Victoria’s Secret Appletini

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Appletini is a part of Victoria’s Secret Double Body Mist Beauty Rush line. The product itself is a fun little thing with a layer of color and scent resting over a layer of moisturizing oil. You use it by shaking it up, combining the separated components and spray it on yourself. Appletini

In Bottle: Appletini smells like apple Jolly Ranchers. Remember those hard candies that taste like fake fruit flavoring? The green one in those candies is Appletini’s very close cousin.

Applied: Straight up apple candy with an added jolt of sugar. Appletini is simple and painfully sweet. There’s nothing else to this fragrance but a huge apple Jolly Rancher scent and probably some sugar added in just so you get the full effect but the big, lush, brick of candy. Unlike Plumdrop, I find Appletini to be a far simpler construction with very little in the way of complexity. It is what it is and it won’t ever be anything more. I get tired of straight up fruits. As I smell more and more things, I find the fruity florals to still be pleasant–when they’re done right–while the straight up fruit scents outlive their novelty and I move on. Appletini is one of those straight up fruits that’s outlived its novelty to me.

Extra: Appletini is a perfectly fine fragrance, for sure, if you like scents in the same skein as DKNY Be Delicious or Nina Ricci Nina. But in the case of those two perfumes, they had other notes propping up the apple. Appletini smells like one note and if you don’t like that one note enough then you probably don’t want to go for this. Otherwise, this is great for people who want to smell like apple candy.

Design: Appletini and Plumdrop are bottled and packaged the same way except for the color of the liquid. Appletini has a vibrant green color. You get a sturdy plastic spray bottle with a metal sprayer and a plastic cap to protect the sprayer. Not a glass perfume bottle but it is a very nice and very competent presentation for what is, essentially, a body mist. One thing to note is that, unlike most other body mists, the Beauty Rush Double Body Mists line have their sprayer nozzles factory sealed onto the bottles so you cannot remove the sprayer (very easily anyway) and reuse the bottle when the fragrance is all done.

Fragrance Family: Fruity

Notes: Green apple, sugar.

I find myself able to tolerate this fragrance but I don’t like it much. It’s just too simple for my tastes. Each full size Beauty Rush Double Body mist has approximately 250ml.

Reviewed in This Post: Appletini, 2009, Oil and Body Mist.

Guerlain Eau de Fleurs de Cedrat

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Eau de Fleurs de Cédrat is probably one of my favorite Guerlain fragrances. So it’s a good bit of fortune that I came upon it recently at La Signature at Disney Epcot in Florida. Eau de Fleurs de Cédrat is a classic from 1920 that is available at better stocked Guerlain counters, but more exclusively than Shalimar. Nothing wrong with you, Shalimar.  I just see you everywhere. Eau de Fleurs de Cedrat

In Bottle: Lemons! I hope you like lemons because Eau de Fleurs de Cédrat is a big lemon tree. Green and crisp and citrus and fresh. Lacking the notable Guerlain base but still so lovely all the same.

Applied: Sweet lemon candy is a strange introduction into Eau de Fleurs de Cédrat but it’s a welcome one as the fragrance matures immediately into a cool lemon. As this is a pretty simple mixture with low concentration Eau de Fleurs de Cédrat is a fleeting scent, even on clothing. It’s even more fleeting on the skin. After the lemon candy dissolves a bit, the lemon dominates the scene and an hour later, you’re left with a soft light, floral quality that’s just barely there and extremely fleeting. Don’t wear this if you want longevity. This fragrance has no base stage and I hesitate to say it may not have much of a mid-stage either. Wear if you want a quick fresh burst of fragrance from a sophisticated lemon-like note. I’ve had trouble with lemon notes in other fragrances so I was pleased to note that cedrat is not lemon necessarily but a close relative that smells much better on me. The cedrat in Eau de Fleurs de Cédrat is a lovely, soft, crisp little thing that won’t overstay its welcome or yell the entire time it’s there.

Extra: Eau de Fleurs de Cédrat is pretty much what its name suggestions. It’s a flower and citron. It’s not trying to be anything else and if you do expect more complexity, this isn’t the place to look. The cedrat is similar to a lemon but has an icy and more candy-like fragrance. It smells remarkably similar to a lemon, but in a fragrance it couldn’t behave more differently.

