Issey Miyake - A Scent By Issey Miyake

Issey Miyake’s A Scent by Issey Miyake is supposedly inspired by “pure, fresh air” and when I spritz a pump of the juice onto my arm I can indeed associate the product in question with it’s inspiration. A Scent is fairly clean and certainly dallies with freshness but sadly, as with 99% of perfumes that purport to be pure, it just misses it’s mark.

The scent has an alcoholic opening that sadly moves south of the fragrance border and into floor cleaner town. While there is a lightness here, it simply gets strangled beyond recognition by a headache inducing chemical niff. The initial smell is greenery and is neither particularly pleasant nor excruciatingly awful. After 20 minutes the lemon of the composition drifts into view but never quite manages to do much more than timidly tiptoe by, always keeping it’s distance. I waited for a refreshing dash of fragrant citrus, but I waited in vain. The alcoholic coldness dissipates slightly here but, as is often the case in perfumery, never quite lets the olfactory notes speak for themselves.

The woods that make up the base of the fragrance are a pleasant finish and inject a little masculinity. When they appear, they seem to mingle rather well with the alcohol that clings to the scent throughout it’s lifespan and I’d wager that a man would find this perfume easily wearable. It certainly holds a lot of similarity with numerous aftershaves I’ve come across in the past. That said, it is an extremely droll masculine, taking it’s place among the thousand other chemical woody green-florals.

Rather than being cooled by this fragrance, I am simply left cold. While it does have it’s original moments (an opening of passable dewy greens), it is dragged down at all points by an overbearing alcoholic burn that chokes every single note in it’s repertoire. If assembled just slightly differently, this scent could be intriguingly androgynous, but as it is I would advise prospective purchasers to sample Tommy Hilfigers Tommy Girl. However, don’t avoid this one entirely, give it a sniff and let me know what you make of it in the comments.