Pros: Yes, it smell goods, but...
Cons: This is nothing more than another run-of-the-mill vanilla oil with a ridiculous price tag.
Development: Zero
Longevity: Lasts a good 4-6 hours on my skin if amply applied, with a faint echo thereafter.Sillage: Is someone baking cookies?
Reminds me of: Where do I start? Everything...just pick a vanilla/patchouli oil.
Where can I buy it? $250 for a .5 oz oil; $140 for .25 oz oil at Luckyscent.com
Bottleworthy? Absolutely not...For $140 I could buy 3 or 4 100ml bottles of lesser-priced scents with a heck of a lot more artistry.
The Bottom Line: Yes it smells great, and yes it's produced by very talented jewelry designer, Loree Rodkin, but at these prices, I can only laugh. This is a scent for the money crowd who want the name and prestige.
Rating (out of 10): 4
I'm a little insulted, much how I felt when sampling the Clive Christian scents, though those are significantly more interesting than Gothic I. What scent insulted you?
14 comments:
Any of the Escada LEs (you know -- Ibiza whatever. Rockin' sumpthin'.) Because they're so insipid.
Estee Lauder Beyond Paradise. Because Luca Turin thought it was the bomb. I re-sniff it every few months, trying to understand what part he thought was genius ... and every time my head does that RCA-dog tilt of bafflement.
I revisited Narciso Rodriguez this weekend and was utterly insulted.
Here are my thoughts, since you asked. :)
Musc for her: he has convinced a lot of people that head shop Egyptian musk oil smells 'magical' with his name on it and at $100/oz. EDT is a crappy , scratchy chypre with notes that are not here nor there, and fight each other until the bitter end where they vanish entirely. His EDP is also a total rip-off of another inexpensive fragrance oil, 24K musk, a rose-y variety of Egyptian musk.
Oh, and to add the the insult, I sampled Armani Bois d'Encens... pine trees and liquid smoke, puhlease. This one totally offended me.
marchlion: I laughed out loud at your comment. In total agreement.
I'm with Rue on all of the Armani Prives. That price is absolutely unforgivable. I like Bois d'Encens, but if I really want to smell like frankincense that bad, I'll read the obituaries and see who's being buried at a Catholic church that day and I'll just go and sit as close as I can and pretend to mourn.
Is that wrong?
The newest Lacoste is the most recent thing to offend me. Big advertising campaign for a vulgar, pathetic, redundant citrus fragrance. It's not even the price, it's the idea.
And Luctor et Emergo is also offensive. Don't get me wrong, Play Doh brings back memories, but I don't want to smell like it. And for how expensive it is, the bottle could at least be made of something other than the thinest glass on earth.
At least the Prive's are packaged well.
I felt the same way as you do about Clive Christian - all of them. I was expecting to be bowled over due to their luxe reputation and oh my, the prices! However, they all smelled similar to me and could not hold a candle to other niche houses like Serge Lutens or L'Artisan. Maybe I was not giving them a fair chance since I ahd only recently discovered the Serge Lutens Export line, which will pauperize me to be sure, but I really don't think the Clive Christians are all that special.
I also had another gagworthy experience recently - I was given a sample of Alexander McQueen's new My Queen - blechh! It's supposed to be a "fresh floral-oriental" but there is the most awfully intrusive, harsh synthetic marine note that utterly overwhelms it - it goes all sour and tinny on me, and I can barely detect the florals and woods struggling to get out. I hate all those "marine" notes messing up perfectly good fragrances and making them all smell the same. When that particular fad is over I will be relieved. As much hype as this one has had, it ought to be really unique, but toss it in the bin with the rest of the quick-buck clothes designer perfumes out there, I am not impressed.
Which reminds me of another time I was insulted by a perfume - Christian Lacroix's C'est La Vie. The most godawful stuff ever put in a bottle, and it was NOT cheap. So animalic and oily it smelled like pure polecat. I never bought it but too many others did back when it came out, so I had to smell it all the time. In the same class as the cheaper Giorgio and White Diamonds - one whiff and your nose is stunned into submission for hours.
mark said: "Is that wrong?"
*giggle*
flora's entire last paragraph. Ditto.
Oh and another thing, Thierry Mugler's Alien, which I had such high hopes for because I really love the bottle, turned out to be a Perry Ellis for women dupe. Perry Ellis, the one with the light blue cabochon thingy on the cap, the quintessential 80's fragrance that I wore once a week under duresse because a friend bought it for me and if I didn't wear it she would ask me why I wasn't wearing it.....
I should have known because in retrospect I now see how the bottle is purple, a very trendy color of the early eighties, a tacky (although I have a soft-spot for tacky) purple and gold Cylon in a ZOOT suit. Ugh.
march - I hear ya...The Escadas are getting to all smell the same...I remember what an unusal "hit" Tropical Punch was, and it seems all down hill from there...but yet they sell incredibly well!
rue, mark - I agree, the Prive line is a little over the top...
flora - ditto...there wasn;t one scent form CC that I felt I had to have or that broke new ground...
rue - careful now, I've come to quite like Alien recently...although I find it a little too sweet.
La Prairie Silver Rain - absolutely gorgeous bottle, a price tag which makes you recoil in horror and a juice you can get in thousands of variations in any no-name scent discount. That was really disappointing!
I daresay Hermes "Doblis" doesn't live up to its price either, but I haven't tried it yet.
And the Armani Privés? I like some of them. But not to the extent of buying them or even hoping somebody will present them to me (even if I do adore wallowing in anything with incense).
Forgot to mention: Yosh scents (all of them). BPAL. Most of Dawn Spencer Hurwitz scents. Ah, let's stop here, shall we? I could fill volumes with disappointing and overhyped fragrances!
BPAL. What a scam. I can't believe the money people shell out for slapped-together fragrance oils (although they claim to use eo's, even stoopider) based on recipes found in neo-pagan literature and tied into classic literature and mythology. Not to mention people wait months to receive their orders because they are each 'hand blended'.
I used work out of a majorly successful occult shop. They had a wall of oils and would mix them on the spot for their customers using recipes from Anna Riva and Scott Cunningham to name two. I can gone ad nauseum, but I think I'll stop now. :)
BPAL - hah! I have smelled some great concoctions from them, but have yet to actually want to wear one passed the testing stage. I put them in my oil burner instead...I'll take a $30 Lothantique scent over BPAL any day...
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