Yet another hit from Hugo Boss’ upscale niche-adjacent line The Collection. Daring Saffiano opens with davana and geranium but the patchouli and leather do the heavy lifting. This is a unique, slightly sweet and smooth suede leather fragrance doused with patchouli. It’s a solid performer and exudes elegance. Hugo Boss’ The Collection is still batting 1.000.

Tread very carefully.

Well guys, I’ve never seen anything like it. I just bought a 125ML bottle of Babycat Raw Bourbon for 169 bucks at The Luxury Beauty Store (run by L’Oreal as an outlet for their overstock fragrances and beauty products). They’re usually a pretty good deal for a random assortment of Armani, Valentino, Prada, Maison Margiela, Viktor & Rolf and YSL fragrances but I’ve never seen the more exclusive lines in stock there before. They had 125ml and 35ml bottles of Tuxedo Sharp Patchouli, the Babycat, Muse, and a bunch of others for 40% off retail and just today they started running a Labor Day sale of an additional 15% off. If you happen to have one of these stores near you, you should absolutely call them to see what they have in stock and get the heck over there ASAP. I found this link which has addresses for these stores in California, Texas, Washington, New Jersey, Oregon and Nevada https://www.simon.com/brand/luxury-beauty-store They had some other incredible deals like a 150ml refill bottle of Prado Luna Rosa Ocean EDT (one of my top five fragrances for life) for like 30 bucks. They even had YSL’s private line - in addition to Babycat I picked up 24 Rue de l'Université for a steal as well (sadly, they didn’t have bottles of 6 Place in, but they did have the candle versions which was pretty funny). Good hunting!

I'm a relative newbie, but I am curious about this group of fragrances. Please offer your best, most sincere advice for a 65-year-old father and grandfather who may be back on the market in the next year or so...

I’m a fan of the Cotswolds perfumer John Stephen and Energizer by Boadicea the Victorious is one of his early creations. This is a basically linear, long-lasting “photorealistic,” juicy, rindy grapefruit bomb. Like all BTV, it consists of top-notch ingredients from this generally overpriced niche house, though Energizer is more reasonably priced. If you enjoy citrusy fragrances I suspect you’d gravitate toward this.