Gentleman (new)
Givenchy (2017)

There is really no Gentleman to purchase these days, just a cheap and vulgar imitation of a timeless classic . The vulgar imitation is in the same old bottle but no perfume really is present inside the bottle.

How long must perfume lovers endure having their favorite perfumes turned into garbage? And the perfumers have the audacity to call it the same name and hike the price up instead of down.

Is a very pleasant smell, a perfume for everyday for me. I choose my SOTD depending on weather, activity, and mood mostly. This one reminds me when I was living in Arizona, I don't know why, but those were good times. A perfume that can make you remember good memories is always good. Nothing complex but is not a basic smell neither. Always give a full try before buying if possible.

Interesting that this little diddy gets savaged. I think it is a pretty good fragrance. There is something a bit off and synthetic about the opening fruity pear thing, but as that dies down they actually did a good job on the mid and base here. That is so rare these days in a mass pleaser. Its got some dry woody vetiver stuff in the mid, that almost feels like a fractured version. It is a clear white woody thing. The iris hold. That pear in the opening mixed with the iris gives that facet a Ultra Male thing, but at an appropriate volume. I like the bottle. I like most things about this one, and think I might pick up one from this line. It does smell masculine, though in a clean way, and not an overly trying to be the sexy man with an upturned collar.

I was given a sample of this by the rep after buying Terre d'Hermes. Gentleman has a fairly strong leather note and sweet citrus almost green notes. It's light and inoffensive and would be a good office frag. Scores a neutral because I won't be buying a full bottle and I think there's better leather fragrances for the money.

For those who grew up on Cuisine perfume - with its naturalistic smells,
this woody-fruity aromatic mush - with too much pepper sauce - is like eating a dessert from a burger joint.
Synthetic and unsatisfying.

This reminds me of something not too pleasant from my British childhood. Dettol disinfectant! Horrendous.

I have been using the original GG more or less since launch, so when I bought this, I assumed it had undergone one of its periodic redesigns.

Frankly, if I had picked this up cheap on a street market, I'd be kicking myself for wasting money, but I would have known the chance I was taking.

This is the "new formula " coke to classic coke, or even a supermarket own brand cola.

I'm not a professional, just a user, but this is an over sweet almost sickly smell that has no relationship whatsoever to original GG.

I must conclude that the oh so subtle switch in the name was deliberately and cynically designed to get mugs like me to boost the sales of this >>> thinking it was the original.

And I'm not alone - having tried and failed a dozen times to get a definitive answer from Givenchy by phone, email and tweet as to whether they were ceasing GG original, I went on an orgy of stockpiling.

Unfortunately, even well established online merchants are still selling and illustrating the new stuff with pictures of the old, so its too subtle for them TOO, and I now have £300 of this dreck to shift on ebay.

If anyone knows of an alternative with similar charachteristics to the original GG please let me know.

Hey now! This one is actually quite pleasant on its own merits, compared to the brash old-school original.

Top notes: pear, cardamom
Heart: iris, lavender
Base: patchouli – leather accord, black vanilla

I find this to be a well-blended wearable tart, spicy-sweet cologne, a youthful retake on the Givenchy Gentleman mystique. Fairly simple in construction and seems to be a "reboot" type scent in Givenchy's collection.

How ironic indeed. This placid fragrance is pathetic but I actually like it...sort of.

Such a boring fragrance. Neither it's classic enough to be strong in scent and character, neither it's modern enough to be wanted by the crowd.

If one wants classic, stick to the classic Gentleman because even the reformulated version is class in itself when compared to this one. If you want a bit of more modern approach, Gentlemen Only and G.O.Absolute are really more than ok.

Who wears it? Boys wannabe men, same thing with YSL "Y"!

Irony is, I'd probably even buy this stuff for the office wear and casual room spraying here and there. Sort of usable, actually.

Scent 5/10
Originality 2/10
Longevity 5/10
Projection 4/10
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40%

First thing's first, this should really be labelled as "Gentleman by Givenchy" and not "Givenchy Gentleman (New)", because Givenchy themselves try to separate this from the original Givenchy Gentleman (1974) in the same way Dior separates Sauvage (2015) from Eau Sauvage (1966), with a little re-arranging of the name. Calvin Klein also recently did this with Obsessed for Men in 2017, separated from Obsession for Men (1986), and so far only Yves Saint Laurent has flat-out reused a name with their new male iteration of Y (1964) in 2017 as well. I feel a lot of the hate and confusion in the fanbase would subside if everyone just referred to this scent the way it's makers do, because most of the problems stem from insisting it's the "New Givenchy Gentleman" when one good sniff clearly shows that it isn't, but rather just another nostalgic take with new juice in a throwback presentation like all the above (save maybe Sauvage). Now that we got all that fracas out of the way, how does it smell? Well average really. Ever since Chanel released Bleu de Chanel (2010), the first latecoming aquatic from the house that re-purposed a name from an old discontinued perfume and using the then cutting-edge ambroxan captive to give it a warm dry down, every other higher-end designer realized they too could release a more mainstream masculine scent capitalizing on heritage with that synthetic base note to bridge the usually more taste-specific world of upper-class male perfume with the demographics-driven median tier (and below) world of "men's cologne". It was only a matter of time before Givenchy jumped on board this craze too, and made Gentleman. The stuff is presented in the "classic" mid-century shouldered "pill bottle" with the wraparound label which all old Givenchy scents used in the beginning, but the similarities to vintage juices end there. This is a squeaky-clean floral for all intents and purposes, which is an interesting turn away from the aquatics, citruses, and barbershop scents other houses imitating the ambroxan-powered freshness of Bleu de Chanel have pursued. It sits somewhere under Bleu de Chanel and Sauvage for me, and it certainly better than the horrible dreck of Y for Men by Yves Saint Laurent, but not by much.

