I've been closely eyeing a bottle of Euphoria Amber Gold Men at my local TJ Maxx. Yesterday it finally hit clearance and I snapped it up blind. It's incredible stuff. Warm, sweet but not overly resinous, always dancing around the idea of Nag Champa incense without smelling quite like it. Performance is great. I also own Liquid Gold from a couple years back and it's a spicy sandalwood / saffron with some of the most brutal strength of anything in my collection. It behaves like a pure parfum or extrait on my skin. There was another one, Pure Gold which was so scarce I've never come across it in the states.

All three of these flankers appear to be Middle East exclusives which slowly made their way over to discounters in the US. Little is known about any of them - Amber Gold from last year was the first one to even list a perfumer.

So what gives? These three fragrances represent the closest thing we will probably ever get to an exclusive / private men's line from cK, with exotic, decidedly non-office-safe note pyramids, good ingredients and beastly strength. They sold new at higher price points than any previous cK offering. And most bafflingly, they're part of the insipid Euphoria men's line instead of Obsession, their only long-running line that could make any pretense to the exotic and unusual.

Seeing Calvin Klein defy all expectations without anyone noticing, it really makes me think about how much has changed since ten years ago when mediocrities like Halston Man Amber - which is ten times closer to safe designer territory than the above-mentioned - were hyped to the extreme.