Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Paris

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Paris was one of the very first Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab scents I ever tried. It was in the form of a sampler vial (what they call ‘imps’) and it was, unfortunately, not my cup of tea.

In Bottle: Tons of lavender loaded up with sweetness and a little bit of spice.

Applied: Yep, lots of lavender with a lot of sweetness. I’ve tried other BPAL lotus scents to me and the lotus components always smelled sweet and a little off. It’s off because it smells like chemical sweetness. Like the chemical sweetness you might associate to something you’re not supposed to be near. That’s the kind of sweetness that I’m getting from Paris and it’s very distracting. Lavender has to be mixed just right for me or it ends up distracting or just smells weird in a fragrance. Unfortunately, Paris’ off-sweet lotus mixing with the strong lavender in this fragrance creates an odd sensation that I’m at the dentist and getting ready to have my teeth worked on. As Paris progresses, the fragrance ages into strong off-sweet lavender with a hit of cinnamon. The spice does help to mature the fragrance and make it more appealing, but it’s too little too late for me.

Extra: Paris is a part of BPAL’s Wanderlust series of fragrances.

Design: Pretty much what you’d expect from a BPAL. Paris sits in an amber apothecary bottle with a standard BPAL label and standard black cap.

Fragrance Family: Sweet Aromatic

Notes: Lavender, lotus, cinnamon.

In addition to Paris, I also had a scent that worked out a lot better in my first order from BPAL. Thankfully, The Unicorn was a big hit for me and kept me going on BPAL’s to slowly sample their massive library scents. In that time, I’ve discovered stuff that didn’t work at all and stuff that I really like. Though it’s way too easy to get lost in all the inventory.

Reviewed in This Post: Paris, 2010, Perfume Oil.

Karl Lagerfield Sun Moon Stars

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I saw the bottle, said, ‘No way!’ and decided it had to be tried. I don’t actually have a bottle or held a bottle of this but I do have a somewhat aged sampler vial.

Sun Moon Stars

Sun Moon Stars

In Bottle: Strong fruitiness up top. That’s pretty much all I get.

Applied: Very strong and sweet fruits up top in this fragrance. It’s the candy version of fruit and it’s a bit nauseating. I read some of the reviews on this one before I tried it and many people report a synthetic quality to the fragrance. I almost want to explain that particular problem on the over eager fruit opening. The sweetness does settle down in the mid-stage where the soft florals roll in with a spicy carnation making a pretty big impression to me. The  fragrance ends on a very nicely done vanilla with sandalwood. Normally I’d loathe the standard sandalwood vanilla mixture but the fragrance does it so well that I can’t fault it for taking a trope and doing it justice.

Extra: Sun Moon Stars was released in 1994 as a fabulous floral oriental. The Karl Lagerfield brand is primarily focused on fashion and headed by the iconic man of the same name. Presently the brand is owned by the parent company, Tommy Hilfiger.

Design: I saw the bottle and immediately thought of the Britney Spears Fantasy line. The shapes are so familiar that I couldn’t help but seek this one out. The bottle reportedly contains designs of a sun, a star and a moon as per its name. While I still think the shape is unappealing the blue glass used in the design is quite nice. At the very least, the design is much better put together than anything in the Fantasy line. It’s quite a bit more elegant, actually.

Fragrance Family: Fruity Floral Oriental

Notes: Bergamot, pineapple, orange blossom, lotus, rice, peach, heliotrope, freesia, jasmine, orange blossom, daffodil, lily of the valley, orchid, carnation, iris, sandalwood, cedar, amber, musk, vanilla.

Apparently there was a reformulation of this fragrance at some point. I’m not sure which version of the fragrance I have, but judging from the general disappointment in the reformulation, perhaps I have the old formula.

Reviewed in This Post: Sun Moon Stars,  ~1998 Eau de Toilette.

BnBW Paris Amour

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Another new-ish release from Bath and Body Works, Paris Amour is supposed to be a sophisticated, romantic fruity floral scent. I already have my doubts.

Paris Amour

Paris Amour

In Bottle: Very fruity, the strawberry is really present along with this peach and apple combination. Everything is also very sweet.

Applied: Strawberry all up in my face. There’s the apple blossom kind of waffling about with the peach note as the big fruity opening starts drying off in the mid-stage where the floral notes start to come up. We got a little bit of something green but there is a lot of frangipani to my nose and an equal amount of cleaned up lotus mixed with a tiny hint of cleaned up jasmine. The dry down is not too much more interesting as the floral midstage gives way to a vanilla sandalwood scent that’s been bathed in white musk.

Extra: Paris Amour, like pretty much all other Bath and Body Works fragrances comes in a variety of different products. You can get a lotion, body mist, body cream, shower gel. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a candle version of this scent.

