Narciso Narciso Rodriguez 2022 Eau de Parfum Cristal

Which fragrance was it? Idôle? Miss Dior? Oh dear! About two hours earlier, I had tested my way through the medium-sized perfumery. Nothing had convinced me. But as is so often the case, a whiff didn't land on the test strip, but on my thumb. And there now sprouts a delicate rose dusted with powdered sugar, dragging me mercilessly back into the perfumery and retracing my steps. What a relief when we find each other again!

This love at second sight, the faint echoes of an on/off relationship, has stayed with me to this day. If I don't wear the fragrance for a few days or weeks, my enthusiasm is limited - to put it mildly. It opens as if all the women's fragrances in a department store perfume department had arranged to meet up with a few cans of hairspray under my bed to jump out together and spray me all over. Orange blossom and freesia storm around me, it's sweet and shrill and I'm seized by a brief panic - I'm not 17 anymore, I can't smell like that.
But once this shock is over, this beautiful rose blossoms, softly nestled against jasmine. The freesias recede, becoming more delicate and clean, just the way I like them, and leave room for a powdery, lightly elegant, never dominant musk. How beautifully caressing, relatively sweet, I can't suppress my smile. This is what good humor, warmth and cheerfulness smell like to me, but without digressing too much into the banal.
By the evening, the sweetness has faded and now the fragrance smells most strongly of Narciso Rodriguez, powdery, slightly woody and creamy, and I am determined to wear this wonderful fragrance, this pure happiness in a bottle, again the next day. Until I feel like wearing something else again. And then the fragrance stays on the shelf for another week until I reach for the bottle again - and then the dance starts all over again, the fragrance molecules arm themselves for the attack, I wonder what possessed me, we finally fall into each other's arms laughing.