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…
Category: Reviews
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…