Aspasia0

Baklava and me, we have a love-hate thing going on. I either want to sink my teeth into the stuff when they're really nutty and soaked with dark honey. Or I want to spit them out again when what I thought was honey turns out to be just sugar syrup (which is usually not possible because the stuff sticks like nothing and only closing your eyes and chewing will save you from imminent death by suffocation)

So much for my culinary take on baklava. Let's move on to the olfactory. In my search for THE honey scents, I couldn't get past this one either, especially as I also love pistachios. So I bought the scent and gave it a sniff and it started really promisingly.

The pistachios were there immediately, along with an intense roasted aroma. The honey was in the background. Overall, an insanely delicious start, but the roasted flavor kept it tart enough to be portable. I was very taken with it. The orange blossom made itself known far in the background, but still very hesitantly.

I was happy with my delicious baklava. I soak up the aroma and admire how this sweet sin lies shining golden on the plate in front of me.
And then, as I look away, someone has the audacity to sprinkle my perfectly shaped baklava with any floral perfume! With a diabolical grin, this person must have poured half a bottle of some LVEB clone onto it, because suddenly my baklava no longer smells like a sweet temptation, but like, well, a baklava that has been doused with an LVEB dupe, there's no other way to describe it.

If I catch the flit who messed up my baklava, then I'm in for a treat! Then clap, but don't applaud!

If, like me, you've been researching honey fragrances recently, you quickly come across Bee by Zoologist and, if you read the reviews and statements, you get the impression that this fragrance is the king of honey fragrances. Honey for hardcore fans of liquid gold who are not put off by concentrated bee power. Eat or die!
Of course, this aroused my curiosity and after a few attempts to get hold of the bee's dream (damn, you're expensive T_T ), I finally held a sample in my hands yesterday and sprayed it on immediately.

Immediately the honey drips thick and viscous into my brain, embeds itself there on the shaggy aromatic broom, which is the usual chaos in my head and because my nerves are already singing "Ode to Joy", they sprinkle a few more petals over it, dancing merrily. Outside in the real world, there is a campfire made of freshly felled wood still covered in resin, but my stupidly blissfully smiling self only notices this in passing.

Bee doesn't have a great progression, because all the notes are there in one form or another from the beginning and remain until the end. It is a total work of art, an ode to honey, but not one that has been finely cultivated by the beekeeper, but one that is far more primal. I can't explain it exactly, but there is something wild about the scent. Nothing strongly animalistic or dirty, but also nothing that belongs inside four walls or fences and certainly not on bread.
I rather imagine that this is what ambrosia, the food of the Greek gods, of which Homer and Virgil write that it also served as a fragrance essence, smells like and in my mind nymphs smear themselves with it and then chase through the forest together with Artemis. Elegant and irrepressible at the same time.

What more can I say, I love him, I also want a bit of untamedness in everyday life and that is now a serious problem. Someone with more sense than me once said she doesn't test anything she can't afford. I say yes, more sense than me, because here I have the salad, or rather the honey...

XerJoff, a prominent brand that stands for (mainstream) luxury in the perfume world. The 100ml bottle of the white lady currently costs a proud 270 euros. Even with the knowledge of the already obscenely high margins in the luxury perfume segment, you would expect a bit of perfume art and quality, wouldn't you?

So when I was able to properly test my first XerJoff, I was looking forward to a full-bodied fragrance experience. Dama Bianca, that sounds elegant, that sounds like high society in a white linen dress on Capri "Take me into a world of glamor and galmour" I whisper softly with my eyes closed and spray.

BAMM ball to the face, two square ball, team selection, the nightmare for any unpopular kid like me. After an hour of sweating and socially acceptable humiliation, off to the changing room. The year is 2006, my classmates and I are around 12, breasts are growing, the first hair is sprouting far from our heads and the completely nonsensical idea that entering puberty is something great still prevails in our heads (poor things, they didn't know what was coming). Proud as punch that mom and dad now allow you to use deodorant and that you're so grown up, they're getting all drizzled up. And what was (still) all the rage in 2006: Impulse Vanilla Kisses deodorant. Just about every 6th grade girl had it and to show that you were really grown up, you had to count to at least 20 while pressing the spray button. Girls who went down gasping and struggling to breathe in the increasingly dense synthetic gag? Never mind, collateral damage, only the tough get into the garden! And only those who can suck 10ml of nebulized Vanilla Kisses on Ex through their nose like a vacuum cleaner with glitter lip gloss without batting an eyelid can call themselves a teenager, according to the prevailing opinion.

