Dior Dolce Vita

Dolce Vita is a vibrant little number that I kind of wish I had more of. It’s bright, peppy and classical all at the same time.

Dolce Vita

Dolce Vita

In Bottle: Sweet, almost pastry-like with a strong peach/apricot and cardamom showing initially.

Applied: Dolce Vita goes on reminding me of a peach pastry. It’s got to be the–well–peach, and the spices that make me think of the jammy fruit filling in a danish. The pastry feel doesn’t last for too long before I get a hit of sandalwood with a pretty strong sweetness. Dolce Vita is sugar and woods with a tablespoon of cinnamon sprinkled over it. The sandalwood is quick to settle down but the sweet cinnamon fruity floral thing has bigger plans and sticks around on the fragrance for quite some time. Dolce Vita has good staying power on me, I barely noticed when it slipped from its sweet fruity floral middle and nestled between a nice tame cedar and a soft, lilting sweet vanilla base.

Extra: Dolce Vita was released in 1994 and was composed by Pierre Bourdon of Cool Water fame.

Design: I really like the bottle. It looks like it came from an earlier time than the 90s and it has a nice feel to it too. It’s a good looking piece that has 90s elements to it, but at times can feel like it came from an earlier era. Hard to describe, but overall, I like it.

Fragrance Family: Oriental

Notes: Grapefruit, bergamot, lily, peach, rose, cardamom, cinnamon, apricot, magnolia, heliotrope, rosewood, sandalwood, cedar, coconut, vanilla.

I had to take a couple of tries to figure out if I truly liked Dolce Vita or if it was just a fad I was going through. I do really like it, it’s nice and well-composed and thankfully still available to boot.

Reviewed in This Post: Dolce Vita, ~2004, Eau de Toilette.


Lady Gaga Fame

I’m going to make a deal with you guys and myself. I’m going to review this thing, then I will absolutely not mention Lady Gaga or Fame again for the duration of this year. I think we’d all like to move on, and I was almost going to pass on even trying this because of how bored I got with the marketing. So, I promise, this one last post and then no more.

Fame

Fame

In Bottle: If I had any expectations that this would smell anything different than a generic fragrance then I would like to once again concede my disappointment. Fame smells of slightly synthetic honeyed florals and the barest glance of vanillic incense.

Applied: I aimed a spray of this on my arm was fascinated to see the black turn clear. And that was probably the most promising thing about Fame. I will say upfront that if you expected this to be bold, unique, or interesting then you might be in for a let down. Fame starts off with a synthetic blast of fruity florals. I can’t really tell if the synthetic waft I got came from the purported belladonna note or the honey note they used. Maybe it even came from whatever agent they used to turn black liquid into clear liquid. Whatever it is, it smells faintly of chemical and plastic on application. Rest easy though, that stage of it lasts for a few seconds and Fame settles down into a honeyed apricot floral fragrance. It is very apricots and jasmine based with a thick coat of sweet honey. After the very generic mid-stage, Fame dives into a slightly more interesting saffron and incense with florals dry down. The dry down gives off a smoky saffron (smells a bit like vanilla to me) twist to the generic florals, but it’s really late to the ballgame and to be honest, the incense is lightly used which makes the dry down even less noteworthy.

Extra: Fame has been causing a huge buzz in the celebuscent circles for months and I’m particularly happy that it’s finally released and we can hopefully move on from here. Fame was developed by Coty with some sort of collaborative effort from Haus Laboratories. The fragrance was apparently marketed as having new technology including the black liquid and some nonsense about it being “push-pull” where the notes weren’t going to work in a typical pyramid fashion. I don’t know where they got that one because 1) perfumers have already been making that happen for years, and 2) I experienced a mostly linear progression.

Design: What Fame does well is mix Lady Gaga’s style with the design of the bottle. It very much reminds me of her while at the same time forces me to draw some similarities to Thierry Mugler’s designs. It’s Alien-esque, but I think it works well for Gaga’s image. The bottle isn’t ugly, but at the same time it’s not my kind of style as I’ve confessed before that I find most Mugler bottles to be a bit of an eyesore. Still, it felt nice to nice to hold and was easy to use. I’m not going to be buying it for looks or smell any time soon though.

Fragrance Family: Fruity Floral

Notes: Apricot, orchid, belladonna, jasmine, honey, saffron, incense.