Olivier Cresp and Nathalie Lorson worked on this together, but it doesn't really seem like it to me. Gentleman by Givenchy opens with a pear and cardamom accord, sweet, soft, and a bit powdery, before going into a fairly synthetic iris in the middle, which is touted to be the scent's main accord. A good iris scent is like a good leather scent: usually expensive to pull off convincingly, although designers like Versace have proved that a cheap iris can be done effectively with enough quality flanking notes, like the tobacco iris of Versace the Dreamer (1996), but here it's paired unconvincingly with a rather astringent lavender, making the iris quality (or lack thereof) very evident. I love a good cheapie, as long as it doesn't smell cheap, and this isn't even sold cheaply, so that makes it worse. A bleached-out leather, patchouli and "blackened" vanilla pairing are up next in the base, which is the same combination that Ilias Ermenidas and Christophe Raynaud used in Obsessed for Men, but here it's not committed to as strongly since it's not an oriental, so it ends up just being an irritation sweet powdery stickiness that is carried aloft on musk and ambroxan, making this go from clean to itchy in the finish. Gentleman by Givenchy just doesn't seem like something that a gentleman would actually want to wear, since it is just dialed in so fiercely to what's most abundant in the 2010's on the male side of the fragrance fence. It doesn't come off as a citrus, nor an oriental, nor even a barbershop scent, has no distinction of it's own, even among it's modern peers, and although not a total mess like Y for Men, just is so much filler trying to play itself off as killer that the only enjoyable aspect about it is holding the bottle, and maybe smelling the brief pear and cardamom opening, which is the only part I can see myself really enjoying. It has pretty decent saying power thanks to that Ambroxan, but you'll tire of it long before it fades from skin or shirt. Gentleman by Givenchy feels like a dialed-in and rushed attempt to make a cash cow to fill the coffers, but unlike selections such as Bleu de Chanel or Sauvage, doesn't even try to be -good- at what it does.

There are always going to be people that hate generalist scents whether they are made by Avon or Roja Dove, but even when compared to the merits of other past generalists high or low, Gentleman just comes across as "passable", which is not worthy of a thumbs down for me, but neither a thumbs up. There's just so much better you can do even if the opposite of there being so much worse is also true. No house should really being trying to achieve a state of mediocrity, but whilr houses on much tighter budgets or selling to much larger (and less affluent) crowds can be given a pass because they don't have as much wiggle room to make things truly extraordinary (although they can happen like accident), houses with much more riding on the line like Givenchy, and the proven talent at the wheel has even less excuse. If you absolutely need Givenchy to be the purveyor of your next nine-to-five work scent and it must be something new, this is an okay choice, but you're really boxing yourself in here. The original Givenchy Gentleman which begat this scent was not a whole lot of sophistication in a bottle either, as it was mostly patchouli with some cinnamon, leather, oakmoss, and civet to make it a bit sweet and manly, but at least it was classy and distinct, with a love-it-or-hate-it unflinching stance on how it presented itself, like most gentlemen of quality. This scent is more like "please please please don't notice me as I take the last cup of coffee from the pot" in a bottle. The guy who wears Gentleman by Givenchy doesn't want to be noticed, or complimented, or reprimanded, or anything; he just wants to be there and that's it. Gentleman by Givenchy is literally just "me too" in a bottle, and long after it fades from view, people will still be talking about the original and laughing at this the way they do the initial wave of surviving New Beetles chugging along the main drag in a patina of faded paint, cracked plastic bumpers, and "wash me" written in the caked filth along the running boards. Meh.

I really don't get a lot of iris in this, not like DH or Prada L'Homme anyway. Reminds me of Gentlemen Only, except no ginger, and also Gentlemen Only Intense, except not as spicy. Soft, sweet and very pleasant.

The main accord lasts for 3-4 hours and then you are left with a very soft, generic woody scent that lasts the rest of the workday.

Projection is average.

Don't be fooled. This is nothing remotely comparable to the original Gentleman. This is dank, horrid iris note over synthetic woody calone. Unfortunate performance.

Appalling.