YSL Opium Fleur Imperiale

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Still working up to my ultimate appreciation of Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium. I decided that since I wasn’t able to work myself up to Opium yet, I should start with Opium Light, as I call it. Otherwise known as the limited edition Summer Opium Flankers that feature Fleur Imperiale. Opium Fleur Imperiale

In Bottle: Definitely Opium based but the original fragrance has been reduced from its big flashy self to a lighter pleasant base for a layer of clean and sheer woods.

Applied: Neroli and Jasmine make a first impression as the Opium base matures and sticks around for the mid and dry down stages. Over Opium there is a nice, dusty sandalwood that covers the fragrance in a clean twang. The rest is handled by dry osmanthus and cleaned up myrrh. At its heart, this is a more flowery version of the original Opium. Carnation is used sparingly in this giving the fragrance a bit of floral spice. Not a lot though so if you were concerned about it, don’t be. Fleur Imperiale smells exotic. Like a nap under the shade of a tree in a desert  palace. It helps that Fleur Imperiale is a dry, warm, clean scent as its approach on dry down is a parched but beautiful myrrh-backed, golden vanilla amber.

Extra: Great introductory fragrance to Opium, the classic. Even though this is a flanker one wouldn’t venture to purchase a flanker if they didn’t like original Opium. I urge you to try the summer limited editions, however. Particularly Fleur Imperiale and Shanghai. They are toned down and more sheer. Great for anyone hesitant and anyone who wants to come to understand and appreciate Opium for all its earthy, spicy goodness.

Design: I love the design on this bottle. It’s shaped like Opium with pretty red flowers on the glass. My major complaint, however, is the plastic sprayer and plastic cap. Okay, the plastic caps are common and I should stop raging about those now. I can dig that. But a plastic sprayer? Come on. Every time I go to spray this stuff, I’m worried the plastic sprayer is going to somehow break or worse yet, break off. The plastic sprayer just feels and looks cheap. I’d like a hardware upgrade (too late for that) but other than that, Opium Fleur Imperiale is a pleasant thing to behold.

Fragrance Family: Floral Oriental

Notes: Mandarin orange, neroli, bergamot, carnation, jasmine, apricot blossom, amber, patchouli, vanilla, osmanthus, woods, myrrh.

I was very  impressed though a little disappointed by how similar Fleur Imperiale and Fleur de Shanghai are. There is a minor difference though as Imperiale is decidedly warmer and lacks the gentle sweetness.

Reviewed in This Post: Fleur Imperiale, 2006, Eau de Toilette.

Bath and Body Works Twilight Woods

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Despite all these things I have with the word Twilight or related to the hour of twilight, I really do not have any affection for the popular book/movie phenomenon. Really. Though I can’t help but think that this fragrance, in particular was a well-timed release by Bath and Body Works to capitalize on the Twilight craze at the time. Twilight Woods

In Bottle: Warmth is what Twilight Woods is. It’s warmth first, vanilla second, and woodsy last. And that’s just from the bottle. This smells clean, sweet, comforting and quite competent.

Applied: Opens as a fruity vanilla woodsy scent and starts moving into creamy vanilla woods scent with the frangipani. Twilight Woods lingers in that area for a bit before the fruitiness comes back for an encore and bows out with a nice watery, sweet woodsy vanilla scent that’s very pleasant. This smells like a really good fragrance to cozy up next to fire to. It’s nice, pleasant, very smooth and creamy and has excellent longevity and moderately good projection.

Extra: This is probably my favorite fragrance from Bath and Body Works. They talked about this and P.S. I Love You being two of their ventures into more abstract fragrance. Before, Bath and Body Works had fairly simple to decipher fragrances that were fairly linear. I was partial to their Pink Grapefruit body mist.

Design: Cute bottle with a nicely detailed image of a tree laid over the glass so when you’re looking at the bottle on the right side, you get a very pretty looking design. The cap is also quite nice. The entire design is slick and functional and most of Bath and Body Works’ eau de toilettes now come in bottles shaped like this one. The sprayer is functional and works just fine.

Fragrance Family: Woodsy Gourmand

Notes: Juicy berry, sparkling mandarin, coconut, creamy frangipani, soft mimosa, wet honeysuckle, wild freesia, apricot nectar, oud wood, skin musk captive, vanilla milk, and warm woods.

How do you like that notes list telling you what each  note is supposed to smell like? Frankly, I kind of like it but acknowledge its unnecessariness (it’s a word now).

Reviewed in This Post: Twilight Woods, 2009, 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.

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.

Yves Saint Laurent Elle

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Light, sweet, and fruity. Elle is Yves Saint Laurent (YSL)’s attempt at attracting a younger female audience. While there has been some discussion about Elle smelling like tea, I have to differ. It’s a bright fruity, clean, woodsy scent and that is pretty much where the buck stops. Elle

In Bottle: Immediate smell of citrus and fruits. Elle comes on strong and sweet with a burst of lychee and berries after the citrus carries it up to the nose. The fruits don’t quit when this stuff is in the bottle and they make it difficult to detect anything beneath them. Yet, I get this clean feeling from the scent with a touch of steady base that I attribute to the woods.

