Reviews of English Fern by Penhaligon's

Nice, fresh soapy Fougere that reminds me of a lovely, sunny spring day every time I wear it. A tad heavy at application but settles quickly into moderate spillage and lasts 6 - 8 hours on me.

English fern is the first cologne I ever bought as an adult, and its got a strong and memorable scent that's much like an old-time barbershop. The geranium is very strong and quite sharp and pleasant, and it smells quite clean--but I'm not sure if that's the impression I want to give all day.

Beautiful masculine Fougere with good longevity and a great complementary line of shower gel & soaps.

Have used for many years...

Thumbs up!

I love Penhaligon's fragrances and have yet to find one that smelled bad on me or clashed with my body chemistry. I really wanted to like this one because it's one of their older fragrances (1911), but for me the Geranium comes on way too strong, and geraniums have never been my favorite floral scent. Like everything Penhaligon's makes, it's well made and superior quality. If you love, and I mean really LOVE, the smell of geraniums, I'd give this one a try.

Let me start by saying that I am a fan of this house. I have been pleased with most offerings from Penhaligon's. I'm especially drawn to their tradition and history. So, I was really hoping to like English Fern as it is one of their scents that has stood the test of time having been introduced in 1911.

English Fern's opening is a extremely bold pine/geranium. These top notes are almost repulsive to my nose. I can usually find redeeming qualities in most fragrances but EF doesn't give me that opportunity as the pungent top notes dominate and stay throughout the dry down.

It is one of those fragrances that makes me shake my head and wonder how it has stayed in production for so long when others are discontinued after such short runs. To each his own, I guess. This one is not for me.

Lovely fresh scent with the grassy and soapy notes sticking out for me. One for every day and work use. I tend to wear for my own pleasure, my wife considers this one acceptable with a subtly pleasant dry down. As she is a very fussy Russian lady I take that as a positive.

English Fern opens with a fresh, soapy aspect that's got green notes around the edges. It's very refreshing in my opinion, and I'm enjoying it immensely. With that said, I've realized that Creed cloned Penhaligon's 1911 creation English Fern when they created Cypres Musc, I'm astonished at how much Cypres Musc reminds me of English Fern. Obviously, Cypres Musc is not an exact replica of EF, but it's a direct ancestor as far as I'm concerned. The biggest different for me is that CM is nuclear in strength, longevity and sillage. It's a bit too heavy for me and tends to burn out my senses before the end of the day. English Fern on the other hand sits very nicely on the skin. The sillage could be a little more pronounced, but it's very tasteful and enjoyable. Such a clean, fresh smelling fragrance. I will keep this in my rotation for many years to come. I love finding frags that were created so many years ago that are still so enjoyable all these years later. Bravo, Penhaligons!

An extremely sharp and astringent scent that showcases, to my nose, lavender, geranium, moss, and perhaps some form of citrus. It is not particularly pleasant and would not be so other than in the form of some cleaning product. As many have said already in reviews of EF, there are just so many better things out there in the vaguely fougere / green department.

Now please excuse me, it's making my eyes water.

Wearing English Fern for the first time today. 30 minutes past the initial application and I still see no significant evolution. At this point I could not make any difference between EF & Puig's Agua Lavanda. All that I can detect is lavender (not particularly of a refined variety), sharp geranium leaf and some moss lurking underneath.

I'll be updating my review is case something changes but based on this first impression I think that my 25.5 oz bottle of Agua Lavanda can do precisely the same job for significantly less money.

I tried this in a sample originally - and can only concluded that time and treatment had worn off the top notes.

There's a reasonable scent under there somewhere. The problem is that the top note - and its a really nasty chemical top note - persists.

I tried wearing it overnight - to see if the top note wears off - it does, but settles into a really grubby dusty smell.

Misunderstood geranium leaf bomb.

This opens with a harsh pine disinfectant smell that feels synthetic. However, that synthetic green minty smell is actually the geranium leaf note, which is used in abundance but mostly burns off after 20-30 minutes. What is left is a nice fougere with a minty background worthy of a thumbs up. However, those first few minutes are hard to forgive, so it is a neutral from me.

In about 1990, newly arrived in London (I moved back North again years later), a friend took me into the Penhaligons shop and offered to buy me any fragrance I liked. I didn't try any of them (duh...) but went for this one as I've always been attracted to green, mossy, herby scents (I wore Grey Flannel at the time and still do now). All I can say is that I found this really unpleasant, harsh and bitter. I later read a review once where someone described it as the poisonous, Victorian, rank potion that Dr Jekyll took before he turned into Mr Hyde, and that sums up how I remember it. The memory has lasted 25 years, and not in a good way.

I'm an amateur, so I feel a bit uncomfortable about writing negative reviews, but my opinion on this stands. for me, it was awful. Sorry....

Jun
14
2015

Genre: Fougère

English Fern introduces itself with a burst of spices and lavender, sweetened by fruit notes that I cannot identify. The lavender soon begins to recede, leaving room for a very distinct licorice/anise note and some barbershop soap to blend with the remaining brisk spices. English Fern settles into a conventional spicy “absinthe” tinted fougère, not far removed from the grand old Crown Fougère, but less complex and less nuanced. The scent remains linear for most of its duration, before fading into a sweet vanillic woody drydown. This is a very pleasant, conservative fougère – the kind of scent that one can wear to the office or to dinner with no fear of offending anybody. In this respect it strikes me as distinctly “English,” which is to say that it is proper, refined, and elegantly traditional. It may not be exciting, but it's a solid representative of its type, and highly versatile to boot.