Design: Eau de Fleurs de Cédrat comes in a bee bottle design as a 100ml bottle. Lovely molded glass with bee designs on the glass itself. It both looks and feels luxurious , which is why I adore the bee bottles so much.

Fragrance Family: Fresh Citrus

Notes: Citron, white florals.

La Signature, also known by many Epcot patrons as, “That store that sells really expensive French perfume that I’ve never heard of”, is probably the best place to go–short of Paris–for a big selection of Guerlain fragrances and their cosmetics line. I don’t  use their cosmetics but the amount of Guerlain perfumes they’ve got there is fantastic.

Reviewed in This Post: Eau de Fleurs de Cédrat, circa 2008, Eau de Cologne.

Vera Wang Princess

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Vera Wang Princess is a wildly popular girly fragrance released in 2006 and marketed toward women in my age bracket, the late teens to mid-twenties girl. It seems those of us in this bracket are wild about fruity, floral, candy scents because Princess is all of those things lumped into one big, purple package. Princess

In Bottle: Fruity top notes blended with clean girly florals. Very sweet, very feminine, and extremely young and lighthearted scent. There’s something a bit musky about it too.

Applied: Princess is a weird mix of foody floral peppiness and clean musk. It’s trying to go two ways and I’m not really sure that’s working out for it. However, what Princess does get right is a pleasant, sweet light floral swirling in pretty chocolate cake batter being mixed in the shower. The musk in this prevents Princess from being an all out gourmand. Dark chocolate mixes very well, I have to admit and this is coming from someone who thinks most chocolate notes smell terrible. The dark chocolate present in Princess is a rich, cakey note that is often one of the first notes to fade on me. Eventually, all I’m left with is sweet and clean musk. This is pretty much what a Disney Princess would smell like.

Extra: Seems like I’m on a sweet and floral binge lately with my fragrances. Princess is one of those scents that, for some reason, goes straight up my nose and blinds my sense of smell after a while. I smell this on everyone though, as its popularity means every young woman in and around my age is rocking the purple heart.

Design: Bottled in a big glass heart, Vera Wang Princess is an appealing look for–well, anyone younger than me who likes that kind of thing. I find the bottle to be  garish and a bit tacky. Cute, yeah, but it’s a big purple heart. You can also pop the cap off and wear it as a ring. The design is just a little too young for me, I think. Or maybe they just completely missed me when they designed this bottle because everyone else seems to love it.

Fragrance Family: Sweet Floral

Notes: Water lily, lady apple, mandarin meringue, golden apricot skin, ripe pink guava, Tahitian flower, wild tuberose, dark chocolate, pink frosting accord, precious amber, forbidden woods, royal musk captive, chiffon vanilla.

Jeez, look at that notes list. It’s pretty much like a recipe for some of the craziest cupcakes ever.

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

Jean Paul Gaultier Ma Dame

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Ma Dame has one of the most addictive and fun commercials I’ve seen as of date. It features international It Girl, Agyness Deyn, with a snappy song and a great dynamic series of cuts showing the rejection of order and embrace of rebel and style. But like all fragrances, I advocate smelling the actual juice. The fragrance itself doesn’t really follow its marketing image. Ma Dame

In Bottle: Fruity, sweet and candy-like. This is floral too and has a strangely clean cotton candy scent to it. Now that’s just a bit odd as when I think cotton candy, the last thing I think is clean but hey, Ma Dame.

Applied: Flowers, sugar and citrus, big chunks of sugar and a ripe orange thrown in for good measure. At the heart of this fragrance is a lovely floral mixed in with the sweetness, like candied flowers covered in citrus clean. There something lemony to this because I can smell a very strong, sharp citrus trying to overcome the other notes. Ma Dame is a strong scent with lots of sillage. It’s projection will reach an impressive distance so use it sparingly if you’re going to be in an enclosed space with others. She’s a nice fragrance though with a bright and spicy little kick to her. The dry down is a sweet woodsy affair.

Extra: Ma Dame is by Jean Paul Gaultier, a French fashion designer well known for his haute couture and conceptual fashion items. You may recognize some of his work adorning the likes of Marilyn Manson.

Design: Ma Dame is bottled in glass with a female figure recessed into it. The figure is a throwback to Gaultier’s usual bottle style in the shape of a woman. The glass has a nice orange pink sheen to it. This one is pleasant to look at but I’ve always found the body shape bottles to be a bit too much.

