It would be hard to buy Estee by Estee Lauder by accident. It's not a well-known fragrance these days, and even the Estee Lauder website relegates it to the list of "Other Fragrances," the place where banished perfumes of yesteryear (remember Cinnabar?) are relegated.

Well, I love retro-scents. Estee was introduced in 1968. It was Estee Lauder's second official foray into the perfume world (her first, back in the 1950s, was Youth Dew, still sold on the front pages of the website),

I love retro-scents for a couple of reasons. First, they're unusual and unexpected. In a world where everybody smells Beautiful (another Estee Lauder scent), why not smell like something different? In a day and age of rooty-tooty-fresh-and-fruity, it can be an olfactory kick in the pants to smell like you're wearing grown-up lady perfume.

I notice these days we favor light scents, gender-unspecific, airy, unoffensive, and terribly vague.Just as socially, it is now quite permissible to believe in a wide range of ridiculous things (do you know how hard it is these days to be wrong ... you can believe you are descended from a space man and nobody would dare contradict you). Ours are days of excruciating political correctness. Well, they're also the days of weak perfume.

Back in the 1960s, you could be wrong. People said all sorts of outrageous things and other people told them they were wrong. Women painted their eyebrows black and wore stockings with seams down the back. Well, back in those days, perfume was perfume. Some of it could knock your head off, but, hey, it helped counteract the all-pervasive aroma of cigarette smoke.

Okay, the metaphor is going too far. But it's a stronger perfume from a stronger era, and I tend to like strong perfume because so much of what we have available now wimps out in the Southern heat.

Estee Lauder named this perfume for herself and intended it to be her signature scent, which, of course, it never really was. Estee Lauder is best known in fragrance circles as a purveyor of strong scents. I have a friend who told me that if you buy perfume or eau-de-parfum everywhere else, buy cologne from Estee Lauder. That's the equivalent.

I got something called Super Cologne Spray. You have to go to the back of the website and really look for this stuff. I doubt it is carried by department stores. So what is it like?

First of all, it is strong. It's got that rich deep undercurrent of roses and jasmine to it that remind me of other scents of the era. Not that I think Estee is particularly old-fashioned. If anything, it reminds me of Nina Ricci or some of the French masters who concocted these sort of rich, floral tapestries. It has ylang-ylang in it, and there is a powdery bit to it. There are some light peach and raspberry notes to it, sort of to intensify the texture of it. It's a complex sort of scent. You have to study it for a while to untangle the notes (if you do that sort of thing; I suspect many people can accept a complex fragrance without asking themselves what the individual notes are).

Although it's complex, it is mainly a floral and works as a daytime scent. I suspect the biggest danger to this perfume is that you might wear it and it could remind a person in your life about somebody else who wore it back in its heyday in the 1960s. Perfume evokes so many memories, that's always a risk with a retro-scent. But it's a very fine scent, and it's the kind of thing that you can keep in your reserve of scents that you wear but mysteriously won't tell anybody what it is.

Most people won't guess this.

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