I went down to the Chelsea drugstore to get your prescription filled....

Issey Miyake L'Eau d'Issey Pour Homme

Because I have some persistent health issues, I have to have blood drawn on a regular basis. (FN1) As I took off my jacket today, the two lab techs getting ready to take my blood commented on how nice I smelled. I was trying Issey Miyake L'Eau d'Issey Pour Homme, and told them so. I also mentioned it was a men's fragrance, and then we started talking perfume, and once again, I had one of those wonderful experiences where I mention this blog and people are impressed and excited, rather than treating me like they just noticed I have a third eye in my forehead and are horrified and disgusted but can't make themselves look away. (FN2) When I mentioned it was a 'men's' scent, they seemed surprised, but I told them that I liked what I liked and didn't care who it was marketed for, which was surprising and pleasing to my Portland audience in a way I don't think a random selection of women might have responded back home in Tejas.

This is the second gender related interaction I've had related to Issey Miyake L'Eau d'Issey Pour Homme. I went last week with a female friend to trade in my Sephora gift certificate for a bottle (choice to be revealed in a later post) and while there I was fishing around the 'men's' wall when a male salesperson approached me.(FN3) "Who are we shopping for ladies?," he asked. "We're just looking," I standardly replied without turning around. "But who are you thinking of -- boyfriend, dad, brother...?," he persisted.

At this point I wheeled around to face a boyishly handsome mid-twenty something guy with extensive tattoos peeking out above his collar and below the cuff of his shirt on his right wrist. "Me, alright?," I said, palpably belligerent. "I wear men's scents, too."

This totally threw poor tattoo kid off his game. I have never seen someone backpedal so fast; if he'd been a cartoon there would have been a bubble above his head with a cartoon of himself, top half frozen, legs wheeling comically around like he was trying to win a gold medal for sprinting.) After several desperate "Ummm"s to indicate the engine in his head trying to reverse gears at 50mph, he immediately began looking over the wall trying to figure out what to offer me. To his credit, once he started, he offered me two or three different things that were very nice and also scents I could see someone with a traditional monolithic idea of femininity really digging. The best one, by far, was the last, which turned out to be L'Eau d'Issey Pour Homme, and he was kind enough to decant me a 2.5ml sample in a sprayer (thus redeeming himself), which is why I was wearing it today.

According to the Issey Miyake perfumes site, L'eau d'Issey is

A fresh, vibrant and elegant Eau de Toilette. A timeless fragrance with a very masculine signature. When the vibrating freshness of Yuzu mets Sandalwood.

This, of course, tells you basically nothing at all about the scent. Other websites contained such helpful copy as

"A fragrance representing the earth's most precious element: water. The purity of water is reflected in the clean design of the bottle and the scent." (Nordstrom) "Reflecting the principles of his women's scent, it embodies yin and yang, and the extreme polarities of the world. L'Eau d'Issey Pour Homme is a fresh yet warm, woody scent accented with spicy notes." (Sephora). (FN4)

So at this point L'Eau d'Issey Pour Homme could smell like any or all of the following: citrus, sandalwood, spices, or (least helpfully) water, which can smell like anything from rotten eggs (sulfur) to a weird tangy taste (lime) and tons of stuff in between depending on where you live. Sephora unhelpfully files this under "fresh:: water" scents that are "cooling and refreshing, these scents dampen the skin with notes of wet air, ice, and cool dew," while simultaneously describing the scent's style as "A fresh herbacous scent with warm, woody undertones." Perhaps their hope, here, is that if they use enough adjectives, everyone will think from the copy it is for them. There is, though, the only list of notes I can find: "Notes: Verbena, Tangerine, Cypress, Yuzu Zest, Coriander, Clary Sage, Geranium Bourbon, Blue Water Lily, Nutmeg, Saffron, Cinnamon Bark from Ceylon, Amber Tobacco, Vetiver, Sandalwood, Musk."

Armed with all this, let me tell you what I actually smell. This *is* a light smell, and I definitely get citrus up top. It's a nice citrus, though not specifically lemon or lime or grapefruit. It's less recognizable than that, but I've never eaten Yuzu, so maybe that's why. It's also got a fresh green smell to it, and I suppose it could be herb-y in the way lemon grass is, but I normally just think of grass, a very strong citrus with an undercurrent of herbs. It's got that clean musk smell of the Cool Water/cK One variety. It's very light scent, and I think it would work well in the high heat of summer. The tattoo-laden salesguy told me it a lot of women buy it for themselves; I don't know if that was true or merely an attempt at recovery on his part, but I got a lot of compliments on it, and everyone was surprised that it was intended to be a masculine. I think it's the sweet undertones that do it. I know some people get a really fake note off this, but I don't necessarily, at least not any fakier than anything with an overwhelming amount of 'clean musk.'

