Wild Poppy Nest 2019

This opens with sweet apricot, just a whisper and then it’s gone. The rose and pear together though are sheer beauty! The richest, greenest rose, and a juicy but still kinda tart pear that lasts throughout the fragrance and beyond. The pear is still with me after 7 hours. How is the longevity so good without a traditional base note? A youthful jasmine note is in there somewhere, but I think the tart raspberry is overtaking it, in the best way. One of my spring and summer favorites, and it wears beautifully on a warm night.

If you’re looking for a photorealistic scent of poppy you’ll not get it here.. because poppies actually don’t really smell like anything, there’s no distinct floral scent from them. Most ‘poppy’ perfumes are usually a rose, violet and iris accord of some sort.

It’s more the idea of a poppy that people have a scent memory association with that’s been planted by perfumers over the years with words and imagery. Think Kenso Flower for example. A floral scent with an imagery that evokes the idea of a field of poppies or an english country garden filled with wild flowers.

So in effect, Nest had carte blanche to create a perfume that was their vision of wild poppies. And it really is very pretty and delightful.

Wild Poppy opens bright, juicy and fruity. It’s a sweet tropical scent of pear and rose, a little tart raspberry there too. It’s clean and shampooy and very pleasing to the nose.

But as it settles into the dry down this gorgeous soft, round almost creamy apricot, apricot blossom and a muted rose starts to develop on my skin and here it is really lovely. It’s stays bright yet has this softness to it, almost a little hint of powder. The familiarity is what has me wanting to constantly bring my nose to my skin. It took me all day to figure out what the scent memory is was, it was ‘Sweet Suds’ My Little Pony and the Perfume Palace from my 80s childhood. And I very much loved whiffing this.

This scent had good longevity and a lovely apricot blossom and muted rose scent bubble throughout the day with very enjoyable breezes of bright fruity floral rosey apricot catching my nose regularly.

It’s an adorable scent - feminine and pretty. On its own, I *think* I would find it a generic fruity floral, but I am struggling to get beyond the scent association and see past the idea of adult me smelling of this when there’s such a strong connection to child me.

The memories triggered excite my brain and nose, but it doesn’t drive me to want wear this. However, I’ve a funny feeling I’ll cherish this little miniature rollerball and take it out every now and then for a wee whiff!

I've been going over the fragrance notes trying to understand what gives because this fragrance is giving me this weird (not necessarily in a negative way) green, spicy vibe with a hint of floral and underlying powdery accord. I also think it triggered my allergies, but that's another story entirely.

Since I was so puzzled with what I smelled vs what the fragrance notes were, I asked some of my colleagues about their impressions (they're all aware of my passion for perfume so it's not weird I asked them xD ). Someone told me the perfume smelled like putting your face in a bouquet of flowers and taking in a deep breath. Nobody could say it smelled spicy (although they might not necessarily know about fragrance vocabulary enough to tell me what they smelled in-depth). Everybody I asked told me it smelled floral. So take what comes next with a grain of salt. It's not a bad smell per se, but on my skin there's this green and spicy accord that I just can't get over. I don't smell the fruity notes although there is an underlying sweetness to this perfume. It's pretty linear and it stayed the same throughout. It does have a certain lasting power, although the sillage is not that great: my colleagues told me they could smell it only when I was beside them (which makes it great for a workplace).

It might be my skin chemistry that reacted badly to it or my nose is broken (I'm still puzzled over this), but it won't be added to my collection. There's this (imaginary?) weird spicy and green accord I'm not able to get over. Too bad!

Black Tulip by Nest is one of my favorite fragrances so I thought I'd give another one of their fruity floral scents a try. It seems as though I prefer the darker take on fruity florals from Nest rather than this brighter version! On my skin it's more fruity than floral, I have to really take a deep whiff to pick up on the green notes. I will grant that it has more complexity when I smell it directly on my skin, but I dislike the sickly sweet cloud that I am now enveloped inside of after spritzing my test bottle on the inside of my elbow. It's too strong a sillage for such a simple scent in my opinion. It reminds me of something I would have smelled in a locker room when I was in middle school in the 2000s.

This is a very juicy and cheerful perfume! It is also good to wear for day-time dates. You will get a lot of compliments. Despite its name, this perfume predominantly smells like roses. It’s a very clean light scent with a bit of sweetness to it. The sweet scent is well-balanced with the tartness from the fruit notes. This scent can be a little strong in the first few minutes so don’t use too many sprays at first. Once it dries down, the scent is quite light and leans a bit more on the rose scent with a slight citrusy undercurrent.

The artwork on the bottle is also beautiful. The art on the bottles are what lured me to try out the Nest perfumes in the first place. I’m glad discovered this house because almost all of the perfumes that Nest makes smell amazing.

I also own Delina by PDM and honestly...Nest Wild Poppy smells so similar to Delina I would consider it a dupe. There is a slight sourness/tartness in Wild Poppy that Delina does not have though, so keep that in mind. Nest perfumes are relatively affordable too, so if you just want something reliable with a low barrier to entry into the world of perfume, you should try out the Nest perfumes first. You can even try layering this with a lychee body mist or a rose perfume oil to get closer to the Delina profile.