Tommy Hilfiger Tommy Girl

“All-American girl” is pretty much out an of reach image for me but it doesn’t mean I can’t smell like one. Tommy Girl is marketed as a fragrance all about the modern American girl with her clean, trendy, urban, and wholesome persona. I don’t know if those are the words I’d use to describe Tommy Girl but then, I’ve never really felt like an All-American girl–being a Canadian, you see. Tommy Girl

In Bottle: Sweet and tart, watery blackcurrant with bundle of fresh grassiness and citrus backing it up. It’s layered with a mild dusting of florals and gives off this prancing in the fields in a pair of jeans and a plaid shirt, kind of feel. Though that feel can be attributed to the marketing.

Applied: Burst of very tart, very strong blackcurrant. I can’t really get past that battle between sweet and tart here while the blackcurrant is practically jumping up and down shouting, “Look at me! Smell me!” I get where Luca Turin was going with this, saying it smelled like tea. That watery quality from the blackcurrant is helping and that mixture of sweet and citrus-y sour really does it. As the dry down starts, the tartness goes away and the sweetness chills out a bit letting those florals in. Blackcurrant is still working its magic as the fragrance heads for the fresh and clean direction. Mid-stage, Tommy Girl is a sweetly presented flowers on soft fruit affair. Further dry down reveals a lovely smelling base of clean, fresh, sandalwood, and sweet flowers.

Extra: Tommy Girl was released in 1996. Back then, Tommy Hilfiger was all the rage in school. The cool kids wore the shirts and the jeans. I never really “got” the Hilfiger craze until I grew up and did a little reading.

Design: Tommy Girl is presented in a triangular prism shaped glass bottle with a metallic cap bearing the Tommy Hilfiger brand on the top. The sprayer works just fine and I was pleased that the bottle shape was so easy to hold in my hand. The design itself is sort of skirting that weird area between so simple it’s aesthetically pleasing and so simple it’s boring. But the fact that it feels so comfortable to hold nets it a lot of points in this arena.

Fragrance Family: Fruity Floral

Notes: Camellia Flowers, apple blossoms, blackcurrant, mandarin, tangerine, grapefruit, citrus, green notes, honeysuckle, butterfly violets, desert jasmin, cherokee rose, magnolia petals, dakota lilies, cedar, sandalwood, wild heather.

Tommy Girl has an interesting mixed background. While the fragrance itself is billed as an American mixture, the concoction was brewed up in Europe. Had it not been marketed so well, Tommy Girl could be any number of modern fragrance releases. Just goes to show you the power of marketing.

Reviewed in This Post: Tommy Girl, 2010, Eau de Cologne.


Fruits & Passion Orchid

Evidently, many of Fruits & Passion’s eau de toilettes remain largely undiscovered. I have a hard time finding a complete database of their outputted fragrances though perhaps some of my difficulty has to do more with ignorance rather than Fruits & Passion’s tiny footprint in fragrance territory. Orchid is a sweet, floral, ambery fragrance, simple and fruit and just plain fun. Orchid

In Bottle: Sweet florals. The florals are a bit drowned by the amber in this fragrance and the perfume itself reminds me of L’Instant de Guerlain. Notice that this is now two fragrances that remind of L’Instant. Orchid’s amber note is a strong one and the blending to get the florals and ambers to work together favored the latter and this treatment shows in the bottle and will probably be the same story on skin.

Applied: Big and floral with the flowers disappearing on me sooner than I’d like. This is less orchid and more amber and something is trying to convince me that I’m smelling peach. A ripe, pink, very sweet peach. This fragrance ages and drys down very fast as its mid stage is characterized by that fading peach note while the amber gets a bit stronger. The dry down at the end has amber and a slight powdery note hanging out until all that’s left is the amber base.

Extra: Orchid belongs in a floral eau de toilette collection from Fruits & Passion. There are two other fragrances in the collection as Fruits & Passion tend to like going in threes. The other two are Rose, which smells very much of roses and Jasmine which I have not yet smelled.

Design: Orchid comes in a tall, thin rectangular bottle with designs embossed onto the glass. There is a cap for this fragrance. A matching plastic rectangular shape that I found nearly impossible to take off. As a result my bottle of Orchid is lacking a cap. The sprayer can be a little flaky, sometimes distributing so much scent that it drools but I have only had that happen a handful of times. By and large the bottle and sprayer work fine. The cap for my bottle was just awful though and I have opted not to use it.

Fragrance Family: Soft Oriental

Notes: Orchid, amber, musk.

Orchid is a hard fragrance to keep on the skin. Amber, to me, is one of those ethereal meant to blend into the background notes. That’s partly the reason why it’s used so often as a base because its purpose is enhance the natural scent of the skin. Now, I hesitate to even lump this fragrance in with the orientals. I mean, it’s amber dominant but that’s pretty much all.

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