Juicy Couture Couture Couture

No, you didn’t read that title wrong. The fragrance name is Couture Couture, making the entire thing seem like an excessive exercise to test your ability to avoid spitting all over yourself and the poor sap standing in front of you. Couture Couture is the young 2009 release from Juicy Couture followings its two wildly popular fragrances, Juice Couture and Viva la Juicy. Couture Couture

In Bottle: Sweet, sweet, fruit. One only has to take a sniff of this to realize that there’s at least a few degrees of sweetness in there. That something sweet is being layered over something sweet, and those two sweet things are being coated in a thick layer of sweetness and on top they’ve drizzled some fruit, added a drop of vanilla and called it a day.

Applied: Sweetness. But that’s okay, it’s not done yet. Couture Couture still has a ways to go and evolve before the day is done. The fruits start to come up as well as the vanilla, which I had thought would remain behind everything else for a while longer but it’s a more eager vanilla, I guess. I’m smelling grape punch, the kind that you buy frozen and then mix with water at home.  There’s florals in there though. Don’t think Couture Couture is a fruit and sugar only gal. The sweet honeysuckle note makes an appearance here along with its jasmine friend, hovering around the miasma of sugared fruit. The dry down of Couture Couture is a bit friendlier to me. The rest of the fragrance is so sugary sweet that when the dry down arrives, I get a hint of light sandalwood and realize that things are going to be okay. But that’s after the hours of tumbling down fruit and sugar mountain.

Extra: Juicy Couture, the company, started in 1994. Their velour tracksuits were all the rage when I was younger. I never did catch onto Juicy Couture’s line of clothing though.

Design: Nice interesting bottle design. Not rectangular, but also not in a bizarre shape that takes up too much horizontal room. The cap has an interesting topper on it, giving the bottle an exotic look. There’s a pink ribbon tied to the bottle to give it an extra cute little detail. The topper kind of reminds me of the Betsey Johnson bottle–except done a thousand times better.

Fragrance Family: Fruity Floral

Notes: Mandarin, grape, plum, orange blossom, jasmine, honeysuckle, vanilla, sandalwood, amber.

In a way Couture Couture reminds me of a mix of original Juicy Couture and Viva la Juicy with a huge smack of sugar thrown in. But that familiarity with the other two Juicy fragrances might also have something to do with the fact that they’re all fruity florals, come from the same company, and are made to appeal to the same kind of people.

Reviewed in This Post: Couture Couture, 2010, Eau de Parfum.


Chanel No.5 Eau Premiere

Commence the raving, Chanel No.5 Eau Premiere makes the regular No.5 and twists it into a modern, clean but still classic smelling fragrance. Eau Premiere was made to capture that lost subsection of individuals who thought the original No.5 was just “too much”. That No.5 smelled too much of aldehydes or far too old. In essence, Eau Premiere is an updated, stripped away, younger version.  Eau Premiere

In Bottle: Bright, fresh citrus over that familiar Chanel No.5 smell. But there’s something clearly lacking. The aldehydes that come up immediately upon first sniff have been toned down. The sparkle is a bit duller but Eau Premiere still has that No.5 base, it’s just less blatant now.

Applied: Citrus and a shout of florals before Eau Premiere settles down. Imagine Chanel No.5, then take away most of that sparkle by toning down its aldehydes. Tweak the florals so they dance and float in the air like a pretty, flighty piece of transparent cloth. The powder is noticeably toned down in Eau Premiere to further “update” this fragrance and make it more youthful. The final dry down also lacks that heady, dense, muskiness in the original No.5. Eau Premiere is a younger class of lady. She’s a pale gown and a diamond necklace compared to Chanel No.5’s sleek black dress and pearls. I get that same, but subdued clean, floral, jasmine fragrance but it’s lighter, greener, more fresh and less dense. Nevertheless, the essence of the old classic is still in there.

Extra: Beautiful as it is, Eau Premiere is a flanker. And flankers are not always bad. Though the ones that come immediately to mind for me weren’t to my tastes. Still, when you think about all the different products Chanel has with No.5’s essence, soaps, lotions, body gels, powders, and on and on, another flanker based on No.5 might seem excessive. But if you love Chanel No.5, it’s daughter, Eau Premiere is worth a try. She’s got the same breeding but is obviously in a younger style.

