5/2/12

English Leather (Dana)



English Leather is yet another critically neglected masculine fragrance that deserves far more attention than it has ever gotten, and I'm happy to give it a fresh look. I used to have a bottle of vintage MEM Company English Leather, but it's either been misplaced, or disposed of - I haven't seen it in months. The biggest problem with the MEM version was its intensity. My math joke about it: two dabs + ten minutes = Tylenol squared. It was nice stuff, but just too much for me, and I rarely wore it.

Fast forward to today, and Dana's reformulation. I bought an eight ounce bottle a few hours ago, and it's terrific stuff. No headache material here. It basically smells the same as the original, but with some interesting tweaks. English Leather always smelled more like leather treatment oil than actual leather to me. MEM's juice was very smooth, with a rich citrus opening full of sparkling orange, lemon, and lime. Dana's opens with a sharper lemon and lime, and the orange is completely gone. This makes for a brighter citrus accord, reminiscent of terpenes, maybe even tannins, which transitions nicely into a lab-balanced, lemon-concentrated Jeffrey Pine scent.

The wood note deepens within twenty minutes, becoming redolent of seasoned riding tack. It's stable leather, but unbrushed stable leather, its dry hide smeared with evergreen resins after a trot through the woods. Eventually, English Leather fades away, leaving a hint of dry wood in its wake. The overall effect is very staid, clean, masculine. There's nothing complicated about English Leather, but it doesn't smell like another hackneyed chemical composition. It only boasts four notes, but they're very nicely rendered, and truly evocative of the English countryside. It's a fox hunt in a bottle.

It's easy to dismiss a simple woody fragrance from the '50s as being dated and cheap, especially when it's only $4 an ounce, but English Leather smells of expensive leather, and leather is timeless. Like Pino Silvestre, English Leather is the definition of truth in advertising, and getting what you paid for. In this case, the name and the scent say it all, and you get much, much more than you paid for.