Fragrance Family: Fruity Floral

Notes: Orange zest, rose, musk, cedar wood.

I wouldn’t refer to Ma Dame as an order rejecting fragrance. It’s a nice tweak from the usual fruity floral fare but it has a long way to go before it rejects anything. The sweet floral is pleasant though it can be a bit much–especially if someone mistakes this fragrance for a wilting lily and bathes themselves in it, thus causing a 100 mile radius cloud of pink scent to perpetually swirl about them like a sugary tornado.

Reviewed in This Post: Ma Dame, 2010, Eau de Toilette.

Viktor and Rolf Flowerbomb

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Flowerbomb is a pretty silly name for a fragrance that features so few flowers in it.  In fact, it smells more like caramel  or cotton candy than anything. You could call this Candy Bomb and it would make more sense. Flowerbomb

In Bottle: Despite the notes listing for this fragrance the first thing you are going to smell is sugar, vanilla, and caramel. Yes, the  fragrance that calls itself Flowerbomb doesn’t open with any florals. It opens with a gourmand. But wait, there’s more if you give her a little more time.

Applied: As you’re settling into your dessert you may start to wonder, where are my flowers? Didn’t I buy Flowerbomb? Why am I tasting a mountain of sugar instead? Then it hits you, jasmine and smoke. Did someone burn the caramel? Wait, I think I found a flower in Flowerbomb! A faint floral whiff of it coming at you from behind the cotton candy bush. It sneaks up on you, this little jasmine note, but its feet is stuck in the sticky candy and caramel mush road. When you finally notice it, you also start to notice the other florals too. Florals who had bloomed and are now dying, sinking into the hot sugar quicksand made of powdered sugar and melted caramels. What I’m trying to say is, Flowerbomb has a sweet, toothache inducing caramel fragrance with a floral heart that’s barely detectable. If you are looking for a floral fragrance, you will be looking hard for it behind the candy. As the heart continues to develop the caramel turns burnt, and the sugar, vanilla and whatever else is making this stuff smell like the underside of an amusement park ride seat gets even sweeter and sweeter until it hits cloying. Not just cloying like Miss Dior Cherie. Flowerbomb is smoky cloying. It stays at cloying well into the dry down when sugar attack mania is still all that you can smell until it fades into nothing but a light smoke trail. Wait, is that patchouli I’m smelling at the very tail end of this? Well, a little late to the show but at least I caught a fleeting glimpse.

Extra: I can’t understand the appeal of this fragrance that was released in 2004. I could understand Angel by Thierry Mugler but Flowerbomb’s youthful jolt of sweetness is beyond me. It polished the grit and character out of the patchouli so what I’m left with is a benign patchouli that can’t tame a sugar overloaded scent. I don’t think I will ever come to fully understand Flowerbomb either and can only commend it as one of the sweetest gourmands ever. If you want sweet and candy-like, you want this stuff. Did I mention this stuff has insane projection and longevity? Go easy on the sprayer, you will smell this for many hours.

Design: Flowerbomb has its rather signature pink grenade shaped bottle. Cute and iconic. A little conceptual if somewhat literal in interpretation. It makes this a nice looking perfume and a good conversation piece. The bottle itself is well designed, has a nice weight, is easy to hold and the sprayer is just dandy.

Fragrance Family: Gourmand

Notes: Bergamot, tea, jasmine, freesia, orchid, rose, patchouli.

Flowerbomb is probably one of the best examples of why the advertisements are not to be taken to heart. Official word labels this as a floral. But it is a gourmand above and all else and almost everyone who has smelled Flowerbomb would tend to agree. It takes a lot of digging, in other words, to find the flowers. This is a great fragrance for a very young audience who likes sweetness, likes caramel, and likes candy with a once in a while faint whiff of florals. It isn’t for me though.

Reviewed in This Post: Flowerbomb, 2009, Eau de Parfum.

Britney Spears Fantasy

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Watch a few perfume collection videos on YouTube and you’ll start to notice a pattern. Everyone owns relatively the same perfumes and one of the most commonly mentioned is Britney Spears Fantasy. That fragrance in the crazy rhinestone studded ball. So of course I went out to smell it. A scent this popular practically begs to be sniffed. Fantasy

In Bottle: Pink, sweet and candy-like. There’s a huge jolt of sugar. I’m thinking Couture Couture’s sugar mountain has a very likely adversary vying for first place in the tooth decay competition. This doesn’t mean that Fantasy smells bad. This stuff is sweet, but it’s not so sweet that it approaches the point of no return; cloying sweet.

