Greenley
Parfums de Marly (2020)

Alright!

So let me start by adding credibility to my nose:

I love citrus in the summer (doesn't everyone). I also like well done aquatics!

My top 10 summer scents: (not in order)
Beach Hut Man Amouage
Nautica voyage (cheap but good)
Bleu de Chanel (just good)
Renaissance Xerjoff
40 knots Xerjoff
MFK gentle fluidity silver
Erba Pura Xerjoff (I just like them)
Bleecker Street Bond 9
Hamptons bond 9
Costa Azzurra Tom Ford

For me, the scents above 1ast forever on my skin, project like beasts, my girl digs it, and the compliments come from all sides. There are a few barbershop scents I reach for just because they are easy to wear and smell good in a generic sort of way: vodka on rocks kilian, pdm Percival & sedley, nasamotto silver musk, the harmonist yin transformation& sacred water...

Now I mention all of these to say a few things: I think I have a good nose for summer scents, if you like these scents and can agree that these work well in summer and work well with your skin and or agree with my likes so far, you will feel incredibly comfortable when I say whoa to Greenley!

Almost a photorealitic green apple. Like mfk gentle fluidity silver and amouage beach hut man this departs from the typical citrus summer spring scents. It's crisp, bright and with some spice and wood to make it well rounded. My girl smelled it and she liked it.
It'll set you apart for sure. It makes someone want to come in for another hug for sure. Unisex of course.

Sillage is great.
Longevity is great.
Unique for sure.
Compliment puller no doubt.
Unisex slightly mask leaning in the base.
Summer and spring definitely.
Priced decently at discounters.
Do I recommend getting this? Yes. Duh.

Well done PDM.
Well done.

I'm not usually a fan of PDM, but I have to give credit to this scent for being pretty decent. As Varanis Ridari points out, we could live without Greenly, but it's still a likable fragrance. While it doesn't necessarily evoke a green feeling, the combination of tart pomarose and woody amber creates a surprisingly good smell. While I wouldn't go out of my way to pay over $250 for this type of scent, as there are Hermes fragrances that give me a similar vibe, if you can overlook the price tag, it's a good scent.

Maybe it's the sinus infection skewing my perception, but this is exactly the same as JVAP without the neroli note. Check out my review on that for more details, but tl:dr JVAP has beautiful green herbal notes along with neroli orange - a beautiful note that women unceremoniously relate to baby diapers and baby wipes.

Okay, further into the drydown I think I know what happened here. Someone saw the success of apple in Y EDP but knew it was way too sweet, but also realized JVAP was a masterpiece of green herbs but the neroli had to go. They put their own apple into JVAP and added quite a bit of oakmoss in the drydown to make it more appealing for older guys and smell more expensive. If you like this, buy a clone. I prefer just wearing CDNIM EDP and sauvage EDT in spring and not playing the niche pricing game, so pass for me.

It's a happy, juicy, freshly-fruity-woody green scent (unisex, but leans more masculine especially in the top notes) with very showergelly/shampooey vibes. I think it's this shampooey apple scent that makes it feel so. I normally am not a fan of shampooey/showergelly perfumes but this is probably my favourite of the kind, it just smells very nice and refreshing, it's equal parts cooling/calming and energizing, just like a good shower. It dries down to a lovely and clean-feeling woods and cashmeran base that feels very comfortable and, to me, is the best part of the scent.

I'm glad I got a sample and I'll use it up on days when I want to smell fresh, nice, clean and not too feminine while not opting for straight citruses - but I cannot imagine recommending it to anyone except the most wealthy because the price for what you get is just not justifiable in my mind. It's a fresh and nicely made everyday scent, and in my peasant mind everyday scents should be at least somewhat affordable. But if price is not a concern to you and you want to smell NICE and CLEAN and freshly showered, this is it, it's beautifully made fruity-woody scent, it's strong and stays all day.

To me it's nicer than Versace Dylan Blue (both feminine and masculine) but it's probably the closest idea I can think of - except this is green and not blue.
Thumbs up because I like the scent - but if I considered the price, I should knock the rating down a bit. I mean, it's nice, but don't forget you can achieve this niceness for five times less.

A bright fruity offering from PDM, but not a "green" scent. Greenley should be quite popular but seems somewhat over-shadowed by some of it's PDM line mates. Greenley's got a lot of similarities to many other fragrances and leans in the direction of many masculine bath/shower products, but in an appealing way. There's a load of cashmeran in this, but I happen to like cashmeran's musky, woody tones and it fits quite well in support of the cedar and violet heart. Excellent performance like all PDM fragrances.

Hacivat
heylegros04/27/21 11:24

I love Parfums de Marly, but I'm not overly impressed with Greenley. Oddly enough, all my favourite scents from the house are listed as unisex (Carlisle, Percival and Layton), although I definitely think they're masculine. Greenley is definitely a unisex scent to my nose. It's not even slightly or a tad bit more masculine than it is feminine. No, it sits right on the fence.

The first few minutes are not particularly enjoyable to my nose. I find that it's a tart blast of pretty crisp apple note that has a sourness to it that is a bit off-putting. It could be the accords with the citrusy top notes, but there is definitely something conflicting in that opening. And it's definitely foreshadowing.

A couple of minutes in, it does get much better, with the musky base basically doing what it does so beautifully (and so much more successfully) in Percival: provide a toned up, powerful body to carry a bunch of notes and accords that evolve through the drydown. Once the woody notes really settle in, they do smoothen up the experience, and those oakmoss, cedar and petitgrain notes blend quite well all in all, although they're somehow pivotal, as they slowly turn the scent into something that has quite a different feel to it. It could be that the cashmere and amberwood notes feel somewhat out of place, as they bring some sort of warmth that just doesn't work all that well in a scent that so blatantly tries to feel fresh at first.

