Kiss My Name Ramón Monegal 2010

After the first test a few hours ago, the following experimental setup was consequently necessary: left wrist Kiss My Name, right wrist Sécrétions Magnifiques.

Do you remember how, as children, you would write words on each other's backs and guess them? Drawing each letter one by one with your index finger, separating individual words with a sweeping gesture? Kiss My Name could be the adult version of this game, my first thought upon reading the name of this Monegal; it was accompanied by notions of lightness and carefreeness, playfulness and sweetness.

The surprise was all the greater when I suddenly felt like Barbie. The opening is squeaky-fruity-floral-pink-loud. This fruitiness, which comes across as very intrusive and therefore almost artificial, reminds me of Lady One Million - the plastic strawberry, the Escada summer scents, as well as melon shower gel, although I couldn't name individual fruits. Underneath this unreal-looking fruit basket is a floral sweetness, from which I can at least recognize jasmine and tuberose. How far the recognizability goes becomes apparent as the experience unfolds:
I read here and there about the fecal side that a jasmine blossom, which I find so pleasing, could take on, which I have never encountered before. At this point, I perceive not excretions, but a penetrating metallic-rotting note. It was this metallic hint that immediately made me think of Sécrétions Magnifiques and led to the aforementioned experimental setup.

In direct comparison, the metallic aspect of Monegal appears much more harmless compared to Etat Libre d'Orange, yet I can now, after about the fifth to seventh test of the "magnificent secrets," appreciate this much more than Kiss My Name, which knows how to repel more sustainably with a chord of rotting flowers in stagnant water. The metallic note is intentionally at the center of the experience in Sécrétions Magnifiques, making it exciting and presenting a challenge - completely in contrast to Kiss My Name, where unpleasantness takes an even more unpleasant direction. It should be mentioned in passing that I find Sécrétions Magnifiques increasingly tolerable, if not necessarily wearable, with each subsequent test.

However, the metallic note soon runs out of breath, leaving behind jasmine and tuberose flower heads that float with a few leaves and stems in a lukewarm pond, rotting away. In the drydown, Kiss My Name comes across as trivial and arbitrary with a blurred, sweet floral accord that is not worth mentioning, were it not for that final chewing gum association - chewed out in just over one and a half hours.