PBullFriend

My experience with this seems very different from that of other reviewers. Wow, did I hate this one. The listed notes sound great but I didn’t smell any of them. Instead, I got an early-2000s industrial fruit juice that reminded me of Incanto Shine or Incanto Charm and made me feel a bit sick. So I used my usual exfoliating scrub to try to remove it and then sprayed the heavy-duty Demeter Bonfire, but Radiant kept poking through. Another exfoliating scrub and a few sprays of Dior Dune finally finished it. I guess the good news is that people who like it only need to spray once to enjoy it all day.

I got a sample of this in my ongoing quest to please my freesia-loving sister. Freesia is listed as a note but I don't smell it at all. It's purely orchid -- very linear and not much depth. It's quite nice but its simplicity and propriety gives me a mental image of something a very proper teenage girl with long straight hair would wear to go to church on Sunday with her parents in a well-off Chicago suburb. It smells nice and would not offend anyone. (6/24)

This is a sample of the early 2020s trend of unnecessary salt. It's fake driftwood with fake seaweed/salt, like a lot of others of its time. Jo Malone's Wood Sage & Sea Salt succeeded in the salty genre by adding plum, but a minimalist approach to the salty-herbal category doesn't seem to work. Although I usually try scents twice, once is enough for this one.

I bought this for some trifling amount ($10 US, maybe) on eBay a long time ago. It's a lovely long-lasting espresso with a hint of sweetness (makes me think more of sugar cubes dissolved in espresso than cream) that projects well and lasts for hours.

After quitting cigarettes in 2005, I decided to reward myself with perfume. I tried all sorts of things, and could often find used bottles on eBay for very little. There were perfume blogs but not sites like this one. US eBay hadn't thrown off the hand-decanting sample sellers yet, so I took a lot more gambles than I do now. (When the sample sellers were thrown off, some of them formed their own websites, like The Perfumed Court, but many of them weren't up for that extra work, so sample supplies decreased drastically. There are a few hand-decanting sample sellers on eBay now, but I think they're flying under the radar.)

I bought this one based on nothing other than "I like coffee." When I realized how much I liked it, I bought a backup bottle. I'm finishing the first bottle now, and still finding it to be better than the Comptoir sud Pacifique coffee scents. It's on a par with L'Or de Torrente, but sometimes I am not in a mood for the roses in L'Or . It's also in a league with Comme des Garcons Wood Coffee, which has also been out of production for many years.

It reminds me that perfume *could* be a lot cheaper than it is now and still be good. But popularity makes it more expensive, and I'm also pleased that more people are enjoying scent. I'm just refusing to go to $200 a bottle, and hoarding this, and my old Cinnabar, and a few other gems we won't see again.

I am not privy to the marketing decisions at the Thymes, which is headquartered about five miles from my home, but I wish I were. They could be a solid alternative to Bath & Body Works, making less-sugary and more-adult scents in a similar price range. But, somehow, they aren't. Nearly 10 years ago, they launched a line called Lulah, which had the simplest and least-interesting logo and packaging possible. Despite this, the scents were nice! This tamarind-ginger body spray is simple and gorgeous, and should have earned the happy following that keeps Origins Ginger Essence (similar with the ginger and citrus) going strong 22 years after its release in a full line of scent and body care. Instead, Lulah has been gone for years, its website now nonexistent.