Lollipop Bling Honey

Posted on by

Reviewing Lollipop Bling after last week’s classic perfume review-a-thon is like attending an opera then going home and watching reality TV. There’s really no graceful way to segue from one to the other but I review what I have in my notes as I smell things. Some days I might go through five or six perfumes. Some days none. Then there are weeks like this and the Chanel week earlier this month where I yaw between the sensual, dirty romance of Jicky and Mariah Carey sitting on a pink cloud. Lollipop Bling Honey

In Bottle: I don’t know why they called this “Honey” because it smells like pineapples. Maybe it’s Honey as in, “Honey, why does your arm smell like pineapples?”

Applied: After the pineapple hello, Honey evolves into a warmed up honey pineapple treat that makes me think of the tropics. The tropics being an interesting muse for recent perfume releases. I’m happy to see there is actually honey in this but I find myself having to focus on finding it as it is buried under the giant fruity  balloon that rubbed itself onto a field of unsuspecting flowers before it floated off. I don’t think much of Honey. I don’t like it much. It’s far too simple, lacking in imagination and I can’t even enjoy it for its sheer fun factor because this has been done before and so much better. If you were going to go for Honey, go for the better version of this concept in G from Harajuku Lovers. Unless you hate coconut, then you might as well go Independent and score yourself a bottle of Rangoon Riptide from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. I know it was a limited edition but at least you get more than this. This is just too simple to be any good. It makes me beg the question why I should care about it when there’s better stuff out there for the same price point. I smell three notes (pineapple, honey, flowers) for a period of an hour and then it devolves into that watered down, miasma of florals, “something sweet used to be here but died”, perfume scent that I hate so much.

Extra: Honey is a part of Mariah Carey’s (read: Elizabeth Arden’s) Lollipop Bling perfume collection. The collection is notably styled after M by Mariah Carey, only simplified to the barest essentials.

Design: There are three perfumes right now in the Lollipop Bling collection and Honey is identified as the yellow one. It’s a yellow glass bottle with a butterfly cap on top. Reminds me a bit of the butterfly bottles from Annick Goutal, only much clunkier and obviously designed to appeal to a much younger audience.

Fragrance Family: Fruity

Notes: Pineapple, white florals, honey.

I can’t say Honey brings anything new to the table when it comes to tropical scents as we already had Desire Me by Baby Phat, G from the Harajuku Lovers collection, and Bath and Body Works’ Pineapple Orchid that doesn’t come in perfume form but if it did, I’m sure it’d be popular. After all that, do you really need another perfume that makes you smell like pineapples?

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

Old Spice

Posted on by

Today we’re smelling Old Spice. I’ve smelled new Old Spice (hah) plenty and I’m sure you’ve smelled Old Spice plenty too, so let’s take a minute to appreciate what Old Spice smells like. Just because.

Old Spice

In Bottle: Spicy sweet floral with a citrus palette cleanser, bold for a men’s fragrance I gotta say. This is sharp, clean, sweet and strangely complex. A surprise to me immediately as it adds to its opening concoction a slightly boozy note intermixed with a dash of sugar sprinkled in.

Applied: After the citrus is done its job, the spice lingers around as is to be expected as the fragrance slowly introduces a fantastic miasma of cinnamon and clove with a few powdered flowers tossed in there for good measure. This scent is very dry, like a basket of cinnamon sticks at a spice market sitting near a bunch of burning incense on a hot summer day. It’s dry and warm and comforting with an interesting note of smoothness that comes up to mix with the florals and the spices that I want to say is sweet vanilla. Old Spice is a remarkably complex fragrance that goes through several stages on me but it’s mid-stage–that mix of sweetness, smooth vanilla, dry spices, and incensed florals is truly something else. Don’t turn your nose up at this or you’ll miss out on a very, very respectable scent. When Old Spice dries down, it takes a while to get there, but when it does it introduces a woodsy quality to the spicy floral sweet vanilla incense and warms things up even more with an amber and toasty tonka bean scent. Something this complex is mind-boggling how it could work together but it does! And it’s delightful.

