fruity

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Yvresse

Vintage champagne cork shaped mini bottle, detailed with indentations of the muselet–the wire cage that “muzzles” the top–and rumpled gold foil, with red lettering.

Happy, happy.

The best New Year’s party ever, that changed its name from Champagne for copyright reasons.
(Perfume is technically alcohol, so it cannot legally be sold with the word champagne unless it is made from specific grapes by a specific method in a specific region.)
The new name is a play on YSL and the word ivresse, which means intoxication.)

Yvresse does sparkle out of the bottle, a joyful room-filling effervescent peach muddled up with delicious spices, that calms to petal-soft fuzzy apricot florals in slow dance space for the evening.
Finishes with lovely sweet wine notes over resinous woods–another pun on the cork–that last the night, leaving rosy dregs on the skin in the morning.

Rich and light-hearted, but not silly.
‘Til next year!

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Marie

TokyoMilk pot of solide parfum, with matchbox featuring Marie Antoinette holding a fan, on a dupioni dress with beaded lace.

Marie wants to be “Candied Lemon, Honeydew, Cassis, Sugared Violet, Ylang-ylang, Creamy Musk & White Woods,” but winds up being pale lilac clementines, in a surreal watercolor wash of cake icing.
At the very bottom is a wisp of incense smoke that makes it decadent and sexy, fruity sweet dessert dressed in Rococo ruffle lingerie of sheer organdy, while getting stoned on joints rolled in gardenia scented paper.

My favorite of all the TokyoMilk’s I’ve sniffed. I wish it were offered as an eau–I’d bathe in the stuff.

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Believe

Full sized bottle with pale rose motif and back printed with handwritten script, capped with gold tall top, and a bright pink cabbage rose from my garden.

“Cabbage Rose & Citrus”

Matronly green apples and roses on top, sweet florals and wicker furniture on the bottom.

Doesn’t last long–I reach for this one when I want a splash of rose that’s more comforting and less business than Tea Rose–both the fragrance and the packaging has a maternal cottage-chic vibe, but sometimes one is in the mood for that, y’know?

Edit – 6/7/21

Pulled this one out of a box in the back of my closet today.
I’d forgotten how much I like it–there’s a clear sweetness that seems really refreshing when compared to so many of the muddy caramel stuff that’s out lately.

The roses I planted this spring actually managed a few blooms–and I had fun comparing the raw materials to the bottled fragrance. Believe definitely captures the softer, apple-ish aspect of the cabbage rose (named for the appearance, not the scent!) versus the sharper lemony quality of the hybrid tea rose.

I’ll leave it out for a while.

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Another comfort rose–

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X: L`Heure Folle

blueberry cairn
Stacks of very blue blueberries and Cartier’s signature red leather-look box, and test tube of X.

Cartier’s Ten o’Clock wants to spend the ‘Crazy Hour’ picking blueberries on the forest edge but sadly snoozes with Dad’s outdated watch in the sock drawer.

Ironing starch on cotton handkerchiefs with jam stains that fade to metallic dusty rose.

It makes a nice room scent.

P!nk covered Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy in 2009, when this scent came out. It’s not dusty at all.

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Eau de Star

eau de star
Triangle bottle with blue liquid, surrounded by a rainbow of hard candies.

Thierry Mugler’s Eau de Star bottles up that summer you spent with the bleach blonde stoner cutie who carved a bong out of a watermelon.

Fresh and wet and high and unforgettable.

It was my favorite candy perfume until the guy said, “That reminds me of what (our hot European neighbor) wears.”
She’s ten years younger than me and a flight attendant.

I love this live version of Madonna’s Candy Perfume Girl, bitchy and hard and still sweet.

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Royal Riesling

4711 cut crystal flask with plain gold and white label, and a bunch of green grapes.

Nice green grapes at first bite, effervescent and tart, but then it suddenly turns into raisins…? Sickly sweet with awkward dusty spice.
Weird and disappointing.

Edit – 9/5/21

Sometimes I find old notebooks, snippets of things on scraps of paper, my first impressions of something distasteful or not interesting enough to write about–
Reading them later, I have to laugh at my ignorance, my arrogance, or my honesty–or the fact that I take a disappointing fragrance so personally…

But really, who wants to smell like raisins?!

4711 gold bottle cap and a stem bereft of its grapes, on notepaper scrawled with the word “why??”

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Royalty.

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Lotus Sake

TokyoMilk solid perfume and matchbox, and gold capped bottle, both featuring two ladies in cheongsam dresses.

TokyoMilk #53 touts Crisp Greens, Plum, Green Lotus, Warm Sake on the label–
–and yeah, this stuff smells like a drunk dinner salad.
(The parfum solide adds oil to the dressing.)

Has an interesting vegan prep chef aura–I’ll toss the solid and keep the eau.

Edit 2/1/23

Unearthed this one today and did a double take, then did a comparison test, and yep, it’s got a LOT in common with Un Jardin sur le Nil—
Maybe I’m into alcoholic vegetables?

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A bit of crunk.


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So Sweet

so sweet rasp
Red LL apple bottle with a heart-shaped bite, surrounded by sugared raspberries.

So Sweet is burlesque in a candy-by-the-pound store. Raspberry, rose and tawdry flirting.
Like panties with ruffles–it’s not meant to be taken seriously.
I love it.

Lolita Lempicka’s gourmand musk is sheer, almost lacy, compared to Angel‘s heavy satin sheets, and I like it so much more.

More raspberries.