Tag: Perfume review

3121 by Prince

Opens medicinal and weird on me. It doesn’t actually smell of cough drops, but it has that feeling, strange and astringent but then it blossoms into something sweeter softer and more gentle as the gardenia blooms and the jasmine adds its heady richness, with lily of the valley and orange blossom adding something wet and almost soapy with the earthy patch in the background, unisex and sexy. The first time I tried this, I thought I hated it, but you just have to give it time to develop. Really gorgeous.

Petale Noir by Agent Provocateur

Is a heavenly wet floral leather.  It’s like sex in a magical garden on a spring day just after it’s rained and it’s all misty and everything smells clean and green and fresh and floral and yet somehow it’s not soapy or innocent, it’s petal pink lingerie with nothing virginal about it.

It’s a dark carnal floral, elements that shouldn’t work together but do.

Yesssss.

What We Do In Paris Is Secret by A Lab on Fire

Powdery, balsamic, sweetly floral, the most perfumey perfume scent I can imagine, in a beautiful way. It is not a smell that could occur in nature and is better for it, it seems to me to be like the platonic ideal of perfume an archetype of “perfume-ness” in its subtle beauty. I need a bottle. It reminds me of something I can’t put my finger on.

It’s honey and flowers and fruit and citrus over amber and sandalwood and tolu.  It is your grandmother’s dressing table.  It is a French cafe in 1952 and a French cafe in 1968.  It is glamorous and ageless, appropriate to debutantes and revolutionaries.  It is utterly the essence of perfumeness.

It is warm and sensual and wants desperately to invite people to bury their face in that nook where your throat meets your shoulder.

Classique Intense By Jean-Paul Gaultier

Pomegranate, lush juicy and tempting, white flowers given fuller bloom by vanilla, big and sweet. Gloriously unsubtle, unexpected despite what you might think, nothing else I’ve smelled smells quite like it. It is “BOOM” and “VAVAVA VOOM” for the era of CGI action and Kim Kardashian, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. It is glamorous and decadent and quite unique, other fruity florals pale in comparison to her voluptuous blatant sensuality.

There is something suggestive… perhaps a hint vaginal in the lush wet pomegranate, it hints at larger than life baroque fabulist sex with effects by Weta.

Isabey Fleur Nocturne by Panouge

A sweet gardenia dream, elegant and yet playful, heady florals with a hint of lush fruit, but it’s by no means one of the ghastly boring fruity florals dominating perfumery at the moment, no, this is lusher than life, not naturalistic, but impressionistic, something more real than real in its heady french soap and gardenia blossoms aroma. It smells of a theatrical dream of lovers meeting at night in a summer garden.

The peach and mandarin are perfectly ripe, sweeter and juicier than any real fruit has ever been. Panouge seems to have mastery of this better than reality technicolor and stage lighting dream world school of perfumery.

Ugh I’m so in LOVE.

Gucci Guilty Intense

One of the best examples of the modern school of perfumery, sweet, floral, fresh and pretty but not watered down, She’s very girly twirly but smarter than you might think, she reads Foucault as well as Cosmo, all lilac and warm amber, she’s complex, more interesting than you might give her credit for if you don’t pay attention

Black Opium Yves Saint Laurent

Sugary fruity vanilla-y but not as boring as it sounds, there’s some weird dark undercurrent of something here, it’s like an ultra girly sugar bomb layered with something very womanly and seductive, it’s a little bit disturbing, the juxtaposition of innocence and sin, definitely interesting
Update: It makes me think of the baby groupies of the 1970s, like Lori Maddox and Sable Starr, that sort of underage, grown up way too fast, “oh no that’s too much for a girl your age” decadent 1970s everything is permitted zeitgeist.

It smells pleasant but also somehow unwholesome.