Design: Presented in a tall rectangular glass bottle with the house name and fragrance name embossed onto the glass. The bottle takes its inspiration from the original Chanel No.5 bottle but in a taller, easier to hold form. The cap is especially familiar, being made of a denser material. Chanel’s bottle designs have always been beautiful and Eau Premiere’s is no exception.

Fragrance Family: Fresh Floral

Notes: Mandarin, bergamot, aldehydes, jasmine, neroli, ylang-ylang, rose, vetiver, vanilla.

Eau Premiere was tweaked by Chanel’s in-house perfumer, Jacques Polge. Polge was responsible for the wildly popular, and very successful Chanel fragrance, Coco Mademoiselle. He’s also done Cormandel, Egoiste, and Allure Homme.

Reviewed in This Post: Chanel No.5 Eau Premiere, 2009, Eau Premiere.


Chanel No.5

What could anyone possibly say about Chanel No.5 that hasn’t already been said ten times over? So all that remains to be said is to share my experience like anyone else would have to do at this point. Simply put, No.5 is the perfume people think of when they hear the word, “Perfume”. It’s misunderstood, well-loved, adored, respected, hated, revered, confusing, complex, and familiar. Any fragrance lover worth his or her salt knows what Chanel No.5 smells like. Chanel No5

In Bottle: Loud sparkling aldehydes and florals. Heady but clean and vivid in the sense that the fragrance is immediately recognizable. Chanel No.5 was not meant to be contained to a blotter though. It’s a fragrance that demands wearing.

Applied: Freshness from citrus and aldehydes. There are some fragrances that overdo the citrus but No.5’s initial citrus is tame. It smells very necessary as the scent settles down giving off aldehydes and florals. I can smell the ylang-ylang, the rose, and jasmine. The aldehydes are giving this a very clean, crisp feel. There’s something slightly dry about this, like desert air, as the fragrance starts to age and the florals are joined by powder and this dry airiness. No.5 is not for the lighthearted. It lasts and lasts and will continue to last for hours while it has trouble settling between floral, dryness and floral, powder. The final dry down of this scent may very well happen late into the night if you applied this in the morning. It’s fade loses most of the aldehydes and gives way a clean, sandalwoodsy, musk.

Extra: Chanel No.5 was released in 1921 when it became the raging success it is today. Hundreds of stories surround the creation of Chanel No.5, even more about who wore it and why. There are fan clubs dedicated to No.5, people who have written songs featuring No.5, and people who go their entire lives wearing No.5. Even through its various reformulations, Chanel No.5 has kept its core personality as a classic.

Design: Iconic perfume bottle for the eau de parfum version. Rectangular glass with Chanel No.5 label set in the middle. The cap is a heavier, nicer material that snaps onto the top to protect the sprayer that distributes an even, fine mist. There is a small Chanel logo running along the band on the cap. The juice itself is a dark yellow amber color.

Fragrance Family: Floral

Notes: Ylang-Ylang, neroli, aldehydes, jasmine, mayrose, sandalwood, vetiver.

Chanel No.5 is probably the fragrance most accused of smelling like “old lady”. While everyone’s perceptions of old lady smell is different, No.5 to me, is way too fresh, way too sparkling to be an old lady smell. But neroli and powder are the two marks of an old lady fragrance and I cannot deny that it has a certain feel to it that excludes it from being young.

Reviewed in This Post: Chanel No.5, 2009, Eau de Parfum.


Will Rubbing Your Wrists Crush Perfume?

I’ve had this happen a few times to me and used to subscribe to the idea myself before I gained a little initiative and went looking for some real answers. Does rubbing your wrists together really crush those delicate scent molecules?

Picture yourself standing in the fragrance department of Saks Fifth Avenue or other department store of choice. You pick up a bottle of the latest release and give it a spray on your wrist. Just to test it out. And, as you go to combine your wrists together, someone from across the room–a sales associate, another perfume appreciator, a man whose hat is composed of used beer cans, whatever–shouts, “No! You’ll crush the scent!”

