Horizon
Guy Laroche (1993)

A true masterpiece 🏆❤️ and still available for peanuts 🥜 discontinued but available on the grey market 👍 great scent 👌

Vintage Guy Laroche Horizon EDT (Cosmair)

Did you ride your Kawasaki Ninja to the yacht club for an afternoon of tacking around the harbor and an evening of trimming your mainsail?

If so, then Horizon is for you as this one stands shoulder to shoulder for enthusiasts of any of the many 90’s era sporting scents.

The opening is great as it smells like a blend of Drakkar Noir and Azzaro Pour Homme! From there, it becomes a “greener” version of Drakkar Noir all the way into the drydown.

A really good, clean, aromatic fougere!

I’m assuming this was the answer at the time for Guy Laroche to Davidoff’s Cool Water, which basically dominated then entire landscape of men’s fragrance from 1988 through the 90’s.

Horizon debuted 5 years later in 1993 and remained in production for at least 15 years before getting shelved. The price definitely depreciated as my vintage 50ml box was labeled and priced at $49.99. I only paid $11 for it online.

Luckily for us, the scent hasn’t depreciated at all and remains a solid performer after all these years. Thumbs up!


4 / 5 stars

Following reviews by Toxicon and Varanis is daunting, so I'll just add a few observations. I get a scent of a chinese herbalist, with artemesia, gentian, ginseng and similar bitter principles. That isn't a negative - I have always loved that scent. Mysterious, alchemical. This is soon joined by a slightly less prominent accord of aromatic fougere, bursting with lavender, aldehydes and soapy goodness. Mixing two quite different accords that I like often results in failure, but here, it works nicely. While not the same, this brings to mind Perry Ellis 360 (the og, not the Red, the one with the blue color), showing a risk-taking approach revered by the niche lovers, by a house and at a price that straddles blind buy and outright WTF. As made clear by earlier reviews, you will be disappointed if you are expecting a blue freshie. But if you are one of those people who says "there is no creativity in fragrances anymore", this may be your antidote.

Horizon by Guy Laroche (1993) is an odd little fragrance, mostly unloved by the general masses, if years of original launch stock being available online for peanuts even 30 years later says anything about the stuff. This strange semi-aquatic semi-fougère furrowed brows in 1993 and still does today, but those who love it seem to really do, which makes this a "hidden gem" for those still believing in those (I personally do not). Perfumer Alain Astori seems to be the kind of perfumer to make fragrances that get discontinued and develop cult followings, if his other past works are anything to go on, so I'm not surprised to see his name pop up again here as the man behind Horizon. People using shaving products from this era might also recognize some of the blue/green mish-mash tropes here as downmarket, which might also have been a damning blemish against the success of what was meant at the time to be an upmarket fragrance. You might laugh now with how most Guy Laroche products go immediately into discounters upon release, but there was a time when they were quite luxuriant.

The strange thing about Horizon is how it uses the aquatic structure to present a fougère, as if it was an evolution of the preceding Drakkar Noir by Guy Laroche (1982), from which the aquatic genre was ultimately an outgrowth with things like Davidoff Cool Water (1988). Horizon feels like a "clap back" against Cool Water (a fatal mistake considering its impact), by rolling back the aquatic aesthetics and asserting more herbal structures under the aldehydes, mint, and dihydromyrcenol "aquatic" opening moments. There are just too many notes here to bother confirming or denying what I smell among them, so just take away the fact this rides into a fougère accord augmented with rose and carnation, then made chewier with artemisia, fennel, caraway, and pine resins. The rich base of patchouli, sandalwood, oakmoss, and amber is a bit of a surprise really, with a muskiness that feels fuller than an aquatic usually is, plus more agrestic too. Performance is not a barnstormer, which is a hallmark of its apologetic 90's design. By the time its all over, you're wearing a fougère in much the same way you are with Jean Patou's ill-fated Voyageur (1994).