Again, without ruining it completely, they bring something conflicting to the experience. It's like a mid-July, sunny day freshie for the first minutes, then it turns into a scent that feels best worn in front of a Christmas tree.

I'll give Greenley due credit for not being linear. It reaches a point where it's enjoyable, but to me it never goes beyond that. It would be fair to say that the musk base note in Greenley does with green apple what the musk base note of Percival does with lavender. The main difference, to me, is that the other notes and accords are deeply elegant and sophisticated in Percival, whereas they feel a bit plain in Greenley, and too tart-scent oriented for my taste.

Greenley is no different than other PdM outings in that its longevity is really good, and it projects satisfyingly. However, it is definitely not one of their standout fragrances.

Bright, fruity (not citrus) opening that is modern and youthful. As it settles, you get the violet and cedar which is the overall vibe. Green? I guess. There's some dirtiness or bitterness, so that makes me think of Layton, but maybe I could just be influenced by their relation to each other.

I actually feel that this is an excellent work scent. It's pleasing overall and doesn't project much at all, which is surprising. In fact, this smells more designer than niche, so be sure to sample as you may find something similar for less.

There was so much drama surrounding the name of this Parfums de Marly fragrance that I almost forgot there was even a fragrance underneath all the drama in the first place. In typical Miranda Priestly fashion (The Devil Wears Prada), self-important career beauty executive (formerly Lancôme, Cosmair, L'Oréal, and Creed) and founder/owner of Bond No. 9 Laurice Rahmé is something of a "bully" in her field, and likes to overzealously protect her interests in litigious fashion, going after several other perfume houses for using names too similar to the names of places in New York (none of which can really be trademarked directly). She even goes after every two-bit small-time blogger that says something unflattering about her or her brand, making sure record is scrubbed of any credible dissenting opinion (including having a Reddit thread deleted), so I may receive a cease and desist letter forcing me to edit this review by her legal team just for mentioning it, we'll see. The point is, the focus surrounding Parfums de Marly Greenley (2020) quickly became about Rahmé threatening action against Parfums de Marly for originally calling it "Sutton", than about the fragrance itself. For a time PdM considered "Epsom", but clearly association with a bath salt or a one-letter switcheroo to a brand of a copy machine (Epson) didn't sound good either, so we got stuck with a name that could double as that of a Sesame Street Muppet: Greenly. All publicity is technically good publicity, although you'll only really like Greenley if fresh contemporary people-pleasers with slightly better-than-designer materials are your favorite breed of niche, and that isn't saying anything new.

Whatever you want to call it, Parfum de Marly's first foray into green fragrances since the old-school chypre that was Lippizan (2010) is certainly not your typical Parfums de Marly experience. A lot of people used to their richer and more redolent winter-friendly fare such as Carlisle (2015) or high-powered aromachemical "clubbers" like the best-selling Layton (2016) will surely be at odds with Greenley, but we did get a taste of this lighter direction with Sedley (2019), which I found to be quite good. The opening is a fresh, juicy Granny Smith green apple note that lingers, bolstered by orange and bergamot. Some people may notice a very trace similarity to Creed Aventus (2010) thanks to this juiciness, but it is brief as the apple ends up having its own tart character not found elsewhere. The heart is focused on the synthetic "Pomarose" molecule, described as a double-unsaturated ketone not found in nature, giving off a fruity rose-like smell that sometimes is compared to fig or raisins. Violet leaf and petitgrain do a good job in drying out this fruity floral feel while adding the "green", allowing cashmeran and Iso E Super to add a woody musky feel into the base. Ambrocenide anchors the scent down, which is a tandem "woodyamber" that combines the olfactive "lifting" facets of ambroxan with the scratchy woody facets of other often more-jarring woody ambers, without being as harsh. Evernyl adds a slight oakmoss roundness to further smooth down the "nü-chypre" finish, and Greenley sits on skin as a mostly-pleasant casual affair if sprayed judiciously. Wear time is about 8 hours, and sillage can be monstrously harsh if over-applied due to the aromachemicals in the base, which is par for the course with the house. Best use is in summer as a general dumb-reach.

Perhaps more important than the controversy surrounding the clash between the queen perfumista of bête noire attitudes and the king colognoisseur of influencer-shilled luxury perfume, is the fact that Parfums de Marly Greenley (under the original Sutton name) was planned for a late August launch, which was far past prime time for a fresh scent like this in the first place. When combined with the recall caused by the controversy, the already-exacerbated manufacturing delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the hype from everyone wanting to finally get a bottle of this highly-discussed fragrance, what you get is a latecoming "green instead of blue" freshie with a huge price tag that missed its window to make a difference. On the plus side, Greenley got to sorta stand alone rather than be compared a dozen times to other niche summer releases. Do I like Greenley? Sure. Could we live without it? Definitely, because for as nice as the apple note is, the rest of the fragrance is par for the course in this segment, but with a twist of "green". Since some bottles with "Sutton" on the bottom sticker and box made their way into influencer hands for pre-release, collectors or scalpers may be tempted to find one as a trophy or later investment flip, but the scent inside the bottle is far less interesting than the battle which was waged over the name on it. If you're a cash-flush "FragBro" that lives life through an Instagram filter, the smell of this has got you all over it, otherwise I'd sample first. Greenley is nice in that it feels left-of-center in a world where everyone making generalist freshies at this price point tries to dupe Creed, but without the flailings of Rahmé, Greenley would have ironically gotten lost in the shuffle. Thumbs up