Vanilla Powder Matière Première 2023 Eau de Parfum

Looking at its current rating, you’d probably think this is just another average vanilla fragrance.

I honestly think there’s much more to it than that.

Yes, it has a slightly synthetic edge - and surprisingly, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Once you get past the opening, the vanilla, coconut and palo santo blend together into a creamy, sweet and surprisingly addictive fragrance that has a personality of its own.

Performance is another story altogether.

One day, a customer walked into my flower shop wearing Vanilla Powder. I recognized it immediately. About ten minutes after she had left, I could still smell the fragrance throughout the store.

That moment genuinely impressed me.

It’s one of the few fragrances that convinced me to buy a bottle simply because of the impression it left on me.

I truly wanted to love Vanilla Powder. With all the hype around it being a "perfect creamy vanilla," I was expecting something soft, comforting, and deliciously gourmand. Instead, what I got was... well, not very vanilla at all.

To my nose, this leans heavily masculine, more like a lightly sweetened cologne than a vanilla fragrance. The opening is powdery and clean, with a woody or musky undertone that dominates everything else. The vanilla? It’s barely there. I really had to focus to pick it out, and even then, it felt more like a background suggestion than the star of the show.

What makes this even more frustrating is the projection. The scent feels intense up close, there's a richness to it, but the sillage is surprisingly weak. It stays close to the skin and fades faster than I expected, which makes the lack of vanilla even more noticeable.

If you're looking for a strong, creamy, gourmand vanilla, this isn’t it. For me, it was more of a masculine-leaning skin scent with the tiniest hint of vanilla buried underneath. Hugely disappointing.

I held off on trying it for a long time because I saw other people's review about it which made me pause. Thankfully, there's absolutely no synthetic smell to my nose unless you count the sharp beginning. Instead, I'm met with a scrumptious bourbon vanilla mixed in equal parts with a creamy coconut. It's decadent, gourmand, but not heavy! Made me think of either a coconut and vanilla (pastry?) dessert or a luxurious coconut and vanilla butter cream. There's a hint of woodiness coming from the palo santo at the edge of the scent that stops it from becoming too sweet or cloying. It could probably be worn during spring or summer (no heatwave temperatures) for that reason.

Like others have said, I do admit it's pretty linear. There's less complexity and depth than other vanilla-centric fragrances out there, but the performance of this fragrance is absolutely amazing and makes up for the rest of it. If you're in search for a vanilla and coconut scent, this one is it!

Even if it is a bit on the "pricey side", this fragrance is a beast. So if it's up to me - definitely worth the price.

Not a typical "woman's vanilla", not by a long shot. It's very masculine, dry and salty. In the opening to my nose a bit peppery, palo santo/inscence note comes through immediately. There's not much fuzziness or sweetness in here, just dry, salty coconut shavings and a high quality, masculine vanilla.

In that sense, really different, not so warm, simplistic and predictable. Longevity easily up to 12+ hours, sillage also great.

Exercise caution if you’re sensitive to amberwood/Super Amber molecules. They unfortunately mask literally everything else to my nose and I get a huge blast of them in this (possibly used to build the palo santo note?) Some people experience those molecules as suffocating and all-enveloping (like me) while others don’t have the same reaction according to a research paper I read (available on ResearchGate, titled ‘Overview of High-Impact Woody Amber Molecules in Modern Perfumery and Critique of Trigeminal Effect on Sensitive Consumers’).

This sounded absolutely divine (Vanilla! Powder! Heliotrope! Coconut!) but I’m unable to smell everything that some describe as almost magical, sadly. I’m unable to smell any of the listed notes at all. It’s just amberwood all the way down, and STRONG.

A reviewer below suggests that those giving negative reviews don’t “understand” this fragrance. I would be willing to bet that it’s not that at all, it’s just a sensitivity to the amberwood molecules, and to my nose this perfume is loaded with them.

Rated as 1 for me personally because of this, but I’d imagine that for those who don’t have the same reaction as me, it could be quite a lot higher.