Applied: Again, citrus and sweet fruits up front and center as the fragrance pulls no punches in making itself well known. Elle has a veneer of simplicity though because as the fragrances ages on the skin the fruits are slowly complimented by the wood notes giving this fragrance a sharper quality. There are elements of florals in this fragrance but the fruits are difficult to get past. I can barely detect the jasmine hanging out. As for the two earth notes (vetiver and patchouli) that are supposed to be in this? They’re there but they compliment the fruits so well that I didn’t really notice them. Overall, Elle is a well incorporated fragrance though the fruits in here are very prominent but they are kept well in line by the woods. The rest of the notes seem to be content with just hanging out.

Extra: With perfumers Olivier Cresp and Jacques Cavallier behind the creation of Elle, it’s really no surprise how we came to arrive at this woodsy fruity mix. Cresp and Cavallier are known (to me) as the men behind Nina Ricci’s Nina (2006), a sweet citrus fruity fragrance. My first “grown up” perfume.

Design: I can’t say I’m wild about the bottle for Elle. On paper it looks bold and interesting. In person, the bottle fails to impress me. With its hard sharp edges, Elle is built like a skyscraper with a plastic hot pink detachable cube to protect the sprayer. The design looks girly and metropolitan at the same time but the shape and the feel of it just seems lacking to me like there’s something missing in the design that would make it stand out a bit more.

Fragrance Family: Fruity Chypre

Notes: Citrus, lychee, berries, jasmine, woods, vetiver, and patchouli.

Pleasant, pleasing and inoffensive. Elle’s got it all if you’re looking for an easy to wear, fruity chypre. I wouldn’t say it’d be my first pick for a fruity perfume but the woods definitely give it a bit of uniqueness when compared to the other fruity fragrances it has to compete with. As for that tea thing? I don’t smell no tea.

Reviewed in This Post: Elle, 2010, Eau de Parfum Tester.

Guerlain Mitsouko

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I don’t think highly enough of myself to kick off this blog with a review of a Guerlain classic because I feel I’m particularly versed in olfactory luxuries. I just wanted start with a relatively agreed upon fragrance. A classic, in other words, where so many others have said what needed to be said and I’m just filling in an already overflowing gap.

Mitsouko is Guerlain’s 1919 debut girl. Formulated by Jacques Guerlain with a following that describes her with such words as deep, sensual, sophisticated, and mysterious.Mitsouko

In Bottle: The fragrance is so well blended that I have a hard time picking out any specific notes. This is not a bad thing as it means Mitsouko has that unique quality. She smells like something never smelled before. I immediately associate her with with the word ‘classic’ and ‘old world’. Old world being a very endearing term to me, of course.  It’s spicy, it’s woodsy, just a little floral and very lightly fruity, but it’s all of those things at once too. To separate the notes and describe them feels wrong.

Applied: Mitsouko’s initial application is a burst of complex florals and soft woodsy notes. In a manner of seconds, as if she shed her flower coat as she drifted from the air onto skin, Mitsouko begins to deepen. The woods and spices come up creating this miasma of scent that makes me think darkness, headiness, and shadows drifting in and out of a sunless forest. As she dries the woods and moss come up more, blending with the spices as the components practically meld together. It is easy to forget that this is a fragrance composed of different notes and the fruitiness that people love in this fragrance is the softening agent used to tame rather than dominate. It’s hard to separate the notes and what’s left is just Mitsouko as a whole.

Extra: So it is said that Guerlain’s Mitsouko is a homage to many things, the name, the novel, the woman herself. Most people seem to subscribe to the theory that Guerlain based Mitsouko on the novel, La Bataille by Claude Farrčre. Where the novel is now difficult to find, at least for an English speaker with no foothold in French, the fragrance lives on in those who continue to love her.

Design: Mitsouko’s bottle design, I suspect, is supposed to reflect its scent and the artistry of the time. It looks and feels like a piece of design history. It’s a piece that, to me, reflects the orientalism of the fragrance and while art and design has since evolved into abstract shapes, clean and sharp lines, with flowing bulbous nodes of color bold against white, Mitsouko’s bottle design is an echo from an era gone but never forgotten. The one thing about my bottle I dislike is the plastic cap which seems to be on par for most recent Guerlains. I would have liked for them to invest in some nicer caps but you can’t have it all.

Fragrance Family: Oriental Chypre

Notes: Citrus, rose, peach, clove, pepper, spices, oakmoss and woods.

I believe a modern fragrance lover, and I wholly admit myself as a rotten, no-good, fruity-floral loving modernist, would find it difficult to like Mitsouko. But liking and respecting are two different things to me. I own a bottle of Mitsouko, a small one, for the simple fact that it is a piece of fragrance history. Once in a while I’ll bring her out and try to analyze  the complexities of her nature and to assuage my guilt of not warming up to Shalimar yet (I’m getting there). I find her too deep for normal wear as the people I’m around most often tend to react poorly to her. It’s not their fault, and it’s not Mitsouko’s fault either. Mitsouko is to be appreciated for sure as one of those classics you’ve just got to try at least once because reviews just don’t do her justice. As for wearing her? That depends on what you like.

Reviewed in This Post: Mitsouko, circa 2008, Eau de Toilette.