Chloe 2008

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Chloe 2008 like Nina and Champs-Elysees is a moniker borrower. It is not a release of the original in different packaging. And along with this new formulation is a wave of disappointed fragrance lovers who expected 1975 Chloe but got 2008 instead. Chloe

In Bottle: It would be good practice to never approach a name borrowed fragrance or even a re-released fragrance with the expectations that it would even come close to smelling like the original. Nothing but disappointment can result. So I approached the new Chloe with as much open mindedness as I could. And you know what? It was pretty good. The new Chloe mashes together the light sweet peony with clean freesia and other mild, inoffensive and easy to love florals getting a nice, pleasant easy to wear flowery amber perfume.

Applied: Chloe goes on sweet and clean the peony and freesia doing its work immediately. There is a touch of sweet fruitiness but the focus of this fragrance is on the flowers. Rose comes in with magnolia tailing behind melding together with the opening notes as the entire scent turns airy and pretty. Chloe is a light yellow dress kind of scent with its sunny, cheerfulness and youthful sweetness. The dry down is a bit understated but still retains magnolia even as the sweet, warm amber heralds Chloe’s departure.

Extra: A little known fact about me is that I can never associate peony as smelling like anything else but air freshener. When I was a kid we had some off-brand air freshener kicking around the house. It was some concoction of berries and peonies but the strongest note was peony. If there was any sort of odor or blast of mustiness, out came the peony. One day, after frying a fish, the peony air freshener came out. The rank that erupted. I remember and loathe it to this day. It was a mix of fish, saltiness, burnt oil and sweet cloying peony. Emphasis on the sweetness and the fish. After that little incident we bounced around air fresheners that smelled like rain.

Design: Chloe is bottled in a cute glass rectangular affair with a plastic cap and an adorable little brown bow. The simplicity of this is very nice but in its simplicity the minor details like the textured glass and the little brown bow are pleasant bonuses.

Fragrance Family: Floral

Notes: Peony, lychee, freesia, rose, magnolia, muguet, amber, cedar.

The new Chloe is all right. At the very least, it is a highly wearable and easy to love scent. The best thing about the new Chloe for me is the bottle. I didn’t much like the old one but I prefer the original Chloe’s scent.

Reviewed in This Post: Chloe, 2009, Eau de Parfum.

Twilight, The Perfume

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I had the dubious honor of being able to smell Twilight (the fragrance inspired by the books and movies).  It was a rather strange moment in my life as I had originally thought myself too insulated to ever encounter a bottle of this fabled stuff but lo and behold, it wafted itself to me.

Now, it wasn’t like I thought it would smell bad. So few modern made fragrances (especially celebrity fragrances and those based on pop culture) could contain anything that would be considered “stinky”. I just didn’t buy into the hype. I didn’t like the books which excluded me from everything else, thankfully. Aside from seeing the occasional personal thumbing through one of the novels in the series, I largely avoided this phenomenon. But hey, a chance to smell a pop culture phenomenon? Who am I say no? Twilight

In Bottle: Word on the manicured, rainy Oregon streets have it that this fragrance is supposed to be representative of what Bella smells like to Edward. My initial reaction? This reminds me of high school. Lavender is the prominent note in this and I detect that sweet, bubbly, clean freesia too.  There’s more to it than those two notes though. I’m picking up something woodsy and very, very slightly bitter. Cedar, very small cedar though. Think sapling sized.

Applied: Okay, I really only had one shot at this so here goes. The initial burst is a flare of green lavender and bitterness. The bitterness is really fleeting though as the freesia comes in to do its work. The lavender is a nice, dewy, clear note that does a great job until freesia rolls into town with its screaming soapiness. This is a clean fragrance, clean and cool like a late spring shower in a forest. Which, I suppose, is appropriate given the imagery in the movies and books about rainy old Forks. As the fragrance starts to dry down the lavender takes off for the background letting what I’m pretty sure is some sort of musk note come up. I lost all traces of cedar except a tiny patch of green. Throughout the duration of this, I get green, clean, sweet and floral. The four scent groups that are the most inoffensive to people. The final dry down is a sweet, soapy with an now almost invisible lavender. Not a whole lot of evolution, kind of predictable lifespan and really not breaking any new fragrance ground. But it is a step above what I thought this would be.