Now, if you’re a huge fan of Gaga, I don’t think my review is going to curb you away from buying this. If you aren’t a fan of Gaga and just want to know if this is anything at like Mother Monster, then I’ll save you a trip to the department store and say, “No”. Fame is very pleasant, not gross or weird, but really generic and easily beaten by more competent honey fragrances such as Tokyo Milk’s Honey and the Moon or for a less gourmand and more floral scent, Aftelier’s Honey Blossom. If you want Gaga branding, go with Fame. If you want an actual interesting and beautiful honey floral fragrance? Seriously, check out Aftelier’s Honey Blossom.

Reviewed in This Post: Fame, 2012, Eau de Parfum.


Coach Poppy Flower

Coach Poppy Flower is a flanker to Poppy. It’s supposed to put a more floral spin on the original fragrance. Not sure what else they want out of the original Poppy because that one was fairly floral to me. Ah well, we’ll see.

Poppy Flower

Poppy Flower

In Bottle: Fresh, juicy flowers with a lot of water lily representation.

Applied: Sadly I’m smelling predominantly water lily from the starting point. I get a bit of citrus and the other sweet fruity things in this, but I suppose this is how you can go about making an already floral fragrance even more floral. The water lily gives me a bit of a headache as it seems particularly potent in this fragrance. The rest of the florals are giving up a good fight to help overwhelm or tame the water lily but I think that initial whiff blasted whatever chance the rest of the notes in this had for me. I really just get a lot of water lily with a little bit of jasmine and rose layered in there for good measure. As the fragrance ages, the peony comes up a bit more and given my previous association with peony, I don’t think that’s a good thing. Poppy Flower smells watery to me, kind of like a flower water mix and it isn’t very good, but it’s not horrendous. I wouldn’t venture to say this is okay, it’s just not too bad.

Extra: Coach Poppy Flower is marketed as fashionable, chic, and flirty. I have to admit, that despite being bombarded by marketing that claims something is flirty, I have yet to truly understand what that means in a marketing perspective and the word has been thrown about so much that it’s lost all meaning to me. What I do know about flirtiness is that I get nothing of the sort from Poppy Flower.

Design: Similar shape and style to that of Poppy, only it’s interpreted as purple and silver this time. I still don’t like the bottle, but the handwritten affect they used on the packaging is still fitting and aesthetically pleasing in its own way.

Fragrance Family: Floral

Notes: Citrus, black currant, raspberry, litchi, apricot, ivy, water lily, rose, jasmine, peony, sandalwood, musk, amber.

Coach Poppy Flower is available in EDP format and also comes in a body lotion if that kind of thing floats your boat. Me, I’m not personally a fan of this fragrance and actually prefer Poppy.

Reviewed in This Post: Poppy Flower,  2011, Eau de Parfum.


Cacharel Amor Amor

Some days I like Amor Amor. Other days I think it’s a soapy mess. It ultimately comes down to my mood and Amor Amor has good days more than bad days, though it’s so far the only perfume I hate one day and love the other.

Amor Amor

In Bottle: Sweet and floral, a bit sharp, with a very strong soapy undercurrent. There’s a ton of white musk in this to me.

Applied: Sweet and clean with a bit of fruitiness that eventually evolves into a sweet and clean floral mid-stage. There’s something in this that’s sharp–I think it might be the white musk–that rears its head in the mid-stage and sticks around until the very end of the fragrance. Amor Amor is a bit of fun and girly balanced with sharp clean musk. The mid-stage reminds me of a bunch of fruity florals mixed together with an extra heaping of sugar slapped into the mix. The dry down gets a bit less sweet and a bit cleaner as the white musk takes over and sweeps the fragrance into a vanilla woods with a scrubbed amber scent.

Extra: I don’t know what to think of Amor Amor. Some days I think it’s one of the better fruit scents out there. Other days I think it’s just too sweet and too typical.

Design: I don’t like how Amor Amor looks. It feels like it wants to be a gimmick and reminds me too much of the rose under glass in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. The bottle itself is easy to hold and use. I just don’t care much for the aesthetics.

Fragrance Family: Fruity Floral

Notes: Blackcurrant, orange, mandarin, bergamot, cassia, grapefruit, apricot, lily, jasmine, rose, white musk, amber, tonka bean, cedar.

