Flanked by flak and flaked by flankers...

Euridice and Cassandra meet for an afternoon coffee in their favourite cosy spot. Euridice can't help but notice that her usually upbeat friend is kinda laden by some version of the "thousand yard stare" while she's languidly imbibing her beverage when not ignoring it. But that aside, she smells like a million bucks! Euridice, feeling that her cheap body spray is being slaughtered, can't keep her curiosity (and a bit of envy) at bay, thus she can't help but ask her.

After finishing their coffee, Euridice is sort of concerned by her friend's lethargic desposition, but not concerned enough to stop herself from running happily to the local Sephora, and buy the fragrance. As soon as she kicks her shoes off and jumps on the couch, she hungrily tears the cellophane off and sprays two good blasts of her object of desire in her wrists. In a couple of secs her silly smile vanishes and her eyes widen with surprise.

The first seeds of "Dafuq?" begin to sprout in her mind, while tiny worms of doubt start emerging from their roots. Following the "skin chemistry lore rituals" she also sprays some on a napkin. After half an hour the "Dafuq?" flora has reached sequoia heights and the ex-tiny invertebrates have grown to Frank Herbert proportions and they're having anacondas for breakfast.

One step away from calling her lawyer so as to sue Sephora's butt to oblivion, she finally decides to wait for the sucker to develop some more. Alas...

After an hour, the damn thing keeps refusing stubbornly to be Cassandra's perfume, Euridice picks up the phone and dials her number. Her friend's strangely drowsy voice answers with an "Hmm?" instead of her usual mirthful cheer.

Euridice hangs up, feeling like an idiot. The thought that she somehow got fooled is unbearable and almost brings tears in her eyes. Especially when she realises that she has just spent half a week's wages for something she didn't want. Meanwhile, the heads of L'Oreal smile complacently while sitting in their high thrones. Feeling like geniuses apparently...

(And yes, I know that a fleeting glimpse in Parfumo would have sufficed to spare Euridice the frustration, but I simply couldn't resist making the place hosting my rants star in the story too.)

Moral of the story? Too many variations of a theme (a.k.a. flankers here) can make you loose your mind (and your money in some cases) in the name of diversity and freedom of choice. There are nearly 30 Opium flankers out there waiting to make every poor Euridice of this world trip over them. This chaos however does not always require a battalion of flankers to be brought upon any unsuspecting victim who was not wise enough to write down the name of the craved scent, cause you know, "Verba volant, scripta manent". At some time, while I was in a cosmetics shop, one of my friends asked me over the phone to look if there was any Gucci by Gucci available. There was. I bought it at his behest. Only to realise afterwards that he actually meant Gucci by Gucci Sport. Before pestering him for his olfactory likings, since both fragrances suck, I couldn't help but wonder why this mess had to take place. I mean what kind of name is Gucci by Gucci? What were they thinking? Was there any chance it could be Gucci by Etat Libre d'Orange? Naming a fragrance after the house launching it was usually a move kept for firstborns. Like Armani by Armani in 1982 or Kenzo by Kenzo in 1988.

And speaking of Kenzo, what's this fad including places and time, the likes of 7:15 in Bali and 5:40 in Madagascar? These are not flankers per se, but we all now how schedules can be blown to smithereens by some tiny detail like missing a flight or the next caravan. What kind of space-time horror is going to materialise in front of your weary eyes if its 7:15 and you're still in Madagascar?

Anyway, back to the heavy flak flanking us.

Anyone who likes both Guerlain's Shalimar and La Petite Robe Noir (some bizarre taste I must admit) should buy a behemoth of a closet to store them all, nothing less than the size of Taj Mahal, in a New York minute, since these two alone have nearly 40 flankers launched. One of the Shalimars guarantees a full identity crisis, for it's called Shalimar Talisman Byzantin. Something tells me that some dudes in Balenciaga and Rochas had a good deal of Euridice's dafuqs upon watching it being launched. I guess it was created a bit like Dr.Frankensteins creature, outshining the mad scientist in the end with its "reasonable" price of about 11,500$. OK, it's a 1500ml flacon to be fair, but that doesn't counterbalance the fact that 100ml still cost 766,6666666666667$. And you know what they say about being at sixes and sevens...

The last petite robe, alias dictus Ma Premiere Robe, comes as a "limited edition" along with a set of stickers to render you able to "personalise" your bottle. Ignoring the oxymoron of a first dress being launched last, I'm quite sure that it will introduce Guerlain to a brand new target group which loves stickers by tradition.

Is it just me, or the whole thing is turning rapidly into some "Barbie world" mayhem? If this is not rock-bottom then I don't know what is.

The swarm of Dior's missus, convinced that by wearing some lousy bow they can be forgiven anything, have somehow missed the meaning of "enough" and "cute" and they could fill a class with their self-acclaimed cuteness, since there are 24 of them out there. And what's worse, they seem to procreate uncontrollably, since almost all of them hit the shelves in less than 10 years.

I hate to repeat myself but come on Dior, are you serious? 27 perfume in 53 years (until 2000) and another 150 in just 15? Although still a far cry from Guerlain's "creativity" with its 70 perfumes in 140 years and 220 in 15, the whole thing makes "ridiculous" sound like a major understatement.