There’s talk buzzing about the fragrance world surrounding wrist rubbing and perfume. A lot of people rub their wrists together or rub perfume into their skin after application. I don’t know how this started or who originated it but in addition to these wrist-rubbers you have anti-wrist-rubbers on the other side having a conniption every time they witness someone do it. By far, the most common declaration I’ve heard:

“Don’t rub your wrists together. You’re crushing the delicate scent molecules.”

Is there any truth behind this? Yes and no.

First of all, you are not crushing any molecules by grinding your wrists together. You can’t crush molecules with your wrists. Molecules are extremely, mind-bendingly, tiny. So crushing molecules is not at all like crushing a grape. They’re simply too small for your wrists to obliterate. And if you could crush molecules, you’ll be a few years ahead of current scientific research and should probably turn yourself in for scientific study. Come on, for the good of mankind.

So perhaps it’s not so much the fact that people truly believe they can crush molecules with the magic of their wrists but a poor choice of words. “Crush” is a hyperbole and a rather poetic way of saying, “You’re generating heat and causing some perfume notes to evaporate faster than they should.”

Perfumes work through evaporation. When you spray a fragrance onto your skin, your body temperature causes the fragrance molecules to start evaporating. As they evaporate they fly away from the body and give off their scent. The warmer your body is, the faster these scents evaporate.

What you’re doing when you rub your wrists together is generating heat. Heat increases the rate of evaporation and some notes are more susceptible to heat than others. Due to the different rate of evaporation, the perfume may end up smelling different than it should.

This does not mean that wrist rubbing should be banned and you’re a terrible person if you rub your wrists together to distribute the fragrance. Nah. If you want to rub or you’re just used to it, then do it slowly. You’re not in the wrist rubbing competition here and you’re probably not trying to start a fire using your wrists either. Though that would probably make you very popular among smokers and campers.


Twilight, The Perfume

I had the dubious honor of being able to smell Twilight (the fragrance inspired by the books and movies).  It was a rather strange moment in my life as I had originally thought myself too insulated to ever encounter a bottle of this fabled stuff but lo and behold, it wafted itself to me.

Now, it wasn’t like I thought it would smell bad. So few modern made fragrances (especially celebrity fragrances and those based on pop culture) could contain anything that would be considered “stinky”. I just didn’t buy into the hype. I didn’t like the books which excluded me from everything else, thankfully. Aside from seeing the occasional personal thumbing through one of the novels in the series, I largely avoided this phenomenon. But hey, a chance to smell a pop culture phenomenon? Who am I say no? Twilight

In Bottle: Word on the manicured, rainy Oregon streets have it that this fragrance is supposed to be representative of what Bella smells like to Edward. My initial reaction? This reminds me of high school. Lavender is the prominent note in this and I detect that sweet, bubbly, clean freesia too.  There’s more to it than those two notes though. I’m picking up something woodsy and very, very slightly bitter. Cedar, very small cedar though. Think sapling sized.

Applied: Okay, I really only had one shot at this so here goes. The initial burst is a flare of green lavender and bitterness. The bitterness is really fleeting though as the freesia comes in to do its work. The lavender is a nice, dewy, clear note that does a great job until freesia rolls into town with its screaming soapiness. This is a clean fragrance, clean and cool like a late spring shower in a forest. Which, I suppose, is appropriate given the imagery in the movies and books about rainy old Forks. As the fragrance starts to dry down the lavender takes off for the background letting what I’m pretty sure is some sort of musk note come up. I lost all traces of cedar except a tiny patch of green. Throughout the duration of this, I get green, clean, sweet and floral. The four scent groups that are the most inoffensive to people. The final dry down is a sweet, soapy with an now almost invisible lavender. Not a whole lot of evolution, kind of predictable lifespan and really not breaking any new fragrance ground. But it is a step above what I thought this would be.