Extra: Unlike a lot of people, I don’t have any early memories of Old Spice. I don’t know anyone aside from my fiance who may have once used Old Spice deodorant. And I kind of wished I did because this stuff is great.

Design: Old Spice’s bottle can be seen above. I don’t actually own a bottle of this stuff though with the affordable price tag, I really have no reason not to. The shape is reminiscent of a cola bottle but it works for this stuff and actually looks kind of nice. I can imagine that sitting on someone’s vanity. Wait, do men have vanities? I’ll just call them sink counter. Bottom line, the bottle works, it looks fine, it’s a good design for what it is and good for what you pay for.

Fragrance Family: Oriental

Notes: Orange, lemon, spices, clary sage, aldehydes, cinnamon, carnation, geranium, jasmine, heliotrope, pimento berry, vanilla, musk, cedar, frankincense, benzoin, tonka bean, ambergris.

Don’t knock it ’til you try it. Old Spice is a confident little classic number that’s been around since 1937. Yeah, the Old Spice really is old and I have to say, it’s aged rather well.

Reviewed in This Post: Old Spice, 2010, Eau de Cologne.

Aquolina Chocolovers

Posted on by

How do you round out a week of reviews for one of the world’s most famous and respected fragrance houses? Easy.  Chocolovers. Chocolovers

In Bottle: Very sweet, rather cloying, chocolatey, milky, nutty fragrance with a splash of orange and lemon juice. I didn’t expect anything different from this and it really delivered.

Applied: The orange and lemon curdle the fragrance on initial application and I wholly believe Chocolovers would have been better off without it. Once the lemon recedes you’re left with–well, what else? A smooth, creamy chocolate milk with hazlenut dashed in there for a little added complexity. Chocolovers smells like a candybar. A gooey, rich, wafer-stuffed candy bar that probably has a thousand calories in it, is probably bad for you. Once you’ve eaten it, you aren’t left feeling satisfied but you do feel a little guilty. That’s my experience with Chocolovers. Big strong smell upfront, fleeting feeling of guilt in the back. The chocolate note in this smells as expected, it’s a synthetic and it’s a clearly detectable one which would harm the fragrance’s enjoyability but come on–the thing is called Chocolovers, how serious can it possibly be? It smells all right for what it is; a fun, cute, throw it on during an off-day fragrance. Just be warned, it is powerful. Chocolovers will fade in a few hours to a milky, dusty fragrance that seems to float up out of nowhere.

Extra: I’m not a fan of the Chocolovers fragrance and feel Aquolina got their Pink Sugar fragrance just right with how fun and simple and unapologetic it was. But the Blue Sugar flanker and now this one? They aren’t very original or unique from one another. They are all gourmands of some relative state and they all echo the Pink Sugar base.

Design: Chocolovers’ design is an interesting thing to love. I can’t get past how just how little it cares about being serious. Pink Sugar had a cute little motif. Blue Sugar was subdued and rather boring. Chocolovers just takes literal interpretation to the extreme with its bottle. Little wavy hearts on the glass. A chocolate heart on top of the cap. A red sprayer nozzle. There’s not a single serious thing you can say about this fragrance.

Fragrance Family: Gourmand

Notes: Bergamot, orange, lemon, lily of the valley, coriander, hazelnut, vanilla, malt, musk.

It’s great when the first thing I thought when I saw the notes list was, “Really? Coriander?” The second thing was to look up on Google how many flanker products Chocolovers has and it turns out the fragrance has been made into  body butter. Now that I can see.

Reviewed in This Post: Chocolovers, 2008, Eau de Toilette.

Britney Spears Radiance

Posted on by

I’m still perplexed about the popularity of Britney Spears fragrances. The only scent I could take from her line was Midnight Fantasy which has its on and off days and became too synthetic and sweet for my tastes near the end of its 30ml bottle lifespan. Still I went into Radiance hoping for a surprise. I always approach celebrity scents hoping for surprise and always end up a little disappointed. Radiance

In Bottle: Sweet tuberose scent with a slight tart berry top note that isn’t particularly interesting but does remind me a bit of other sweet tuberose based scents. Namely, Baby Phat Dare Me.

