Milk & Matcha

Un Été

Obvious 2023

In contrast to Scoville which actually smells just like a chili pepper, Milk & Matcha doesn't really live up to the billing. It's a bland "perfume"-y fruity creamy floral thing that smells like a department store feminine fragrance. Like other reviewers have stated, the old name for this fragrance was "Un Été," or "summer," but it doesn't really fit that either. Not really fresh enough for summer. The matcha accord is very slight and smells more like a more traditional tea accord rather than having the bitter dustiness one would associate with matcha. But it also doesn't smell like actual milk tea, just a hodgepodge of synthetic notes that don't really seem to come together into anything cohesive.

An incredibly authentic matcha latte, but not necessarily a well made one. The mug is a bit soapy, the tea is too bitter, the milk is oversweet and a little scalded, and for some reason they squeezed a tangerine over top. When I got this it was still called "Un Été," which is no good. This is too creamy and lactonic for summer. It's much better suited to spring.

Renaming this to boost marketability does an absolute disservice to the fragrance. I don’t know if they tweaked the formula as well but there is nothing creamy or lactonic in the Un Été I know!

It’s like rummaging through the kitchen cupboard of your (imaginary) summer house for the first time that season. Everything still feels slightly unfamiliar: there are thin layers of dust on the surfaces and the hinges are a bit squeaky. The first whiff is a wild mix of blond, sun-bleached woods, citrus, different types of herbs and teas. As it settles, the grassy sweetness of matcha comes through and your gaze finds the tea you've been craving, nestled comfortably in-between a small bag of mate, a dried-up ginger root and a jar of vanilla beans. The orange blossom in this is beautifully subdued and soft like it's promising you something rather than shoving it in your face directly. It gives it a pleasant sunscreen-y sensation in the drydown.
If Un Été is a summer, it's definitely *last* summer: a sweet, slightly dusty memory.

Just got a whiff from my blotter. First I was puzzled, it smelled definitely familiar like I perfume I own in my teenage year. Then I got it, “This is her” from Hugo Boss, an overly sweet chemical juice taking dust in my teenage room. But the notes are different but on my paper those are really similar.
On paper : No matcha just really harsh sweet synthetic notes for me
On skin : okay definitely need to tried on skin, initially i do get creamy sweet, slightly aromatic. But definitely sweet on first impressions

It's okay, but i don't think i want to wear it more than just a bit, so i might finish the sample and it's good.

I am convinced that the classically-trained non-POC European nose is simply incapable of conceiving a matcha fragrance that doesn’t just smell like the drugstore women’s perfume section. The matcha in Milk & Matcha feels like an afterthought. The milk took itself out to the grocery store. I got one nice whiff of a sweet matcha latte before soapy orange blossom and blonde woods descended upon my nose. My nostrils feel colonized.

The matcha note, for the 2 seconds I could smell it for, was actually decently realistic, though albeit extremely sweet, like if you ordered the matcha latte at 200% sweetness.

This whole scent feels very “Thing, Japan”, which is funny, because it wasn’t even made in Japan, or by a Japanese person. I guess yet another orange blossom gourmand isn’t very easy to market nowadays… But matcha? That’s unique. That’s groundbreaking! I actually first sampled this in Japan, and the creamy matcha accord was definitely there, but it was clearly struggling against the other scent components.

I will also say, while the matcha note is nice (creamy, a bit umami), it misses that earthy, slightly astringent, savoury aroma that good-quality matcha has.

Of course this is not the first time I’ve been disappointed by a “matcha” scent, but Milk & Matcha actually smells like matcha for a moment—whereas Matcha Meditation and Princess did not ever smell like matcha, but at least they smell good. (They smell like regular green tea, which is lazy but very common in Western “matcha” perfumes.)

I did try this scent multiple times while hoping something in it would make me change my mind. Sadly this something never came. And I’m saddened to report that after 6 hours, my skin is left smelling like residual Play-Doh. This scent is also weirdly synthetic on my skin, bordering on plastic sometimes.

My experience with Milk & Matcha is like being a starving prisoner and having a prison guard who gives you one big sniff of bread before sliding you a bowl of grey slop. It makes me hate wanting to smell like matcha, because then I had to go through all the disappointment and misery of sampling this fragrance.