One can only admire the quirky Andy Warhol, who turned a soup can into gold, and I enjoy his mass-appeal art just as much as the works of Roy Lichtenstein.
After the eccentric achieved fame and fortune during his lifetime, numerous film stars, including Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, and Marilyn Monroe, had themselves immortalized in his silkscreen portrait series.
The fragrances released under his name and featuring the beautiful Marilyn seem to have failed to capture the success of the images and appear to have mostly disappeared from the market in the meantime.
However, the scent concept of Marilyn Bleu credibly leans into the tradition of Pop Art.
There is no trace of the supposedly present blackcurrant, and the peach remains hidden from me.
Only a surreal, shimmering rose in neon pink unwinds from the bottle and floats overexposed on a creamy-sweet atomic mushroom through the room.
It is not a gourmand or cotton candy sweetness, but rather a kind of muted aspartame sweetness that is just bearable for me as a proponent of the more opposite fragrance direction.
The scent tries to evoke a long-lost or buried memory, but no matter how hard I try to extract an image from my past associated with this sweet-creamy odor, it remains beyond my grasp.
Yet the scent is not unpleasant to me. It comes across as very artificial, much like the platinum-blonde coiffure of the cult figure Marilyn Monroe, under which the unfortunate Norma Jean Baker ultimately had to perish.
Delicate woody hints in the base seem to want to prevent the scent from drifting into other spheres, but with moderate success.
The sillage is okay at first and retreats relatively quickly to skin level with rather poor longevity.
For me, Marilyn Bleu is the perfect olfactory counterpart to the artificially distorted reality of Andy Warhol's work, although not crowned with the same success.
