Parfums de Coeur Fireworks

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With a weather related headache, I had to question whether it was a good idea for me to test another Sexiest Fantasies fragrance from Parfums de Coeur considering the last fragrance I reviewed from them gave me a headache.

Fireworks

Fireworks

In Bottle: Very sweet, very peachy and fruity with an equal part vanilla and not a whole lot else.

Applied: Super sweet peach and vanilla. The vanilla gets even stronger as the fragrance ages until all you smell is pretty much synthetic vanilla with a fruity background. I’m not getting much else but fruity vanilla out of this which is a bit of a disappointment. In terms of individual notes, they’re all drowned out by the very strong vanilla. The dry down ends up as a plain old synthetic vanilla fragrance.

Extra: Fireworks and a lot of the other scents I have in this line are just body sprays. Fireworks, itself, is very strongly scented so don’t feel that a body spray won’t last as long or be as strong as a full on fragrance. This particular scent can hold its own in terms of longevity and power.

Design: Packaged in a simple black bottle. No frills or thrills here. It’s functional and tries to dress itself up a little, but it’s still essentially a body spray bottle.

Fragrance Family: Fruity

Notes: Strawberry, peach, vanilla.

Not much to say about this one, it’s fruity and sweet and that’s about the start and end of it. It’s not my kind of thing as it’s too sweet and one-dimensional, but it will smell great to the right person.

Reviewed in This Post: Fireworks,  2009, Body Spray.

Parfums de Coeur Strawberries and Champagne

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Having found myself the recipient of a set of these Parfum de Coeur fragrances, I decided to give these a try. The fact that Parfum de Coeur’s last scent experience didn’t go over well with me doesn’t mean none of their other fragrances won’t.

Strawberries and Champagne

Strawberries and Champagne

In Bottle: Smells like really sweet strawberry hard candy with a weird floral blanket.

Applied: When I was a kid I had a doll that came with a tiny bottle of perfume. The doll was great, the perfume smelled exactly like this. It was overly sweet, it was some sort of berry and it had florals thrown into it in an attempt to make it smell a little more interesting than just extremely potent strawberry candy. But what the florals just end up doing is give me a headache and make the fragrance smell especially synthetic. There is not much of a progression to this. It starts sweet and strawberry, and it ends sweet and strawberry.

Extra: Apparently there’s a large number of fragrances that also belong to this line of Sexiest Fantasies. I have to admit this Strawberries and Champagne doesn’t remind me of sexy fantasies.

Design: Rather uninspiring design that reminds me a bit of the 90s in a retro nostalgia way. This isn’t a full on perfume–it is just a body spray so I don’t expect too much of its design. The design is functional. It works. It just looks very dated and a bit cheesy.

Fragrance Family: Fruity

Notes: Florals, champagne, strawberry.

I had actually been looking forward to seeing if I would get their Skin Musk fragrance in my grab bag as it seemed to be pretty well received, but it was not to be.

Reviewed in This Post: Strawberries and Champagne,  2010, Body Spray.

P.S. And with this rather underwhelming fragrance, I hope you all have a great New Year!

Parfums de Coeur Vampire

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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.