Extra: Apparently these were initially only sold in Hot Topic stores and were fairly popular. I can see why people like this. It’s really inoffensive, highly wearable, and it’s a fairly competent clean lavender scent. There’s barely any interesting dry down though and it’s no wonder they only bothered to list two notes. It’s because the dry down is pretty uneventful. Musk, green, and persistent lavender. This isn’t going to rocket Twilight into the gilded halls where the likes of Guerlain and Caron live it up but it’s workable.

Design: All right, let’s talk bottle. Twilight’s bottle is pretty much a direct rip off of Nina by Nina Ricci. The differences being a slightly darker glass and a sentence written on the Twilight bottle. The bottle construction itself is also a fair bit poorer than Nina. The little silver leaves on the Twilight bottle were a bit loose. And on the Nina bottle, the glass is seamless and smooth. On the Twilight bottle, there is a noticeable seam where the two halves of glass were combined. It’s a blatant copy otherwise. In early 2009, Nina Ricci opened up a can of lawsuit over the bottle design. No surprises there. No word on how that’s going but I’m sure there won’t be any dirt slinging. If there is, I am so there.

Fragrance Family: Fresh Floral

Notes: Lavender, freesia, cedar, musk.

Twilight was sold at Hot Topic stores as a limited edition scent that rode in on the coattails of the book series and movie successes. As far as I understand it, this fragrance is extremely popular among fans and whoever likes (or doesn’t mind) lavender will probably like this too. The fragrance itself is hard to hate. Oh, and don’t ask me if “perfume spray” means eau de toilette or eau de parfum. I honestly don’t know.

Reviewed in This Post: Twilight, 2009, Perfume Spray.


Miss Dior Cherie

Sometimes, you come across a fragrance that just isn’t to your taste. Miss Dior Cherie is not to my taste. While I do tend toward the fruity and the sweet, Miss Dior Cherie is like a candy strawberry syrup attack that goes straight up my nose and into my head. Congratulations are in order, I suppose. No. 5, Shalimar, Brut, and all the powerhouses of the 80s combined could not induce a perfume headache. Today, Miss Dior Cherie took that prize home. Miss Dior Cherie

In Bottle: Sweet, sweet, synthetic strawberry layered over a lovely slather of caramel. There’s so much sweetness and sugary fruitiness in this that it’s crossed the line between edible, wearable sweet and cloying sweet. I tend to think of myself as having a high tolerance to sweetness. After all, I didn’t mind the tooth numbing sweetness in Love of Pink by Lacoste or Pink Sugar by Aquolina. But that combination of sugar, candy and strawberry in Miss Dior Cherie takes it a notch above just sweet into shrill sweet. So sweet you can feel your blood turn to high-fructose corn syrup.

Applied: Initial minor burst of sweet citrus aside, Miss Dior Cherie wastes no time letting you know what she’s up to. She’s going to turn you into a walking strawberry lollipop. I immediately got hit with the sugar and caramel and whatever else is sweetening this so much. It’s cloying upon first application and several hours later, it’s still cloying and I can still smell it. It being the initial notes upon application. I was really surprised to find this fragrance hadn’t moved or evolved on me at all. If nothing else, Miss Dior Cherie deserves applause for longevity. The strawberry candy fragrance is a strong one. The projection isn’t bad. It’s neither far nor short. It’s just right. I just don’t think this one works for me. And as I wait a few more hours, it starts to turn for the cleaner, melting down from strawberry lollipop to jaded strawberry and sweet, fresh florals. I can only assume that slight and freshness is the patchouli trying its hardest to come up. The dry down is rather pleasant, though surviving that powerful longevity to get to the clean last act is too much of a challenge. Really, the initial burst and the workings of those middle notes just reminds me of cough syrup. Sorry, Miss Dior Cherie.

Extra: Dior’s had a lot of hits in the past. The original Miss Dior, Diorella, Poison. All of them to be respected. And a lot of people really love Miss Dior Cherie. I can see why. It’s a very sweet, very fun, extremely girly fragrance. But to me, it overdid the sweetness and the strawberry note was too candy-like. The fragrance itself didn’t dry down fast enough for my tastes and the dry down is really where I start to appreciate Miss Dior Cherie. Otherwise, she sits right at the start with that syrupy strawberry and remains one-dimensional for hours. Overall, Dior has had a lot of hits, a lot of great fragrances and Miss Dior Cherie, while popular and peppy and cute, is probably not one of my favorites.