Applied: Berries up front with a slightly tart treatment that is mildly reminiscent of Tommy Girl with less zing. The berries fade into the mid-stage where the tuberose amps up and leads a mild jasmine note in with it. The two create a sweet, and creamy tuberose-heavy floral heart stage that smells like it can’t decide whether it wants to be sensual and sophisticated or sweet and fun. But Radiance pitches an interesting middle ground and ends up smelling okay. Not great. Just okay. The orange blossom flares up now and again in the mid-stage but aside from that Radiance is a quicker fader into the base with a clean, very sheer ending.

Extra: Britney’s perfume line is one of the most popular fragrances for young women and girls. She’s got the market pretty much cornered with her fragrances. And this goes particularly for Fantasy with its huge fruity sweet personality.

Design: Not a fan of the bottle. I think it looks a bit garish to be honest. It’s a heavy glass bottle with a colored jewel motif that reminds me of Bejeweled, the Flash-based game. As stated, the bottle is glass but the cap is a blue plastic jewel that fits over the sprayer. I just can’t get on board with these types of over the top designs and I have yet to really like a Britney Spears perfume line bottle design and Radiance is no exception.

Fragrance Family: Sweet Floral

Notes: Berries, tuberose, jasmine, orange blossom, iris, musk.

Keep doing whatever it is that you do, Britney because it’s obviously working out for you. As for Radiance, it’s not my idea of a good time.

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

Sugababes Tempt

Posted on by

I saw this thing laying about the internet and thought to myself, “Are you serious? Is that another Fantasy perfume I haven’t heard of yet?” Thankfully no, this isn’t an unknown bottle of yet another Britney Spears Fantasy. Tempt is actually a member of the Sugababes collection of fragrances. Being Canadian, unsavvy when it comes to music, and a general hermit, I had no idea who the Sugababes were. But I smelled Tempt anyway–in a safe, closed environment from a small sampler vial.

In Bottle: Fruity floral. If there’s anything I wholly expected from Tempt, it was this. Nothing exciting about this, it’s just  “that fruity floral smell” you can get anywhere else.

Applied: Berries up top, layered with a sort of sticky sweet tea scent that’s helped along in its tea-journey by blackcurrant that tries its best to bring the sugar down to tolerable levels but doesn’t succeed. It reminds me of a sweeter, sillier version of Tommy Girl. The midstage isn’t anything to phone home about either. It’s more fruits, more sweetness, a touch of rose to give this thing some florals, and an orchid note that might as well not be there because you have to dig to find it. The dry down is a typical, rather boring way-too-sweet vanilla scent that’s still too sticky for me to handle seriously.

Extra: Apparently the Sugababes is a pop group from the UK. No wonder I haven’t heard of it. Well, if nothing else, Tempt’s smell matches what the band seems to be all about. It’s definitely sugar.

Design: Ugh. I thought the Fantasy bottles were ugly to begin with, why on earth would there be another fragrance line to borrow design elements from it? The shape is awful and it’s made worse by the lack of embellishments.

Fragrance Family: Fruity Floral

Notes: Berries, blackcurrant, ced tea, rose, orchid, vanilla, musk.

Too sweet, too boring, terrible bottle. I’ll say what I always say for fragrances like this. It is by no means a bad smell. But it is definitely synthetic and unoriginal. If you like sweet fruity things, this is up your alley. If you are looking for something a little more sophisticated, this shouldn’t even be considered.

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

Bath and Body Works Twisted Peppermint

Posted on by

With Christmas coming up, I thought it would be nice to visit an old favorite of mine and a favorite of a lot of other people too. Bath and Body Works’ Twisted Peppermint is a seasonal offer that smells just like its name; peppermint candies. Twisted Peppermint

In Bottle: Strong sweet, sugary peppermint candy. There’s not a whole lot to say about Twisted Peppermint that you can’t get from immediately smelling the fragrance. It’s strong, it’s festive, it’s sweet, it’s just plain fun.

