Friday, July 31, 2015

Viktoria Minya Hedonist Review

The good thing about summer is that I can wear one perfume during the day and another one at night. Sometimes that can lead to wearing the same old thing night after night but last night was different. I have a neglected bottle of Viktoria Minya's debut perfume Hedonist that I decided not to neglect anymore. I've had Hedonist pretty much since it's release and I've smelled it and worn it off and on for the better part of two years. I'm not sure why it's been neglected but so many in my collection do get lost in the shuffle that I do forget about them.

What pulled me in initially is the bottle, I swooned over the bottle but was a little hesitant about buying a full bottle unsniffed. What if the perfume doesn't match the bottle? What if it really sucks and I am left with a bottle of perfume that just sits on my dresser? But all that was unfounded. The perfume does match the bottle.

I do have a liking for honey in perfumes and I do smell honey from start to finish. After looking around the Internet, I am not really seeing honey listed as a note but it's got to be the rum and peach that must be the ones creating that. But the rum and peach do keep their identities but when together they seem to create that honey accord. I don't get a whole lot of flowers but the flowers that I do get is the big white floral. I don't exactly get any one big white floral but it's there. This is one perfume that I do not regret at all. It smells good without being over the top nor loud but not exactly second bottle worthy for me.

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Buying Backups Matter

The thought hit me last night when I was looking through my collection last night when looking for my before bed perfume. Do backup bottles of perfume matter or needed? I have to say yes they do in a few ways.


When you are always dealing with the threat of reformulation due to restricted ingrediants, backups do start to matter if a perfume is either your signature or one of your favorites. Mitsouko is an example of a restricted ingrediant and subsiquent reformulation. The IFRA had decided that too many people were allergic or some such thing to oakmoss and that meant that Mitsouko had to be created without oakmoss. But a chypre that is like Mitsouko, the oakmoss in all of it's inky glory, is vital. So Mitsouko was in real danger of being discontinued but treemoss was substituted and Mitsouko doesn't smell quite the way it should but it's a valiant attempt of the perfumers to save a part of perfume history. Now this is when hunting down vintage and back ups become vital. But if you are like me and don't live close to a really good Salvation Army or flea market, E-Bay is probably your only way to go. And in my opinion, it becomes a good like trying to find any reasonably price bottles. But I keep looking for bottles and very rarely come across one I can afford.


Then there is the discontinued perfume deal. Because there are companies that just up and decide to discontinue a perfume. Sometimes it is that a perfume after a while just isn't doing well in terms of sales and I can see that aspect of having a perfume discontinued. Sometimes it's not the right time to release that kind of perfume. Take Deneuve for example, it was released during the time where the bigger the better perfumes was fading and the watery CK Ones and all similar ones were becoming all the rage, so a floral hyper didn't sell and being sold by Avon didn't help. Some companies seem  have a tendency to just discontinue a popular perfume for no reason. Fend seems to be one of them. Theorema is probably the most recent one. I know that it maybe it's not the biggest best seller for Fending but just by poking around the internet, it's popular enough to keep it as a staple in Fendi's perfume portfolio. When perfumes are discontinued, it's always good to grab a few bottles.

Friday, July 24, 2015

Chanel Cristalle Eau Verte EDT Concentree Review

After spending two days with Bois des Iles, I was going to review that but that's not happening today. But yesterday, I lost the motivation to wear Bois des Iles for the 3rd day straight and went Cristalle eau Verte yesterday.

I've stated before that I do have a hard time with citrus due to Espirt de Fleurs and how the citrus was presented in that one. But this Cristalle is different with the citrus. It's a huge, and I mean huge, burst of lemon in the beginning. It's like you just got through slicing a lemon. And I like that and how effervescent the lemon is, not the rotting citrus or the oven cleaner vibe. There is supposed to be magnolia listed as a dominant note but I am not smelling it. I smell a huge whopping hyacinth note and hyacinth isn't listed as a note. I love a massive hyacinth note in my perfumes but absract white flowers are listed so that doesn't tell me much. As soon as I start really enjoying this and think about getting a bottle, this just drops off the face of the earth. I can't smell it after 2 hours. Two full hours, I could believe that. So every 2 hours, I was spraying.

