One of the most incredible things about perfumes is, beyond the way they smell, and the way they make you feel, is their ability to transport you to a place and/or a time, either a real one from your own memory or even a place or era wholly imagined. Hinoki is a scent that wells…
Cherry Smoothie by Zara
Zara has come out with good fragrances, especially recently, and you really cannot beat the price for much of what they come out with. I’m a big lover of cherry fragrances so of course I didn’t hesitate to blind buy Cherry Smoothie. But, much as it has a few good points to it, overall it…
Serendipitous by Serendipity 3
I’d been hunting down today’s fragrance for many years, not in an obsessive kind of way, but enough to get me excited when I finally found it here in Japan on the second-hand market. It’s only got three notes – Tahitian vanilla, bitter orange and cacao – so you can probably predict what it’s going…
Intense Café by Montale
Intense Café is one of my most loved, but not necessarily most worn fragrances over the last decade. It’s a fantastic gourmand oriental. This one was really hyped up in the media when house owner and perfumer Pierre Montale released it 2013, so I’d be surprised if you’re a perfume lover who’s not at least…
Ambre Sultan by Serge Lutens
To get a general sense about how others feel about a given fragrance, I often head over to Fragrantica, which I did to prepare for this review. I was not entirely surprised to find that the social site has added an AI component to its website that summarizes comment-generated pros and cons of a given…
Pi by Givenchy
Crumbly marzipan cookies dusted with icing sugar à la 3.14159265. That’s Givenchy Pi. In this post, I take you back a few decades to review an early gourmand I first discovered in a Montreal department store on a home visit between jobs here in Japan. I had a boyfriend at the time who smelled delicious…