Applied: Twisted Peppermint goes on with a big blast of peppermint followed by the sweetening sugar that layers on top of the fragrance, sitting in place until the vanilla comes in seconds later. There is no progression to this fragrance and very little in the way of complexity. As stated, it’s just plain, easy, simple fun. The peppermint in this lends a nice cooling, tingling effect to add some extra zing to the fragrance. This makes a great cooling spray for summer but you might be a little out of season wearing this stuff in July. It really does smell like peppermint candy and candy canes. The vanilla is the typical synthetic kind, but it’s easy to ignore that when you first spray it on. It will become apparent that this stuff isn’t composed of the highest quality materials as the scent ages, taking on that “something is off” smell that you get with synthetic scents sometimes. I find the synthetic smell distracting during the fragrance’s final stages and find it near impossible to tolerate in the lotion. In the perfume, it is easier to ignore. This stuff does not have a whole lot of lasting power as it will fade on you within a couple of hours. But for a couple of hours you can at least smell like a festive candy cane.

Extra: Twisted Peppermint comes in a variety of products. My favorites include the lotion and 3-in-1 shampoo, body wash, and bubble bath. These two, plus the body mist, have that same peppermint oil tingling effect that I really like.

Design: Twisted Peppermint has gone through a few makeovers as far as I can tell. Its current incarnation is as a plastic globe containing a shimmer mist. The sprayer nozzle is a little wonky as it is made out of plastic and it is trying to disperse sparkles as well as scent. I sometimes have to wipe the nozzle opening to clean the sparkles off or the sprayer will dribble product instead of spray it. I have an old bottle that lacks the sparkly business whose sprayer nozzle works much better.

Fragrance Family: Gourmand

Notes: Peppermint, sugar, vanilla.

If you’re looking for a fragrance that’s candy-like and will remind you of the holidays, then this stuff should be right up your alley. I think it’s kind of cute that Twisted Peppermint’s tagline on the bottle is, “Mint with an attitude”. There’s no attitude to this. It’s just a peppermint candy. A sweet, delicious peppermint candy scent that’s done rather well.

Reviewed in This Post: Twisted Peppermint, 2009, Body Mist.

Parfums de Coeur Vampire

Posted on by

I don’t know why I’m drawn to do reviews of some of these more silly fragrances sometimes but you can chalk this one up to curiosity. Like that time I smelled Danielle Steel and decided I didn’t like her. Vampire

In Bottle: Citrus with a bunch of florals, rather sweet, with a violent note that makes me think of sticky flowers floating in cough syrup.

Applied: Goes on as a citrus with a sweetened pile of sugar. Again, that sticky flowers in cough syrup scent. It’s quite distracting as Vampire seems to want to get sweeter and sweeter on me as it slowly introduces more and more flowers. But it hits a road block before it goes too far with the chocolate note coming in to join the fray. What I end up with is a sickly sweet floral with chocolate slathered on top. The dry down occurs about nine hours later because Vampire has one major thing going for it and that is that this scent will not give up. It’s strong and it’ll last a very long time. Anyway, the dry down is remarkably pleasant if somewhat banal as the sweetness finally goes away giving the base of Vampire a rather pleasant mix of sandalwood and gentle amber. But that’s after you survive the top and middle notes.

Extra: Parfums de Coeur etched a place for themselves making “Designer Impostors” a somewhat different concept than counterfeits–I guess. Impostor fragrances basically try their best to match the scent of a designer perfume. Often they are sold at a cheaper price in cheaper packaging as is the case with Parfums de Coeur. Whether you approve of this practice or not, Parfums de Coeur offers a few “Designer Impostors” and a few original fragrances, such as Vampire.

Design: The bottle design for vampire is obviously not for me. I’m not entirely sure what was being accomplished here but the bottling is a major turn off. I like simple though, and this is anything but. It seems like the bottling took a strange mix of Cashmere Mist and original Chloe’s packaging and mashed in a muscles or veins motif onto the glass.