Design: Lovely and simple bottle glass bottle with a metal bow attached to further add to the youth of this fragrance. It is overall, very nice, youthful, and trendy packaging. The sprayer works fine, the packaging is adorable. And the French commercial is one of the most fun-loving, uplifting perfume commercials I’ve seen. A very recognizable, in branding, fragrance.

Fragrance Family: Fruity Gourmand

Notes: Green tangerine, strawberry leaves, violet, pink jasmine, caramel popcorn, strawberry sorbet, patchouli, musk.

I admit, I’m probably not the target group for this. It seems like Miss Dior Cherie was made for women around my age or younger but they kind of missed me I suppose. I wanted to love this fragrance. Really, I did. But I think I’d like a more understated fragrance. Nevertheless, Miss Dior Cherie would be a wonderful hit for a teenager or younger woman who absolutely loves sweet scents.

Reviewed in This Post: Miss Dior Cherie, 2010, Eau de Parfum.


Annick Goutal Gardenia Passion

I suppose spring is coming to my nose, that means breaking out the florals and readying the fresh for summer. Gardenia has a sweet fragrance with that similar greenness to it that I notice in a lot of flowers. To me, it’s a crisp, young reminder of warming temperatures and budding leaves. Then you have Annick Goutal’s Gardenia Passion, the fragrance with the deceptive name. Gardenia Passion

In Bottle: Gardenia Passion is tuberose. Predominantly tuberose. So tuberose, in fact, that in the bottle I smell nothing but tuberose. Tuberose, tuberose, tuberose. This is so tuberose in the bottle that it beats out By Kilian’s Beyond Love. Though it lacks the finesse and gentle greenness of Beyond Love.

Applied: Strange sour, almost vinegar-like, note upon spray that lingers for a few minutes after application. That sour note is mixing with the sweetness in this fragrance and the powerful hit of tuberose. This makes for a pretty wickedly strange blend of sweet and sour florals. The sourness does go away eventually, letting tuberose shine through. I’m searching the murky waters of Gardenia Passion for its namesake but aside from that sweetness–which could be from the tuberose too–there’s not a whole lot of it to be had. I feel a little cheesed, honestly, because a fragrance named for gardenia should either have gardenia in it or at least have notes that illustrate the concept of gardenia. With the way this is going, it should have been called Tuberose Passion. Or Tuberose to Eternity. Nothing wrong with tuberose, just, where’s the gardenia? I get no mention of that elusive gardenia on dry down either. It’s just lighter tuberose with a vegetal background.

Extra: Now, I like tuberose. I think it’s an interesting blend of screech and whisper. Tuberose is a sweet, almost tropical scent. Sometimes, people mispronounce its name saying, “toober-rose“. It is actually, “toob-rose“. As for Annick Goutal, the company was started in 1980 by Annick Goutal and had a skin cream line prior to branching off into fragrances.

Design: Placed in a beautifully textured bottle with a ribbon tied to the neck. From that ribbon dangles a paper label with the name of the fragrance and house on it. The cap is colored gold, very lightweight, but comes off the sprayer nozzle very smoothly. The sprayer works just fine.

Fragrance Family: Soliflore

Notes: Orange blossom, tuberose, jasmine, gardenia, herbs.

It’s almost funny that this should be a soliflore, given the fact that its focus is on the wrong flower. But maybe that was the point. Maybe I’m just smell blind to whatever gardenia was used in this fragrance. Maybe I’m just nuts about tuberose and it is the only flower I will ever smell again.

Reviewed in This Post: Gardenia Passion, 2010, Eau de Parfum.


