Black Opium Yves Saint Laurent 2014 Eau de Parfum

"Black Opium" - a new scent by YSL? It would be better to openly declare on the package that it's a product by L'Oreal. The marketing people have tried very hard to make the most of a legend, but the result is a flanker which smells like a cross of "La Vie est belle", "Flowerbomb" and "Si" with a touch of coffee. Mediocrity, here you come. The bottle is from cheap-looking plastic and doesn't impress me much. Staying-power is good, but that's the only positive thing I have to say about this kind of horror from France. A loud, coarse and chemical scent capable of turning me into a perfume-hater.

i can never slander black opium. even though my tastes have expanded and i do not wear it daily, nor do i wear it often, when i need to smell sexy it is always there. this is a popular fragrance for a reason with a gorgeous drydown that really lingers on the skin. i recently oversprayed a little (for me anyway) and received one of my first fragrance compliments in a long time while wearing black opium, which continues this bottle's run as my most complimented scent. it's one of the first true crowd pleaser designer frags of the modern era, and for me, it will never overstay its welcome.

on a separate note i do not enjoy any of the flankers, especially not the milquetoast "marshmallow" black opium glitter and my dislike of cherry continues with black opium over red. broadly with designer fragrance i am getting tired of brands attaching themselves to one line and releasing flankers like there's no tomorrow, even when the original DNA is completely absent or altered enough that it feels like photoshopping a family member into the picture. it's extremely hard to maintain original DNA and branding when you're stretching and modifying the fragrance's image and notes every two weeks to make more and more money, and as time goes on i fear brands will not innovate and produce more modern classics like black opium under unique branding, and will instead shove millions of dollars into making the next Donna BIR flanker that really should have been its own fragrance. one can complain about black opium but at least, for a long time, it was a stand-alone titan.

I have seen so many people say Black Opium is their most complimented fragrance, or it's their signature scent. As such, I came into my experience with Black Opium with great optimism, and I was magnificently let down.

Initially, I did a test spray in-store with a new bottle. I was met with an incredibly unpleasant, sharp pepper. Behind the assault of pepper was a very Generic PerfumeTM -- as if I asked ChatGPT to make me the most uninspiring mall fragrance it could, and the AI slop it churned out was Black Opium. (This is not to say that I consider all "generic"/mass-appealing scents to be bad, or all spicy/peppery scents to be bad, because there are others that I like. However, I find Black Opium's particular execution off-putting.)

Later on, I obtained a sample. This sample (perhaps because of time to macerate?) did not have that same wall of pepper that my first spray had, which was an improvement. Unfortunately, it still had the overall impression of unpleasant Generic PerfumeTM. Later on in the drydown, I was left with only the warm vanilla in the base, which admittedly I did enjoy. But suffering through the top/middle notes was not worth getting to that vanilla.

Despite its classic status, I was overall left supremely disappointed. I actually plan on decluttering my sample to somebody who hopefully will appreciate it more than me!

Smells like being drunk as fuck in New York City, stealing drags off of someone's off-brand menthol 100 and reading tarot cards at the bar. Little whiffs of it clung to the collar of my coat and followed me and my hangover around all the next day- little bursts of sweetness fading in and out, still-frames from a night that I couldn't quite remember all the way. A sexy, trashy, sugarbomb covered in glitter and mascara smears- I literally don't know what this smells like when it's not mixed with an ambient miasma of cigarette smoke, but if you wanna be the hottest girl loitering outside the door to the dive bar, there you go.

Black Opium smells like someone squeezed Strawberry Shortcake’s sweet freckled face until the top of her plastic molded head popped off and they smeared the cloying, syrupy ichor that dribbled out all over their body, and then they rolled around in a heap of rotting jasmine that reached the point in the flower's lifespan where the blooms stop smelling beautiful and immediately start to smell like a cracked bucket of pee-stained underwear. Thus adorned in a doll’s blood-jam and sticky toilet flowers, the individual boldly assures themselves they are sexy as hell and heads out to the club. Oh, to have the confidence of a person wearing one of the world’s shittiest perfumes.