Quote Originally Posted by Disburden View Post
Have you tried the pinaud special reserve? That stuff smells great, I just got a bottle on Friday and I am loving the smell of it.
Someone's going to get rich some day by buying cases of Pinaud (your example, especially), pouring them into fancy glass bottles, slapping a Victorian-artsy label with a pompous name on the front, and selling it for ten times what Pinaud gets. I really like the Special Reserve, as long as I remember to use it as a cologne and not an aftershave. It's got some staying power that isn't apparent at application. On the other hand, I thought I had several favorite scents, all in that price range ... until my Trumper's and Truefit & Hill samplers arrived. I'd say half of both I rejected at first whiff - just not my style - and the others didn't smell all that promising in the bottle, but since I had them I gave them a try. The difference is stunning.

As I think I mentioned in another post, I made "lures" (animal attractants/scents) for trappers and animal control professionals in the '80s, and I spent a great deal of time and money developing and testing them. It's no great feat to find something that will smell good to a particular animal and catch it's attention, but that isn't enough to keep it around the trap long enough to catch it unless it's young and dumb. It's a whole different thing to make a scent so complex and curiously attractive that it draws an animal closer and closer and holds its attention - and the ingredients to make the latter do indeed cost many times more than the simple scents and take a lot of trial and error to develop, as many of the trace ingredients are somewhat rare. To me, that neatly parallels the difference in the Old Spice scents and those in Trumper's class. I like them both, myself, but they aren't in the same class of "attractants".