Perfumer Jean Kerleo famously resisted modernizing Patou's house style, feeling the focus on high-quality natural materials and ostensibly classic French styles are what kept Patou "above" Chanel, Dior, and the like for years in the designer perfume market, and thus subversively granted the corporate suits at former owner Shaneel their wish by making Voyageur pull a bait and switch in the dry down. I don't think Alain Astori had such a tongue-in-cheek goal in mind with Horizon, just that he wanted to embrace the aquatic phenomenon storming the designer perfume market by the 1990's, but perhaps didn't want to lean too fully in as many competitors did, since Guy Laroche sorta helped start it all. Whatever the reasoning was, or whatever insanity must have been on the brief that he won the bid for with his work, the results created a fragrance that straddled generations and worlds, which usually results in rejection from both parties since people seldom like compromises in their fragrance. Oh well, this "if you know, you know" fragrance gets a clean bill of artistic health from me. Thumbs up

First time revisiting this on skin in many, many years... and it's excellent for what it is, not only for nostalgic reasons. Drakkar Noir was the first serious perfume I can remember choosing for myself; wore through a few bottles, and I was fully primed when Horizon came out in 1993... in the futuristic cracked-glass blue-green Drakkar Noir-shaped bottle that still looks cool today. I remember wearing through a mini pretty quickly, then moved on to a 50 ml splash. This was the era of fresh fougeres and sporty aquatics, and I was rotating between this, Nautica Classic, and Polo Sport. I remember liking it at the time, but I forgot about it and moved on after I finished my second bottle. It may have already been discontinued.

Revisiting now, I was worried this would smell like a grody Cool Water derivative. Frankly, this is much better than that, more interesting in its composition. It opens with a blast of aldehydes and the expected aquatic vibes but quickly pivots to aromatic herbs and pine--in that sense it makes me think of New West more than anything (which is also great). Definitely a product of the 90s, but doesn't feel quite as much like a mall scent as many from that era. My younger female coworker caught a whiff on a test strip and loved it, describing it as "herbal and fresh".

Fragrantica lists a ton of notes (much more than listed here): TOP - aldehydes, cassia, mint, green notes, lavender, artemisia, bergamot, mandarin; MIDDLE - pine needles, carnation, caraway, cyclamen, geranium, rose, jasmine; BASE - oakmoss, leather, cedar, patchouli, sandalwood, musk, sea salt, amber. Notably, the Basenotes list is a lot shorter, but it adds fennel, thyme, and marine notes. Regardless what's actually in here, I get a strong herbal aspect over pine and marine notes. No sweetness in sight, with an almost oily depth to the aromatic notes that you don't often encounter in 90s designer fare. Makes me think of ocean rain, tree-lined shores, oversized Ocean Pacific t-shirts, the final scene of Point Break... a whole lot baked into one forgotten blue-green bottle. This won't convert anyone who outright hates aquatics--and I'm not ordinarily big on this genre--but it is an excellent scent for what it is.

A note on formulations: I picked up an unboxed 50 ml spray bottle for $6 on Fragrancenet. There are a ton of these floating around, which made me wonder if this was some gutted reformulation dumped to resellers after discontinuation. Nope. I can confirm mine is a 1993 bottle distributed by Cosmair,* meaning this dates to the first year Horizon was offered for sale. Unsurprisingly, this stuff is pretty strong. 1 spray to the wrist, 1 to the chest, and it's as potent as I could hope for. Killer scent, insane value.

*See this excellent Raiders of the Lost Scent post on dating Guy Laroche bottles: https://raidersofthelostscent.blogspot.com/2014/04/how-to-recognize-guy-laroche-perfumes.html

Hi for some reason I just can't comment positively on this fragrance. I mean I LOVE the ORIGINAL Drakkar Noir from 1982 but this one I just don't know. I mean what is it? Is it a fougere? Is it a Chypre? Is it an Aquatic? I just don't know and even though you can almost buy this for about $15 what exactly are you getting? I'm definitely not a fan of blue fragrances and this seems to have just about anything and everything inside and out. Ordinarily I wouldn't think of parting with any of my fragrances but I've had Horizon for a few years now and all it's doing is collecting dust and it'll continue to do so until I make a decision on what to do with it