So since it lasts only two hours on me, I decided not to get a bottle, which is good for my wallet but for some reason, it's saddening because it's one of those that should last a whole lot longer on skin than 2 hours. If and when an EDP version comes out, I'll test that and see if a bottle would be in order.

Friday, July 17, 2015

Guerlain Chamade EDT Review

I took my good old time reviewing this because it took me forever to even wear this. When I tried the current formulation of Mitsouko's EDT and Shalimar, I promptly said that the current formulations of Guerlain's EDT's were a disgrace. Yes, the smelled like they should in the beginning but after a half an hour, they were gone and an hour if sprayed on clothes. The vintage EDT is worth trying out. So yeah, I was hesitant to try Chamade. It just seems like Chamade is either in parfum form or the EDT.

Chamade starts out with a peppery, green blast that I couldn't quite put my finger on. I smelled that in a couple perfumes before but it took me a while to figure it out. Then it came to me, the beginning was like the EDP version of Chanel no 19 but the whole structure of Chamade is no 19. But there are differences. Chamade mostly focuses on the green aspect and the hyacinth. No 19 does focus on the green but depending on the formulation, the emphasis is on either the rose or the iris. I knew that there was hyacinth in there but it is peppery and dominant. I couldn't think of which perfume that I have tested out that had a dominant hyacinth note but I realized that it was Une Couer Mai that I was thinking of. For a current version of a Guerlain EDT, I got about 4 hours out of this one. The vintage Guerlains (EDT), I get about 5 or 6 hours of wear.

I'm still not certain that I would get a bottle of the current version of the EDT but I think that it would be worth it to seek out the vintage version of the EDT.

Sunday, July 12, 2015

Amouage Dia Bath Products Review

Ever since I have tried the Lyric shower gel and body butter, I've been thinking about trying out Dia's bath stuff. But this time, I have the guest soap bars and the body lotion. I was wondering if the body lotion was going to be moisturizing enough and would the hand soap drying.

The guest soap did have somewhat of a nice lather but after using it once, it maybe isn't a soap to be used in the shower or bath. I'm going to use it anyway in the shower or bath. But this bar of soap isn't drying out my skin, which is a good thing when your skin is sandpaper dry. That is when I used the body lotion, hoping that it would be like the body butter.

The body lotion is different than the body butter. The body lotion is a little richer and a little more long lasting than your drugstore offerings of body lotion but I was thinking that this is from Amouage and Lyric set the bar to what I expected out of the bath stuff. But while the body lotion did it's job, I was a tad disappointed because I wanted a little more moisture for another hour or two (the body butter lasted at least 5 hours on me. But it did soften up my elbows and knees.

What is great about what I have tried with Amouage and their body products is that they haven't caused a reaction. I'm not itchy, don't have hives and they do stay put. The perfumed part of the whole bargain of Dia is not as huge as it would be in Lyric, so I can squirt a little bit of Dia along with the body products. I'm not sure I would exactly get these bath products of Dia again though.

Friday, July 10, 2015

Badgely Mischka Parfum Review

Last year, I was on a little bit of a hunt for minis but quickly lost interest. The reasoning was that they were pretty much decants and at The Perfumed Court and Surrender to Chance, I could get a better selection and pricing than buying minis off Amazon (but vintage or discontinued scents are different). Somehow, I lucked out price wise with Badgley Mischa's Badgley Mischa. Parfum seems to be notoriously expensive for a small amount but somehow got a quarter ounce of parfum for $11.

So I splash this on me last night because I haven't worn this in a while and I couldn't remember what is smelled like, then I couldn't figure out what it reminded me of. After about a couple hours, it just hit me that the structure of it was in the way of Coco Mademoiselle. Mademoiselle and I don't exactly get along. I'm thinking that it's the structure of it or the patchouli that annoys me. But if it were not the fruit, I couldn't have smelled the difference. The lasting power of this one is about average with some throw but this is not something that I would wear. I think that I will give this one to my mother since she likes Mademoiselle and this is pretty close.