On the whole, L'Eau D'Issey Pour Homme is a pleasant, if not particularly original or singular, scent. I think you could probably wear cK One or Cool Water and get a similar feel from the classic art scents of this category, but the nice thing about L'Eau D'Issey Pour Homme being less recognizable is that people won't automatically recognize it as a masculine, which I enjoy because it confounds expectations. Also, when I tell people, they get this little jolt of insight that they, too, can wear anything they like, and I like to think I just opened up roughly 1/3 of the scents out there to women who might wear them. That's an accomplishment, though, and however small, I cherish it. In a world of gendered fragrances that tend to feature notes that may not work for everyone who shares that gender identity, being able to acknowledge and own and wear the beauty of that 'other' Sephora wall might not be what you think you want, but maybe it will get you what you actually need.

I picked up my sample from Sephora, but you can buy L'Eau D'Issey Pour Homme from Nordstrom in a variety of sizes (2.5 oz for $58.00 and 4.2 oz for $78.00) as well as some collectible bottle types, if you're looking for something special. (The juice is same as far as I can tell; the packaging is different and limited edition. Personally I think the beach wood bottle, seen above, is nice, but hey -- juice is juice.) The unemployed and frugal part of me also forces me to confess that you can buy L'Eau D'Issey Pour Homme from a number of online discount retailers even more cheaply, including Amazon and beauty encounter (and beauty encounter has samples for purchase, but you can get a sample for free just by walking into Sephora).

"You can't always get what you want.
You can't always get what you want.
You can't always get what you want
but if you try sometimes, you might find
you get what you need."
- "You Can't Always Get What You Want," The Rolling Stones (You see a video featuring the Glee! cast version here which returns NEXT WEEK! <Squee!>)

Once again, it's tough to find reviews. L’Eau D’Issey Pour Homme was made in 1994, and I suspect many had tried and passed judgment on this one while the internet was still in it's youth. Octavia has a review over at 1000 Fragrances that is basically a pan, but the Makeup Alley overall rating is a 4.4 of possible 5 with 80% willing to purchase it again with 36 reviews. Seems like just as many people really like this one as hate it, and it's probably worth trying for yourself.

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FN1 Apparently I am now incapable of writing any post without (a) footnotes and (b) some random soapboxing. Given that, can I once again just say YAY! for universal health care coverage? I'm lucky in that it's been several years since I've been without coverage, but that is largely to do with my husband's job stability. If I were on my own, it would be a whole different story, and I, for one, am thrilled that not only will domestic violence victims no longer be turned away on the grounds that their DV status creates a 'preexisting condition' but that victims in need of health care for themselves/their children will no longer have to stay with their abusers in order to get medicine and care they desperately need. Every time a barrier to freedom is removed, every victim gets one step closer to a life without violence, and I am very grateful for that.

(FN2) This negative reaction happens with surprising frequency, and I am always shocked because I'm also a chess-playing, online MMORPG playing, table-top role-playing, musical-loving, karaoke-singing, hipster-level-obscure-music-collecting choir dork with an obsessive fascination for teen TV and yet no one thinks those things are nearly as weird or obscure or dorky as my perfume collecting.

(FN3) I was actually trying to find a bottle of Bvlgari BLV Pour Homme to shoe my friend how much is smelled like Indian food to me, and then when I found it of course it smelled nothing like that on her, and this being the second time this has happened recently, is starting to make me think that my nose is imagining things. But no, I dug out my sample again today, and there it was, the smell of curry and sweet spices, cooked meat and skank, all weird and wonderful...hrmph. I couldn't find the shiny blue box indicating I was trying the same fragrance, though, which makes me think they had those damnedable flankers and not the one I tried, which I believe is the original.

(FN4) Yuzu, I have discovered, is "a Japanese citrus fruit which is about the size of a tangerine and is quite sour." I'd love to try cooking with it, but don't know where to look for it locally. Perhaps I'll try the Asian food market down the highway.