The week I sampled Light Blue Pour Homme I came upon some 50-60 tuxedoed teenage men standing together on the sidewalk in front of a Cheesecake Factory restaurant (“Welcome Class of 2007!”) As I passed this bunch, the smell of Light Blue Pour Homme was powerful in the air. And what to make of the advertisements? There’s a tan man in a boat, legs splayed, aiming his crotch at we viewers, and wearing suspiciously flat white swim trunks - weird and prosaic at the same time! (I did a quick search of Vogue Hommes and L’Uomo Vogue to see if European audiences were allowed to see the bulges that normally appear within a man’s swim trunks but could not find a Light Blue Pour Homme advertisement.) The commonness of Light Blue Pour Homme’s juice is matched by its bland-as-can-be bottle. Light Blue Pour Homme is a mid-strength fragrance and could be worn year-round. Not being a chemist or perfumer but having no fear of making a fool of myself, I imagine the formulation of Light Blue Pour Homme thus: add to a bottle’s worth of alcohol, water, fixatives - one tablespoon of ‘fresh’/ozone notes, ½ tablespoon of “bright” imitation citrus, ½ teaspoon ‘musk wood’ and ½ drop of all other (exotic-sounding) listed ingredients. The long-lasting base of Light Blue Pour Homme’s composition is ho-hum ‘musk wood.’ Rosemary, incense, pepper and oak moss were nowhere to be smelled.

In this well-blended fragrance, one strains to find individual notes, but I did “sense” for a split second ‘juniper’ and maybe a driblet of ‘rosewood’. Light Blue Pour Homme begins with zippy citrus (accent on the ‘frozen’ grapefruit peel). Before smelling it, three of Light Blue’s notes caught my attention: mandarin, rosewood (the King of Woods to me) and incense, but my imagination created a fragrance very different from Light Blue Pour Homme’s actual synthetic, and instantly recognizable, scent. Light Blue Pour Homme is a fresh citrus-musk its listed ingredients are Sicilian mandarin, ‘frozen’ grapefruit peel, bergamot, juniper, rosemary, Szechuan pepper, rosewood, ‘musk wood’, incense and oak moss. Sniff a department store perfume area and what you will smell is a dull and artificial aroma, the combination of all this perfume “stuff”: fruity-florals and fresh citrus-musks. A ‘fresh citrus-musk’ fragrance contains large quantities of “fresh” (ozone or marine) accords, all types of sharp citrus (mandarin, bergamot, lemon, grapefruit, tangelo, etc.) and a base of soft, vague ‘woods’ and light musk. Finally, I asked point-blank about Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue Pour Homme and she said, “That’s OK - but it smells like lots of other colognes.” Her response was unusual at Nordstrom all scents are “wonderful,” “fabulous” or, at the very least, “ interesting”.įemale perfume lovers have an overabundance of fruity-florals to contend with, but men, we are plagued by too many “fresh citrus-musks”. I told her I had already tried Gucci Pour Homme II, so she suggested Lancôme Hypnôse Homme or Terre d'Hermès or Dunhill Pursuit or Fleur du Mâle or Viktor & Rolf Antidote or Lacoste Elegance or ….

When I went to Nordstrom to smell Dolce & Gabbana’s new Light Blue Pour Homme fragrance, I asked the sales woman, “What’s new and doesn’t smell like everything else?” She clapped her hands and gestured towards a large Gucci Pour Homme II display.

Dolce and gabanna light blue ad