Tom Ford Black Orchid Review

Okay, I am a little less than a week out from my surgery and still pissed that I have a drain. My post surgical appointment is on Monday and I am hoping that my drain can be removed on Monday.I want to start being able to sleep on my right side, be able to take a shower normally and not have to deal with all of these extra steps. I'm tired of how the area around my drain in sore and I am tired of how the bandages and tape pull on my stomach. I just want to resume more of my normal activities.

I don't have a whole lot going on in my extensive free time. Since both of my parents are home, I haven't been able to burn any candles. Last Monday was the last day that I was able to have a lit candle and with the potential of having some minor winter storm, that means that we might lose electricity and that means I will have a candle going. It would probably be when the sun starts to set then will I have a candle going. I keep hoping that for once, I will be able to polish my nails while on a vacation. Every vacation I do keep meaning to do that but something either comes up or I just forget about it. So maybe this time around, I will actually do it.

Since I have all of this free time, I decided to give Tom Ford's Black Orchid. Sephora was having one of  their sales and I decided on getting a travel spray of this one. Sometimes I do feel like I do give Tom Ford's line up the short end of the stick. Tobacco Vanille is a little to powerful, Bitter Cherry would have been great if it hadn't been for the prominent tonka note. So I figure that I would give one last shot.

What got me to get a travel spray of Black Orchid was the fact that I was pulled in by the product description by rum soaked. Let's just say that there is nothing rum soaked in Black Orchid. It's a whole lot of nothing to my nose. I get an aquatic jasmine/tuberose thing with hints of vanilla and maybe some patchouli. I thing Tom Ford said that this is elegant or classy. Considering what Tom Ford's ad campaigns are, I would not consider this classy nor elegant. I think Black Orchid just sucks.

For the price of Tom Ford offerings, I do expect better. If you are going to charge Amouage range prices, I do expect a hell of a lot. I expected something boozy, more full figured, a little more fleshed out. Not something thin and watery smelling. While Black Orchid did have lasting power, there would be no way that I can spring for a full bottle. At this point, I don't think that I will be buying anything more from the Tom Ford line, I don't think that I would even get decants of this line up.
 

 

Tom Ford Tobacco Vanille Body Spray

 I don't know if this was a regional thing, but back in the day, there was a company that sold knock offs of popular perfumes. This isn't a new thing but I mostly saw these knock offs at my local drug store/cheap groceries place. This place was the type of grocery store chain that was the only place in town that accepted food stamps or if you made too much money for food stamps, you went there to shop for groceries. In their health and beauty area, they had this spot where the perfumes were. These bottles were those aerosol bottles that always said on the bottle that they smelled like Clinique Happy or CK Obsession and down the line. I remember that the aerosol sprayed something pretty damn close to Happy that I did buy a bottle. Let's just say that I have always lived at least a half an hour or 45 minutes from an outlet mall or a proper mall. I remember at that time, I was down to my last dregs of Clinique Happy, had $15 in fun money for at least a week and a half. This was back when I was in high school and this was in the '90's. My parents were not going to take me to the mall to buy a bottle of perfume and were not going to buy it for me. Their view was if I wanted that perfume so badly, I had to save up for it and have someone else take me. Clinique Happy was pretty much my go to perfume in high school. I got bored with the Bath and Body Works Cucumber Melon pretty quickly but liked to wear it once in a while. That was the last time I bought any kind of perfume that came is aerosol form until maybe sometime last year.

I think that it was sometime last year that I had bought a 6.8 ounce bottle of Tom Ford's Tobacco Vanille body spray. My rational at the time is that I probably wasn't going to own a full bottle of the EDP any time soon. I wasn't exactly willing to buy a Tom Ford offering for an Amouage price. So my options were the travel spray or the body spray. For $80 I could get 150ml, I couldn't exactly refuse that price. I had initially placed it on my dresser and it somehow got moved. So it languished for a year before I pulled it out. From all my previous notions about aerosol cans, I figured that it would be fine. Turns out that I was dead wrong.

When I first tested out this version, I got a whopping dose of Play-Doh and nothing else. I figured that it was because it had never been sprayed before and it pretty much sat around for a little over a year before I tried it. The second time I had gotten that big dose of Play-Doh and that smell that one gets when you spay an aerosol can. Both notes never went away and was left wondering on why did I spend that $80. Then some hints of Tobacco Vanille started to come and then disappeared quickly. The whole thing was a waste of time and money. I am probably going to have to either pitch it or sell it. What's the point of this whole thing when I am not getting what I actually wanted. I wanted a little more of the Tobacco Vanille and not the Play-doh aerosol combo thing. I could have don't without the latter two. At this point in the game, I am not afraid of saying that something sucks and as far as I know, no perfume company reads my blog.

Gearing Up for Another Storm

 Right now, it looks like another winter storm is headed my way and naturally, I am going to be working. Well, I only have to work one of those days but it still sucks. When I go into work tomorrow, I will be dealing with tons of people panic buying groceries. I live in Ohio and this kind of stuff is nothing new. It rains and it snows here. What I am doing and going to be doing is trying to get stuff down around the house and really keep on it. Who knows if I will lose electricity and I don't want a sink full of dirty dishes from the night before and with no way to wash them and I have to remember that tonight I need to take the garbage to the curb. The less I have hanging over my head, the happier I will be. All I know that is I am fully stocked on candles and if the power goes out, I will have something in the way of light and the fireplace for heat. Candles don't give off a lot of heat even if you burn 10 at once. I'm hoping that things won't be too bad. I don't want to go through 2020's snow storm fiasco again. Days of no electricity and running waster was horrible.

