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.
A tea party with all the old dollies, the ones that that have grown sticky-sweet as their painted plastic faces break down with age. Real almond cake petits-fours, with orange flower icing, but the teacups are made of Play-Doh.
A must-have for quirky Lolita goth girls.
A breakfast salad in a garden.
I get cantaloupe and delicate flowers, and honey. The finish is a musky trail of almonds that lingers six inches above the skin for an hour.
It’s too pretty for me.
Here’s a pretty tune from Blind Melon.
This is all the ingredients for an Italian cream cake stored safely in Tupperware bowls.
Vanilla for days, orange flower water, ground nuts, sugar, but with a note of plastic underneath.
It’s such an odd fragrance–too pretty, like the buttercream frosting no one will swipe with a finger for a taste so as not to mar the icing; the child with the best manners and cleanest white dress that no-one will play with, for fear of getting her dirty.
Undeniably sweet and somehow slightly sad.
I saw Tori do this one in concert. It was amazing.
Sutter Home White Zinfandel.
Pleasant enough for a bluejeans lunch date with the girlfriends–fresh tart fruit, woodsy nuts at the bottom–and cheap enough to order the whole bottle.
*
A fun tune for an easy afternoon spent with friends.
Muzzy nut candy.
Opens clear yet cloyingly sweet, a fizzy cream soda with a hint of almond and pistachio flavoring–then gets murky as it warms into a nasty yet kind of enjoyably sweaty honey amber.
Edit – 4/7/22
This one is still in production–not a bad buy for a light gourmand with acceptable performance.
The candle has a lot more nuts.
*
I love this old school new generation blues!
I got this at a mission store in Stockholm for ten kronor, and didn’t open it until I got back to the States…
…where it smelled like every Victoria’s Secret store distilled into a bottle. Entirely too girlish sweet almond, rosebuds and muted citrus with some obligatory white musk underneath.
On my early twenties daughter-child it became Earl Grey tea in a rose-patterned china cup, elegant and perfect.
Dammit, I’m old.
This Swedish song (Oriflame started out in Stockholm) was a hit in 2016, too.
Amarena Whim is the vanilla ice cream and sour cherry cough drops after you get your tonsils out. Medicinal, comforting, delicate, soporific… one to wear to bed when sleeping alone.
The sugary musk on the bottom is delicate and delicious, but also metallic, like the scent of a tin of silver dragées.
I’ve doled this one out over a decade, my Rx at the end of a rough day. I’ll be heartsick when the last drops are gone–I look for it at every airport shop, every high end thrift store.
My all time favorite song ever, with so many different cover versions to love–I just discovered Nina didn’t write it!–originally from the 1964 musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd.
Dior’s Hypnotic Poison is the femme fatale in the upscale mall who laces the gourmet sweets with cyanide.
It took over my house and punched me in the teeth and made me watch movies about international intrigue.
Jordan Almonds and loud vanilla sex, this stuff.
Morcheeba, a trip-hop R&B band, has been going strong since the mid nineties, too. This song has some of the same lethal sweetness.
Les Belles de Ricci Amour d’Amandier is those macarons I wish I hadn’t eaten at my great aunt’s funeral reception-
-the ones that tasted like stale almond paste to me, but everyone else thought were lovely, and didn’t she look so peaceful lying there?
kira a. gold 