Aspen for Men (1989)
by Coty (originally by Quintessence)

Aspen for Men by Coty (1989) began life as it's own brand marketed by Quintessence, a perfume division of Beecham that was the corporate remnants of a leveraged buyout involving the house of Jovan. Beecham acquired Coty in 1992, launching the masculine Coty Gravity (1992) the same year but eventually merged Quintessence into Coty by 1994, which is when Aspen became a de-facto Coty fragrance. At the time Aspen launched it was fairly novel, and likely a downmarket attempt to capitalize on the emergent fresh style of fragrance created by Pierre Bourdon and Olivier Creed in 1985 with Creed Green Irish Tweed (1985), a style that had already tumbled downmarket once when Bourdon cannibalized much of his own work to create Davidoff Cool Water (1988), a fragrance recognized as the first archetypical aquatic. Aspen also featured a heavy slug of dihydromyrcenol to give it the same fresh airy aqueous lift that both Green Irish Tweed and Cool Water had, but took the template into more of a proper aromatic fougère direction with an actual lavender/geranium/tonka/oakmoss core. Straddling the lines between the fresh fougère, aromatic fougère, and aquatic, Aspen went quietly unnoticed by high-brow connoisseurs for decades, guys who typically stuck to designers at minimum but more and more dedicated themselves to niche and luxury brands, because Coty had the same relative reputation as any drugstore or catalog brand (e.g. Revlon or Avon), but that seems to be changing thanks to people looking for lower-cost alternatives to the ever-increasing prices of the aforementioned Green Irish Tweed.

The opening of Aspen is that telltale slug of aquatic aromachemicals, which were likely the most expensive part of the composition when new. Lemon, galbanum, juniper, calone-1951 and cyclamen add airy woodland floral pop and sizzle to this opening, while the heart of lavender, geranium, hedione, neroli, and a light dusting of violet ionones establish the green floral fougère core. The base is balsam fir, oakmoss, limonenes and linalool compressing a rounded ambrein-proxy of something other than ambroxan (which was really expensive then), giving a midway feel between Cool Water, Green Irish Tweed, and something like Drakkar Noir by Guy Laroche (1982) minus the smokiness. Performance is to be expected as modest and for the price, can you really complain? You'll get six hours out of this with moderate sprays and projection that dies in an hour but sits detectable on skin or clothing, and the overall aesthetic is appropriately "mountain forest air". You'll smell like how the mascot on Brawny paper towels looks, and that isn't a bad thing if you're the cheap cologne and expensive survival knife kind of guy, with a beat up 1970's Ford F-100 covered in primer and NRA stickers. This is a work-in-the-sun or gym bag kind of fragrance to be used up, thrown away, and repurchased every six month to a year, so don't overthink it. Best use is pretty much year round because for how cheap and versatile it is, you can just super-size your applications in colder weather, but Aspen for Men is not date night material or meeting-with-the-board fragrance either. If you want that, spend a little more on a bottle of Armaf Tres Nuit (2015).

So what's the skinny on Aspen? How does it compare? Well, if you try holding them up, you get in one hand a $10-$20 drugstore scent made to sell blindly based on the blurb printed on the back of the box to truckers passing through a Bucc-ee's, and in the other hand a once-$150 but now-$450 luxury niche brand that touts par excellence only for billionaire movers and shakers of our Capitalist hellscape to conspicuously buy. In short, you're setting yourself up for a really bad time with comparisons. Aspen borrows the skeleton of Green Irish Tweed for sure, but is built for cost and themed in a way that at the time would be thought appealing to the everyman demographic snapping up Coty (née Quintessence) fragrances anyway, folks oblivious to Creed and probably Davidoff too. The oldest pre-Coty bottles just had the leaf on the bottle and a shinier brass cap without the word "Aspen" printed anywhere, and no other info on the front besides whether you had a natural spray or an aftershave on your hands. Later Coty bottles added the name and weight to the front, with a duller thin bronzed cap. Quality differences are marginal because again, this is a cheap fragrance that's sef-aware of its cheapness. For the price however, this is a great dumb reach casual fling for fans of the style that want something they can go nuts with and not have to worry about price point or being overbearing to others. If that changes and Aspen becomes a pricey unicorn like Coty Stetson Sierra (1993), I'm going to once again point you to Tres Nuit, because Aspen will always be a fragrance that smells like you paid $10 for it no matter what you actually paid. Thumbs up.