Herrera for Men (1991)
by Carolina Herrera

This fresh, metallic, herbal, floral creation must have felt cutting edge in '91, just a few years before Platinum Egoïste stole its thunder.

There's some sweetened tobacco and spices in here giving it a bit of exotic flair, but it's a freshie at heart, floral and herbal and clean.

one of the best spice tobacco frags ,however the reformulated version lost a considerable ratio of the glamour of the original formula , bad that this old formula gem is no more in production.

I recently acquired a current, allegedly reformulated bottle of this (all brown dotted packaging with silver borders) and without having tried the previous one, all I can say is that this more recent version smells really good for me. Nothing harsher or more “synthetic” than one may reasonably expect - and accept - within this price range; Herrera for Men is actually kind of classy, suprisingly compelling and really enjoyable, and also fairly creative for its era: basically a sort of really smooth, niche-like curry-scented tobacco scent with a hint of honey, some clean musk-lavender tone and the shade of a classic fougère structure. Lots of interesting nuances here, from something tea-like to a really balanced use of cloves (a note that 99% of the times I hate bad). What amazed me at the first sniff is how surprisingly close to tobacco this is – way more than other more praised scents that were kind of a disappointment to me to this extent (e.g. Aramis Havana, which is great but doesn’t remind me of tobacco that much; or inferior juvenile stuff like Michael Kors for Men – not to mention most of contemporary tobacco scents smelling like cheap candies).

Speaking as a long-time cigarettes smoker, I think Herrera for Men quite captures the aroma of a packet of cigarettes – not the raw, dry-earthy one of cigars, not the sophisticated, “humid-sweet” aromatic smell of pipe tobacco, but the mildly sweet, slightly synthetic, maybe pedestrian smell of common cigarettes. There’s lots of this tobacco here, tasty and realistic, together with cumin, a drop of citrus at the opening and something sweet-warm and slightly fruity, like honeyed amber and a bit similar to tea too (think of a grown-up macho version of Gucci pour Homme II), with a really clever accord of more “traditional” masculine notes (musky lavender, woods, geranium) that gives the scent a pleasant touch of “barbershop”. There’s also some really nice sandalwood here, joining the sweet-earthy side of the fragrance. A lot of names come to mind considering the different sides of this Herrera individually, but none would be really a comparison for the fragrance as a whole, as in fact Herrera for Men smells honestly quite new and unique to me. It’s surely a bit close to other early 1990s fragrances (the first Zegna comes to mind in particular) but there’s quite more going on here. The quality isn’t top-notch but it works really good, way better than I expected given that all other Herrera scents I’ve tried were utter crap for me. A bang for the buck if you ask me; it smells good, bold but classy, masculine as a Raymond Chandler villain, totally decent for the price.

7-7,5/10

Like Platinum Egoiste if you spilled it in a curry

When I first discovered this fragrance, I liked it. It smelled pleasant and masculine and a little unusual compared to most men's fragrances today.

However, once my nose picked up on the overwhelming smell of CURRY that exists in this fragrance, it became absolutely disgusting to my nose.

Go with Platinum Egoiste instead, they are very similar, only Platinum Egoiste doesn't smell like someone's home while they're cooking.

Highly derivative of Calvin Klein's Eternity for Men, Herrera is a bit more subtle and progresses from top to base notes more quickly. The opening is fresh and zingy, then it settles down through its green mid-notes into a warm woody-musky base. I like!