La Nuit de l'Homme Yves Saint Laurent cologne – a fragrance for men 2009

I held off on buying this beautiful fragrance for months because every youtube video and review all parroted the obvious *fact* that it had terrible performance due to years and years of irresponsible reformulations. There are several youtube videos comparing the smell and longevity of LNDL over the course of a decade and the videos all found that they farther back the bottle was made, the darker and stronger it was and the longer it lasted. It is still treated as fact that YSL is a greedy awful company who is watering down their product over the years to sell more bottles and save money. Even though it would be terrible business to alienate your loyal customers and the costs of perfume oils and raw ingredients are marginal to the overall cost of a fragrance. Out of curiousity I looked at old reviews of LNDL that are on this website and I found the following comments:

It certainly lasts longer than L’Homme but still not more than about 4 hours (unless you spray lavishly but which makes it too sweet) -04/18/2009

3 hours of good sillage then close to the skin -09/19/2012

I like the base note, but it’s weak as water -2/26/2013

Smells good, but nobody notices I am wearing it. -2/24/2013

Smells wonderful straight from go, gets better as it drys, doesnt last long though. -2/17/2013

Lasts about 2-3 hours on my skin. -10/01/2014

It has the basic vibe of the original though more generic and so much weaker that I wish I didn’t go through my old bottles so quickly. The original scent also projected more. The sillage was better as well. So it is very safe to say that reformulations have ruined the performance of this once beastly fragrance. -09/06/2015

This was never a beast mode fragrance and performance has always been fairly weak to moderate longevity. Well why do youtubers say the older bottles lasted longer? Because they do? What? Let me introduce you to a new word: Maceration – The aging of chemical compounds. All perfumes will change in smell overtime, often becoming denser as the lighter top notes like citrisus and bergamot burn off, alcohol is slowly evaporated, and basenotes combine becoming stronger. The back of all your fragrance boxes has a number (usually 36 to 48) which is the number of months until the scent starts to change significantly.

The Creed Aventus message boards all harp on how old bottles of aventus were darker and smokier and longer lasting and all the new ones are much brighter and weaker. The comments from 2016 all say they wish they had stocked up on the 2012 holy grail batches, the 2017 threads all wish theirs performed like the 2015 holy grail batches and the new 2020/2021 wish they had more of the 2016/2017 batches. It’s all the same juice. It might be reformulated slightly to be in compliance with EU regulations but it’s all essentially the same.

The point of this long post is I’m trying to say that the reformulation police are mostly a bunch of morons who have no idea what they are talking about. Almost every fragrance is accused of reformulation that has made it weaker and killed performance. These companies aren’t stupid, these frangrances are multimillion dollar businesses and subjected to stringent quality testing and extremely precise material inspection and mixing standards. This is an incredibly beautiful fragrance, performance is just okay.