Obsession for Men Calvin Klein cologne – a fragrance for men 1986

I hate to see Obsession criticized here in the way that best-selling masculines of the past so often are — disdained for being previously ubiquitous, bemoaned as gutted by reformulation, and (the kiss of death) referred to as ‘old man’ fragrances. Why, I wonder, are men so hard on their fragrances? There are some of these tendencies in reviews by women of previous heavy-hitters like Poison or Giorgio, but by and large, reviews of women’s powerhouses of the past do not seem to entail the same sense of betrayal. Anyway, I think it’s unfortunate…Must we be so insecure?

I have a few old magazines from the era — ca. ‘86-87 — that are revealing of the advertising used to market the Obsession lines (of course you can look them up now online)… The monotone photographs by Bruce Weber are absurd in what will likely eventually be read as ‘in a good way’, once they pass into canonical advertising history…They represent a time much more adventurous than our own in terms of a willful mixing of art photography with luxury merchandising, featuring (despite plenty of very heteronormative coupling on display) a heady dose of homoeroticism and the shameless idolizing of men’s muscular torsos and stoic profiles drawing a quasi-pornographic line from Arno Breker to Abercrombie & Fitch… Oddly passive action figures mounting an art deco monument in South Beach Florida looking like golden Olympian gods (Google it…) And there were those crazy TV advertisements that sounded like Strindberg plays (“save me!”), or the others directed by David Lynch (yes, *that* David Lynch) featuring quotes from D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and F.Scott Fitzgerald. This was heady, nay, dizzying stuff…the degree to which it represented a planet unlike our own cannot be underestimated. Planet Obsession.

So what does it smell like? This review started as an update to a review I posted some time ago about an 11-year-old bottle I sampled. About a year ago I picked up a new bottle at a drugstore that was clearing out fragrances after Christmas (a batch code from 2018 as it happens). As I mentioned previously, I wore Obsession for a time in the early 90s and to my nose this is very much the same animal…The tremendous, sensual stickiness of the non-edible vanilla base is just as I remember it. The mellow fruity sweetness up top is something I notice more now, but this is mostly a matter of perspective I think; I also note now a pleasant breeziness in the way that the fresh coniferous note cuts the dense sweetness of the benzoin and myrrh. Having become in the past eight years or so a fan of fragrances shoehorned into the ‘barbershop’ category here on Fragrantica (Eau Sauvage, Azzaro Pour Homme, Paco Rabanne, et al.), I’ve come to recognize how the light touch of citruses and coriander can add sharpness and invigoration to the opening, as well as the pivotal role of lavender in adding a delicious creaminess to the mid that starts off in its more traditional ‘soapy’ manifestation in concert with the top notes before merging with resins, herbs and spices to form the rich heart of the fragrance.

As we all know, an ‘amber’ is a fragrance composed around tree resins like the benzoin and myrrh in Obsession…these are dense, dynamically complex materials that are often combined with vanilla or asian spices like cinnamon to extend their varied effects (Myrrh has reminded me of the sap of coniferous resins but also the effervescence of cream soda, for instance; it can also smell bitter and rubbery, although not unpleasantly so.) Ambers with a heavier use of woods (thinking here of YSL Opium for men or Guerlain Heritage EDP) speak in a plummy lower octave, whereas Obsession feels more like an impassioned tenor. Without an abundance dry, woody or mossy notes to ground it, Obsession can seem like it’s almost all heart notes, creating a sense of (brash? youthful? American?) intensity at odds with statelier ambers.

And everything about this heart-centric construction of Obsession feels pointedly dualistic: the combination of clove, cinnamon and nutmeg is almost Proustian in its stirring up of some kind of ur-domestic cozy comfort aura, but things are heating up in places besides the kitchen… a sweetened lavender-vanilla leads me fondly recall a lavender-infused crème brûlée, but also a rich vanilla amber with some sort of head-of-hair-musk accord and an unlisted — but very prominent — civet (civetone) note can and does remind me of sex – is this dissonant? No, not really…

Roja Dove once said in an interview, “People who like [‘oriental’ fragrances] tend to be a bit larger-than-life….Because usually underneath they’re a little insecure. When you come across vanillic scents, whether the association is with ice cream, cake, or biscuit, the vanilla subconsciously makes somebody feel very secure. We learn that security is a kiss and a treat. So the big character, who inside is vulnerable, loves these very large perfumes, because inside it feels like a safety thing.”

