It’s become almost impossible to find a new, quality perfume. Even the classics from such houses as Guerlain have been reformulated into ghosts of their former glory. Recent EU restrictions (where most good perfumes were made) have forced perfumers into foregoing the natural ingredients of the classics, including as fundamental an ingredient as oak moss. This also affects the perfumes made elsewhere, as the EU is a large market for selling them.
Unless a person can get their hands on a vintage perfume which hasn’t deteriorated too badly, they will never smell a classic chypre again. I don’t think that that bothers younger perfume buyers, as they seem to mostly buy the ubiquitous fruity florals and gourmands anyway. They’re never going to know what they’re missing, and that’s too bad. But it has certainly put a halt in my own purchasing of new perfumes, including the niche perfumes. Fortunately I have a huge stockpile of old classics, including such gems as Shiseido’s “Nombre Noir”, classic Diors (old formulation), original YSL Opium, a lot of pre-formulation niches, classic Hermes Doblis, and many others.
(My all-time favorite perfume is Guerlain Djedi, and I hoard my two vintage bottles of it as if they were worth their weight in gold).
I was in high dudgeon when these regulations were passed (and I fully believe that the huge companies which produce the synthetic molecules, such as Firmenich and Givaudan played a role in this).
I don’t care what they say about any given isolated molecule smelling “just like the real thing”, they can’t reproduce the complexity and richness of the natural ingredient. Not to mention what it’s doing to regions such as Grasse, which for generations grew the flowers upon which the perfume industry relied.
Just more Big Nanny interference in something even as innocuous as personal fragrance, though it’s not so far-fetched when you think what’s in it for the huge synthetics firms. And in this case, the EU’s reach is global, if you want to tap the huge EU market. So the rest of the world has to suffer cheap smelling, unsophisticated perfumes.