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.

Victoria’s Secret Plumdrop

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When people ask me to name my top three favorite fragrances at the moment, I tell them this: #1. Spirituese Double Vanille. #2. Plumdrop. #3 Chanel Allure.  Which then prompts them to say, “What was that about number two?” I love Plumdrop by Victoria’s Secret. It’s a competent, wearable, likable, well-done fragrance and I am not afraid to admit it. Plumdrop

In Bottle: Creamy, soft fruit. Fairly non-descript on the fruit part. It’s like a vanilla bean milkshake with a heap of whipping cream a sprinkle of icing sugar, mixed with plums, a little coconut and topped with jasmine.

Applied: The linearity of this fragrance makes it hard to really review its fragrance life as it pretty much has one smell that it sticks to and does fairly well. So is it a top note, middle note, or base note? I don’t know, guys. I don’t think it matters. It has one smell. Pretty much what you smell in the bottle is what you get on skin. On paper, it’s a fruity floral with an added dollop of creaminess. That creamy, milky feel this fragrance has is what sets it apart from the generic fruity floral that tends to focus on the sweetness. Plumdrop is sweet, but it’s main priority is smelling like a really good milkshake. Plumdrop has a fairly decent life on skin as its creamy fruity floral scent is a nice captured essence for a spring day, or even a hot summer day. It’s lovely, girly, highly versatile. It would be hard to offend someone smelling like this because you just end up smelling like a fruity milkshake anyway. And sometimes, you just want to smell like a fruity milkshake without having to think about it. Fun, easy, and a little bit different.

Extra: Plumdrop is a member of Victoria’s Secret’s Beauty Rush line. To call it a perfume wouldn’t be exactly right. It’s not even really a body mist. It’s one of these new fangled innovations called moisturizing body mists. Victoria’s Secret calls Plumdrop and its concept similar brothers and sisters, Double Body Mists. You have an oil layer and a watery colored layer that contains the fragrance. Before using, you shake the stuff up to combine the two layers and spray it on for moisturizing properties and scent. I am a lazy person and I can get behind this 2 in 1 routine.

Design: Plumdrop comes in a plastic cylinder with two layers of product; an oil layer and a colored water and fragrance layer. Plumdrop is a light, pastel purple color. Prior to use you should shake this up because as experiments have revealed, the oil only layer does not smell good. The sprayer nozzle is a nice metallic material with a plastic cap. For a body mist/spray moisturizer the packaging is pretty good.

Fragrance Family: Fruity

Notes: Plum, milk, sugar, honeysuckle, violets, vanilla.

Those notes are approximations only. I was actually wrestling with whether or not this counts as a fragrance, and for a fragrance review blog. But hey, it’s got a scent, so why not?

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

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.

Victoria’s Secret Sexy Little Things Noir

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Victoria’s Secret, known mostly for their underwear brand, also has a fairly lucrative line of beauty products and fragrances. It’s fragrance side is a well-loved establishment that releases mostly fruity floral fragrances that are wearable, girly, light and happy. Sexy Little Things Noir

In Bottle: Fantastic burst of fruits. It’s like I just sprayed a bowl of fruit punch on myself. There’s a slight sourness that really compliments and helps tame this very sweet fragrance. Something about this is really juicy, like biting into a crisp piece of fruit, juicy. And behind it all, I smell the faint waft of the very enigmatic jasmine supported by the spicy creaminess of tonka bean.

Applied: Fruit punch and creamy vanilla is what Sexy Little Things Noir is to me. For its massive list of notes, it does a great job projecting a fruity almost gourmand fragrance. Also due to its massive list of notes, I can’t separate nectarine from apple. However, I can pick out jasmine in this as well as the tonka beans. Sexy Little Things Noir lacks anything that I would really consider to be “noir”. In that a fragrance that’s marketed as “noir”, to me, should have some element of deepness or darkness. Sexy Little Things Noir is just a sparkling, juicy, fruit salad with a sprinkling of white flowers on top. There’s no deepness or darkness, which betrays its name but hey, I’m all right with that. It has fantastic projection but the longevity on me is a bit weak, fading within four hours into light vanilla and jasmine.

Extra: Tonka beans are said to smell like vanilla. A while ago, they could have been eaten in addition to being used in perfumes before someone discovered they contained a potentially lethal anticoagulant. Thanks for the kicks, nature.

Design: I’ll admit it, I was drawn to this perfume like many others for the bottle. The glass is a very dark purple in a pleasing, beautiful shape. The winning feature for me? That pump atomizer. That pump that’s so iconic of Hollywood Noir where the women were glamorous and the movies were in black and white. Though fragrances in pump atomizers back in those days tended to be from fragrance families that people these days refer to as “old lady” perfumes.

Fragrance Family: Fruity Floral

Notes: Nectarine, apple, citrus, pineapple, guanabana, pear, red fruits, bergamot, cattelaya orchid, muget, cyclamen, jasmine, plum, vanilla, dewberry, cassis, amber, musk, woods, tonka bean.

Sexy Little Things Noir is a part of Victoria’s Secret’s fine fragrance line. Meaning, it’s an Eau de Parfum as opposed to the body mists that Victoria’s Secret sells. Sexy Little Things Noir also has a counterpart body mist, shower gel, and perfumed body powder.

Reviewed in This Post: Sexy Little Things Noir, 2010, Eau de Parfum.