Jessica McClintock Jessica McClintock 1988 Eau de Parfum

JESSICA MCCLINTOCK reminds me of barbie dolls. Not the sort of perfume which curvaceous Barbie herself might don—wouldn't she really prefer ANGEL?—but the sort of fragrance which little girls who play with Barbies might wear. Little girls being groomed by their housewife mothers to become good housewives one day. They also have Easy Bake Ovens and little bottles of nail polish, like the toddler daughters of a former colleague of mine. He brought them to work with him one day (his wife must have had an appointment at the beauty parlor), and I was a bit taken aback that these little girls, barely able to talk, had chipped polish on their tiny little fingernails. Small wonder that nearly half a century after the ratification of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, women in this country still earn only 77 cents on the dollar paid to an equally qualified man for performing the very same work. But I digress...

The flowers here smell more like lilacs than anything else to me, but all in all, this composition strikes me as quite juvenile and not romantic at all. The manufacturer's card boasts that this perfume is "the fragrance that whispers romance...," but to me it just whispers: "Shut up and go clean your room!"