Design: Designed in much the same way as other Bath and Body Works fragrances. Essentially, you’ve got a square bottle with some cute pastel colors and the Eiffel Tower. Nothing too exciting though the design of this particular fragrance is a little unbalanced with the tower standing out a little too much in my opinion.

Fragrance Family: Fruity Floral

Notes: Mandarin, strawberry, cassis, freesia, apple blossom, peach, jasmine, lotus, frangipani, tulip, musk, sandalwood, amber, vanilla, coconut.

Paris Amour is pretty generic for what it is. I don’t know, Bath and Body Works seems to have one hit fragrance and that was Japanese Cherry Blossom. Everything else is kind of like this, “It smells all right” kind of affair with no real sense of the dramatic or the unique. As for whether or not Paris Amour is the sophisticated and romantic scent it was toted as being–eh, not really. This makes me think, “fun”, “girly”, “happy”. Romance and sophistication don’t come into the picture.

Reviewed in This Post: Paris Amour, 2011, Eau de Toilette.

Moschino Glamour

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The bottle for this fragrance reminded me of Nina by Nina Ricci so as I was drawn to the bottle, I also had to see what this stuff smelled like on me. Having little to no luck with Moschino’s I Love Love, I discovered Glamour was actually quite nice.

Glamour

Glamour

In Bottle: Very light but rather nice. It’s a clean, sweet floral fragrance. like fresh laundry or hand soap and something just a tad salty.

Applied: Okay, I’ve got it. This is what washing your hands smells like. At least it’s what Glamour will smell like on the top performance. The saltiness does stick around but as it mingles with the rest of the fragrance it becomes less pronounced. The scent goes into its mid-stage in a soft, gentle, clean floral with a woody cedar note trying to break through and ruin my day. But thankfully the cedar never gets very far as this fragrance can pretty much be defined in one word; weak. Not weak in a bad way but Glamour’s not very interesting, unique, or new. It’s a staid and safe clean floral that’s very soft and very fleeting. The dry down is a pretty dull affair of warmed amber and vanilla with the lingering floral notes from the mid-stage. I can’t quite pick out the florals but they blend together to smell like soap instead of the very dreaded “perfumey” smell where the florals are mixed so haphazardly that the fragrance just smells cheap and bad. Glamour doesn’t smell cheap and bad, it’s just incredibly light and rather boring.

Extra: Glamour’s longevity kind of sucks as she faded on me after about two hours and there was almost no projection. At times it was like I had actually washed my hands instead of sprayed a fragrance on.

Design: I like the bottle and the shape. Like I said, I was drawn to this initially because it looked so similar to my believed Nina by Nina Ricci. There’s a slight hint of burlesque to the design which could be entirely me speaking as there’s nothing remotely burlesque about the fragrance itself.

Fragrance Family: Fresh Floral

Notes: Salt, artemesia, tangerine blossom, pear, rose, lotus, petit grain, hibiscus, orchid, vanilla, amber, cedar, musk.

Me being the clean floral lover, I could see myself rocking out with Glamour. Though rocking out is probably a bad term to refer to this. Glamour’s more of a stay in and have a tea party kind of girl.

Reviewed in This Post: Glamour, 2008, Eau de Parfum.

Donna Karan Pure DKNY

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So here we go, Pure DKNY was slated to be one of the finalists for the 2011 FiFi Awards. Now, I don’t put too much weight into the FiFi awards as a means to determine “best” and “worst” as fragrance preferences differ a lot from person to person. But the FiFi’s certainly are a spectacle. But when Pure DKNY popped up in the ranks I set the spectacle aside for a bit and had to wonder why. Why Pure DKNY? There were other Luxe fragrances released this year that did things so much better.

Pure DKNY

In Bottle: Waifish is probably the best word I can come up for the in bottle experience. This is a light airy vanilla floral treatment that lacks body and personality.

Applied: Bit of creamy sweetness to open up with the vanilla note that quickly devolves into a floral breeze. There’s not enough words in the English dictionary to describe how light this fragrance is. It’s so light that there’s barely an opening, a mid-stage, and drydown. I got the impression of vanilla opening and there is vanilla there but it’s so fleeting and light that it might as well not be there–just like the rest of this fragrance. The mid-stage has a hint of jasmine, something rosy with that bed of vanilla and the drydown is a single burst of air from someone fanning a branch of sandalwood at you. Everything about Pure DKNY is light and waifish. It’s not just a delicate, quiet, little lily of a fragrance in the bottle but it’s also an invisible force on the skin.

Extra: The interesting part about Pure DKNY is the use of Ugandan vanilla which is sourced by a humanitarian organization called CARE that fights poverty. The CARE organization’s goals and visions are fantastic. This perfume is not quite so fabulous.