I’m writing up this review from a set of notes so I haven’t smelled Amor Amor in a while. I do wonder if my opinion of it has changed since I wrote the review. I guess I can try to smell it some time soon and see if I’m having a good Amor Amor day or a bad one.

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


Lancome Tresor

I know I haven’t done any reviews of Lancôme’s fragrances because very few of their fragrances interest me. The scents are fine, of course, but they all seem to hit an off note on my skin.

Tresor

Tresor

In Bottle: Very strong but the notes are all blended together to form a rather generic perfume scent that isn’t very pleasing to me. It’s generic-smelling right from the get-go and that disturbs me a bit.

Applied: Goes on with a slightly fruity and sweet sheerness that’s rather pleasant. A powderiness approaches the opening turning the fruity sweetness into something akin to sugar dust. The florals amp up next taking the scent into the mid-stage with a sweet jasmine and rose combination. Now, jasmine and rose are two of the most common floral notes in perfumes and the result is a rather generic floral scent unless something else in the fragrance is helping it hold its own. So far Trésor’s sticking to a pretty generic scent as the jasmine and rose combination dominate the mid-stage with a few wafts of iris and that sweet sugar dusting wiggle in and out of the scent. The dry down is an unremarkable affair too with a sandalwood note layered over vanilla and a very subtle dirty amber note.

Extra: Trésor’s considered to be a classic smelling perfume amongst some circles. To me, she’s not so much a classic as she is a generic. I smell Trésor and I think generic floral mostly due to how strong the jasmine and rose notes were in the mid-stage for me.

Design: Trésor’s design is an interesting jewel-like bottle. It also bears a resemblance to a pyramid in a way and reminds me also of honeycomb. I don’t know why but the design is decent, not garish but not exactly to my tastes. I do think it is well done though.

Fragrance Family: Floral

Notes: Pineapple, peach, lilac, bergamot, apricot blossom, lily of the valley, rose, orris, heliotrope, jasmine, apricot, peach, musk, sandalwood, amber, vanilla.

What I think of Trésor I can pretty much apply to the other fragrances from Lancôme. At least for their recent releases anyway. I haven’t had the gumption to dig up a sample of Climat though I have it on good word that it’s a beautiful piece of classical perfumery.

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


Britney Spears Circus Fantasy

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.


Etat Libre d’Orange Jasmin et Cigarettes

I didn’t want to leave Etat Libre d’Orange as, “Those people that made that one perfume” since they are a lovely, off-beat, and fantastic fragrance house. Jasmine et Cigarettes is one of their many very beautiful compositions.

Jasmin et Cigarettes

In Bottle: Tobacco is very prominent in the bottle with this fragrance with a lovely heady bouquet of dry jasmine flowers mingling with it.

Applied: Tobacco, smoky and heady, with that mixture of jasmine. There’s something about this fragrance that will stick to your nose when you smell it and you won’t honestly mind it that much because it’s simply lovely. The tobacco hangs out during the majority of the fragrance, even into the spicy sweet mid-stage as a cedar note tries to come up. It’s tame cedar, and I am happy for that, as the cedar attempts to clean up the fragrance a bit but just ends up adding another layer of complexity to the smoky spicy personality of Jasmin et Cigarettes. I get a lot of jasmine in the mid-stage too, but it’s well-behaved and works fantastically with the smoke and spice. By the time the dry down approaches, I get a crisp jasmine scent with a warm amber quality along with remnants of the spicy mid-stage.

Extra: Jasmin et Cigarettes was composed by Antoine Maisondieu, who is known for composing other Etat Libre d’Orange fragrances such as Antiheros.

Design: Most of Etat Libre d’Orange’s bottles are the same with differing labels. You will find the fragrances bottled in a rectangular glass bottle with a very simple cap and an equally simple label listing the fragrance name and its unique graphic on it.

Fragrance Family: Smoky Floral

Notes: Jasmine absolute, tobacco, hay, apricot, tonka bean, turmeric, cedar, amber, musk.

I’m a little addicted to this strange little beauty. It’s got the jasmine that I love in it mingled with that smoky scent. Some days I can’t stand the smokiness, other days I can’t get enough of it.

Reviewed in This Post: Jasmin et Cigarettes, 2010, Eau de Parfum.


