By Kilian Prelude to Love

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Prelude to Love is one of the six original fragrances released in 2007 By Kilian. It’s a part of that expensive lacquered box collection that costs an average of $200-and then some for a thrill. So since this fragrance humbly requests that I throw down the cash for it, it should wow me. I was mostly fascinated with how beautiful Beyond Love’s tuberose was so I decided to slap on Prelude to Love and see how it rocked the boat. Prelude to Love

In Bottle: Sharp citrus and pleasant slightly sweet orange blossom with what smells like fresh dirt.

Applied: Sharp citrus with orange blossom and slightly bitter and green floral. Prelude to Love is a notch stronger than Beyond Love but it’s also not to my liking. The opening is just too sharp for me and a bit too earthy. The mid-stage starts up with a more earthy note. I couldn’t wait to get the top notes away because I didn’t really appreciate their earthy, bitter, sharp brightness. As the fragrance ages though, I noticed the citrus calms down a little while the earthiness continues its crusade with a bed of miscellaneous green florals and a pleasant spice and dryness. The dry down is even earthier, greener but lacks the sharpness the opening top notes had. This scent smells spicy from mid-stage to dry down. It’s a green, earth scent. Like digging up vegetables from your garden.

Extra: Prelude to Love was composed by Calice Becker. She did some of the other By Kilian fragrances too like Taste of Heaven and Pure Oud.

Design: Like Beyond Love, Prelude to Love is bottled in a rectangular lacquered bottle and will be presented to you in a nice cushy box complete with a lock and key. A little over the top? Maybe, but for $200 per 50ml, you might as well take the bonus features too.

Fragrance Family: Earthy

Notes: : Lemon, mandarin, bergamot, lavender, freesia, neroli, rose, iris, cardamom, pink pepper, ginger, orange blossom, leather, musk.

So far I’m not enchanted enough by this collection and Prelude to Love is a bit too earthy for my tastes. I do prefer Beyond Love because it’s more to my tastes.

Reviewed in This Post: Prelude to Love, 2007, Sample Vial.

Avril Lavigne Black Star

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Black Star is Avril Lavigne’s first fragrance (well, one that’s named after her anyway) and it’s just about as unremarkable as I thought it would be. Though my initial hope for it, upon seeing the bottle was that it would be something more interesting. Black Star

In Bottle: Smelling citrus and juicy fruity notes. Blackcurrant, I’m thinking, with plum and something smooth, sweet and flowery. Maybe honeysuckle.

Applied: Plum and citrus up front with the citrus receding very quickly. Something in this smells of apple for about ten seconds. It’s a very recognizable and familiar apple note that I swear I’ve smelled before. But it was a very fleeting note. The rest of Black Star evolves into a nice, full fruity vanilla fragrance. Highly agreeable but very reminiscent of Love Etc. by The Body Shop. The difference between Black Star and Love Etc. is the underlying notes. Love Etc. was more tart. Black Star has this very sweet, smooth vanilla-like note warming up the fragrance and cutting the tartness. Black Star dries down to a nice, soft fruity scent.

Extra: One of the things you start to realize as you get more and more into fragrances is that the press releases are often full of flowery language that doesn’t mean anything. Black Star for instance is supposed to be unique and individual much like Avril Lavigne tries to be (on the outside anyway). But there’s nothing really new going on with this fragrance at all.

Design: The bottle is a bit silly looking to me, but I’m not the target audience for it. It’s contained in an interestingly shaped glass bottle with a plastic top that has spikes running the rim of the cap. You can take the spikes off and wear it was a ring. An uncomfortable ring. The sprayer I tried was fantastic. One of the nicest, most even distribution I’ve ever seen. I know the sprayers on every bottle tends to differ a little and I probably sound like a lunatic for raving over a sprayer nozzle but that’s just how I roll.

Fragrance Family: Fruity

Notes: Plum, apple, lemon, hibiscus, honeysuckle, dark chocolate, vanilla.