Guerlain Shalimar

At long last I’ve come to appreciate Shalimar and truly understand her. I knew for years that there must be a reason for why people love Shalimar so much that I’m just not seeing. I kept reading on about how the dry down is this rich, deep, sensual vanilla but the top notes just turned me away. Then I decided to hell with it, and needed to see what I was missing for myself. And now, I think I’ve finally got it. k5f2jcs0

In Bottle: Smoky, slightly sweet and very spicy. Like taking in a lungful of cigar smoke. The bottle phase of Shalimar is excellent at hiding the vanilla deep in a hole somewhere and it’s just begging for you to come dig it up. To be completely honest, I am not wild about how Shalimar smells in the bottle or off-skin. It was the major thing holding me back for years from actually trying it on. And let me just say, Shalimar is strong. It’s not the kind of fragrance that sneaks into a scene and sits behind everyone else and stays quiet. Shalimar’s best trait is its projection. You don’t wear Shalimar to blend in with people. You wear it because you want your presence to be known. In short, it is powerful.

Applied: Initial burst of citrus, bergamot and lemon at work I’m thinking, but it’s very quick to go away. There’s cloves in this that lend to its spiciness. To me, cloves have this slightly plastic quality to it. But, hey, I’m warming up to them. As the initial lemon and clove notes starts to dry down I get more smoky sweetness from Shalimar as it leads me into the much raved about vanilla phase. The final vanilla phase for me is not what would be expected of vanilla. These days, people think sweet and gourmand when they hear vanilla. The vanilla in Shalimar is an incense laden, smooth, and dense smoked vanilla layered over powder. I know Shalimar is a classic. I’ve always known it was to be respected but up until now, I only respected it from afar. This is one perfume that needs to be allowed to age as its dry down is simply masterful.

Extra: Launched in 1925, Shalimar was the trademark of the daring, sensual woman. Shalimar, in Sanskrit means “Temple of Love”. Shalimar has a somewhat mixed reception these days. As more often than not, people opt for lighter, cleaner fragrances. As a result, Shalimar’s been called a lot of names. “Old lady” is one of the predominant criticisms. And “too strong” is another. It’s true, Shalimar is an old lady. It’s a classic, beautiful, timeless old lady. It’s also true that Shalimar is too strong. It has tremendous projection and is inappropriate for the office, public transit, and dinner parties held in close quarters. Like I said, this scent projects like mad. You need to pick the right places to wear it because it won’t go on lightly.

Design: Shalimar’s most well-known classic design inspired the current modern version. The classic design was based on the shape of a fan. A very romantic, lovely piece of art and design history. The modern design, though modern and hip, has lost quite a bit of that romantic and classic look. I prefer the old design. This new one isn’t bad, of course, but it feels a little mismatched for a classic fragrance so well-loved and well-known. As if the modern version was trying to take it away from the 1920s when it was born. The version I have comes in a clear glass bottle in the modern style. It has a plastic cap with “Guerlain Paris” written on it.

Fragrance Family: Oriental

Notes: Bergamot, cloves, smoke, iris, opopanax, vanilla.

All right, I fully admit my embarrassingly slow warm up to Shalimar. I think some people need to work up to this fragrance. Try it out enough times before they finally get it. I hear the same could be said for Jicky. Jicky being one of the Guerlain classics I’m really hesitant to try due to its infamously civet treatment. Ah well, Shalimar today and now that I finally understand her, it’s time to hunt down Vol de Nuit, Habit Rouge and Apres L’Ondee.

Reviewed in This Post: Shalimar, 2010, Eau de Parfum.


Tommy Hilfiger Tommy Girl

“All-American girl” is pretty much out an of reach image for me but it doesn’t mean I can’t smell like one. Tommy Girl is marketed as a fragrance all about the modern American girl with her clean, trendy, urban, and wholesome persona. I don’t know if those are the words I’d use to describe Tommy Girl but then, I’ve never really felt like an All-American girl–being a Canadian, you see. Tommy Girl

In Bottle: Sweet and tart, watery blackcurrant with bundle of fresh grassiness and citrus backing it up. It’s layered with a mild dusting of florals and gives off this prancing in the fields in a pair of jeans and a plaid shirt, kind of feel. Though that feel can be attributed to the marketing.