Extra: Apparently these were initially only sold in Hot Topic stores and were fairly popular. I can see why people like this. It’s really inoffensive, highly wearable, and it’s a fairly competent clean lavender scent. There’s barely any interesting dry down though and it’s no wonder they only bothered to list two notes. It’s because the dry down is pretty uneventful. Musk, green, and persistent lavender. This isn’t going to rocket Twilight into the gilded halls where the likes of Guerlain and Caron live it up but it’s workable.

Design: All right, let’s talk bottle. Twilight’s bottle is pretty much a direct rip off of Nina by Nina Ricci. The differences being a slightly darker glass and a sentence written on the Twilight bottle. The bottle construction itself is also a fair bit poorer than Nina. The little silver leaves on the Twilight bottle were a bit loose. And on the Nina bottle, the glass is seamless and smooth. On the Twilight bottle, there is a noticeable seam where the two halves of glass were combined. It’s a blatant copy otherwise. In early 2009, Nina Ricci opened up a can of lawsuit over the bottle design. No surprises there. No word on how that’s going but I’m sure there won’t be any dirt slinging. If there is, I am so there.

Fragrance Family: Fresh Floral

Notes: Lavender, freesia, cedar, musk.

Twilight was sold at Hot Topic stores as a limited edition scent that rode in on the coattails of the book series and movie successes. As far as I understand it, this fragrance is extremely popular among fans and whoever likes (or doesn’t mind) lavender will probably like this too. The fragrance itself is hard to hate. Oh, and don’t ask me if “perfume spray” means eau de toilette or eau de parfum. I honestly don’t know.

Reviewed in This Post: Twilight, 2009, Perfume Spray.

Hugo Boss Deep Red

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Hugo Boss has never really grabbed my attention in the fragrance department probably because their marketing is so geared towards men that I kind of gloss over them. They’re something of an invisible entity to me as I neither see their brand around nor smell it. But Deep Red is a fragrance worth investigating because it is a lovely perfume. Deep Red

In Bottle: Sharp and astringent. I detect some woodsy notes with a smooth vanilla coating. There’s definitely a large floral element here, sweet and light and just a touch of powder. In the bottle, it reminds me of black vanilla tea. It’s that sharpness and astringent quality doing it, I think.

Applied: Sweetness amps immediately upon contact as the florals and vanilla get sweeter and sweeter, eventually overcoming the powder as the fragrance begins its dry down. I get sweet vanilla flowers and blond woodsy notes with a really light and easygoing citrus topper. The citrus is battling with something a little musky in this scent and I wish it wouldn’t. It gives Deep Red a bit of a personality complex because it can’t decide between being sharply clean or musky. The fragrance eventually disappears, entirely too soon I might add, into a sweet vanilla before fading away completely.

Extra: Vanilla is derived from an orchid. More specifically the vanilla plant that’s a pretty flowering type of orchid whose fruit is harvested and cured into the dried vanilla pods we see in little jars at the supermarket. Outstanding.

Design: The bottle is presented in dark red glass in a tapered flask shape. The cap is a very nice weight that pops off very easily to reveal the sprayer. The design elements on the glass are simple but effective, which by looking at Hugo Boss’ other fragrance offerings, is on par with their design course. The one problem, and it’s a pretty major one, is the sprayer on my bottle. Perhaps it’s just me but my sprayer distributes a ridiculous amount of product. One spray visibly reduces the amount of perfume I have left in the bottle. The mist also gets everywhere because of this and liberally coats anything in its way. It’s a nice fine mist, it’s just that I wish the spraying mechanism would be a little more frugal.

Fragrance Family: Floral

Notes: Pear, blood orange, clementine, freesia, ginger flower, woods, musk, vanilla.

I slotted Deep Red in the floral department because of the dominance of sweet flowers in this scent. Evidently, I was supposed to smell fruits too but wherever those were I couldn’t find them. Sorry, pear, you’ll have to hide somewhere less obscure next time.

Reviewed in This Post: Deep Red, 2009, Eau de Parfum.