The PR for this fragrance was pretty sparse with the notes, only disclosing three things. Hibiscus, plum, and dark chocolate. There’s obviously more at work in this than they’re letting on so I slapped some of what I think I’m smelling up there. By no means go with my list and honestly, who cares, form your own notes list. Be a rebel. Anyway, despite the advertising campaign insisting this is an edgy fragrance, it’s really not. It’s about as tame as it can get. You say edgy and I think of the nasal assault that is Secretions Magnifique, not Black Star. Black Star is just a very pretty, girly, young, fruity fragrance that bears a pretty striking resemblance to Love Etc.

Reviewed in This Post: Black Star, 2010, Eau de Parfum.

The Body Shop Love Etc.

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If I had to pick one fragrance that would be the very best example of fruity floral, it would have to be Love Etc. Typical smelling, yet it gets everything right about what a fruity floral is.  Love Etc. is a perfect, generic fragrance. But one that I believe is the “standard” for its genre. Love Etc

In Bottle: Bergamot with a layer of jasmine and a fine vanilla background to sweeten up the fragrance. There is some other note in there too. I’m going to hazard a guess and say it’s berries that I think I’m smelling over a nice tangy, citrusy scent.

Applied: Bergamot with a mix of jasmine and that perpetual very nice and just-sweet-enough vanilla. The fruits in this are a mixture of tart and sweet as they mix well with the florals to create a gentle fruity fragrance that’s not too sweet or too floral. Love Etc. is a fruit salad with a dollop of cream that cuts the tartness of the fruits. I’m no good at picking out fruit notes but the pear is in there with what I’m swearing is a vibrant berry-like scent. This fragrance is like an edible platter of fruits and flowers that develops into a soft, plush, vanilla and cream dry down. It’s highly wearable, very young, but also tasteful.

Extra: The Body Shop is a bath and body company. One of its most famous fragrances, still being made today, is White Musk. When I smell White Musk, I’m reminded of the 90s because it seemed like everyone was wearing it at the time.

Design: Love Etc. is bottled in a small, squarish glass container with a metal cap on top. I love the design, mostly for its function rather than its form. As a perfume bottle, it’s kind of plain but the price point agrees with the appearance. Love Etc.’s bottle is also small and compact enough to throw into a purse and go.

Fragrance Family: Fruity Floral

Notes: Bergamot, neroli, pear, berries, jasmine, heliotrope, muguet, vanilla, cream, sandalwood, musk.

Love Etc. is probably in the running to be The Body Shop’s popular everyday fragrance. It was released some time in 2009 and just reminds me of every other fruity floral I’ve smelled. The fact that it’s generic shouldn’t be taken as a bad thing. If anything, Love Etc. is the catch-all, “if you’re unsure then try this”, fruity floral.

Reviewed in This Post: Love Etc., 2010, Eau de Toilette.

Creed Love in White

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Love in White is one of those fragrances with a wide split between people who love it and people who hate it. It’s Creed’s answer to the ultimate fresh fragrance. This stuff is so fresh and crisp it makes my eyes water. Billed as a women’s fragrance, Love in White comes in a cute, feminine white bottle that’s supposed to represent a woman, the sand, and the sea. I can dig it. Love in White

In Bottle: Sweetness, aqua, and something sharp. Like sugar water with broken bits of glass and twisted pieces of metal. Love in White is strong too. So strong that my first whiff of it went straight up my nose and exploded in the back of my head. The sharpness that I assume might be the zest is so strong in this that it went beyond fine fragrance and reminded me of household cleaner.

Applied: Not much dying down of that sharp note on application but I do get the rest of the fragrance now that it’s on my skin. It’s like somebody turned up the volume on the jasmine note here because it’s very high-pitched, almost shrill as it tries to out sing the sandalwood. Meanwhile, iris with its rather distinct brightness is adding to the fresh feel. There’s got to be some aqua note in this because I swear I can smell water. I suppose that’s where the ocean imagery comes from but so much of this fragrance is clean and fresh that it’s hard to move beyond those two concepts to something gentler. The dry down helps a bit, the sharpness fades and the florals have sore throats and are now just whispering. I can appreciate the quiet calm of the dry down here as the soft creaminess of that vanilla shows up to help tame the sandalwood a little.

