Bath & Body Works Japanese Cherry Blossom

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Japanese Cherry Blossom, to me, holds the prestigious title of most wearable powdery oriental floral. It’s a very well-made and well-loved clean, powder floral fragrance that almost anyone can pull off. It’s extremely versatile which makes it a fantastic work or school fragrance. Japanese Cherry Blossom

In Bottle: Powdery white floral with an airy quality that gives of a clean aroma with a slight dewy fruity note hovering beneath the floating powdered flowers.

Applied: Clean burst of florals and dewy fruits. The fruits are not at all heavy and are very quick to burn off. What’s left is a lovely, light powdered and clean floral fragrance that’s smooth and surprisingly complex. Japanese Cherry Blossom is the floral for people who don’t like florals. It’s got enough flowers in it to please those who enjoy flowers and it goes on light enough to be all right for those who  hate flowers. This fragrance is like a big soft bag of cherry blossom petals. Your dry down ushers in a bit of muskiness and amber to it as the fragrance transitions to a very well thought out base of floral sandalwood.

Extra: Over the years the Japanese Cherry Blossom scent has spawned a huge line of bath and body products including perfumes, body mists, shower gels, dry oil sprays, lotions, candles, and so on.

Design: Japanese Cherry Blossom’s bottle is the same shape as other Bath and Body Works eau de toilette bottles. It has black and white cherry blossom designs on the glass. Bath and Body Works tends to redesign their product lines once every few years so the bottle you’re looking at now may not look the same three or four years down the road.

Fragrance Family: Oriental Floral

Notes: Asian pear, fuji apple, ume plum, japanese cherry blossom, butterfly lily, Kyoto rose, mimosa, hedione, vanilla rice, amber, silk musk, cinnamon incense, Himalayan cedarwood, sandalwood.

I’ll give it to Japanese Cherry Blossom to be an oriental. But it’s not rich and deep and heady like what you would normally associate with an oriental. It’s a very cleaned up, very light version.

Reviewed in This Post: Japanese Cherry Blossom, 2010, Eau de Toilette.

Bath & Body Works Warm Vanilla Sugar

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Warm Vanilla Sugar is one of the lead selling fragrances from Bath & Body Works. This, along with Japanese Cherry Blossom, aretwo of the most predominant fragrances I smell on younger women. It’s easy to wear, it’s affordable and it’s a pleasant enough foody vanilla fragrance. Warm Vanilla Sugar

In Bottle: Someone loaded this up with a mountain of sugar and vanilla because that is all I can smell. It’s a big dollop of that, now very familiar to me, faux vanilla scent.

Applied: Extremely sweet, almost cloyingly so, upon application as the very delicate floral notes in this evaporate almost immediately. What I get with the rest of the scent is a hugely predominant sweet vanilla that just won’t quit. If you have smelled a vanilla based fragrance, you’ll have smelled the vanilla in Warm Vanilla Sugar. It is the same sweet, foody, vanilla that you’ve likely experienced before. It’s reminiscent of a lot of vanilla based scents that I can recognize in Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab vanillas and Comptoir sud Pacifique vanillas. It’s the same vanillas that tend to have that slightly plastic feel to it. Warm Vanilla Sugar, nevertheless, is a great little gourmand with a nice tasty edge to it. Like you’re drinking vanilla milk and smelling a puffy vanilla pastry. This is yummy smelling stuff and let’s face it, you don’t wear Warm Vanilla Sugar to get several layers of complexity in the ingredients. This goes on smelling like vanilla milk, it arrives mid-stage with vanilla milk, and it’ll dry down with vanilla milk and a bit of clean dry musk to keep things a little interesting.

Extra: This stuff smells great on the right person so don’t take my aversion to it the wrong way. It’s a really great baked vanilla goods fragrance to it and is one of the nicest, most pleasant and versatile gourmands I’ve smelled.

Design: Warm Vanilla Sugar is bottled in a similar way as other Bath and Body Works eau de toilettes. A nice, classic looking glass bottle with the fragrance’s name on the glass and a plastic cap to protect the sprayer. Nothing too fancy. It just plain old works.

Fragrance Family: Gourmand

Notes: Florals, vanilla absolute, basmati rice, coconut, heliotrope, musk, veltol, sandalwood.

You might be wondering to yourself what in the world ‘veltol’ is. It’s a food additive meant to give things a freshly baked scent. So in this case, if you think you’re smelling a vanilla pastry, that’s the vanilla absolute mixed with the veltol talking.

Reviewed in This Post: Warm Vanilla Sugar, 2010, Eau de Toilette.

