Wind Flowers
Creed (2022)

Wind Flowers not what i was expecting from Creed. It is a sweet perfume, seductive, mass appealing. Nothing ground-breaking. It is a very nowadays perfume with sweet and floral ingredients, the point being is that sometimes-and in the olfactory world, oftentimes-you make a bigger statement by having a bit quieter voice and more things to say than in your face blast of smell that suffocat everything else around you.

The fragrance opens with a zesty burst of citruses- orange blossom, mandarin, peach, followed by the heart notes where blooms clean jasmine, classical romantic rose and iris. To conclude the nice dance of top and middle notes, simple patchouli emerges, accompanied by the praline and sandalwood that personally i'm not impressd this phase of the scent. Lasts more than six hours and projects heavily for the first three hours and then sits quiet on the skin, still potent, it's not going anywhere.When will Creed ever creat an masterpiece such as "Bois du Portugal" or "Green Irish Tweed" again?

Wind Flowers by Creed (2022) names a number of firsts for the luxury brand, the biggest one being it is the first fragrance developed and released after the BlackRock takeover of the brand in 2020. We cannot count Viking Cologne by Creed (2021) as the first BlackRock scent because that one was in gestation since late 2019 as the sibling to Creed Aventus Cologne (2019), and both pre-pandemic and pre-sale to BlackRock; but COVID-19 saw fit to keep that one off shelves until two years later in 2021, so Wind Flowers wins the medal of first official Creed scent created and marketed by someone other than just the Creed family, and their long-held marketing firm ICP (irony) under Thomas Saujet. Olivier Creed still claims the perfuming is his, and also claims he has been working on Wind Flowers since 2016; but we all know better, and some poor sap with a formula they couldn't pitch ended up making a deal with the crossroads demon from Supernatural to sell their formula for a winning lotto ticket, or a bespoke suit from Olivier himself, whatever. Every Creed fanboy's worst fear of Creed becoming "nothing special" anymore (if they ever really were) after the career-topping Creed Aventus (2010) may have some proof of that pessimism here with WInd Flowers. Lovers of the few great feminines the house had produced may yawn with Wind Flowers too; this is no Creed Fleurs de Bulgarie (1980) or even Creed Love in White (2005) to be sure. Everything here reeks of low-effort high-yield corporate vulture strategem.

The other firsts are more subtle for WInd Flowers, like having a glass stopper bottle available and having a cap that doesn't fall off, but the next most-noticeable one is the juice color. This is the first delibterately-dyed perfume from Creed, as any other color you have seen beforehand in Creed perfumes is simply a by-product of raw materials used and perhaps even aging. Once you discover the launch date (Mother's Day) and then smell Wind Flowers, it really makes sense what this is trying to be: a new-age haute bourgeois Coco Chanel (1984) for the mothers of the usual entitled male audience Creed attracts. The opening is bergamot and aldehydes, but not too much of the latter. We get an old-school lactonic peach note and tuberose mixed with jasmine hedione and rose, all very reminiscent of Coco Chanel as penned by the marvelous Jacques Polge. The base of this fragrance is where most of the modernization happens, as Wind Flowers eschews the benzoin and animalic muskiness of vintage Coco for laundry musks, praline, ambroxan, and Iso E Super with a pinch of evernyl. Wear time is long and projection can be very loud for the first few hours, so no complaints on performance. With so many better fragrances like this at much better price points, I can't say I'd recommend using this anywhere, although I guess WInd Flowers is best for spring and summer. Creed oddly calls this unisex in European-only marketing, but for most guys I don't think Wind will appeal unless you like Coco Chanel or tuberose in general.

The other remaining firsts are the new bottle form-factor, which all women's fragrances may or may not inherit going forward depending on how well Wind Flowers does; and the ability to etch something custom on the bottle just reeks of intentionally-marketed as a gift for ol' momma. In their own words Creed (or more likely their new corporate overlords) more or less admit the brand has become the epicenter of every insecure, overpaid, and understimulated upper-class salaryman ever; and that means they have an entire lost market of female fragrance buyers to try and woo; this is especially true since the brand even states that only 30% of their customers are women, while the average North American high-end department store like Neiman Marcus (where Creed does business) only has about 30% of their customers being men. Wind Flowers then, is meant to court the female equivalent to the usual Creed customer; meaning the wives, mothers, or girlfriends of upper-class twit of the year are the mark. The next time some frumpy bleach-blond Karen in yoga pants climbs out of her Lincoln Navigator to take iPhone pictures and threaten you with a police call for being poor in her presence, if you smell Creed Wind Flowers in the air, you'll know Creed has succeeded. For $40, I could see a lot of women liking this, although if you add a zero as Creed pricing dictates, WInd Flowers becomes quite the raw deal, which is honestly par for the course with the house anymore. Neutral

The clean smell of freshly laundered linens hanging to dry in a sunny summer breeze in a mythical French garden where the smell of tubs of soapy water mixes with the scent of fresh flowers and green leaves on the wind.

Perfumes like this are difficult to pull off. With too much musk, they smell like cheap fabric softener. A waft of bleach helps create the illusion of clean laundry, but too much bleach smells like, well, bleach. Meanwhile, too much fruit (or the wrong choice of fruit) drags things into cheap fruity floral territory.

So, does Wind Flowers satisfy all these criteria? I think it does. It really achieves an exact point where everything works. That being said, could it be better? Sure. The jasmine here is masked enough by everything else that it doesn't smell particularly real or expensive, and no matter how hard you nail this genre, there's always a nagging suspicion that something similar could be had much cheaper from Tocca, Philosophy, Clean, or any of their copycats. But if you have $400 and want to smell like some idealized rich peoples' laundry garden, Wind Flowers smells great!