Sarah Horowitz Perfect Nectar


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Something rather delightful was waiting in the mail for me just the other week. I hadn’t been active much on this blog since work started ramping up again, so it was a pleasant surprise to find a package from Olfactif containing three samples of fragrances I hadn’t yet tried. Hey, smellies in my mailbox? I’m game.

Perfect Nectar

Perfect Nectar

 

In Bottle: I went with the one sample that seemed to be the most lighthearted. With a series of notes sliding around in the fruity floral arena, I felt Perfect Nectar was a good one to start off with. A light citrus opening that dives right into its white floral roots.

Applied:  I get very little else but white flowers in this interpretation. It’s quite sweet and rather heady. The white florals taking the prominent podium for the majority of the show. With no base notes to go off of, the florals are pretty much all I get. Now, I like white florals just fine. There’s a definite sense of Perfect Nectar trying to hit a sophisticated note, but it does come off exceptionally strong and a little bit lacking in the depth department. Lovely as it is, there’s not a whole lot in terms of other notes. I get sweet florals for pretty much the entirety of its lifespan and it’s got a very long lasting lifespan.

Extra: Perfect Nectar was released in 2000.

Design: Lovely simple bottle. I’m a big fan of delicate little flourishes on bottles too. No frills, and none needed. Lovely bottle.

Fragrance Family: Fruity Floral

Notes: Tangerine, blood orange, papaya, mango, ylang-ylang, green tea, white forals.

Olfactif is a fragrance delivery service where the samples you get once a month introduces you a potential fragrance love. Did I mention that they specialize in niche so you won’t be faced with getting samples of painfully obvious fragrances? I love the concept. As for Perfect Nectar, I don’t think it’s the one for me as it is somewhat one-dimensional, a little too strong in the floral note and not nearly enough of anything else to keep me interested. If you are looking for a clean fragrance with excellent staying power and throw, this might be a good contender for you.

Reviewed in This Post: Perfect Nectar, 2013, Eau de Parfum.


Calvin Klein CK One


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CK One brings back memories of the early 90s. Where people these days love their Viva la Juicys, the early 90s seemed to be marked with the citrus-y smell of CK One.

CK One

In Bottle: Opens on a rather tart but very crisp and dewy fruity citrus note. There’s a pineapple in there but it’s not your  run-of-the-mill fruity sweet and tropical pineapple. This is tart pineapple and I quite like it.

Applied: That clean, green and crisp opening with the tart pineapple and the citrus. CK One takes its citrus and leads into a clean floral mid-stage dominated by lily of the valley, iris and a very potent lemon note that works well to keep this fragrance fresh and clean. The best part of CK One for me is the dry down where the citrus is gone and whats left are florals clinging to clean and diving into a base of tame cedar and sandalwood. I don’t so much smell the oakmoss in this than I smell the green notes that were in the opening. The closer is a green, floral woods.

Extra: I remember being a little girl and first smelling CK One. It was at a department store and we had little money at that time for things like this. But I always tried to sneak a smell. I don’t remember if I liked it or not, I only knew that Calvin Klein–at the time–was some fancy brand and one of the girls in my class bragged about wearing this perfume.

Design: Very simple bottle. Flat and rectangular with frosted glass. The sprayer is quite uniform-looking too but it’s still an extremely recognizable design. There’s something very utilitarian about this that I love. Maybe it’s the lack of fanciful shapes and colors. I actually like the design, but I think it might be a bit on the plain side.

Fragrance Family: Fresh

Notes: Pineapple, green notes, mandarin orange, papaya, bergamot, cardamom, lemon, nutmeg, violet, orris root, jasmine, lily-of-the-valley, rose, sandalwood, amber, musk, cedar, oakmoss.

CK One isn’t anywhere near as big a deal for me now as it was back then. Still, there’s moments when I smell this and remember sneaking sprays at the makeup counter while my mother and the sales associate gabbed about sunblock.

Reviewed in This Post: CK One, 2002, Eau de Toilette.