Popular Young Fragrances

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The following is a list of popular recommendations for young women interested in popular perfumes and wondering what everyone else is smelling like. In no particular order:

Harajuku Lovers Ad

Harajuku Lovers Ad

  • Britney Spears Fantasy
  • Britney Spears Midnight Fantasy
  • Britney Spears Curious
  • Juicy Couture, Viva la Juicy
  • Juicy Couture, Juicy Couture
  • Harajuku Lovers Collection
  • Aquolina, Pink Sugar
  • Jennifer Lopez, Glow
  • Jennifer Lopez, Live
  • Jennifer Lopez, Live Luxe
  • Dolce and Gabbana, Light Blue
  • Miss Dior Cherie
  • Dior J’Adore
  • Vera Wang, Princess
  • DKNY, Be Delicious
  • Paris Hilton, Heiress
  • Paris Hilton, Paris Hilton
  • Paris Hilton, Can Can
  • Calvin Klein, ck One
  • Calvin Klein, Euphoria
  • Marc Jacobs, Daisy
  • Marc Jacobs, Lola
  • Ed Hardy, Woman
  • Ed Hardy, Love & Luck
  • Ralph Lauren, Hot
  • Ralph Lauren, Ralph Rocks
  • Burberry, The Beat
  • Burberry, Brit
  • Gucci, Envy Me
  • Gucci, Flora
  • Chloe, Chloe
  • Escada, Marine Groove
  • Escada, Ocean Lounge
  • Escada, Sunset Heat
  • Thierry Mugler, Angel
  • Clinique, Happy
  • Hollister, August
  • Victoria’s Secret PINK Collection
  • Victoria’s Secret, Love Spell
  • Victoria’s Secret, Appletini
  • Victoria’s Secret, Juiced Berry
  • Victoria’s Secret, Sexy Little Things
  • Victoria’s Secret, Sexy Little Things Noir
  • Victoria’s Secret Dream Angels Collection
  • Bath and Body Works, Warm Vanilla Sugar
  • Bath and Body Works, Japanese Cherry Blossom
  • Bath and Body Works, Moonlight Path
  • Bath and Body Works, Coconut Lime Verbena
  • Tommy Hilfiger, Tommy Girl
  • Marc Jacobs, Daisy
  • Marc Jacobs, Lola
  • Viktor and Rolf, Flowerbomb
  • Anna Sui Dolly Girl
  • Anna Sui Secret Wish
  • Michael Kors, Hollywood

Notice any trends? First of all, fruity florals are quite well represented in the above list. So is sweetness and candy, and benign fresh and citrus scents. Which explains practically 80% of the things the perfume industry has put out in recent years.

Know something that should be on this list? Please leave a comment. I’m positive I’ve missed something!

Bath and Body Works Twilight Woods

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Despite all these things I have with the word Twilight or related to the hour of twilight, I really do not have any affection for the popular book/movie phenomenon. Really. Though I can’t help but think that this fragrance, in particular was a well-timed release by Bath and Body Works to capitalize on the Twilight craze at the time. Twilight Woods

In Bottle: Warmth is what Twilight Woods is. It’s warmth first, vanilla second, and woodsy last. And that’s just from the bottle. This smells clean, sweet, comforting and quite competent.

Applied: Opens as a fruity vanilla woodsy scent and starts moving into creamy vanilla woods scent with the frangipani. Twilight Woods lingers in that area for a bit before the fruitiness comes back for an encore and bows out with a nice watery, sweet woodsy vanilla scent that’s very pleasant. This smells like a really good fragrance to cozy up next to fire to. It’s nice, pleasant, very smooth and creamy and has excellent longevity and moderately good projection.

Extra: This is probably my favorite fragrance from Bath and Body Works. They talked about this and P.S. I Love You being two of their ventures into more abstract fragrance. Before, Bath and Body Works had fairly simple to decipher fragrances that were fairly linear. I was partial to their Pink Grapefruit body mist.

Design: Cute bottle with a nicely detailed image of a tree laid over the glass so when you’re looking at the bottle on the right side, you get a very pretty looking design. The cap is also quite nice. The entire design is slick and functional and most of Bath and Body Works’ eau de toilettes now come in bottles shaped like this one. The sprayer is functional and works just fine.

Fragrance Family: Woodsy Gourmand

Notes: Juicy berry, sparkling mandarin, coconut, creamy frangipani, soft mimosa, wet honeysuckle, wild freesia, apricot nectar, oud wood, skin musk captive, vanilla milk, and warm woods.

How do you like that notes list telling you what each  note is supposed to smell like? Frankly, I kind of like it but acknowledge its unnecessariness (it’s a word now).

Reviewed in This Post: Twilight Woods, 2009, Eau de Toilette.