I catch my breath and am back in the here and now. I'm shaking a little, the trauma of 12 years of school sports and the general social gauntlet of school days is deep-seated. I try to shake off the unpleasant memory, but the disgusting vanilla deodorant, which I already disliked back then, still sticks to my nose like syrup, where does it come from? Distraught, I search for the source and get stuck on my wrist. No! Oh, yes it is!
The luxury perfume actually exudes the most heart-warming charm of this 90s/2000s synthetic vanilla bomb, and in a potency that is the only one that deserves the title of full-bodied.

You have to let that melt in your mouth. You spend 270€ to smell like a 99 cent deodorant (ok 1,15€ actually today).
And it's not even a good deodorant. This disgustingly artificial vanilla, which makes the vanilla-scented candles from the one-euro store smell like freshly scraped pods and which takes all the other fragrances in its stride and wrestles them down like a professional wrestler, was neither great in the peach-colored aluminum can, nor now in the sinfully expensive bottle.

I carefully put the sample in the poison cabinet myself. Maybe a therapist would advise me to work through my school days with it and maybe that would even work and one day I'll be sitting in a cloud of synthetic vanilla with my new BFFs, laughing and thinking "Oh, the world is beautiful". But honestly: I'm not up for it!

Excitement in the Hundred and Sixty Acre Wood. Pu the bear is gone! Christopher Robin and all his friends are looking for the Bear of Little Mind, but where is he? Is he stuck in Rabbit's front door again? Is he floating as a black cloud in front of a bees' nest? Has he even been devoured by a heffalump?

No, he's at home under the blanket and his head is buzzing and that, dear children, is what you call a hangover!
What had happened? "Was the golden liquid in the barrel that Christopher Robin secretly stole from his parents and brought to the party with his friends perhaps not very runny honey after all?", Pu asks himself, groaning as he emptied the barrel on his own in his exuberance. And so the cuddly bear unknowingly had his first experience with rum.

Why I want to tell you about this forgotten story of the adventures of Pooh the Bear, which A. A. Milne preferred not to include in the book after all, so as not to give his son any ideas, is because it pretty much reflects the scent character of Bee as I perceived him.

In my search for THE honey fragrance that can compete with "Pure Honey | KKW Fragrance / Kim Kardashian" but is more long-lasting, I was often recommended Bee by Ellis Brooklyn. When the sample reached me, I was accordingly full of anticipation. And yes, Bee performs better than my beloved Pure Honey, BUT it doesn't smell particularly like honey to me. The rum and vanilla are just too strong for that.
The former starts things off with the Darvana and together they put a lively samba on the package so that you can already hear Cuban bells ringing. Honey is also there, but stands on the sidelines and watches the two of them. After a while, the Darvana disappears, but the rum has a lot more staying power; for me, it is clearly perceptible right to the end and is accompanied by an equally potent vanilla for most of the time after the opening

All in all, a great fragrance if you are looking for a sweet gourmand with a Caribbean flair, but not what I wanted, namely honey in its purest form.

When I leave my apartment building to go to the bus, I pass a short path lined with four trees. Inconspicuous, a passageway through the maze of high-rise buildings. But for about three weeks a year, the path between the trees turns into a sea of pink blossoms and announces exultantly, "Now it's really spring!"

What I enjoy here with us mostly quietly for me alone, is in Japan a giant event. The annual cherry blossom and the associated Hanami festival is so important to the Japanese that even in the blossom season daily in the news is reported by the degree of opening of the flowers in the various areas of Japan and at the end, in addition to the weather map also a "cherry blossom front" map is inserted, which shows where the pink blossom dreams are just in full bloom

Again, so much culture board in advance of the scent description I, know, but I just can not resist sharing interesting with you, sorry, not sorry.
But yes I come now also to the fragrance. Acqua di Parma interprets the cherry blossom, how could it be otherwise, with an Italian/Mediterranean flair. The prelude of the fragrance is the citrus, which, I am now already accustomed to the brand, again very natural effect, although these are not as intense compared to the blue Mediterraneo series, they are here only companions and not star of the perfume.
With the citrus then also quickly mixes a cherry note, this initially reminds more of the fruit than the flower, but in the course of the perfume it becomes more and more floral.

Then in the heart we have a really beautiful cherry blossom. Delicate, sweet and gentle, it envelops and caresses one, like a pink silk scarf that gently brushes the face. This fragrance does not shout out its existence, it does not need to. Like the delicate pink flower whose name it bears, it is a stylish understatement. To put it in colors: it is pink, but not squeaky candy barberry pink, but an elegant gossamer pink hue. This then also becomes paler and paler towards the end, when the white musk mixes into the fragrance and lets it fade gently.