Sugar and roses at first spray, then more roses, with stray woody spice underneath, then more roses (and sneezing!) with a bit of caramel benzoin and more roses.
The random notes trickling in and out seem like passing cars blaring random pop songs while one is listening to Ella Fitzgerald.
Close to the skin within ten minutes and gone in twenty.*
*ETA: lasts months on cotton–so perhaps a better one for hair and scarves rather than skin?
Smoky neroli that dissipates into sweet iris, then completely disappears. An elegant one-hour-stand, but I don’t remember her name.
(Roland Mouret is a French fashion designer who is all the rage right now for his body celebrating dresses in all sizes.
I was hoping his perfume would somehow be more voluptuous.)
Amourette means “a fling.”
Gets better after an hour.
(The guy called it a mean old lady perfume.)
Edit – 2/24/23
I was so hoping this would be as fun as the dark flankers to the original Lolita Lempicka.
Si Noir is a lot richer and sweeter on the bottom, but still has that pink pepper and sweet pea sharp pinch on top and the patchouli cigarette ash in the middle, but I’m not willing to wait for it.
Better than the first, but it’s no Minuit Noir.
*
“Mean old lady caused me to weep and moan…”
Fresh and fun and fashionable–a mermaid in spangled spandex and designer seashells.
Wet flowers bloom strong, then ease into sugary herbs, water mint and those funny green lake apples that float on the surface in the summer. A bit later salt cascades into the sweet, the sharp edges of the crystals biting like ocean water.
I liked the advertising insert enough to look for it in the store–it fades fast. A pick me up rather than a long wear, but the lack of white musk is refreshing.
This is also fun and fashionable and fresh–
A florist in a hospital, maybe.
Anything with tuberose and peaches shouldn’t be this antiseptic.
Edit – 8/31/21
I keep going back to my favorites, just to make sure that they still smell how I remember, that I’m recovered from the C-19 anosmia–but I’ve found a few stinkers that I wrote off with some snark then forgot about, too.
This one is still sterile and generic, the rose and jasmine coming together in lemony disinfectant that kills everything organic and green, then quickly wilts to the skin.
I think it might do even worse in the summer, than when I initially tried it in January.
For the same price, a prettier bouquet and three times the performance all year round, go with Estée Lauder’s Private Collection.
*
This is as moody, but much prettier.
With emphasis on girl.
One to wear with pigtails and a mini-skirt.
Opens with a juicy slice of pear, and soft citrus, and as it warms, a lovely pistachio.
Orange flower water pushes through, then almond marzipan.
In half an hour it developed to syrupy tonka bean and heavy artificial amber, a foot off the wrist, and made my ears ring and my teeth hurt with how sweet it is.
The guy said it smelled like a very young girl’s perfume and made him feel a bit creepy.
Marshmallow fluff–that powdered huff of air when you open a fresh bag of Jet-Puffed minis–and candied violets, the kind on wedding cakes.
Then a whiff of apples, waxy red delicious skin, that first sniff just before you bite.
Miraculously, it doesn’t do the expected caramel-amber-musk dry-down thing, it stays fresh and sugary and bright.
Ridiculously feminine, lip-gloss blown kisses last for over two hours, hovering a few inches off the wrist, then mature into woodsy sweetness on the shirt cuffs.
*
Miles Davis was a painter, too, influenced by Joni Mitchell and Jean-Michel Basquiat. (Check out this article featuring some of his works.)
This song was in the soundtrack to the Basquiat movie, starring Jeffrey Wright and David Bowie.
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.
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.
*
Another chain link.
kira a. gold 