Escada Tropical Punch


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Escada’s mostly known for their very nicely done line of fruity floral fragrances. I was never that interested in Escada’s stuff because there’s a wealth of fruity florals in the market. But if you wanted a good fruity floral, that’s reminiscent of the tropics then Escada’s got you covered.  Tropical Punch

In Bottle: Wet and sweet fruit juice. Like a blended tropical smoothie consisting of pears and pomegranates and peaches. It smells delicious.

Applied: Burst of that fruit smoothie scent with the pears overtaking the pomegranate until both of them fade into the background and let the florals up. Of the flowers in this scent, I smell the lily of the valley the most followed by the combined powers of hibiscus and freesia making the mid-stage of Tropical Punch a lush bed of florals. The peach note in this lends a bit of fruitiness to it but by and large Tropical Punch’s mid-stage is very reminiscent of an Herbal Essences shampoo. And I like how Herbal Essence shampoos smell so if you’re into that kind of thing, this stuff delivers. The dry down is rather unremarkable but so is the rest of this fragrance as it warms up a bit but fades with a clean fruity floral sweet amber scent.

Extra: Escada is a women’s luxury clothing group founded in 1976. They have a ton of other similarly built fruity floral fragrances in addition to Tropical Punch. Of which one of the most popular is Marine Groove.

Design: I don’t much like Escada’s fragrance bottles. They’re nice and colorful and fun looking but I’m not a big fan of the shape which is reminiscent of a stretched out heart. Actually, I think the design of these bottles is lacking and makes them look more like body mists instead of perfumes. Tropical Punch is a mostly pink glass affair with a gradient that fades into a pinkish orange. It’s easy to hold though, and the sprayer works great.

Fragrance Family: Fruity Floral

Notes: Papaya, pomegranate, pear, hibiscus, freesia, lily of the valley, white peach, white musk, amber.

I’m not interested enough in Tropical Punch to really get a bottle. The top notes on this stuff are fantastic. But as soon as it dries down, it heads into all too familiar territory. Then there’s the price and for the amount of an Escada fragrance, I would much rather get a mainstream Guerlain or a mainstream Chanel–even.

Reviewed in This Post:Tropical Punch, 2009, Eau de Toilette.


Hermes Eau d’Orange Verte


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Eau d’Orange Verte is a fresh little number that doesn’t smell like the year it was released. In 1979, the House of Hermès unleashed this simply constructed, but beautiful little idea. Eau d'Orange Verte

In Bottle: Fresh lemon and mandarin combine to make a really nice, juicy orange-like scent. This smells like orange trees, it smells like someone taking the skin of an orange and squeezing out a spray.

Applied: Orange and lemon, very pretty, a little sweet but mostly sharp citrus. But not that annoying too-sharpness that I get in other fragrances with a lemon note. Methinks this lemon is a bit more tame and I like that. this smells like a pleasant airy citrus, fresh fragrance. There’s a brief  introduction in the equally brief mid-stage where a slight fruitiness peaks through and then dissolves into a beautiful very close and intimate green scent with patchouli. There’s not a whole lot of surprise or complexity in Eau d’Orange Verte but some simple fragrances get it just right and the fragrance is excellent no matter how simple it is.

Extra: Hermès dates back to the late 1800s as a French high fashion house with its headquarters currently in Paris. You might know them better, in the fragrance world anyway, from their very popular Terre d’Hermès scent.

Design: Eau d’Orange Verte comes in a beautiful and very thick textured orange box that you open much like a shoebox. There’s no silly flaps to get in the way here. This is one of the better packaged fragrances with the bottle inside being a green tinted glass with a rounded plastic cap. It was particularly delightful to note that Eau d’Orange Verte’s bottle is refillable. Meaning, once you’re done with the juice, you can easily unscrew the sprayer and refill the bottle with more Eau d’Orange Verte or use the bottle for another fragrance.

Fragrance Family: Fresh

Notes: Lemon, mandarin, papaya, mango, oakmoss, patchouli.

Being an Eau de Cologne, Eau d’Orange Verte is a very light fragrance that you’ll need to layer or go heavy on the trigger for. I go through this stuff like crazy, which is probably why the scent comes in soap and other flanker product forms as well as a gargantuan 200ml bottle.

Reviewed in This Post: Eau d’Orange Verte, 2009, Eau de Cologne .