A loud catcall of fantastic peach nectar, with a pinch on the ass of cloves.
Later she steals a flower from a neighbor’s garden to tuck in her hair, on the way to buy sweet Meyer lemons and flirt with the fruit vendor in the square.
Fresh and brash and juicy.
Peach was my favorite ice cream flavor at Baskin-Robbins.
Opens with lots of roses and some other greenhouse flowers my grandfather grew in patio pots and brought inside in the winter.
There’s an edge of citronella and underneath, some cedar notes, but it doesn’t tell much of a story.
I love the marketing on my little magazine sample–yes to gorgeous Black women with natural hair and real women over fifty! But I’m disappointed that there is none of Kate Spade’s trademark whimsy of typewriter purses and flowerpot bags in this scent.
Edit–2/18/2020
Three years later and here’s a mini in a box of curiosities I don’t remember ordering at all, and I manage to splash it all over the house while opening it. Now I have rosy cedar floorboards and an annoyed cat, but there’s a quirky cottage-core vibe that I like (and didn’t get from the peelie) so I’ll tuck it into my linen closet until I find a good home for it.
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Rest in Parfum, Kate Spade. I’ve loved your fun designs.
Remember that green gum that looked like pillows that squirted sugar syrup when you first chewed it?
Saint Julep is the sparkliest perfume I’ve ever sniffed. It’s that Turkish iced tea that knocks your drunk off at four in the morning, the half an Adderall you saved for finals week.
The mint itches on your skin, keeping you awake, jeering at the insomniacs who are too tired to enjoy the starlight, and then kisses you in the morning with still-fresh breath.
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It’s a bop.
Tea in a European cafe.
Watery with peony and lotus flowers, yet clever, with a twist of hint of lemon. Dries down to a dark woodsy musk.
It’s very swanky. I feel I’d have to be fluent in at least three languages to be able to pull this off.
Like, this woman knows her glove size and exactly which fork to use and how to eat Norway lobster without getting butter on her blouse.
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This opens with The Cheesecake Factory issuing a declaration of chemical warfare to Au Bon Pain.
Disaronno and Lazzaroni broker a tense amaretto truce, but VS Amber Romance blasts in and gives everyone headaches.
Finally the battlefield clears, leaving Toffifay standing alone, making feeble “This is nuts!” puns.
A walk through a suburban shopping center on payday: Starts with a browse through the ubiquitous lingerie shop, stops for chocolate at an overpriced kiosk, samples soap and candles, then spends a frustrated hour in the sports equipment store not getting waited on.
Good Girl has the current trendy components, but it’s all fashion and no style. The stiletto bottle is somewhat clever (if it were packaged in a nice plastic Payless pump, I might have been impressed with the scent) though conceptually counter-intuitive… I can think of no occasion where I would want to spray shoe-juice on my skin.
A virgin Apple-tini served at a debutante cotillion.
A twist of lemon peel, green Jolly Rancher syrup, some cream soda.
And the breath of what I want to think is apple blossom, but is probably some kind of synthetic lily. (It works, though, like that bit of spandex in the silk knit shirt that would be shapeless without it.)
Sweet white musk on the bottom, the way the paper smells after you’ve poured all the sugar out of the one three pound bag.
Opens with a Jamba Juice stand, and finishes with Brach’s Milk Maid caramel bullion cubes, amber, and overpriced shoes, but it works in a ridiculously girly-girl fashion.
Doesn’t project too much and doesn’t last too long, and the bottle is chichi cute.
Girls fashion magazines have smelled like this for the past ten years–inserts fall out of every issue of Teen Vogue, YM and Seventeen–I’m guessing the box sets sell like hotcakes on the holidays.
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Edit – 12/10/21
Flanker after flanker (Bowdacious is the best of them) has come out since Viva La Juicy’s debut in 2008, but the original continues to be the least objectionable of the line and the most popular.
The peelies still trickle from my mailbox with every cosmetics store flyer, and the gift sets are stacked to the ceiling at the shops, but it feels dated, now.
Prada Candy‘s caramel has stayed more fresh.
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Coldplay’s Viva La Vida came out the same year–here’s a great cover.
Remember when you were a kid and you’d rip open the packet of Koolaid and huff that first little wisp of fruit powder?
Only me?
Alllrighty then.
There’s a weird wet/dry to this one, like slippery elm and peachfuzz. Three hours later it turns creamy floral–bright in the winter and soft in the summer–but at the end of the day it dries into a fantastic vanilla tree bark.
And the bottle makes for great curtain rod finials.
Squirts sharp orange out of the bottle–then sniffs some happy springtime flowers that haven’t realized they will be cut for a funeral arrangement.
Later, a furtive pistachio hides in white musk.
Over-designed, like a lovely semi-precious stone turned cheap and sad by a clumsy electroplate setting.
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Another chain link.
kira a. gold 