Crave 
Calvin Klein (2002)
DISCONTINUED

There was a series of shrill battle-cry ozonic scents released into the early 2000's with woods, florals, and fruits racing to the fore in order to reclaim the space taken by the vapid "blue" aquatics. Crave by Calvin Klein was one such fragrance, and attempted to be loud, fresh, sophisticated, sexy, and distinctive... but to the late GenX or early Millenial crowd that was obsessed with complexity for the sake of it. The problem here with this is all the pop and flash worked into the scent, it's packaging, it's advertisement, and even the official name of it's notes ("Fluorescent Fresh Accords" means what exactly?) that it comes across like unapologetic pandering to the demographic it attempts to serve. The all-plastic bottle looked like the disturbing love child of a Windex bottle and a pill planner used to track one's medication, but was supposedly inspired by mobile tech such as cell phones. Naturally, the same tech-savvy generation that would potentially enjoy this scent is also individualist enough in it's self-expression that this sort of "direct" marketing would come across as vulgar, regardless of how it smelled, making this fall flat on it's face in discontinuation after just a few short years.

Hipster culture isn't the death of this scent however, as a few others like Kenneth Cole New York and even an eau de toilette creation by Axe would prove: it just wasn't time quite yet for the aquatic to let go, and the most popular male scents still remained aquatics until nearly the end of the decade. For instance, Ralph Lauren released it's Polo Blue flanker in the same year as this, with much the same shrill chemicals and sweat opening, but retained the overall "cool" accords one would expect from something in a blue bottle from this period, and it remains in production. It's not to say that Crave was a bad scent; when I wear it I get a huge blast of chemically-augmented grapefruit and melon right up front that fades in time to something more like white musk and light spice, with wisps of that grapefruit/melon Kool-Aid mix resurfacing from time to time. It's a hallmark of early 2000's male perfumery to keep top notes around for as long as possible, and this certainly achieves that end. It's a good scent for hot summer if you're tired of aquatics and mossless modern fougères, but only if you're a huge fan of a sweaty missing link between 90's ozonics and 2000's gourmand scents.

Funny that young men from the generation known for high-tech living and bucking tradition ended up siding with tradition against the hip, neon-bright and radioactive fruit salad offerings that were given to them in this period, instead just sticking with the stuff from the 90's their older brothers or upperclassmen wore, rather than reaching up to grab their plastic bottle-within-bottle photon torpedoes and "embracing the future" that this splendid failure of a scent offered them. I owned a bottle of this and even re-bought it once after, but I see it now for what it really was, and perhaps it's just nostalgia for this that kept it in a good light for so long; it was one of the first designers to replace my starters-Avon stash at the time, and I ironically have repurchased all of them but not this one, which I also never really reach for anymore. I've developed past the mindset needed to appreciate this, and the youth of today are back into dark and rich masculines with Oud replacing the moss in most instances, so they wouldn't like it either.