Athalia Parfums de Marly 2016

After buying a sample here, I could hardly wait to test Athalia. Sprayed it on and "bang": I'm back to my childhood. When me and my sister were little, we would sometimes secretly rummage around in my mother's closet and try on her clothes and shoes. She was a simple woman and very rarely did she treat herself to something quietly and secretly. My father was not allowed to know that she spent money on any "luxury products" and so she always hid such purchases in the chests of drawers and cupboards, where she knew my father wouldn't look for anything. And so there was a box of "Avon" products at the bottom of her closet. Various creams and all sorts of things that she never actually used. Far too expensive and you couldn't be wasteful with them. So she didn't even touch the things. Among other things, there were two tins of body powder in this box! Perfumed body powder (I mean, does that even exist these days?): Powdery, flowery, clean, bright! Aha, we thought, this is what a grown woman smells like. How exciting! Well, Athalia actually smells exactly like that to me. But more than 40 years have passed since then. And after spraying it on, I would have liked to wash it off again straight away because it really is a "granny fragrance" for me. But I still wanted to wait and see how the fragrance developed. I mean: powdery, floral, clean, light is nothing bad per se. However, I couldn't detect a fragrance progression on my skin. For me, it remains a boring fragrance with no rough edges. No mystique, no seduction. When I put Athalia under my husband's nose, he said: "Woooow!" And I said: "Do you like it?" And he said: "No, it smells like washing powder." One person's detergent is another person's memory of times gone by and therefore of a scent that is no longer considered contemporary. If I didn't have this childhood memory, I might even like Athalia. But who knows.