Davidoff Cool Water for Men

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It’s funny to me how Creed priced its Green Irish Tweed (GIT) out of many people’s markets and drove them to a cheaper, albeit, very good alternative in Cool Water. These days when people think aromatic aquatic,they think Cool Water for the very simple reason that Cool Water was more affordable, more readily available, and it pretty much smells the same to most people’s noses anyway.

Cool Water for Men

In Bottle: I’m one of those people who find Cool Water and Green Irish Tweed very similar so I’ll try to vary this up a little but do keep in mind these two fragrances go through the motions in relatively the same way. Cool Water opens with a green, citrus, aromatic backed by a couple of gentle wood notes lingering in the back. It’s herbs, aquatics, and woods basically.

Applied: Citrus is quick to fade with the green aquatics sticking it out while the woods and aromatics work their magic. Cool Water is a fresh, clean, easy to wear and easy to love fragrance that I have a hard time finding fault in. This was one of the earlier aromatic aquatics that lived in a time where the market was less convoluted. It grows on me, keeps me reminded of Green Iris Tweed. But there’s a bit of a difference between Cool Water and GIT, and that lies in the complexity difference between the two. There’s a certain flatness that Cool Water hits during the mid-stage, as if some component is missing from the fragrance as a whole. I want to say it’s missing a refined floral heart like GIT had while Cool Water focuses more on the aromatics and woods side. Whatever’s missing it, it needs to be looked for in order to notice, but I’m still left wondering just what that is. It seems to be the ‘spark’ that sets GIT aside from Cool Water for me. Cool Water chills out in the end stage with a cedar note. The cedar’s threatening me, of course, but it’s not as loud as some other cedars have been.

Extra: Now, I can sit here and ponder the intricacies of these two fragrances all day but being a child of the late 80s and early 90s, I smelled my fair share of both GIT and Cool Water. They’re still both very popular fragrances but they spawned a trend in men’s fragrances that still persists today. The aquatic fragrances family. A family so full of members that I have a hard time telling them all apart.

Design: I’m going to have sigh and say I’m not a fan of the bottle here. The colored glass angle has to be played right with perfume in that the shape of the bottle has to be able to stand whatever color you splash on it. Use too little color and people won’t notice. Use too much and the glass ends up looking like plastic. Unfortunately that’s the case with this bottle, it reminds me of a shampoo bottle.

Fragrance Family: Fresh

Notes: Mint, green, lavender, coriander, rosemary, geranium, neroli, jasmine, sandalwood, cedarwood, musk, amber, tobacco.

There’s two main version of Cool Water (and a huge lot of flankers). One for men and one for women. This review was regarding the men’s version.

Reviewed in This Post: Cool Water for Men, 2005, Eau de Toilette.

Guerlain Spiritueuse Double Vanille

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Two of the more interesting vanilla based fragrances I’ve ever smelled have been Tom Ford Tobacco Vanille and Spiritueuse Double Vanille. Being a vanilla lover, I wanted something that captured the essence of a really great vanilla. Tobacco Vanille was a nice one. Being more accessible was also a bonus. Then I found a bottle of Spiritueuse Double Vanille kicking around and fell hard for it. Spiritueuse Double Vanille is heralded by many fragrance lovers as the most convincing, the most real vanilla fragrance. And I have to agree. She’s beautiful. Spiritueuse Double Vanille

In Bottle: Smoky sweet vanilla liqueur. Very smooth, extremely pleasant. Reminiscent of Tobacco Vanille but with a nicer, milder, less tobacco interpretation. The smokiness is pretty light in the bottle as Spiritueuse Double Vanille smells mostly boozy.

Applied: Spiritueuse Double Vanille instead opens with a fabulous liqueur reminiscent of bay rum. The vanilla is up front too, smooth and sweet and pure. The smokiness and cedar make the next appearance as Spiritueuse Double Vanille heads toward the spice. This fragrance is golden and warm and has the most utterly pleasant vanilla fragrance I’ve smelled yet. It’s like having a drink, wearing a monocle, smelling a box of cigars and hanging out in your mahogany library. This stuff smells classy. And that vanilla? It’s the kind of vanilla you’ve always wanted in a fragrance but never quite got. It smells like true full-bodied, boozy with a touch of spice vanilla–not that stuff you usually smell that’s sweet, and a little plastic. As the fragrance ages on my skin I get less smokiness and more pepper and more spice. All the while, the vanilla is hanging about lending the fragrance a fabulously smooth and rich treatment.  The mid-stage is like a blend of tobacco, mahogany, vanilla bean, and cedar and it seems to have lost its booziness from earlier. When Spiritueuse Double Vanille dries down, it resembles a pleasant predominant vanilla. Sweet, smooth, sophisticated and utterly beautiful.

Extra: Spiritueuse Double Vanille is a limited edition by Guerlain released in 2007. Jean-Paul Guerlain himself composed this fragrance for the house. I am not clear on whether or not it is still in production but I sure hope so because I believe this one is a definite keeper.

Design: Love the bottle. Thin and rectangular and easy to hold and spray. The details on it are also fantastic, with a wax seal-like design sporting Guerlain’s iconic bee. The major thing I didn’t like was how this was boxed, making it near impossible to both use this regularly and store it in its original packaging. Spiritueuse Double Vanille comes in a fitted box with a travel cap (that’s just a regular screw on cap) and a separate atomizer spray nozzle that you affix onto the bottle yourself. Due to the different heights of the travel cap and the spray nozzle, and the fitted box this fragrance comes in, once you install the atomizer, you can no longer make it fit in its original packaging. Very annoying. So you can’t keep Spiritueuse Double Vanille in its original box and if you’re nuts about keeping your perfumes out of the sunlight and light in general like me, you will have to shove it into a dark corner or drawer and hope the lack of extra protection from the box won’t make that much of a difference.

Fragrance Family: Woodsy Gourmand

Notes: Vanilla, benzoin, frankincense, spices, cedar, pink pepper, bergamot, Bulgarian rose, ylang-ylang.

Guerlain has been using vanilla for so long as a base for its fragrances. So when a house that built its prestigious reputation on vanilla outputs a vanilla fragrance, you better believe I’m going to go smell it. And of course they hit the nail on the head. When I first got into this whole fragrance thing I was afraid of two things. 1) That I would fall in love with a limited edition fragrance. 2) That the fragrance would be expensive. Thanks a lot, Guerlain.

Reviewed in This Post: Spiritueuse Double Vanille, 2007, Eau de Parfum.