Clean Reserve : Warm Cotton
Clean (2015)

Clashing lemon and woody vanilla dry down to high end dryer sheets. If you like Clean fragrances, you will recognize the dry down. I personally like it but I have other fragrances for when I want complexity, mystery, elegance or mood. This just smells like clean laundry. Sometimes that's all I want.

Imagine walking through Walmart in the laundry aisle, and imagine that all the fabric softener has spilled on the floor. That’s how this perfume smells. While a regular “laundry scent” is nice on the clothes (lightly) this smells like you went swimming in the stuff and are somehow a danger to the environment from coming into contact with a chemical spill.

Life may be too short to wear bad perfume, but still, some days are laundry days. On one of those, I decided to give Warm Cotton a go. With terms like "water accord" and "floral accord," Clean Beauty clearly isn't going for specificity in the note pyramid, which makes it amusing to read their detailed sidebar on Laotian benzoin that hypes the company's commitment to sustainability. (No shock that they didn't give the background story on butylphenyl methylpropional, aka Lilial, which is amongst the many allergens recently axed by the EU's SCCS.)

Anyway, its predictably anonymous and suitably innocuous, but I'd have swapped aldehydes for lavender to achieve a warm cotton scent. Next time, I'll just rub myself with dryer sheets.

This starts off very soapy and with a touch of dryer sheets. The soap smell is the kind Clean scents all kinda smell like to me. Just a generic hand soap smell. The dryer sheet smell is nice but seems like there should be more of that if you're going to call this Warm Cotton. As it dries down, you get less of the cotton smell but the soap smell is toned down too so it smells pleasant.

A very casual smell that has good projection during the first 1-2 hours and then settles to a skin scent that lasts 6-7 hours.

I'm a fan of clean smelling scents but there's something about this one that is too sharp and piercing. It doesn't seem to soften and evolve at all.

This is seriously a reinterpretation of Lauder's Pleasures for Men - A soapy, aldehydic pleasure-fest which dies out much sooner than we all want. I can honestly smell mint, aldehydes, and something vaguely floral in the opening, but by this I mean the first twenty seconds. I am hard-pressed to find a contemporary fragrance whose theme coalesced so quickly. If you don't enjoy the idea of white bar soap as a fragrance then this is going to turn you right off. But, if you are one of those guys that have been silently wishing for an EDT of Irish Spring but you also don't enjoy Pleasures for Men then this scent is for you. It does not at all remind me of cotton but it sure as anything smells good. Misleading name aside I Love this release; this is about as fresh as scents get.