Fragrance Family: Floral Gourmand

Notes: Clementine, plum flower, wisteria, violet, chocolate cosmos, sandalwood, amber, musk.

I don’t think cheapie is going to do it for me. I already have a cheapie in my top ten favorites with Plumdrop and Vampire is geared at way too young an audience for me to pull off. It’s sweet, it’s a gourmand, it doesn’t make me think of vampires or sultriness. But it is very young, and the price is right.

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

Katy Perry Purr

Posted on by

Lovely. I get a little splodge of the most anticipated Purr by pin-up girl by day and pop star by night, Katy Perry, but I can’t get my hands on a vintage Chypre de Coty? Slap a sad face on me and let’s review Purr by Katy Perry.  Purr

In Bottle: Sweet peaches and a mix of florals that I’ve smelled pretty much everywhere by now. It’s a celebrity fragrance so I didn’t expect genius.

Applied: Initial flair of fruitiness up top. I get mostly peaches, sweet and ripe and big with a vaguely familiar synthetic apple note tossed in there with a tiny dash of tartness slathered with a thin coating of sweetness and dipped in a hint of creaminess. That creaminess sticks with the fragrance throughout its cycle. Now the peach in Purr isn’t grown up peach like Mitsouko. Actually, I can’t imagine why anyone would think they’d get any sort of Mitsouko out of Purr so I’m not even sure why I bothered to mention this in order to discern that no, you aren’t wearing this to meet the Queen. The peach in Purr is this is fuzzy peaches candy thing. Fun and girly and not at all serious. After a few minutes the fragrance takes its fruity opening and shifts into the midstage where you’re greeted by a banal blend of jasmine and gardenia. The sweetness is still lingering there. It’s a light sweetness though, not heavy and obnoxious but nothing to phone home about either. The mid-stage blandly shuffles along, smelling pleasant enough, and hits a rose note near the end of the mid-stage’s lifespan, falling headfirst into the very predictable sandalwood and vanilla base with traces of the mid-stage florals hanging about.

Extra: I don’t think Purr is anything to jump up for joy about as I didn’t expect much else from Katy Perry. Nothing to her as a person or a singer, this is just your run of the mill fruity floral celebuscent that hasn’t changed its formula since every other recent celebuscent. It’s an average fruity floral at best, with a variety of other fruity florals doing this tired fragrance genre much better justice. And as much as it pains me to say it, you’d probably get a better reaction scent from the Paris Hilton line. Me? I’ll wait and see what Lady Gaga does.

Design: Purr hasn’t been released where I live  yet so I haven’t handled the bottle, but I have seen photos of the bottle and I have to say it’s not my style. It really, really isn’t. The bottle  is in the shape of a purple cat with a heart hanging from its collar and jeweled eyes. You take the cat’s head off to gain access to the spraying mechanism as far as I can tell. I mean, it’s cute, but way beyond my demographic.

Fragrance Family: Fruity Floral

Notes: Peach, bamboo, apple, gardenia, jasmine, freesia, Bulgarian rose, vanilla orchid, white amber, sandalwood, skin musk, coconut.

Purr smells like so many different generic fragrances that I don’t think anyone should really bother with it if they’re looking for that sweet fruity floral. Unless you love Katy Perry’s work, her perfume is passable but highly uninteresting, and you are better off looking elsewhere for a fruity floral fragrance.

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

Aquolina Blue Sugar

Posted on by

Blue Sugar, as you may have already guessed by now is Aquolina’s male version of their female fragrance, Pink Sugar. The basic gist of this stuff is Pink Sugar with a slap of woods thrown in.  Blue Sugar

In Bottle: Most people who enjoy Blue Sugar like the woodsy notes added in. I have to disagree as the mixture of candy and wood is a bizarre blend for me.

