The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
In 2014, Carlos Powell launched the Peace-Love-Perfume Project, a collaboration inviting perfumers to interpret his community's logo through scent. Shelley Waddington answered. Her brief wasn't a place or a memory this time. It was a type of person: the New York Man, distilled into aroma. Powell described him as everything a man should be, peaceful yet sexy, strong enough to be vulnerable. Waddington built the composition in three movements to honor that duality. The Peace Notes ground the wearer in something contemplative: incense, myrrh, and sandalwood. The Love Notes add the animalic push: musk, ambergris, castoreum. The Perfume Notes, citrus, fir, cedar, herbal, keep it wearable, urban, awake. Scotch and cigars appear as bonus notes, unapologetically place-specific. The result is a fragrance that doesn't ask permission.
The note architecture is unusually layered for a 2014 indie release. Most fragrances of that era chose a single axis, woody or fresh or spicy, and committed. New York Man stacks three. The resins anchor everything. Tobacco leaf appears not as a top-note gimmick but as structural weight, present in the heart and deepening into the drydown. Castoreum functions as a bridge, it reads animalic at the opening but becomes something warmer, skin-like, after an hour. The hemp flower note is small but significant: it adds a green, slightly buzzy lift that prevents the composition from going heavy or syrupy.
The evolution
The opening hits fast: citrus brightness and fir needle sharpness arrive together, a cold slap that announces presence before anything else settles. The first thirty minutes belong to the smoke. Incense and cigar notes dominate, with whiskey warmth threading underneath. This is the loudest phase, strong sillage, projecting hard. By hour two, the tobacco emerges fully. The resins kick in: myrrh, frankincense, patchouli. The composition shifts from sharp to warm, the castoreum now reading as skin-like rather than animalic. The cannabis flower does its quiet work throughout, lifting the heavier materials before they can drag. By hour four, the drydown settles into amber, cedar, and sandalwood, a long, warm base that stays close to the skin. On fabric, this one lingers until the next morning. The sillage drops but the presence doesn't.
Cultural impact
New York Man occupies a specific space in the indie fragrance landscape: bold enough to satisfy tobacco and resin enthusiasts, layered enough to reward repeated wearing, and specific enough to feel named rather than generic. Community reception splits on the animalic elements, castoreum and ambergris polarize as intended, but agrees on longevity. The Peace-Love-Perfume collaboration brought En Voyage into a wider community conversation in 2014, positioning the house as an independent voice willing to build fragrances around social concepts rather than market categories. Waddington's commitment to natural isolates over synthetic accords shows here: the complexity is organic, not engineered.