Design: Pure is bottled in a clear bottle with a clear liquid and the simple word, “Pure” written on the glass. It resembles a bottle of water and the design of the fragrance is fairly decent for what it is and definitely imparts the concept of “pure”.

Fragrance Family: Sweet Floral

Notes: Ugandan vanilla, flower petals, lotus, Bulgarian rose, jasmine, freesia, orchid, amber, sandalwood, vanilla.

Now I like light fragrances but Pure DKNY, for what it costs, should at least smell like something more than vague sweet flowers and vanilla. Make no mistake that while I’m not at all partial to Pure DKNY, I appreciate the humanitarian visions that CARE strives to achieve. Check them out, but skip this fragrance.

Reviewed in This Post: Pure DKNY, 2010, Eau de Parfum.

Calvin Klein Euphoria

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I know Calvin Klein’s been curiously overlooked in this blog for a while and here’s why–I don’t really like anything in their line. Even the hallmarks of Calvin Klein fragrances; Obsession and CK One. But I kept seeing Euphoria around and I’ve smelled it a few times before and decided to just get a few reviews out there because I know a lot of people love CK.

Euphoria

In Bottle: Sweet synthetic apple and berries smelling up top. The sugar isn’t mixing well with the pomegranate or the berries to my nose and it’s turning things into a bit of a cough syrup factory.

Applied: Syrupy sweet berries and a really obnoxious synthetic apple note on the opening that digs into the middle with the same syrupy sweet quality. The middle stage is marked with a series of banal florals, all of which are sweet and clean and try to clean up the sugary mess in the opening but all I get is sugar florals, sugar violets particular, trying to do what they can with a dewy green and clean note supporting them. Peaking up in the mid-stage is also a woodsiness that makes the mid-stage even more appealing. I think I would have liked the mid-stage of Euphoria a lot more if it was just the florals. Cut out the fruity sweetness in the opening and see how things go from there. But since we’re playing up the sweet, Euphoria’s end stage heads into a floral, warm and woodsy closer. Rather nice closing on this fragrance, actually.

Extra: There, I know a lot of people really like Euphoria but it did nothing for me. While the sweetness did not get to cloying levels, I felt the sugar in this fragrance was largely unnecessary.

Design: Euphoria’s bottle always manages to get knocked over every time I go hear it. The bottle itself is a purple glass shaped into a sort of abstract leave. The cap is a tall metallic rectangle that sticks up from the leaf. The design is interesting but the cap and how tall it is really annoys me.

Fragrance Family: Fruity Floral

Notes: Apple, berries, green leaves, rose, lotus, orchid, violets, woods, amber.

Euphoria’s not bad when you consider its mid-stage elements and dry down. It’s a pretty good scent if you can ignore the sugar. I just found the sugar particularly irritating in this fragrance because it really didn’t need to be in this. Or maybe I’m just bitter because this didn’t work as well on me as I had hoped.

Reviewed in This Post: Euphoria, 2007, Eau de Parfum.

Britney Spears Circus Fantasy

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So I dragged my heels on this one a little bit. I’m fatigued with the whole Britney Spears Fantasy line, to be honest. Fantasy, itself, is an icon of celebrity fragrances and its flankers are nothing to be sniffed at either. Though they aren’t so unique  that if you passed on them, you’d miss out.

Circus Fantasy

In Bottle: Circus Fantasy does clean! That’s a nice mix up from the fruitiness of the other two Fantasy scents I’ve tried. It smells like a very sweet glass of lemonade.

Applied: Sweet citrus up front and the citrus is a quick fader so we get down to business rather quick. Heading into the rest of the opening, Circus Fantasy hits up a sweet berry note and falls into a pile of pretty little violets right away. The mid-stage is a more floral fragrance, doing a mixture of sweet and clean florals rather well as the scent hits up peony and orchid. It smells really similar to a bunch of other celebrity fragrances in the mid-stage with that sweet floral heart that’s so recognizable. At least it’s easy to accept and wear! The dry down is an uninspired array of vanilla and sugar with a jolt of clean dashed in there for good measure. Overall, Circus Fantasy does clean and refreshing rather well. The mid-stage bores me a bit along with the end stage but the opening was pretty good. I liked the lemonade smell and wished we had gotten more of that.

Extra: Now the only fragrance in the Fantasy line that I haven’t gotten my nose on yet is Hidden Fantasy. That’s the red one. I can’t seem to find it anywhere but online and I would like to avoid getting more than a decant or sampler spray of it so until I track it down, I’m sure Britney’s perfume line will come out with another Fantasy flanker.

Design: Still hate the bottle. Sorry guys. It will probably never look any better no matter what they do with it. Circus Fantasy is an appealing shade of blue at least, with red rhinestones set into the bottle’s glass.

