Trailblazer
Avon

Avon Trailblazer (1994) was pushing peak "weird" for Avon during their malaise period from the early 1980's through until the beginning of the 2000's. I've written countless times about this so I don't want to keep beating that horse, but I will recount in brief for context. Avon decided in the early 80's there was no room for value-oriented baseline fragrance brands like themselves anymore, and that all the major players were designers or luxury prestige brands, so they focused on makeup for the Avon brand itself and started buying manufacturers of designer perfume, boutique luxury brands, and making deals to front celebrity brands with the idea of passively profiting on them behind the scenes. They shot themselves in the foot with this by then double-dipping with some designers and celebrities having their fragrances appear in the catalog for slightly more than typical Avon prices, confusing everyone. Meanwhile, they spun down internal development of fragrance and hired Ann Gottleib to help them create new fragrances thanks to her success with Calvin Klein, and contracted out to big chemical firms like IFF and Mane to create their stuff for them, no doubt because brands like Lauder did that too. In those years (especially abysmal for their masculines because they sold less and focused less on them), what scents didn't smell like they were up from the vaults of the 1960's and 1970's came across like confused mash-ups of two popular tropes in one fragrance, with the occasional miracle here and there that you can probably attribute to Gottleib's creative direction. Trailblazer isn't one of those miracles, but it doesn't suck either. Oh, as you might have guessed, this stuff has precious little to do with it's hiking and great outdoors theme.

What we have here is another stylistic mash-up, and that mash-up contains top notes lifted from the calone-1951 fragrances proving popular in the late 1980's and early 1990's, plus bits of spiced fougère in the base, as that was another trope gaining ground then. So for those who know your stuff from that era, we're talking a mix of fragrances like Aramis New West (1988) and Calvin Klein Escape for Men (1993) with scents like Jazz by Yves Saint Laurent (1988) and Pasha de Cartier (1992). Whoa, that absolutely can't be good right? Well... no, not for the rigid minded person that separates his peas from his carrots and thinks conventional/traditional perfumery pre-1990 shouldn't mix with the emerging new-school that was based mostly on novel aroma materials created in a lab. If you're that kind stick in the mud, turn back now before your refined palette is tarnished beyond all cleansing that not even an overdose of Patou pour Homme (1980) can fix. If you're just a weirdo like me, or morbidly curious, this leads to a scent that actually reminds me somewhat of Romeo Gigli Sud Est (1994), another unorthodox scent hated by the Fragpublicans for not representing their conservative olfactive values. Sud Est opens with calone then settles into a nice herbal garrigue chypre vibe that actually makes the calone smell less like melon and more like ripened citruses. Here in Avon Trailblazer, the calone moves into the geranium, lemon, lavender, patchouli, and spice fast enough to give a leathery feel, which is a fascinating use for this sometimes-sour and sometimes-metallic material. Tonka, oakmoss, and cedar round this out. Wear time is average, and projection isn't phenomenal, but what Avon is? Sillage is good though and this reads neutral weather-wise.

I gather this wasn't super popular or even an A-list fragrance for the brand, as it didn't get its own bespoke spray bottles like Mesmerize for Men (1992) and Seazone (1992) both got; but rather followed the formula Avon had been using since the early 80's of making a bespoke splash and a uniform "pill bottle" sprayer that looks super cheap, with flimsy plastic cap and slapped-on sticker. They had done this initially for everything that sold justifiably well-enough to get a sprayer alongside the launch splash, but kept doing it for fragrances that didn't get enough attention to have new bespoke sprayer bottles (new for Avon anyway) at launch. The last thing I ever expected to smell was a calone-powered aromatic fougère, which in that exact manner creates one of the most bizarre implied leather notes I've ever encountered. Sour-fresh and aromatic green with crisp dry base notes tickled with the aromachemical blasphemy up top, I can't help but like Trailblazer, and I am fully prepared to be burned at the stake (again) for it. If your future lives at the bottom of an empty Charles of the Ritz bottle of Kouros (1981), stay far away from this, because I will not be responsible for your mental health should you poke the bear here and get mauled; same applies for the usual price wankers too. This is Avon after all, and particularly strange Avon from when they hit creative rock-bottom, during an awkward phase when they segued between internal development of their own simple high-quality fare of the 60's and 70's to their FiFa Award-winning output of the 00's created by some of the industry's biggest names (despite still being cheap). Trailblazer sure is that alright, but I don't think they blazed quite the path with this that they intended to. Thumbs up

Old style albeit weak leather and tonka bean chypre. Don't know when this was released from Avon but I feel as if it's not one to pursue to find a bottle of since there are better and many more leather chypres out there.