You know Kouros right? Some of you will surely remember the way it used to smell, like a messy crime scene of some gory murder commited in a public restroom. Then what on earth is the word "fraicher" doing in one of its flankers? In what universe could anything be possibly "fresh" about Kouros? And what's the difference we're supposed to ken with these ads?

That because of a couple more inches of bare skin Kouros obviously doesn't wear any underpants, thus the difference between him and Kouros Fraicher must be that Kouros Fraicher might be having his underpants on? Is this what the "esprit de conquête" he's blaring is all about, conquering the right to renounce being butt-naked?

Donna Karan seems to have taken New York's nickname "The Big Apple" a little too seriously. No surprise she thought that strafing the metropolis with bursts of her Be Delicious apples would be some kind of a worthy tribute. Thus she launched more than six of them for each of the city's boroughs (you do the math).

A lot of things are delicious, but every single one of them will soon turn into a nightmare if it's eaten/drunk/smoked/sprayed/enter-your-favourite-vice-here 24/7/52. It seems "all in good measure" is something unheard-of in the streets of "The City So Nice They Named It Twice" (and Donna Karan honoured it fifteen times that).

Givenchy's Very Irresistible could not resist multilocation, thus it multiplied itself 20+ times. It seems that we didn't need quantum mechanics after all, since Givenchy, or LVMH if you like, proved this miraculous theory (or is it witchcraft?) in the years between joining elementary school and graduating junior high. Some prodigy in all aspects! Since they outwitted even Einstein, who believed multilocation was hocus-pocus, I can't see any reason for not taking a Nobel prize back home for good.

For those of you not fond of either physics or chemistry, this is a lithium atom. I mean the "real universe" one. Do you know in what field is lithium a prolific scorer? When playing against Major Depression Disorder. Like the one I'm neighbouring for some time now, while watching helplessly once renowned perfume houses being turned into piles of gold-plated rubble.

I could go on with this list like forever, but it would be of no avail.

To be honest, flankers remind me of a certain category of people who, taking advantage of someone they know, frequent places way out of their league. They're like using borrowed credits for they would stand no chance to have any serious presence of their own. Name-dropping does not work only as a social lever apparently.

Watching this foudroyant hailstorm of mainly insignificant money-makers befalling me, sometimes makes me feel like a relic, long forgotten in the darkest corner of a museum's repository. Time outside is marching way faster than I could possibly keep up with, while money talks and bullshit walks and flankers thrive and classics strive.

I'm a man of words so I'll never be able to fathom why the immense wealth of human vocabularies goes all the more South with each passing day. Why there isn't any "Lucidity" out there? Or "Empyreal"? Or "Soliloquy"? Or "Saudade"? Or "Ensorcell"? Why are we up to our necks with noir, intense, concentré and légère?

What made Versace to have more jeans in its line than a Levi's outlet? In blue, red, baby blue, baby rose, green, yellow, black, white and metal. The latter probably kinda hard to fit all anatomical details, thus they came gender-specific for gents and dames. I don't know about you, but the only case I'd find a term like "metal jeans" of some use would be in a Monty Python thing.

Not to mention all these eau de cologne versions of classics that appear to be a furor in the making. Sometimes I wonder what other implements the perfume industry is going to come up with in order to catapult our meticulously bred oniomania to stratospheric heights, before leaving this planet and any acumen left on it for good.

The only flanker in my collection for which I paid for is Eau de Sport by Paco Rabanne. And I'm not quite sure if it's a flanker in the first place, since it was launched in 1986, 13 years after Paco Rabanne pour Homme. Other than that I have a fair share of flanker bottles, samples and decants which were either given or gifted to me. But you know what? I never, ever happened on a flanker better than the original. I'm by no means saying that every flanker out there is rubbish. It's not. A good deal of them are actually very good fragrances (like Fahrenheit 32). What eludes me however is why they couldn't be very good fragrances having their own name, especially when they have nothing to do with the original (like Fahrenheit 32 again). And by the way, what new was Fahrenheit 32 supposed to bring when there was already a Fahrenheit 0 Degree launched five years earlier? Some compromising solution to the everlasting debate between the metric and the US customary units that's raging in the perfume world? Why not add some 273,15 Kelvin or 491,67 Rankine to the series then? They would freeze our souls forever if nothing else. Given the chance I'm still wondering why Dior hasn't added a Fahrenheit 451 to the 8 flankers of the original yet. I guess it's either because of copyright issues or the possibility that the fragrance would spontaneously self-combust out of shame. Or perhaps some kind of fear that Ray Bradbury would come back to life, impersonate one of his nastiest characters, and haunt their lives.

OK, seriously now. There is "creative" and there is "stupid". And leaving aside how much money "stupid" might make, it shall always remain stupid no matter what. I don't expect from David Beckham or Britney Spears to be defenders of the perfume lore, I'm not that naïve. They just jumped on the money-making bandwagon and that's all. But what I did expect from once legendary houses was to retain at least some dignity, even if it's just for saving face. For these faces, although filthy rich, have become ugly and odious, FUBAR (or furchtbar since we're on a German site) by their huge greedy grins. Seeing it not happening anytime soon, it seems that I am that naïve in the end. I just hope it will not be forever...