Applied: I smell the embodiment of Pink Sugar’s caramel and candy on initial application but give Blue Sugar a few seconds and you’ll start to notice the woods coming in to play. The opening is a slightly fresher interpretation of Pink Sugar as the bergamot gives the fragrance a slight hint of sophistication. Only a very slight hint, mind you. Now, I’m not a big fan of sweet, woody scents as it makes me think of medicinal herbs steeping over a fire. A nice visual but a pretty scary olfactory experience that makes me think of wilted plants, bark, and trees covered in caramel. There’s a slick sweetness to this that, I admit, does great when toned down and it makes me wish Pink Sugar smelled more like the lighter sweetness. AS it is, I can’t get on board with the sweet woody fragrance. The dry down is a fairly easy story of sweet wood with the woods coming up a bit more. I like the dry down, it strikes a more fair balance between sugar and tree rather than the slugfest the middle stage was advertisting.

Extra: Aquolina is most famous for their Pink Sugar fragrance but in addition to Blue Sugar they have a gourmand fragrance called Chocolovers which, you guessed it, smells like chocolate.

Design: Bottled in a similar fashion as Pink Sugar. Blue Sugar boasts a tall blue cylinder of scent and like the Pink Sugar bottle, it reminds me of packaging for a shampoo or a body mist rather than a perfume.

Fragrance Family: Sweet Woods

Notes: Bergamot, tangerine, star anise, ginger, licorice, patchouli, lavender, heliotrope, coriander, cedar, tonka bean.

Not much to be expected of this fragrance and sometimes I wonder if it was truly necessary to have a men’s and women’s version of a perfume that was largely straightforward in the first place. Between the two, I will stick (or stink!) with the pink girly version.

Reviewed in This Post: Aquolina Blue Sugar, 2009, Eau de Toilette.

Bath and Body Works White Citrus

Posted on by

What can I really say about White Citrus that hasn’t already been said? White Citrus is one of Bath and Body Works’ more simple compositions that’s billed as a modern take on a classic citrus fragrance. Not sure what they mean about a modern take on a classic citrus as this just pretty much smells like a citrus perfume. Nothing classic about it. But it is very good.  White Citrus

In Bottle: Sharp citrus, tangy lemon zest and a bit of sweet tangerine. There isn’t a lot of sweetness in this but there’s a tiny amount that helps to balance out the tartness a little bit.

Applied: Big white florals and citrus fragrance. Heavy emphasis on the citrus. I mostly get the lemon zest out of this fragrance which is tempered a bit by the lily and freesia present in the fragrance. The freesia helps calms the tartness of this scent a little with its floral sweetness as White Citrus lays on the skin like a clean, sheer coating of freshness. This is a nice, competent citrus-based scent with a good level of initial projection. However, due to its citrus-heavy top notes, the fragrance doesn’t last very long or project very far on me so I end up having to layer, layer, layer. White Citrus remains predominantly floral and lemon until it calms down near the end by introducing a barely noticeable and very sheer woody scent on the exit.

Extra: White Citrus is also available in a white variety of other products from Bath and Body Works. This includes lotions, body mists, travel size items, hand soap and probably much more. So if you’re worrying about the scent fading fast, get the lotion, the shower gel, and start layering. For those of you interested in this fragrance and want something that lasts a bit longer, Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs’ Whitechapel is a citrus-heavy perfume oil that has a few familiar components to White Citrus.

Design: White Citrus is bottled in much the same way as other Bath and Body Works eau de toilette fragrances. A no nonsense rectangular glass bottle with a design printed on the front. In White Citrus’ case, the design on the front appears to be some sort of explosion of green, or a graphical representation of a halved green citrus fruit.

Fragrance Family: Fresh

Notes: Lemon zest, tangerine, grapefruit, mandarin, lily of the valley, apricot, freesia, waterlily, ginger flower, woods, musk.

I had a small bottle of White Citrus lotion and quickly grew tired of it. A nice clean and fresh fragrance is good for an average day but White Citrus wasn’t as pleasing a citrus-based fragrance as I had hoped.

Reviewed in This Post: White Citrus, 2009, Eau de Toilette.