Bath and Body Works White Citrus

What can I really say about White Citrus that hasn’t already been said? White Citrus is one of Bath and Body Works’ more simple compositions that’s billed as a modern take on a classic citrus fragrance. Not sure what they mean about a modern take on a classic citrus as this just pretty much smells like a citrus perfume. Nothing classic about it. But it is very good.  White Citrus

In Bottle: Sharp citrus, tangy lemon zest and a bit of sweet tangerine. There isn’t a lot of sweetness in this but there’s a tiny amount that helps to balance out the tartness a little bit.

Applied: Big white florals and citrus fragrance. Heavy emphasis on the citrus. I mostly get the lemon zest out of this fragrance which is tempered a bit by the lily and freesia present in the fragrance. The freesia helps calms the tartness of this scent a little with its floral sweetness as White Citrus lays on the skin like a clean, sheer coating of freshness. This is a nice, competent citrus-based scent with a good level of initial projection. However, due to its citrus-heavy top notes, the fragrance doesn’t last very long or project very far on me so I end up having to layer, layer, layer. White Citrus remains predominantly floral and lemon until it calms down near the end by introducing a barely noticeable and very sheer woody scent on the exit.

Extra: White Citrus is also available in a white variety of other products from Bath and Body Works. This includes lotions, body mists, travel size items, hand soap and probably much more. So if you’re worrying about the scent fading fast, get the lotion, the shower gel, and start layering. For those of you interested in this fragrance and want something that lasts a bit longer, Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs’ Whitechapel is a citrus-heavy perfume oil that has a few familiar components to White Citrus.

Design: White Citrus is bottled in much the same way as other Bath and Body Works eau de toilette fragrances. A no nonsense rectangular glass bottle with a design printed on the front. In White Citrus’ case, the design on the front appears to be some sort of explosion of green, or a graphical representation of a halved green citrus fruit.

Fragrance Family: Fresh

Notes: Lemon zest, tangerine, grapefruit, mandarin, lily of the valley, apricot, freesia, waterlily, ginger flower, woods, musk.

I had a small bottle of White Citrus lotion and quickly grew tired of it. A nice clean and fresh fragrance is good for an average day but White Citrus wasn’t as pleasing a citrus-based fragrance as I had hoped.

Reviewed in This Post: White Citrus, 2009, Eau de Toilette.


Hugo Boss Boss Femme

Boss Femme is like the amalgamation of fresh floral women’s scents. It’s like Love Etc. in that it pretty much smells like a category of scents without too much to discern it from the rest. But in a way, that could also be where its success lies. Boss Femme

In Bottle: Floral with a hint of fruit. I’m smelling a bit of rose but there’s a stronger jasmine note in this that’s vying for attention. This smells flowery, clean and feminine. Very generic but entirely enjoyable.

Applied: Goes on with a light citrus and slightly tart opening as it spreads into the mid-stage with that pleasant, breezy rose and jasmine combination. There’s a faint hint of sweetness in this too to make it more feminine  than it already is. I like this, it’s nice. It’s not great. It’s not groundbreaking. It’s just plain old nice. As Boss Femme heads into the dry down, you get a little bit of smoothness wandering in as it mixes with the lemon and for a brief moment, I thought I smelled plastic but the dry down is a predominantly sharp lemon, layered with a bit of smoothness and soft wood. Boss Femme is just good, clean, nice, and no nonsense. Kind of like soap–except better.

Extra: I think I’ve said it before, that Hugo Boss seems to be really good at keeping their fragrances on the lowdown and less offensive side of things. And it works out okay for them. It’d be quite the day when this house puts out something so awesome it eclipses the sun. But for now we have nice things like Boss Femme and Deep Red.

Design: Boss femme is an interesting little glass bottle that’s slanted at the top part with a cap that slants down to cover that portion up. It’s an interesting little design decision that makes my need for everything to be straight twitch just a little bit. The name of the fragrance is written in cursive font on the glass. The bottle I used had “femme” running along the dip of the curve and the house name etched into the metal sprayer. The bottle is easy to hold though, has a good weightiness to it and the color of the juice is just adorable.

Fragrance Family: Floral

Notes: Tangerine, blackcurrant, freesia, jasmine, fleur de lys, Bulgarian rose, apricot, lemon, wood.

There was a woman who worked briefly for a doctor I used to go to who wore this scent. I remember her rather well–not so much for her perfume–but for how the smallest things could make her laugh.

Reviewed in This Post: Boss Femme, 2008, Eau de Parfum.


Paris Hilton Siren

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.