Orange Spice (1950)
by Creed

I almost did this side-by-side with Kouros since people make that comparison, but now I'm glad I didn't. It's maybe a bit akin to Kouros Fraicheur: soapy, and domineeringly so, with some legitimate neroli in the top notes but that gets buried under the slick, slimy, alkaline notes of a bar of cheap motel soap that someone peed on a little bit. It out-Muglers Mugler Cologne in that sense, but at least for now it's not as bad as I had dreaded from before. It's also a very dated, almost antique scent, which ought to be emanating from an old-fashioned low-end barber shop, not from a specific fragranced product, but just from the combination of all the soaps, lotions, tonics and creams being used inside all day. Another good scent for the dapper, well-groomed gentlemen aboard the Titanic in 1912. Still, because it passes so easily for heavy soap, it would fare much better than a lot of other antiquated scents, coming in right under the radar even today, when nobody would expect a man to smell this way. The base notes also smell a bit more like a deliberate personal fragrance, woodier and grassier, with even some leather I think, so it wins back some credibility there too. Overall, not a failure by any means, but I'm not exactly sure what to do with it and how to approach it.

4th February, 2012.

Orange Spice is indeed a good fragrance. It starts out with a extremely dated aroma (which doesn't mean it is awful!) as expected, with a corpulent and synthetic orange note which makes me remember of Kouros Fraicheur, specially because after this strong opening that persists for about 5 minutes, spices kicks in with a pungent clove note taking the whole fragrance, but here the clove isn't a pure one, instead it is combined with
that citric chord from the beginning giving another depth to this Creed.

Anyway, a long lasting fragrance that smells refined!

6th November, 2011.

I'm all for animalic notes but I just don't like this composition for some reason. Is it that I need note separation when the animalic notes are strong? Whatever the case may be, this is indeed a smoother, lighter Kouros, so if you really dislike Kouros I don't see why you would like this. An example of a really animalic fragrance that I like is vintage Tabu. OS doesn't have much dynamism nor balance, and is what I call a "man sweat frag," meaning that it seems to be designed to smell like certain people think a man should smell like, rather than being made for a fragrance aficionado. Of course, at the time, thee was no such thing, so you can't fault the perfumer for doing this, but it has an air freshener quality that way, though of course air fresheners don't have animalic notes. Anyway, the longevity and projection/"sillage" are fine, so I'll give this a neutral only because it doesn't appeal to my aesthetic.

6th March, 2011.

I agree that Orange Spice is the older, more mild-mannered sibling of Kouros. OS opens with a blast of smooth yet somewhat synthetic mandarin type orange and is followed by neroli, aromatic spices like clove and cinammon, possibly civet, and dries down to the typical sweet-salty Creed ambergris accord. Longevity and sillage are good though I am used to traditional colognes. Great product from Creed's yesteryear. This is the ambiance of the Elizabethan era--the mixture of citrus, spice, and animalic accords before the Farina made the light citrus and floral cologne popular.

28th November, 2010.

Kouros for those of the nursing home age. Gross!

17th July, 2010.

Little like kuros, just smoother. I think its very good.

7th May, 2010. (Last Edited: 17th May, 2010.)