Acknowledging that Dove is a polarizing figure, I think he may be onto something here. The mix of sensuality and security connecting food and sex are also the through-line of desire and gratification connecting childhood and adulthood. The theatricality and vulnerability Dove refers to are part of the way we ask for what we want, demandingly, beseechingly or flirtatiously, from our first loves, paternal, maternal and beyond… Perfume is a huge part of this of course, although what made Obsession for Men an interesting piece of perfume history is how aggressively it pursued this agenda, muscling past earlier fragrances aimed at men, like Mouchoir de Monsieur, Caron Pour un Homme, Old Spice, or Habit Rouge, that enfolded their oriental/amber aspects within more acceptable conventions of grooming and hygiene, such as lavender water, eau de cologne and analgesic aftershave… Obsession set aside these pretences, thrusting out into the world what one might have previously only discovered within a more intimate proximity. It’s interesting to me that the brand chose to take the premise of an amber oriental and market it this way…this kind of fragrance had and would (per Jaipur and others) continue to be associated with escapist exoticism, but here in the excessive 80s, it is internalized into the narcissistic psychodrama of coupling.

Now the almost-sibling-like nudes of the Weber photographs make sense…The shaded area in the Venn diagram connecting Obsession for Women and Obsession for Men has always been notoriously all-consuming (some people see the former as an ‘EDP version’ of the latter), but have we considered the implications of this? When I read others comparing this composition (usually with horror) to something a grandmother might wear, I reckon that the subversive mission of Obsession has been lost on that reviewer. The fragrance does different things within ‘masc’ and ‘femme’ conventions of the For Him and For Her versions, but the common denominator is urgency wrapped in sensuality promising comfort. The point was driven home so aggressively at the time that I’m amazed it gets missed now: Obsession is not the smell of masculinity or femininity, it’s the smell of a fantasy of connection.

With regard to performance: there is an appreciable complexity in the first two or three hours in which various ingredients announce themselves, chime, blend and blur in the manner of so many complex pyramids of the 1980s. After that the big amber heart-base goes on, becoming gradually less complex in the far drydown, though never really losing its cohesive profile…Even when it feels as if it has settled down closer to the skin, there remains a mobile and distinctive sillage that I smell whenever I move…the effect lasts for several more hours and the skin scent begins to vanish at around the eight-to-ten hour mark depending on the heaviness of the application. In the far drydown I get less benzoin and more the rubbery side of myrrh (something I find weirdly appealing, maybe based on my experiences with the 2012 ‘myrrh-bomb’ iteration of Eau Sauvage Parfum.) I find Obsession for Men to be quite assertive at first, projecting heavily for the first hour especially. I can’t agree that this reformulation is weak, certainly not by contemporary standards. I’m honestly grateful it’s not a whole lot stronger! We live in a very different world now than the one Bruce Weber strode around in… While this sort of vanilla-amber oriental composition has not really been my kind of thing in the past, I can’t deny that Obsession for Men delivers a lot of power and pleasure. I’ve been wearing it for several days now and (as a person does with any good perfume) learning a little more with each wearing. Lately, I’ve noted that there is a really appealing blend of musks I only notice in the far drydown in the evening on a day when I’ve topped it up halfway into the afternoon, or I smell on a tee-shirt the morning after I’ve spritzed it on before going to sleep… it bears a remarkably lifelike scent of a semi-clean head of hair that reminds me just a little of Kiehl’s Original Musk — high praise!

P.S. I concede Edgemaster’s point above…Obsession for Men could be a bit more luxe, nudging it into, say, Jaipur EDP territory, and I imagine that in the 80s and 90s, when everything was just *more* everything, it was… Having worn it then, however, I’ll happily repeat it is still very recognizably the same fragrance. Personally, I think the ingredient quality is just great for a mid-level designer-tier fragrance in the post-IFRA world, especially one that can be picked up very reasonably at discounters. As with many of these older fragrances, the mix of materials is pretty good overall in comparison with current offerings, with one or two soft points partly compensated for by the sheer number of ingredients. Having sticky resins as a base has helped avoid the challenges to reformulation posed by restricted fixatives such as Oak Moss and (less so but still) Coumarin. This is another one that people like to knock as ‘neutered’ but it’s still very much a cohesive (and delicious) composition.