POLO BLACK BY RALPH LAUREN in Chandler Burr: Making Sense Of Scents

Perhaps one should not be astounded that Doreen Bollhofer*, the creative director of Ralph Lauren’s perfumes, has produced a nice, not-half-bad masculine scent. The surprise is partly a function of the fact that around 90 percent of the scents marketed as masculines range from intentional scent banalities to olfactory amphibious assault vehicles. It’s also relevant that Lauren’s 1978 Polo Green (as the brand now calls it), a masculine previously referred to as Polo, was as ubiquitous among young American males as Rive Gauche was across the Atlantic among young French females ten years earlier.

Rive Gauche has held up well. It remains easily wearable as a chic retro statement. (Yes, this includes men; the stuff is great on guys.) Polo Green, by contrast, burned out its aesthetic viability in part because of its determined, semi-militaristic vision of what constitutes a male fragrance — a sort of green, sort of aggressively fresh aromatic scent with the power of a land mine. To be clear: The perfumer who constructed it, Carlos Benaïm, did excellent work. Structurally Polo Green was built like a titanium watch. Stylistically, however, it was a sort of “eau de French military academy.”

Polo Black, on the other hand, is far from green. Black was constructed under Mullarkey’s guidance by the American perfumer Ellen Molner and the French perfumer Pierre Negrin. With the proviso that all perfume categories (floral, oriental, etc.) range from slightly useless to completely meaningless, the surprise here is that Polo Black is a “parfum gourmand,” a culinary perfume where one least expects it. For its first 30 minutes, it is an idea of the delicate sweet smell of a still-warm pastry oven combined with pure, warm, clean man’s skin. There is no cliché “ashtray-in-a-frat-house-at-2 a.m.” smoke, the usual (and boring) semaphore deployed to signal “masculine perfume here!” Mullarkey wisely eschewed this. That said, Polo Black’s main weakness is its, well, weakness — technically the juice runs out of steam rather fast, and it has only moderate diffusion power on skin. The other problem is the drydown; once the 30 minutes are up, Polo Black evolves toward a much more standardized male spice. If only Mullarkey had allowed Molner and Negrin to continue the pastry-oven opening, let it carry the entire story. Polo Black is certainly not an immortal addition to perfume art. But it is pleasant, and as “masculines” go, it makes a decent finishing touch to a man’s body.

By Teresa Findlay
Published November 2nd, 2009 13:58

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