Chanel No.5

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What could anyone possibly say about Chanel No.5 that hasn’t already been said ten times over? So all that remains to be said is to share my experience like anyone else would have to do at this point. Simply put, No.5 is the perfume people think of when they hear the word, “Perfume”. It’s misunderstood, well-loved, adored, respected, hated, revered, confusing, complex, and familiar. Any fragrance lover worth his or her salt knows what Chanel No.5 smells like. Chanel No5

In Bottle: Loud sparkling aldehydes and florals. Heady but clean and vivid in the sense that the fragrance is immediately recognizable. Chanel No.5 was not meant to be contained to a blotter though. It’s a fragrance that demands wearing.

Applied: Freshness from citrus and aldehydes. There are some fragrances that overdo the citrus but No.5’s initial citrus is tame. It smells very necessary as the scent settles down giving off aldehydes and florals. I can smell the ylang-ylang, the rose, and jasmine. The aldehydes are giving this a very clean, crisp feel. There’s something slightly dry about this, like desert air, as the fragrance starts to age and the florals are joined by powder and this dry airiness. No.5 is not for the lighthearted. It lasts and lasts and will continue to last for hours while it has trouble settling between floral, dryness and floral, powder. The final dry down of this scent may very well happen late into the night if you applied this in the morning. It’s fade loses most of the aldehydes and gives way a clean, sandalwoodsy, musk.

Extra: Chanel No.5 was released in 1921 when it became the raging success it is today. Hundreds of stories surround the creation of Chanel No.5, even more about who wore it and why. There are fan clubs dedicated to No.5, people who have written songs featuring No.5, and people who go their entire lives wearing No.5. Even through its various reformulations, Chanel No.5 has kept its core personality as a classic.

Design: Iconic perfume bottle for the eau de parfum version. Rectangular glass with Chanel No.5 label set in the middle. The cap is a heavier, nicer material that snaps onto the top to protect the sprayer that distributes an even, fine mist. There is a small Chanel logo running along the band on the cap. The juice itself is a dark yellow amber color.

Fragrance Family: Floral

Notes: Ylang-Ylang, neroli, aldehydes, jasmine, mayrose, sandalwood, vetiver.

Chanel No.5 is probably the fragrance most accused of smelling like “old lady”. While everyone’s perceptions of old lady smell is different, No.5 to me, is way too fresh, way too sparkling to be an old lady smell. But neroli and powder are the two marks of an old lady fragrance and I cannot deny that it has a certain feel to it that excludes it from being young.

Reviewed in This Post: Chanel No.5, 2009, Eau de Parfum.

Tommy Hilfiger Tommy Girl

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“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

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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.

Guerlain Champs-Elysees 1996

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Champs-Elysees 1996, not to be confused with the classic Parfum des Champs-Elysees from 1904, is one of Guerlain’s more controversial moderns. There are people who love it and people who loathe it. I can’t help but think that those who loathe it, hate it because they expected 1904’s Champs-Elysees to make a comeback and instead got something completely different. Champs-Elysees

In Bottle: Sharp, sweet mimosa. Faintly powdery with a white floral background. I don’t mean background as in base note. I mean background as in, imagine this fragrance is a stage. The actors are the sweet mimosa. The background is this thick, lush wall of white florals. That is Champs-Elysees, clean, sweet, sharp, powdery and utterly, unapologetically floral.

Applied: Mimosa is a major player but it’s battling it out for that lush curtain of florals. I get a bit more almond on application than off. Champs-Elysees reminds me of soap. It’s clean and bright and sweet like a lush bar of luxury soap and a bathtub filled with flowers floating on the surface. This is a white, light, delicate wall of florals fifty feet high. There is little change on dry down for me. The one thing I noticed was an increase in that powdery feel.

Extra: Word on the street has it that Champs-Elysees 1904’s notes may have looked something like this: Bergamot, violet, rose, iris, leather, oakmoss, benzoin, wood. And knowing Guerlain, it was probably laid over that iconic base. I can almost smell it in my mind but that is a pretty silly notion. The original was bottled in a beautiful turtle-like design. It’s really too bad the 1904 version and its re-issue is super rare and also super expensive (almost $14,000!). I want to have a sniff.

Design: Champs-Elysees 1996 is bottled in a pleasing, rather geometric bottle. What takes away from it most is the square wedge at the base of the bottle used to keep it standing. Otherwise, it is an interesting shape and would have been better had its physics allowed it to stand without that jerry-rigged bit at the bottom. Nevertheless, the bottle is easy to hold. The cap is plastic. The sprayer works just fine.

Fragrance Family: Fresh Floral

Notes: Mimosa, almond blossom, rose, buddleia, hibiscus, almond wood.

Poor Champs-Elysees 1996. I feel bad for it. It’s truly a very nice, modern, powdery white floral with sweet notes making it ultra-feminine. I wish more people liked it but I certainly understand the frustration. I do wonder if Champs-Elysees went by any other name it would catch less flack. It wouldn’t please those who currently dislike it but at least it wouldn’t disappoint in addition to being displeasing.

Reviewed in This Post: Champs-Elysees, 2009, Eau de Toilette.