Applied: Sweet fruits with a tiny bit of tartness on the opening. The tartness gives way to more sweetness as the gourmand notes come in for a jam. I don’t believe I could smell a big cupcake but I did smell vanilla and white chocolate that lends the fragrance a very nice creaminess. This is a pretty and edible smell that went from fruits to sugar and candy very quickly. The dry down takes a while as longevity in Fantasy was quite good for me. I get clean, sugary musk on dry down.

Extra: The advertising for this fragrance claims that it’s supposed to signify Britney’s more grown up personality. I don’t know what in Fantasy is supposed to represent that but I don’t have any of it. This stuff is extremely popular with young girls and younger women. I wouldn’t call it anything remotely approaching grown up. But it’s not a bad fragrance. It’s fun, it’s girly, it’s young. Just don’t try to take it seriously.

Design: The design, for me, is repellent. It looks like a number of things but none of those things are particularly attractive to me. I suppose the shape is sort of reminiscent of a fortune teller’s ball and the crystals…eh, I don’t know. Everything from the shape, to the crystals, to the detailing around the cap just isn’t doing it for me. Not me with my clean lines and ultra-minimalism. Interestingly enough the belted design around the sprayer featured in the picture above with the crystals is no longer being produced.

Fragrance Family: Gourmand

Notes: Red lychee, golden quince, kiwi, cupcake accord, jasmine petals, white chocolate orchid, creamy musk, enchanted orris root, and sensual woods.

Some of the verbs used for those notes are just silly. But it’s also fun and playful. I can’t take Fantasy seriously. This isn’t the kind of fragrance you wear to a board meeting. However, you could wear Fantasy to the beach, to a hoe down, or a cupcake festival. Basically, if it’s not whimsical and fun it’s not a place Fantasy would fit in.

Reviewed in This Post: Britney Spears, 2010, Eau de Parfum.

Annick Goutal Petite Cherie

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Petite Cherie is one of the most popular offerings from Annick Goutal. It’s sweetness, it’s pink, it’s girly and feminine and young. And at the end of the day you’ll want to smell Petite Cherie to remind yourself that there’s still plenty of time and plenty of joy left in this world. Petite Cherie

In Bottle: Lovely sweet and clean. Petite Cherie is the classiest of the sugary scents. It’s a beautiful light pink sugar scent that’s reminiscent of other sweet fragrances such as Envy Me and Touch of Pink. What sets Petite Cherie apart from the other sweet scents is its clarity and quality.

Applied: Initial burst of pear and other sweet fruits followed quickly by a sugar sweet mid-stage that is very fast to usher in. Petite Cherie lays down the law in sugar clean territory. A territory I really wish makers of sugary sweet fragrances would explore more often. What if you want to smell like a candy and a bar of soap? Usually with sweet fragrances that are billed as clean, I get sweet, sticky and sharp. Petite Cherie is sweet, airy and freshly clean in a green and pink sort of way. It’s like a fruit juice, or a sparkling water with fruity flavors. The dry down is a pleasant pink rose with its lingering sweetness.

Extra: Annick Goutal fragrances tend to have a relatively shorter shelf life than other fragrance lines. Some might attribute this to the higher percentage of natural oils used in the fragrances. Others might venture to suggest that it’s sprayer mechanism not doing a good enough job at sealing the perfume in. Whatever the reason, if you’re going to get an Annick Goutal, be aware that it may not keep as well as other perfumes. This does not mean that it’s inferior, however, just composed a different way.

Design: Bottled in that same lovely iconic Annick Goutal ribbed glass bottle, Petite Cherie shares the same gold ribbon label look as other fragrances in this line. Petite Cherie is also available in an adorable butterfly-style bottle.

Fragrance Family: Sweet Fruit

Notes: Pear, peach, rose musk, cut grass, vanilla.

I find this fragrance to be a very nice sweet clean scent. But I am still looking out for perfumes that aren’t at all sweet. I think my sweet tooth has finally had enough and wants something sweet with more complexity. This is just a beautifully done but rather simple scent that I would pick over any mainstream sweet fragrance.

Reviewed in This Post: Petite Cherie, 2008, Eau de Parfum.