I finally bit the bullet and cancelled my Barkbox add on. What Jake and Sydney had was a double Barkbox and since Jake is gone, Sydney doesn't need 4 new toys every month and 4 bags of treats. So she is just getting a regular Barkbox now. It's still so strange not having Jake around and how many adjustments that still need to be made to not having him here. Today is the day that I had put away Jake's bedding that was in my room and I have started to adjust to not having Jake snoozing on my bed at night. I still say goodnight though.

For the past couple months, I have been wearing no 5 and craving it at all times. Other favorites seem to annoy me at the moment but I am starting to crave Tobacco Vanille more and more and starting to hanker for Lost Cherry. I have travel sprays of both and I am debating on when the Sephora spring sale comes, do I want to go down the Lost Cherry or the Tobacco Vanille full bottle route? I have enough no 5 to last me for the next 10 years. It's funny on how I've never paid a whole lot of attention to Tom Ford offerings. Maybe his prices are even more outrageous than Amouage's prices. We shall see what the future brings between now and April.

Tom Ford Lost Cherry Review

I never really paid too much attention to Tom Ford's perfume line. The ads were a big turn off for me and some of the names of whatever was being sold got my attention but wasn't making me run out to test anything, let alone buy. Just a little too crude for me. The last reason on why I never paid a whole lot of attention is the price tag. An Amouage price for a 1 ounce bottle is not really in the cards. But I am happy that there are some travel sprays available.

I've always liked Tobacco Vanille and did nab a 10ml travel spray and then recently had gotten a travel spray of Lost Cherry. As a general rule of thumb, it's not the greatest idea to buy a perfume blind but I got the travel spray of Lost Cherry blind. I wasn't sure how much I would like it but I was looking for another transitional perfume.

Lost Cherry starts out with a blast of cherries. The sour, candied type of cherries followed by almonds. The cherry note kind of fades when the almonds come on to the scene but is never out of the picture. Tonka bean comes in shortly after the almonds and kind of takes over the whole thing. I have always been kind of on the fence if I like tonka bean in a perfume. It always kind of overwhelms a perfume. I think that I would have liked no tonka bean or far less tonka bean than what was put into Lost Cherry. Lost Cherry would have probably been a better perfume and I would have seriously looked at saving for a full bottle. I really enjoyed the sour cherries and almonds. Lost Cherry lasted about 8 hours on my skin and had some decent projection.

 

Tom Ford Private Blend Vanille Fatale

I haven't been much of a fan of Tom Ford's campaign ads for anything. His pornographic images to buy his stuff just turns me off. I don't need naked people shown in a crude manner to try something of his out. I've only really spent time with Tobacco Vanille, so I can't say much about the rest of his perfume line. When I heard that Tom Ford was releasing another vanilla perfume, I had to roll my eyes. Think about it, he already had Tobacco Vanille that seemed to be universally well liked or loved. I've always been pretty iffy on vanilla centric perfumes. Most fall into the too sweet and too edible to be a perfume.

I was bored and decided to test this one out just to see what the difference was between Tobacco Vanille and Vanille Fatale. There is a definite difference. Vanille Fatale starts off with a huge blast of vanilla that smells a little plastic like and something else that I couldn't place. I started to smell a sunscreen note. The sunscreen note has a huge coconut element to it. Yes, coconut and vanilla that's trying to take me to the tropics where the smell of coconuts and vanilla reign supreme. After a while, I do get a little bit of coffee in the background but it gets smothered with vanilla and coconuts.

Vanille Fatale has the lasting power of nuclear waste and has a fairly loud projection. It can be enjoyable for me in the right circumstances but not something I'd wear on a regular basis. I'd rather spend the money on another bottle of Amouage Memior or Lyric for what I would spend of a bottle of Vanille Fatale. It's not really worth $230 in my book.

Tom Ford Velvet Gardenia Review

Ever since I smelled a real, honest to goodness gardenia flower I started to look for that would have either that blue cheese note or that huge mushroom note, I thought I would hit that with Velvet Gardenia. At this point, it's a big old no.

When I first sprayed this, I started to wonder if this was even perfume because I didn't smell a thing. I pressed my nose against my wrist and got a faint whiff of flowers and an even fainter whiff of mushroom. The flowers were definitely not gardenia or didn't even smell remotely smell of gardenia. Boy, was I disappointed but there was no throw to this perfume, I had to press my nose to my wrist to get anything. But after a couple hours, I did get some kind of sour that I couldn't identify and still can't identify. This only good thing is that my Amex is breathing a sigh of relief that I am not going to seek this out.

Tom Ford Private Blend Tobacco Vanille

After falling in love with L'Artisian Havana Vanille, I decided to try out Tom Ford's Tobacco Vanille. Both perfumes are similar to each other but there are differences. In Tobacco Vanille, the vanilla is sweet, almost too sweet, which I do abhor in vanilla dominant perfumes. Sweet and very sweet vanillas do tend to wear me instead of the other way around. The tobacco wears nicely on my skin and the tobacco tries to offset the sweetness of the tobacco but doesn't quite succeed. Havana Vanille was a vegetal vanilla with a rum soaked tobacco. Tobacco Vanille is a loud perfume and gets even louder in warm weather. I find Tobacco Vanille to be likeable but not something I would have on a regular basis even in decant form.