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What cologne disappointed you?

If you've bought a fragrance without smelling it first, what was a big disappointment?

I recently bought Nautica and can't really get into the scent. I never tried it the first time around when they advertised all over the place and it was pricey (relatively speaking).

Picked some up a couple months ago at TJ Maxx. for summer, that was casual. I've now used it a handful of times and put it on this morning. For some reason today, I regret putting it on. Smelling it on me actually gives me an unpleasant feeling, like sick or queasy.

I think I'll be trading or PIF this.
 

EclipseRedRing

I smell like a Christmas pudding
I regret buying every scent I have purchased in recent years thinking it would be as good as I remembered it from years ago. Maybe my olfactory sense is failing but no new version or reformulation of anything smells as good as the original. They are all without exception a huge disappointment and waste of money. I will never purchase a reformulated scent again, it is vintage or nothing for me.
 

Ad Astra

The Instigator
Le eau de Issey pour homme. Headachy, synthetic, despite a million good reviews. Gave to wife, don't laugh, could be unisex. Lemon fizz right?

Le Male. Now you can laugh! minty fougere doesn't work, again a million positive reviews. Could be a biased crowd that likes the bottle ... should toss it. Or leave it at that one bar downtown ...


AA
 
Burberry for Men. I bought it blind having liked Brit and London. It was cheap but boy, do I hate it. There's something overly synthetic about it, I just absolutely hate it, but am out only something like $22.

The great joy I've gotten from my blind buys of Terre d'Hermes and Guerlain Vetiver have more than made up for it though.

:D
 
If by disappointment you mean don't like the scent: Paris Hilton for Men. That mango/melon note just kills me.

I've been disappointed by the performance of a number of colognes, but they are wearable, even great scents (John Varvatos Star USA, I'm talking to you!). But only Paris Hilton for Men is unwearable.
 

musicman1951

three-tu-tu, three-tu-tu
Many did, but that doesn't mean they would disappoint anyone else. Between our different noses and our different metabolisms I don't think there is any way to know ahead of time.

One was terrible for the first 30 minutes, and then quite wonderful (and I'm not going to suffer for 30 minutes when I have so many other choices). I like a lot of Tom Ford colognes and I like citrus, but I didn't care for Neroli Portofino - but that doesn't stop anyone else from liking it.

Eucris is popular, but on me it smelled of rotting fruit on a 3 day old corpse and almost made me physically sick.

Samples rule, blind buys are dangerous.
 
I don’t think I dislike any really. Bijan for men was one I didn’t like very much. I give/sell poor performers usually, but I love the scent usually.
 
1. Versace Dylan Blue- it smells alright, but it didn't knock my socks off. Versace Pour Homme is leagues ahead of it IMO.

2. Mont Blanc Legend- smells too much like Axe body spray to me. My girlfriend hated it.
 
Penhaligon Blenheim Bouquet. Thankfully I bought a sample decant. Smelled like pepper to me. Reminded me of being in a Subway shop.
 
If by disappointment you mean don't like the scent: Paris Hilton for Men. That mango/melon note just kills me.

I've been disappointed by the performance of a number of colognes, but they are wearable, even great scents (John Varvatos Star USA, I'm talking to you!). But only Paris Hilton for Men is unwearable.
Oddly enough, my wife like that scent on me.

One I thought I remembered fondly from my youth that CANNOT get along with is Grey Flannel.

Boss Bottled also smelled funky on me. I passed it on to my son and he pulls it off well.

Sent from my SM-N975U using Tapatalk
 
I regret buying every scent I have purchased in recent years thinking it would be as good as I remembered it from years ago. Maybe my olfactory sense is failing but no new version or reformulation of anything smells as good as the original. They are all without exception a huge disappointment and waste of money. I will never purchase a reformulated scent again, it is vintage or nothing for me.
Good post. Anyone who purchases a new bottle of scent based what that scent was like when it was first released is taking a chance. Not every reformulated scent is bad, but the chances of one being as good as the original formulation is pretty remote. Buying vintage scents has its own rather large risks though. And in my experience it is rare that I get to try that vintage scent before buying.

