Beyonce Heat

Today we’ve got Beyonce’s Heat perfume. This fragrance, along with J-Lo Glow, are extremely popular and are often asked about. So I’m finally crawling out of the wood works and digging up my notes on it.

Heat

In Bottle: Ah peach up front. Big, synthetic, sweet peach. You know I used to like peach but now that I’m smelling it everywhere, I kind of wish these celebuscents would move onto a more obscure fruit. How about the beloved durian? Noble, spiky, tastes like custard and smells like sewage . . . What?

Applied: All right, so we got sweet peach up front blasting the opening wide open with a big fruity announcement. The background to the peach that digs itself into the mid-stage is a series of barely detectable florals. The fluffy opener leads rather well into a warm cleaned up amber and fruity flowers mid-stage with the sweetness still lingering about even now after the peach is all gone. Heat dries down in a rather expected fashion, keeping that warm amber scent and adding vanilla and soft woods. Heat’s nothing new, it’s nothing groundbreaking, but like all celebrity scents it is a good, decently constructed, wearable fragrance.

Extra: So Beyonce’s first perfume release was a big smash hit. Though most of Heat’s popularity probably has less to do with the juice and more to do with Beyonce’s  name on the bottle. This stuff sells, and it’s okay with me so long as the stuff they sell is at least decently composed–which Heat is. Smell away. Heat has already spawned a few flankers so if the original doesn’t float your boat, there’s Heat Rush and the elixir version of Heat.

Design: The bottle’s shape reminds me a bit of Hugo Boss Deep Red with a few interesting curves  and a few neat little colors added in. I’m okay with the design. It is what it is, though, which is a flashy celebrity bottle. One of the better ones out there.

Fragrance Family: Fruity Oriental

Notes: Red vanilla orchid, magnolia, neroli and peach, honeysuckle, almond, creamy musk, sequoia wood, tonka, amber.

I don’t know if I’m going to be up to smelling those two Heat flankers. I expected a bit more out of this fragrance than what I got. In the end, it’s a celebrity perfume that’s fairly predictable in how it was built and how it plays itself out.

Reviewed in This Post: Heat, 2010, Eau de Parfum.


Marc Jacobs Lola

Marc Jacobs Lola was supposed to be a more grown-up Daisy. And I had seen this fragrance touted so much that I had to go and find some just to see if all the hype was true. I left underwhelmed with the scent but pleased with it all the same. Lola

In Bottle: Bright grapefruit, clean spice, and fruity pear. This smells juicy and clean right off the bat. It’s almost like a Herbal Essences shampoo.

Applied: Fruity off the bat with a pile of flowers rolling in like a scrubbed clean tide of–uh–fresh flowers. I’m tired. Cut me some slack. That shampoo smell lingers for a bit in Lola as the opening stage gives way to the mid-stage where the flowers rise up a bit more and the fruity, juicy opening dies down to hold Lola at “Smells like shampoo”. This is a really nice, clean and feminine scent and I can definitely see where people would say this is a grown up Daisy. It doesn’t smell like Daisy but it does smell a little more mature. Not mature in the sense of a classic sophisticated perfume but if we were to assume Daisy is meant for the teen crowd, then Lola would be good for the college kids. She lacks the bright, grassy freshness and youth of Daisy but she makes up for it by being a clean pretty floral with a hovering sweet rose. Sweet rose being a good alternative to classic rose that tends to infuse a bit of youth into perfume’s most popular and, strangely enough, polarizing note. The dry down is a typical affair of sandalwood and vanilla with lingering traces of nice shampoo. Lola reminds me a bit of Gucci Flora with a less sweet mid-stage.

Extra: Lola’s spawned a number of offshoot products. One of the ones I see most often is the solid perfume ring adorned with its iconic vinyl flower.

Design: A big bright, red, purple, blue and green vinyl flower adorns the cap of Lola. The glass bottle itself is a purple color while the circumference of the cap is a textured gold-colored metal. There’s two bottle designs for Lola. The smaller (50ml) is a tall bottle. The 100ml is a squat, wide bottle. The design for Lola took a few pages from Daisy’s bottle design and it’s cute as a button. I didn’t think I would like the bottle design as much as I did but heck, it’s adorable. Not sophisticated at all, a little silly but not the least bit pretentious.

Fragrance Family: Floral

Notes: Pink pepper, pear, red grapefruit, peony, rose, geranium, vanilla, creamy musk, tonka.

If nothing else, Lola is an eye catcher for its bottle design. Subtle is not this lady’s business. The 100ml bottle in particular is huge and comes packaged in an equally huge box due to the giant vinyl flower cap.

Reviewed in This Post: Lola, 2010, Eau de Parfum.