Extra: Love in White kind of reminds me of household cleaners. Not in a bad way. I mean, household cleaners contain fragrances meant to offend the least amount of people. Love in White is that inoffensive. The thing I can fault it for is how close it has to stick to my skin so I have to get up really close and personal. And when I’m that close, the fragrance is incredibly strong.

Design: The white bottle for Love in White is supposed to represent the feminine, the ocean and the crisp ocean air. I’m not sure I’m really feeling the look of the bottle or the conceptualization of it but it is pleasant enough to look at.

Fragrance Family: Fresh

Notes: Orange zest, rice husk, iris, jasmine, daffodil, magnolia, rose, vanilla, ambergris, Mysore sandalwood.

When it’s all said and done Love in White is a very fresh sort of shrill scent with a loud projection that also manages to stick relatively close to the skin. I have to get up close to really smell it but once I’m that close I also tend to get its entire assault up my nose.

Reviewed in This Post: Love in White, 2010, Sample vial.

Victoria’s Secret Love Spell

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If popularity made a fragrance iconic then Love Spell should be the staple of teenage girls. This is a familiar fragrance to me, partly because of its fruity floral composition but also because so many women and girls wear Love Spell, its perfume form, body mist, lotion and what have you. It is a simple fragrance, a little low on the complexity meter but what it lacks in complexity, it makes up for in wearability. Love Spell

In Bottle: Sweet, sweet, sweet. The first smell I get from Love Spell is a sparkling peach and jasmine fragrance. It’s like high school exploded in my nose and all I can smell is the trademark sugary peppiness that I was so familiar with. I remember when every other girl smelled like fruit or candy. I was the odd one out with nothing but a stick of deodorant between me and nothing. Now that I can experience all the fragrances I couldn’t wear when I was younger, I have to admit, I do see why this was popular. But its very essence, to me, screams of high school.

Applied: Simple and inoffensive, that first whiff of bright fruits and florals is quick to start dissolving on the skin. It morphs away from brightness and into a near sparkly plastic-like fragrance for a few moments. I’m sitting there wondering if these flowers and this strange slippery plastic smell is going to stick around for a while. It kind of reminds me of a banana peel, slippery, fruity. I can almost taste that strange note which is funny. The banana fades the more I smell this as something aromatic that resembles culantro comes up and dominates the scene. Culantro, not to be confused with cilantro, is an herb. Unfortunately for the culantro and the florals, they evaporate very quickly and re-application is necessary. And with reapplication comes that sparkly banana again. I like the opener. I like the drydown. The culantro scent is an interesting touch that I don’t mind. I could probably do without that strange moment in the middle with the banana.

Extra: Love Spell has that aura about it that screams of high school. There are fragrances out there that just seem to speak volumes about the culture that might surround them. Sweet, fruity, floral perfumes for example are usually in the category of young. Whereas deeper, denser more powder fragrances tend to be lumped in with the old. Me, personally, I don’t much care if I smell young or old. If you like a fragrance, just wear it.

Design: Simple but not ugly. I’ve got no qualms with fragrances that stick to simple packaging. Especially ones that are more affordable like Love Spell is. The EDT will run you around $8-10 depending upon the sale going on at the moment. This fragrance comes in a purple box. Inside is a glass atomizer bottle with a cap over it. On the bottle is the name of the fragrance and a purple flower design.

Fragrance Family: Fruity Floral

Notes: Apple, peach, cherry blossom, lilac, jasmine.

I still remember the big fragrance going around the school locker room when I was younger. It was Hawaiian Ginger by Calgon. It seemed literally every girl was wearing this as everywhere I stepped in the school, in wafted Hawaiian Ginger. Turns out it was only a couple of people who wore this fragrance and evidently they were battling it out for Hawaiian Ginger supremacy because the fragrance permeated the entire school.

Reviewed in This Post: Love Spell, 2010, Eau de Toilette.