Starts off with a really sharp fern scent; just a lot of green. Then it moves down into a very soapy plastic smell, while retaining it's greenness. Once it all settles down, it smells like Pinaud Clubman talc powder. Very dry and old fashioned. A good barbershop scent that takes me about half an hour to tolerate. Even then, it's only a 4 out of 5. I'm not sure what it is that keeps it from being perfect instead of only above average, but it is not a bad office scent and would make for a relatively safe blind buy.

The rich man's Brut by Faberge Sharp and natural smelling ferns and limes and lemons (read: citrus). Not my favorite by this house, but a good warm weather choice. Total barbershop, to be sure. Similar to Brut, I have decided.

Drydown Letdown English Fern, to my sensibilities, opens with a wonderful blast of green accords, with the lavender and geranium muted by the vanilla to produce an interesting ozonic effect, with the barest hint of patchouli providing indications of loam. If you've ever repotted a plant or spent time wandering a commercial greenhouse, that's what the opening is to my nose. And then. . . An hour or so into the scent, lavender, geranium, vanilla, and coumarin all flee the scene, leaving patchouli stomping around on the skin and in the nasal passages to remind one of refugees from Woodstock, or experimenting college kids who thought wearing a solid fluid ounce of the stuff would hide their herbal head-trips. Ninety minutes in - as much as I wanted to like it for the opening - English Fern became a scrubber for me.Pros: Lovely greenhouse openingCons: Must love patch

A bright green, sharp and soapy, minty lavender, with excellent sillage and longevity. It reminds me a bit of those solid green blocks of 'Fairy' household soap, which used to be used for handwashing laundry. A no-nonsense scent for the debonair gent.

English Fern opens with a balmy wintergreen geranium accord that meshes with a fern undertone that at this stage is rather muted with the geranium dominating the scent. As the scent transitions to its early heart the green fern takes the fore, but the wintergreen geranium from the open remains in the background in support with patchouli rising from the base giving the balmy green scent a rugged earthy nature. English Fern pretty much remains linear through its dry-down, with what you smell during the early heart phase being what you smell through the end. Projection is excellent and longevity is average.

English Fern is very odd smelling composition. It is extremely green as you might expect, but the fern is less dominant than the balmy wintergreen geranium medicinal aspect of the scent for most of the development and it is quite unpolished and unbalanced in a very bad way. Obviously for the fragrance to survive since 1910 it must be appealing to someone, but I have to wonder if this is the same formula that Penhaligon's released earlier on, as what I am smelling is very amateurish and not the kind of scent I would expect to be a classic. Regardless of what it used to smell like, it smells pretty bad now and this 2 to 2.5 star out of 5 below average composition is not recommended.

Smells green and fernlike but with much less lavender than I expected. I know there is clover but I think I smell a slight scent of wintergreen oil in the greens at first; however, this might be the geranium - the non rose type geranium - as it combines with clover. There is really much more green in the mix here than what little token traditional fougere elements I detect. English Fern is a dry green, "stiff upper lip" fougere that I like much more than many of the sweeter french fougeres from Guerlain or Houbigant. There is a simple, fresh, solid green scent to this that tells you it is British all the way - very little powder or floral lavender. English Fern smells great for about 3 hours, but I regret that the longer it dries down the more synthetically unnatural the green base becomes. I'd give it 2 of 5 stars**.

The initial fern impression, based on a lot of geranium and lavender, is one of the most delightful fougeres I know. Later clover and a bit of oakmoss with a touch of wood are added. After about an hour a wonderfully clean, light soapy base comes to the fore, a very traditional clean and fresh barbershop-style but with a touch of elegance. Good projection and silage but still quite discrete in the drydown, with a longevity of about three hours on me. A great classic English fougere.

I love Penhaligon's fragrances, and really wanted to like this, the top note was fresh, citrusy, and crisp. It was the middle note that I didn't care for. The moss was nice, but there was geranium that smelled artificial, and an undertone musk that was not pleasant at all. everything died away but the geranium-musk after 20 minutes. I am glad I only bought a sample vial.

I don't know if something happened to English Fern but, the 2012 sample I smell is awful. Maybe, recent severe restrictions on ingredients have strongly affected this composition but, as a matter of fact English Fern smells incredibly wrong and unbalanced. A classic fougere with lavender, oakmoss and the usual coumarin note that's so badly executed to result way too sharp and definitely unpleasant.

Fougere is quite a crowded territory in which you can have plenty of better options at any price. Avoid.

Many of the reviews below already describe English Fern accurately and completely, and since I don't feel inclined to repeat what has been said so well already, I will not be adding anything. In particular, Cello's analysis just a few comments below can speak for me. I can't think of a more genre-defining (fougere) scent than this one. It is the gold standard for all fougeres as far as I'm concerned.

English Fern is very very green with geranium and cloves and is like a soapy citrus blast to the senses and its bracing in the opening. Its short lived but good as a barbershop type scent.