Best use is pretty much year around.Īzzaro Chrome is perfectly well-composed, but also perhaps perfectly boring, as are many top-sellers from the "beige age" that is the 1990's for men's fragrance. Wear time is good enough for a work day at over eight hours, with earlier bottles having marginally better projection thanks to real oakmoss, while later bottles rely on evernyl and fall a bit flatter sooner, like newer bottles of Azzaro pour Homme. Azzaro lists rosewood, sandalwood, and cedar as the wood notes responsible, but it's all too synthetic to really be sure, although I can recognize the tonka which lends that tea-like leafy hay facet. Chrome deviates from cK One and Bvlgari pour Homme in that it doesn't rely just on white musks and an ethereal tea note, but moves into that ultimate "white shirt" territory with green cardamom and the crispness of a wood note with a sliver of oakmoss, which when pressed against those clean laundry musks give the impression of washed linens starched after drying. Similarities to ck One abound as another smash of hedione joins these acetates in the heart, pushed and pulled around by lucid notes of jasmine and a very light cyclamen joined by a dusty coriander. The latter is rather common in most floral fragrance now, and often gets cited as such by people who have knowledge of perfumery, but back when Chrome came out, cranking it up this high as a top note was uncommon in a Western man's fragrance. The opening is fresh, clean and uplifting with neroli, lemon, rosemary, aquatic notes, and a huge dose of benzyl acetates for a massive synthetic floral rush. Chrome is also more of a men's floral fragrance than it lets on, which is kinda fun. The basic theme of Azzaro Chrome is as an aquatic white floral woody musk, crossing the streams between scents like the original Nautica (1992), Calvin Klein cK One (1994), and Bulgari pour Homme (1995). In some ways, Gerard couldn't have picked a better fragrance to be his sole credit, as Chrome is quite literally the epitome of white linen shirt fragrances for men. His work in Chrome is deceptively simple at first glance, especially since everyone from Avon to Xerjoff abuses his techniques here, but leads to a comfortable clean that isn't your average blue fragrance. Gerard is only known for Chrome, and being the father of Raphael Haury, who also did work for Clarins and Azzaro. Enter one Gerard Haury, a perfumer who worked with Harrmann & Reimer (now Symrise) and who was a master perfumer often going uncredited, no doubt because he likely worked for a lot of large-scale ignominious clients like then Azzaro owner Clarins, who probably had him perfume most of their many costmetic lines. The secret here was to deliver clean and fresh modernity with a heavy amount of synthetic abstraction as was fashionable in the 90's, and to deliver it without the heavy-handed wall of sillage that 70's and 80's fragrances became notorious for to the youth of the day, but also to be strong enough to stand out amidst dozens of competitors trying to do the same thing. The extremely artful and genderbendy Azzaro Acteur (1989) was also a commercial disaster, despite being a low-key masterpiece of jammy Turkish rose and leather chypre that would only be appreciated by collectors decades after it's arrival, so Azzaro had nothing relevant to offer until Chrome came along. Azzaro Chrome was also just the right kind of fragrance to revive interest in the brand from young men in the 90's, who shrugged off Azzaro pour Homme as dated along with its original intense flanker released in 1992. Azzaro Chrome (1996) is the best-selling Azzaro masculine fragrance of all time, even if the original Azzaro pour Homme (1978) holds the title of best-seller in Europe, and is arguably far more iconic from a historical perspective.
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