Not so Intense...Masculinity by Intense

By Tom Out of the blue this company contacted Marina about trying their new men's cologne, written of on the box as "The Male Pheromone Cologne". She threw it my way to test. The box is someone's idea of Manly with it's large white M on a black base. Open the front and one is confronted with a loooong paragraph listing notes and telling is how bold, sexy, intense, erotic and more manly than the front line of the Raiders fresh from the buffet at Chuck's House of Beef and Steroids. French basil, West Indian clove, Asian mandarin and Sicilian bergamot are the listed opening notes, amber, black pepper, cedar and leather (oddly not given provenance- are they from someplace hopelessly uncool?) middle notes and the base is Italian white musk, Australian sandalwood and Madagascar vanilla. Then added into the globe-trotting ingredients is something called N10Z (pronounced "Intense"), which is apparently a pheremone meant to meant to attract other men. Reading this you would think that it must smell like an earthquake hit ScentBar. I'm afraid that they hype in this case is actually doing no favor to the juice: the scent itself is a very mild, pleasant little thing, much in the vein of L'Eau Serge Lutens. A nice skin scent that I would actually consider buying if I didn't have to tell people what it was. Because people might look at the packaging and think I was serious. I haven't worn this out of the house, much less through West Hollywood so I can't write anything as to whether men flocked to me. I do kind of wonder exactly to whom this is supposed to be marketed: I would think that the sort of gay man who wants to smell of a "bold and sexy fragrance" that's "erotic, sensual and distinctively masculine" would already have, like this one, long ago discovered Uncle Serge. Or Malle, or Guerlain or even Goutal. I daresay that even the most enlightened straight man might not want to find out whether the pheromones actually work.. $55 for 60ML at their website. My bottle is from their PR Dept, who will no doubt wish they hadn't.