Applied: Burst of very tart, very strong blackcurrant. I can’t really get past that battle between sweet and tart here while the blackcurrant is practically jumping up and down shouting, “Look at me! Smell me!” I get where Luca Turin was going with this, saying it smelled like tea. That watery quality from the blackcurrant is helping and that mixture of sweet and citrus-y sour really does it. As the dry down starts, the tartness goes away and the sweetness chills out a bit letting those florals in. Blackcurrant is still working its magic as the fragrance heads for the fresh and clean direction. Mid-stage, Tommy Girl is a sweetly presented flowers on soft fruit affair. Further dry down reveals a lovely smelling base of clean, fresh, sandalwood, and sweet flowers.

Extra: Tommy Girl was released in 1996. Back then, Tommy Hilfiger was all the rage in school. The cool kids wore the shirts and the jeans. I never really “got” the Hilfiger craze until I grew up and did a little reading.

Design: Tommy Girl is presented in a triangular prism shaped glass bottle with a metallic cap bearing the Tommy Hilfiger brand on the top. The sprayer works just fine and I was pleased that the bottle shape was so easy to hold in my hand. The design itself is sort of skirting that weird area between so simple it’s aesthetically pleasing and so simple it’s boring. But the fact that it feels so comfortable to hold nets it a lot of points in this arena.

Fragrance Family: Fruity Floral

Notes: Camellia Flowers, apple blossoms, blackcurrant, mandarin, tangerine, grapefruit, citrus, green notes, honeysuckle, butterfly violets, desert jasmin, cherokee rose, magnolia petals, dakota lilies, cedar, sandalwood, wild heather.

Tommy Girl has an interesting mixed background. While the fragrance itself is billed as an American mixture, the concoction was brewed up in Europe. Had it not been marketed so well, Tommy Girl could be any number of modern fragrance releases. Just goes to show you the power of marketing.

Reviewed in This Post: Tommy Girl, 2010, Eau de Cologne.


Fruits & Passion Orchid

Evidently, many of Fruits & Passion’s eau de toilettes remain largely undiscovered. I have a hard time finding a complete database of their outputted fragrances though perhaps some of my difficulty has to do more with ignorance rather than Fruits & Passion’s tiny footprint in fragrance territory. Orchid is a sweet, floral, ambery fragrance, simple and fruit and just plain fun. Orchid

In Bottle: Sweet florals. The florals are a bit drowned by the amber in this fragrance and the perfume itself reminds me of L’Instant de Guerlain. Notice that this is now two fragrances that remind of L’Instant. Orchid’s amber note is a strong one and the blending to get the florals and ambers to work together favored the latter and this treatment shows in the bottle and will probably be the same story on skin.

Applied: Big and floral with the flowers disappearing on me sooner than I’d like. This is less orchid and more amber and something is trying to convince me that I’m smelling peach. A ripe, pink, very sweet peach. This fragrance ages and drys down very fast as its mid stage is characterized by that fading peach note while the amber gets a bit stronger. The dry down at the end has amber and a slight powdery note hanging out until all that’s left is the amber base.

Extra: Orchid belongs in a floral eau de toilette collection from Fruits & Passion. There are two other fragrances in the collection as Fruits & Passion tend to like going in threes. The other two are Rose, which smells very much of roses and Jasmine which I have not yet smelled.

Design: Orchid comes in a tall, thin rectangular bottle with designs embossed onto the glass. There is a cap for this fragrance. A matching plastic rectangular shape that I found nearly impossible to take off. As a result my bottle of Orchid is lacking a cap. The sprayer can be a little flaky, sometimes distributing so much scent that it drools but I have only had that happen a handful of times. By and large the bottle and sprayer work fine. The cap for my bottle was just awful though and I have opted not to use it.

Fragrance Family: Soft Oriental

Notes: Orchid, amber, musk.

Orchid is a hard fragrance to keep on the skin. Amber, to me, is one of those ethereal meant to blend into the background notes. That’s partly the reason why it’s used so often as a base because its purpose is enhance the natural scent of the skin. Now, I hesitate to even lump this fragrance in with the orientals. I mean, it’s amber dominant but that’s pretty much all.

Reviewed in This Post: Orchid, 2010, Eau de Toilette.