 🤣
Bravo! I was thinking the same thing. It's not obsolete, but feel the target audience has changed. Few are targeted to mature audiences. Most are just bubble gum freshies making us that grew up with Jazz, kourous, Polo Green, Aramis, etc longing for a solid masculine release. Nowadays polo green is unrecognizable and the rest are but gone. I consider Dior Homme 2020 a good mature masculine as is Sauvage Elixir. Ysl got rid of all their truly masculine scents and don't get me wrong, I love the Y line, but they should have kept Jazz and Rive Gauche at least as part of their flagship heritage (kouros as well). IDk. What's the world coming to.
This makes a lot of sense. We've been trapped in this "eternal youth" cultural and fashion doom-loop since the 90's. It's trickled down into behavior thanks to social media and created man-children of many.

You don't know how many times I've heard people say their sex lives or career lives are over at 30; that if they haven't achieved a PHD and 6 figures, or have 2.5 kids in a cul-de-sac, that they're abject failures. Game over at the first signs of laugh lines.
 

ryan_y

Active member
Aug 3, 2024
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Designer fragrances are absolutely garbage now for the most part I find myself buying older designer frags from the early 00s as they are FAR better quality than anything being released today
 

monacelli1

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Feb 9, 2024
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This thread made me think of a related question: What are the best designer fragrances that no one is buying? We like to bemoan the lack of designer scents that can compete with those of years gone by, and fairly to some extent. But what about worthy scents that came and went, or are dying slowly, because of soft sales? Personally, I think Cartier’s L’Envol is one of those scents. It deserved to be a modern classic, imo, but was discontinued due to lack of interest. I also suspect that H24 is on the fence. Hermes is doing their best to keep the line going through flankers, but it doesn’t seem to be making nearly the mark that Terre did. Heck, one could add Dior Homme 2005 to that list, which scuttles along as Dior Homme Original available only in French stores, as far as I know. So what other scents belong to that list? What current designer scents should men be buying instead of the standard blue juices from Dior, Chanel, and YSL? The inability of designer houses to get people interested in these fragrances probably has a lot to do with why many men’s releases are so “safe” these days.
 

andym72

Well-known member
Dec 19, 2008
3,185
396
The risk aversion has resulted in jumping on bandwagons - “they’ve had a hit, if we do our own version we’ll have a hit too”. Which is kinda ignoring that even with hits, there’s only so many people who want a certain form of scent, so you’re not expanding the market by effectively doing a flanker of someone else’s “original”, you’re diluting it. And then you pump out flanker after flanker and make it even worse. Y oh Y oh Y would you do that? It’s not sustainable to have 8 variants of one fragrance on the market even if they do use ostensibly the same bottle and packaging.

(YSL have got flankeritis worse than most. The number of L’Homme and LNdlH flankers is simply insane)
 

cheapimitation

Well-known member
May 15, 2015
3,281
5,744
This thread made me think of a related question: What are the best designer fragrances that no one is buying? We like to bemoan the lack of designer scents that can compete with those of years gone by, and fairly to some extent. But what about worthy scents that came and went, or are dying slowly, because of soft sales? Personally, I think Cartier’s L’Envol is one of those scents. It deserved to be a modern classic, imo, but was discontinued due to lack of interest. I also suspect that H24 is on the fence. Hermes is doing their best to keep the line going through flankers, but it doesn’t seem to be making nearly the mark that Terre did. Heck, one could add Dior Homme 2005 to that list, which scuttles along as Dior Homme Original available only in French stores, as far as I know. So what other scents belong to that list? What current designer scents should men be buying instead of the standard blue juices from Dior, Chanel, and YSL? The inability of designer houses to get people interested in these fragrances probably has a lot to do with why many men’s releases are so “safe” these days.
Good idea! You named most of the ones I can think of but I'll add Terre d'hermes Eau Givree as a really nice and interesting flanker.

Two others that aren't going to move any mountains but I think are very well done are Brunello Cucinellli and Tiffany and Co. I bought the Tiffany as a gift for a friend who likes it and whenever I smell it I think it's quite nice!

Maybe this is getting too far off topic/deserves its own thread, but I think there's a lot of good stuff happening in the lower tier/freshy lines like Acqua Allegeoria, Chanel Les Eaux, or Hermes Cologne series. Many of these trounce over designer mass releases and at a similar or even lower price point.

Of course there's also everything Comme des Garcons.
 

Varanis Ridari

The Scented Devil
Basenotes Plus
Oct 17, 2012
18,481
24,543
This thread made me think of a related question: What are the best designer fragrances that no one is buying? We like to bemoan the lack of designer scents that can compete with those of years gone by, and fairly to some extent. But what about worthy scents that came and went, or are dying slowly, because of soft sales? Personally, I think Cartier’s L’Envol is one of those scents. It deserved to be a modern classic, imo, but was discontinued due to lack of interest. I also suspect that H24 is on the fence. Hermes is doing their best to keep the line going through flankers, but it doesn’t seem to be making nearly the mark that Terre did. Heck, one could add Dior Homme 2005 to that list, which scuttles along as Dior Homme Original available only in French stores, as far as I know. So what other scents belong to that list? What current designer scents should men be buying instead of the standard blue juices from Dior, Chanel, and YSL? The inability of designer houses to get people interested in these fragrances probably has a lot to do with why many men’s releases are so “safe” these days.
Honestly? More people (especially here) should like Toy Boy by Moschino. Everyone loves their musky rose masculines from the 1980's, and Moschino handed us all a modernized take on that, which was ignored because narrow-minded people couldn't get past the marketing or bottle.
 

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