Michael Kors Island

I am an indoor person. Most days, my skin smells of milk and honey, synthetic musk and aldehydes. Not everyone favors such an "indoor" scent. Where I live, lots of people unintentionally carry the scent of fish and woodsmoke with them from the great outdoors into the mall. But even when it comes to intentional perfuming, there are those in the North and beyond who prefer to join the woodland nymphs and water sprites with their decidedly outdoorsy fragrance choices. A subgroup of outdoorsy fragrances unwittingly reflect the synthetic quality of our idea of nature. Michael Kors Island is one such fragrance.

The whiff of chlorinated water you get at the swimming pool on a balmy tropical day; a first spray of Michael Kors Island releases that so-clean-it's-got-to-be-corrosive quality. The flacon, a carved rectangular pool of aqua, is like a house that's all window, an architecture that brings the outdoors inside. Michael Kors Island does the same for perfume; it transports the outdoor smells of water and flower fresh air to the indoor locale of human bodies. The pitfall of a fresh fragrance like Island is that it masks our riper animal odors under sanitized chemical cover in the banal mode of an underarm deodorant.

Cool, bleached, verdant and fruity notes shine and fade into an imperceptible base of beachy woods. With early smelling flowers like tulip, champaca, ginger lily and stephanotis mixed with a brisk note of rose, this is a bouquet at a casual outdoor wedding, complete with "white bark accord" and "galapagos driftwood." This aquatic ectomorph of a fragrance is a bit of a throwback to 90s Issey Miyakesque minimalism; all stems, no tits.

Michael Kors Island is available from Sephora, Nordstrom and many other online retailers. It contains the following notes: Kauai Waterfalls, Oxygenated Water, Chinese Kiwi, Hydroponic Honeysuckle, Parrot Tulip, Champaca Flowers, Ginger Lilies, Bulgarian Rose, Stephanotis, White Bark Accord, Galapagos Driftwood.