Hey folks! I've begun writing fragrance reviews again on my new blog, Mannscents. I'll be reviewing easily accessible and inexpensive fragrances, offering ingredient spotlights, and covering various other fragrance topics there too. Here's an excerpt from my first review. If you want to read the rest, or download an audio version, please check out the article here. Have an awesome week!

What Does Versace Eros Smell Like?

It opens with a big hit of vanilla, tonka bean, and the synthetic compound ethyl maltol, which smells like nothing so much as fresh cotton candy. It's pretty sweet when it first starts out, likely due to the fact that creative directors these days seem to be convinced that sweet = sexy. Fairly overwhelming at first, but, thankfully, the sweetness burns off early, allowing the rest of the fragrance to come forward.

Once the vanilla/tonka/maltol opening quiets down, you can smell some of the mint accord beneath, which lends a touch of fresh greenness to the opening. I wouldn't really call it a "minty" fragrance so much as one that happens to feature certain facets of the smell of common garden mint. Despite Versace's description, I get absolutely nothing recognizable as lemon from Eros, and it doesn't strike me as a citrusy fragrance overall. Honestly, a good lemon accord would have evened it out a bit, so I'm rather confused as to why Monsieur Guichard chose to incorporate it at such a low level. Maybe the creative director believes in a "less is more" philosophy when it comes to citrus. Whatever.

I'm not necessarily sure that they did it on purpose, but Versace actually managed to create a perfect example of "transparent" perfumery for the apple note in Eros. Transparent colognes and perfumes are basically the equivalent of olfactory mosaics: they're greater than the sum of their parts, and, while you can smell the individual notes, the cologne gives an overall picture as soon as you stop focusing on the particular pieces. Eros accomplishes this quite well, and I find the apple note most apparent when I stop paying attention to any specific bit of the structure. Truth be told, I didn't actually recognize it as apple at first, and I don't think it's especially obvious that apple is supposed to be part of the design, but I can see how the overall scent might give that impression. It smells kind of like apple pie a la mode at some points, and remains very sweet for several hours.

Eventually, a touch of ozonic freshness starts to work its way through the sugar, in this case courtesy of the synthetic compound norlimbanol. Norlimbanol is one of those things that you have to smell to believe; the scent of dryness, of absolute desiccation, it's used to cut the sweetness of many masculine fragrances these days. It's harsh and sticks at the back of your throat when smelled at full strength, but it works really well when used in trace amounts, as it is here. It's kind of a tired trope, though, and I wish that perfumers would start using other methods to cut sweetness (or, better yet, just stop making sickeningly sweet colognes). The use in Versace Eros is a little bit obnoxious, permeated with a feeling of "Haven't I smelled this already, in, like, a dozen other places?"

As the scent starts to fade, you can smell the geranium a little better too. If you've never smelled synthetic geranium, it's usually made up of several different molecules (particularly geraniol and geranyl acetate), and buttressed with little shots of licorice and mint. That's especially obvious here, and Eros starts to pick up a mossy, licorice-mint character as it goes. It's not obviously geranium, but it does work pretty well to close out the scent, which otherwise fades to a nondescript sweet muskiness by the end of its run.

EDIT: AUTHOR'S NOTE

I had originally thought that the slight ozone character was the result of the inclusion of norlimbanol, but, upon further reflection, I think it's actually a feature of International Flavor & Fragrance's (IFF) Amber X-Treme, a captive perfume molecule that imparts a warm, fresh, amber-y character to fragrances in which it's included. It's less harsh than norlimbanol, but has a similar effect.

Knowing how popular it has become in modern masculine fragrances, my guess is that Amber X-Treme is the actual source of the characteristic.