Ten fragrances I hate

Like many of you, I share reviews on various review sites, social media, and my own blog, and I often get people asking me, "Do you only review the perfumes you like?" HA! No way! If I hate something, you're going to hear about it! I thought I would share my top ten most hateful fragrances here today.

Please know that my reviews usually come from a place of emotion and experience, and even when I love them, they are very personal-- so you can imagine how visceral and unhinged it might be when I hate something. But two, please know this is my experience and has nothing to do with you; I am not judging anyone for loving a perfume that I despise, and three, you don't have to convince me that something I hate is actually good! I promise, it is a waste of time and that just means there's more of it for you to love!
That said, here, in no particular order, is my list of the ten worst olfactory offenders!

L’Interdit Eau de Parfum | Givenchy: Givenchy L’Interdit is…oof. It makes my hips ache and my knees creak. It makes me feel like a fucking fossil. This is a candied fruity floral, like crushed shards of every flavor Jolly Rancher forming the vague shape of a flower but I think anyone who smells it will agree it is no flower found in nature. Do you know who smelled it and loved it and thought it was “bomb” and “fire” and “literally everything,” though? A quartet of college girls who robbed a fast-food restaurant and stole a car to fund their spring break plans and who then got bailed out of jail by a skeezy clown of drug dealer/rapper/arms dealer named Alien who looks just like James Franco. I’m pretty sure they are all about this bikini bacchanalia neon candy Harmony Korine girls gone wild hedonist hell of a scent, and man, they can have it. I’m too old for this shit.

Poets of Berlin | Vilhelm Parfumerie: Poets of Berlin from Vilhelm Parfumerie is a vile bioluminescent mutant blueberry thing. A blueberry subjected to a sketchy, underfunded experiment in a prototype telepod but there was also a particle of lemon-aloe-bamboo Glade air freshener in the chamber before it was hermetically sealed as well as a smashed bedazzle gem that fell off of an intern’s acrylic nail, unnoticed. Torn apart atom by atom, the small jammy fruit merged with the glinting shards of sugary bling and a blisteringly caustic glow-in-the-dark citrus-lily. I don’t think David Bowie ever wrote a song about this monster but there was a movie adaptation with Jeff Goldblum.

Rue St Honore | OUAI: Rue St Honore from Ouai is giving me some real idyllic springtime wisteria-draped cottagecore Crabtree & Evelyn Gunne Sax tradwife YouTube influencer exploited by their alt-right faschy podcaster husband for their perceived domesticity, femininity and purity vibes. Is this a field of violets and daisies and gingham picnic daydream or an escapist nostalgia-trap weaponized by Neo-Nazis? Maybe I am overthinking it, but there is something about this quaint floral garden fragrance that feels wildly wrong and deeply uncomfortable and makes me desperately itchy to stage an intervention for someone.
Decadence | Marc Jacobs: Imagine you won a contest run by your local radio station, you know the one with the obnoxious sexist pig morning show duo, generically called something like “Big Dude Bro and the Little Vermin.” Yeah, so you–lucky you!–entered this contest where the prize was the privilege of getting to spend the night in a local spot purported to be haunted. Great, right?! Well, turns out it’s just a sketchy vape shop and the “ghost” is like, how someone saw Jesus’s face in a baked potato or something. And that actually happened next door in the crusty diner. The moment you walk in the door you are assaulted by the sickening aroma of maple syrup vape juice, a cloying waft from an empty rum raisin ice cream container crawling with many-legged insects, and the dusty fumes of your meanest ancestor’s cherry pipe tobacco. Was it a haunting or was it Marc Jacobs Decadence? You conclude that while you did not experience anything in the slightest bit supernatural, this vile combination of notes will certainly haunt you for the rest of your days.