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.

Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Dirty

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Dirty, from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab is a purposefully ironic interpretation. Dirty, supposedly smells like soap and general cleanliness. Miles away from the gritty undertones of its name, Dirty is a flowery bar of soap sitting on the windowsill wafting in the cool breeze of a manicured garden. Dirty

In Bottle: Something very sweet in this. Sweet and floral this can’t be a single clean linen scent because it also contains what I swear is white floral and sweet herbs. It makes me think of fresh, white sheets blowing in the breeze and an opened window.

Applied: Definitely something sweetly floral in this. It reminds me of Bath and Body Works‘ Sweetpea and Cotton Blossom mixed into one. There’s a great sense of imagery in this fragrance though. I mentioned the clean laundry, the window, how about a little house in the Maritimes with the rolling sea crashing against a cliff edge’s jagged skirt hem? Yeah, that’s it. Dirty starts off with that sweet floral aroma and eventually dries down to subtle soap and clean cotton. It’s like a bath and a change of clothes during midday.

Extra: There’s been some speculation abound about whether or not BPAL uses all natural ingredients or if there’s some synthetics mixed in there. I would suggest you ask the company yourself if this concerns you. As far as my nose goes, BPALs are fun and simple fragrances. If they’re safe to use then whether they’re all natural or synthetic is of no consequence to me.

Design: Presented in an amber bottle and a black twist cap with 5ml of perfume oil.

Fragrance Family: Fresh

Notes: Sweet herbs, white florals, cotton.

Dirty has an interesting case study. It delivers everything it needs to. I find myself conjuring up more vivid images in association with natural perfumes than constructed ones. That isn’t to say I don’t love the constructed ones or they’re somehow less effective. What tends to happen is natural perfumes make me think of scenes, landscapes, sounds and events. Constructed perfumes make me think of people and the cultures that they reflect.

Reviewed in This Post: Dirty, 2009, 5ml Bottle.

Prada Infusion D’Iris

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Infusion D’Iris is a fragrance true to its name as the fragrance strength and longevity are pretty much as good as an infusion’s going to get. This is an incredibly light fragrance with a very sad, very short applied life. No wonder a 200ml of Eau de Parfum exists. Having thought it funny that a bottle (not counting fountains) so massive existed at the time, I have since seen the light. I will no longer laugh at your jug’s worth of fleeting beauty, Infusion D’Iris. Infusion D'Iris

In Bottle: Green with a slightly earthy quality to it. Dark citrus laid over breaths of earthy, woodsiness. There is a very beautiful,very clear floral in this that lands the fragrance in floral territory immediately. I love the play between the freshness and the earthiness here. The latter often used in a denser way.

Applied: There’s a very bitter opener in this that powers through and reserve thoughts you may have had of D’Iris possibly being fruity. Nothing at all fruity about this fragrance as it tells you up front that it means business. The floral is also very quick to come up along with the woods and resins that blend together to make this fragrance sing during the early application period. As Infusion D’Iris ages on the skin the bitterness eases off a little, letting the flower and the rest of the fragrance do its work as it smooths out into a light whitish-green interpretation.

Extra: The iris sprouts from a bulb and like most bulb sprouting flowers tend to lack a scent, or have very little scent. There are some iris species that do have fragrant flowers but by and large you’ll find scentless iris petals. So, how come you see some people claim they can smell irises and love iris notes? They probably can because iris absolute does exist. Naturally extracted iris absolute, like many naturally produced ingredients in perfumery, are prohibitively expensive. Iris notes are made from the rhizomes of the plant rather than from the petals like most people would think. It would surprise many to discover that a lot of flower petals lack a fragrance and ye olde iris is one of them. How do they get the fragrance out of iris rhizomes then? They irradiate  them then extract the goodness. Irradiation is done to accelerate the aging of the rhizomes to get irones out of them. Irradiation simply makes things faster. Far faster, as aging iris rhizome the natural way could take years, whereas nuking them takes only a week. For the hypochondriacs out there, you cannot get cancer or radiation poisoning from wearing the extract from nuked iris root. You also will not become a superhero. I know. I’m sorry.

Design: Presented in a tall rectangular glass bottle with the Prada logo embossed on a plate. The cap is a plastic and metal affair with a band of green textured paper running along its barrel. Simple, easy, nothing flashy or complicated. I’m a minimalist by nature so the bottle here suits my tastes. The sprayer is also very decent, even, fine mist, does not distribute too much perfume. Though in this case, it probably should have.

Fragrance Family: Fresh Floral

Notes: Mandarin, orange blossom, iris, incense, benzoin, vetiver, cedar.

Here’s another surprise feature about perfume and supposed expensive ingredients. While there are genuinely expensive ingredients still used in perfume the vast majority of money that a perfume costs to you, the consumer, doesn’t go into the materials to make the fragrance. According to Luca Turin in The Secret of Scent, approximately 3% of the money goes into the fragrance components and development. The other 97%? Packaging, margins and advertising. And so my rage at Burberry Brit’s brick of a bottle continues.

Reviewed in This Post: Infusion D’Iris, 2010, Eau de Parfum.