Fragrance Family: Floral

Notes: Raspberry, apricot, lotus, orchid, peony, vanilla, sugar, musk.

Move over Midnight Fantasy, Circus Fantasy’s got you beat. I really do like that lemonade opening and wish they could have just bottled that for all three stages.

Reviewed in This Post: Circus Fantasy, 2009, Eau de Parfum.

Versace Bright Crystal

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Bright Crystal’s one of those designer fragrances geared toward younger consumers. It hits that purchaser’s sweet spot that’s totally into easy to wear, light and floral, and most importantly young and approachable.

Bright Crystal

In Bottle: Rather strong presence of sharp green grapefruit and tart pomegranate. The florals try hard to make an appearance in the opening but the top of this scent is rather two-dimensional.

Applied: The big fruity opening nets you in if you like fruity fragrances and the light floral heart will keep you around. This opens as a sharp yuzu/grapefruit with a strong flare of pomegranate before it digs into the mid-stage where a mixture of sheer clean florals awaits. The magnolia in this is particularly well done, it’s lush and pretty but not overpowering. There’s just enough of it to make you smell clean and flowery. That mixed with the cleaned-up girly lotus and the always girly and cleaned up peony and you get a mixture of some of the easiest to love florals in perfumery. The dry down is a cool green amber, kind of reminds me of sap, and a rather nice gentle waft of woods and clean musk.

Extra: I think the word of the day here is “clean”. Bright Crystal is highly approachable, highly likable, and will not make people clear a circle around you. It’s really easy to love, and I do like it quite a bit. It’s not the most interesting composition in the world, but you have to hand it to Versace if you’re looking for a youthful and clean scent.

Design: All right, I’m not a fan of the bottle. The color is pleasing, the shape of the bottle itself is simple and easy to like. But that giant, jewel-shaped cap is a bit too much for me. It does make the bottle stand out rather well, but it’s a tad too flashy in my opinion.

Fragrance Family: Floral

Notes: Pomegranate, yuzu, iced accord, magnolia, lotus, peony, plant amber, musk, mahogany.

Bright Crystal is a good choice for office wear or elevator wear. It’s just one of those fragrances that I have to lump into inoffensive and not much else. It’s one of the better inoffensive and not much else perfumes out there though.

Reviewed in This Post: Bright Crystal, 2010, Eau de Toilette.

Paris Hilton Siren

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So I went and smelled a Paris Hilton perfume today and aside from the looks at the drugstore some people were giving  me, it went all right. A lot of people swear by Paris’ perfumes, if they can’t swear by her personality so I was curious.  Siren

In Bottle: Smells fruity in the bottle with a hint of citrus as is per usual for a celebrity perfume. It smells a little bit like a slicked back coconut resting on a bed of fruit salad ringed with flowers. Pleasant but uninspired.

Applied: Fruity flare-up immediately followed by sweet florals where the frangipani makes itself most known. Siren’s a surprisingly pleasant and more successful beachy, tropical fragrance than Dare Me by Baby Phat but I’m still not sure I’m entirely on board with this situation because while it smells pleasant enough, it smells pretty generic and rather dull. As the fragrance ages, its mid-stage is a decked out sweet floral with a predominant splash of vanilla that reminds me quite vividly of Viva la Juicy by Juicy Couture. The florals get a bit weaker as the fragrance wears on though and you’re ultimately left with the hallmark of the modern perfume’s drydown; soft sandalwood and vanilla.

Extra: Paris Hilton has lent her name to the fragrance game for a number of years now and her perfume are quite popular. Maybe, and I hazard to say this, as popular as Britney Spears fragrances. The ad campaign for Siren had a golden mermaid Paris shopped onto a rock with crashing waves. It was a little ridiculous.

Design: Siren’s bottle reminds me a little bit of Guerlain’s Champs Elysees. It’s just in the shape really. It’s got a weird, twisted art deco type thing going on as well that I’m not 100% on board with but the bottling is not bad. You can tell they were going for the whole mermaid tail motif with the myth of the sirens and whatnot. It accomplishes what it needs to accomplish if the imagery is a little bit heavy-handed.

Fragrance Family: Fruity Floral

Notes: Apricot, mandarin, frangipani, honeysuckle, orchid, lotus, lily, sandalwood, vanilla, musk.

I know a lot of people are put off by celebrity perfume but there’s no shame in owning or liking celebuscents. It’s a bit of a funny misconception that people think Paris actually comes up with her own perfumes. Rest assured, she did not don gloves and goggles and spend years or months mixing fragrances together into a coherent mix. I’m pretty sure perfumer, Honorine Blanc had something of a hand in formulating this stuff.

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