Intense Cafe | Montale: I first sampled Montale’s Cafe Intense years ago when I was initially getting into fragrance and perfumes. I guess I was feeling a little nostalgic for that sample a kind MUA-er sent me way back when! My recollection was that it was meant to be a coffee-forward scent, but…it is not. My partner observed that it smells like a teenage girl who typically wore a lot of candied, sugary scents and who wanted to level up with fancy florals and didn’t quite hit the mark. She tried, I guess, was his conclusion. My thoughts are more specific. This is a cloying fruity-floral that smells exactly like Rose Jam from LUSH, which I bitterly loathe because that smells just like those gaggy sweet Jolly Ranchers hard candies that all the popular kids were always eating in 6th grade. Which in turn makes me think of the MOST popular girl, we’ll call her Mary Lesa H., who broke off and ATE part of my sugar crystal science project that year. I hate science projects and I have never forgiven Mary Lesa H., and this awful perfume can go straight to hell.

Shangri La Edition 2022 | Hiram Green: How do I say this without being unkind? Shangri-La from Hiram Green is less lush and harmonious utopian promised land and more a Hieronymus Bosch-envisioned hellish menagerie, blighted and bedeviled, doomed and damned–all the horror and grandeur and unbridled madness of the cosmos, distilled into one raspingly chaotic scent. The initial blast of overripe, fermented peaches and citrus fruit frizzles acridly at us, trumpeted straight out of a bizarre monster’s glossy pink backside; jasmine’s balmy decay wraps us in a fuzzy, fevered winding-sheet of a golden-throned man-eating bird, to remind us that all is vanity and the pleasures of the flesh are fleeting, and the strangely spiced kisses of a porcine nun linger on your skin like a grotesque memento from a carnival of depravity. In what twisted mind is this a Shangri-La? I think Hiram Green is having one over on us.

Ôponé | Diptyque: Ôponé is a fragrance so revolting you’d think someone was joking, that it couldn’t possibly be real. But it is real, and I have a sample of it. It’s a vile cocktail of the following: a freshly-opened bottle of goopy, boozy-but-not-nearly-enough booze bitter berry Robitussin Maximum Strength Cough and Chest Congestion (possibly the one with Dextromethorphan and Guaifenesin), the most repellent, unpalatable artificial fruity-sour energy drink on the shelf with the most outrageously obnoxious packaging, the one so disgusting and foul that even the people you think might be into it would never buy, and the saddest long-stemmed fake rose wrapped in dusty crinkly plastic at the gas station. Nobody wants any part of this. Throw it in the trash immediately.

Salt | Ellis Brooklyn: What even is the point of this? It’s the “live laugh love” of fragrance.

You Or Someone Like You | Etat Libre d’Orange: ELdO You Or Someone Like You is the screechy confrontational performance art of a person having a freaky public meltdown, a full-out adult tantrum, taking place midafternoon in a popular coffee chain or a ubiquitous lingerie store in the mall, and which is probably being recorded by spectators for millions of future views on YouTube even as the melodrama is unfolding. It’s the synthetic aroma of an indoor public space filled with too many people breathing at once and poorly circulated air, the awkward musk of distressed and embarrassed onlookers, the cool mineralic concrete of silent complicity, the acrid, antiseptic arrogance of entitlement and the tang of weaponized tears and performative victimhood of someone who felt personally attacked by Victoria’s Secret’s return policy regarding thong panties or the fact that Starbucks was out of oat milk for their ridiculous latte order. You or Someone like you is the fragrance of someone making a massively upsetting stink in front of a crowd and feeling absolutely no shame or remorse because they have a right to everything, they deserve everything, merely because they exist.

…and the one that started it all, the first fragrance I ever hate-raged about, Flowerbomb | Viktor&Rolf: Described as “an explosive bouquet of fresh and sweet notes”, I personally think it smells like a conflagration of petty spite, mean-spiritedness, and small minds. Like bigoted small-town pageant moms and the shitty popular girls in 80s movies. It simultaneously makes me want to cringe and cry. Also, it’s an enormous lie. It smells nothing like any flower. As to what it does smell like, precisely, I cannot pinpoint. A shallow dish of sugar water with some sneezy, cloying powder mixed in. Like Kool-Aid, I guess. It smells like a celebutaunt-inspired Kool-Aid. Or…unless, of course, there is a blossom or bloom that smells like Bongo jeans and hair-sprayed bangs and the wretched duo of Jennifer W. and Amanda P. in the 7th and 8th grade. How’s it feel to be the inspiration for the world’s worst fragrance, you dumb, hateful b*tches.