Blind buys always seem to be risky, no matter how many reviews one reads.

A couple of buy spring immediately to mind, though. Before I had much experience with scents, I had a bottle of Boucheron Jaipur in an edt formulation I had really liked that I had nearly gone through. So I went on line and found a really big bottle in the higher strength edp formulation that was fairly expensive and seemed like it would be a life time supply, but I bought for myself thinking it would be a treat for myself and that having the more expensive, stronger edp version would be something I would like all the more. Like I said, I at the time I was not a very sophisticated scent buyer. The edp version turns out to smell very different from the edt version, something that I now know is true for many scents--although I have at least sampled a lot of scents in both edt and edp versions and I cannot remember disliking one so much over the other--and I really did not like the edp version. I still do not. A big disappointment and a bad investment. I was so annoyed, it turned me off the the edt version and I have never got any more of a scent I am sure I would still really like. In this case, I probably should have read some reviews.

tabac

I was not prepared for the old lady musty thing to be so powerful.
I take it you are talking about the edt version. I actually should have known better from the reviews, but after having various other Tabac products, including the ss, after shave, and edc, and really liking how each of them smelled, I bought a big bottle of the edt expression. I really do not like it and that is such a shame given how much I like the way the other Tabac products smell.

Versace Dylan Blue- it smells alright, but it didn't knock my socks off.

Based on the reviews, I suppose Jeremy Fragrances' in particular--I generally like his reviews and can tell whether I am going to like something from them, whether he likes the scent or not--I thought I would like Dylan Blue, too. i did not buy it but have sampled it often enough. Seems insipid to me.

Penhaligon Blenheim Bouquet. Thankfully I bought a sample decant. Smelled like pepper to me. Reminded me of being in a Subway shop.

I think the usual line is "smells like pepper and lemon pledge." It does smell like pepper. It is supposed to! One of my all time favorite scents, but no doubt a controversial, even difficult, one.

<Le eau de Issey pour homme. Headachy, synthetic, despite a million good reviews. Gave to wife, don't laugh, could be unisex. Lemon fizz right?>

Popularity is almost never a good test of whether one is going to like a scent, at least as to anything relatively new. If a newer scent stands out from the crowd enough to be especially popular it almost necessarily has some strong, relatively rare component(s). Ones not everyone may like. Issey is a good example. Hugely popular scent and once my absolute favorite, go-to scent, that I wore so much I got sick of it. Smells very 90s to me now. Headachy, synthetic, lemon fizz, all of that and way more, such as dirt/funk, wood, tobacco, spices. The lemon note is yuzu, which was very new on the scene when it came out in 1994. Powerful even in later formulations, which like everything else do not seem nearly as good as the original. Definitely not a good blind buy. Still, to me, one of the great scents.

Eucris is popular, but on me it smelled of rotting fruit on a 3 day old corpse and almost made me physically sick.

Eucris would be a very brave blind buy.

I wonder if there is something wrong with my olfactory senses, I like both Tabac and Blenheim Bouquet
There is nothing wrong with your olfactory senses!

The great joy I've gotten from my blind buys of Terre d'Hermes and Guerlain Vetiver have more than made up for it though.
I would consider those semi-brave buys, but fabulous, classic scents!
 
Sorry for the length of these posts, but this one fits right in to the discussion and it is one where I actually bought a bottle of at full retail.

Aramis Havana has long been a favorite scent, but it had been discontinued, at least in the States--it was said that they still sold the original in South Africa--and I had been getting by on expensive vintage decants, when Aramis announced it was reissuing the scent, in a redesigned bottle, along with a bunch of other Aramis scents that had been discontinued over the years.

I remember going through some trouble to track down a source right away, and I ended buying a regular bottle by mail from some high end store in Manhattan. I think it was Saks. (I live in the Washington, DC area. There is no lack of high end stores here, but no one had it yet, and no one seemed to know when they would get it.)

Very disappointing. It is not a terrible scent, I suppose, but it is a long, long way from the original formulation in nearly every respect.
 
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