Siouxsie

Do you know those no-name chocolate cherries à la Mon Cherry? My grandma had them stacked in her cabinet... and yes: I certainly didn't prefer them to the other Ferrero products in my youth. However, when there was nothing else available, I would eat them too... because chocolate is better in any form than no chocolate at all!
Back to the stacks: Since the chocolate cherries lingered there for a summer or two, the pralines dried out a bit and developed a slight whitish veil on the chocolate surface...
Long story short: This is exactly the scent impression of dark, dry chocolate with an alcoholic touch that I catch during the initial sniff. The alcohol note recedes after a few minutes but remains present for some time, giving the dark, almost black chocolate an interesting twist. The scent lasts for hours and then becomes slightly sweeter and rounder due to the vanilla and tonka.
So, this is a vegan and diabetic-friendly chocolate, without any milky or overly sweet scent notes.
I'm not sure if Wicked Good would be too one-dimensional for me as a fragrance, but it is definitely a perfect candidate for layering... because everything is better with chocolate :)!

at your desire."
Unfortunately, I can't say that... This birth of Venus does not correspond to my wishes at all and does not do justice to the divine namesake in any way. Perhaps I shouldn't have set the bar too high after this song and the similarly named razor. The latter certainly lives up to the price-performance ratio - but the scent, in my opinion, does not.
It starts off very sweet, with individual notes being hard to discern, most likely the raspberry. The target audience I can imagine here would be teenage girls, as the scent feels very girlish and gives more the impression of a rather generic designer fragrance. It has little to do with the goddess of love. It’s perhaps more of a childish gesture, a mischievous glance, a quiet giggle among girls when an attractive boy walks by.
As fleeting as that moment seems, so does the longevity of the fragrance. It quickly retreats and becomes skin-close after just a few hours...
And at that moment, it becomes almost unbearable for me personally. It reminds me of a certain room fragrance. With this spray, I covered up the smell that lingered when my dog had an accident in the apartment, and all the cleaning wasn't enough to get rid of the fecal odor.
Now, not everyone will have such a repulsive association with this scent, but just the similarity to that air freshener is, in my opinion, enough to deny the fragrance the comparison to the birth of Venus.

Finally, summer vacation is here again, and I can spend two of the six weeks with my beloved grandparents! I look forward to this time every year: Grandma bakes egg pancakes and cooks vanilla pudding, there’s ice cream with whipped cream, egg liqueur, and coffee powder. My grandpa teaches me how to draw or what the flags of various countries look like and tells stories from his childhood, the war, and many other things that have happened in history. In the afternoons, we go to the playground to swing, and in the evenings, we watch the news three times, and there’s Hawaiian toast. After that, we play Rummy or watch some Schlager parade.

What does all this have to do with Pikovaya Dama?
I sprayed the fragrance without even thinking about whether I wanted to wear it or not. Rather, it immediately transported me back to the past. I smell the soap that hung in my grandparents' bathroom (Yes, it was one of those magnetic holders where the soap was attached, as a kind of bottle cap was fixed to the soap block.) and this familiar scent brings my grandparents back to life for a moment and makes me happy and sad at the same time.

Of course, the soap in my grandparents' bathroom didn’t smell as distinctly high-quality as Pikovaya Dama, because my grandparents were "just ordinary people" and lived in a prefabricated apartment, not in a castle. But just as this fragrance embodies the ideal of a soap, I envision the ideal of my childhood and the ideal of my grandparents.

"When I am laid in earth
When I am laid, am laid in earth,
May my wrongs create
No trouble, no trouble in thy breast.
Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate."

(Henry Purcell: Dido and Aeneas)

In my opinion, the fragrance symbolizes less the opera in general than the aria:
The aria of a strong and charismatic queen (The scent radiates in its sillage and feels both sovereign and opulent.), who is at the same time vulnerable and fragile. Aeneas left her, and her love is now just a gray veil of the past (recognizable by the ancient-sounding scent of woods). Dido is more of death than of life. She herself sings of the earth in which her grave will be laid (Patchouli gives the fragrance a moist, earthy undertone.)
Yet although she suffers, she remains proud and sovereign. She wants her beloved to remember her in her beauty and tenderness (symbolized by the flowers, the sweetness, and powderiness of the fragrance), but he should forget her fate, which he has brought about (This pride is reflected in the cool nuances of the fragrance.).
The beauty of melancholy, the theatricality of human existence - trapped in suffering and loss... the Memento Mori that accompanies life - this is precisely what Opera manages to express. A true masterpiece.
Like Dido, this fragrance accepts, even celebrates, transience.

In search of the perfect vanilla scent, I came across Vanilla 28 and researched it extensively, as many of you probably do. The result can be summarized briefly as follows: Vanilla 28 is one of those fragrances that any self-proclaimed vanilla lover simply has to try. The vanilla is the main player, and the perfume is excellent for layering. That sounded promising, and I decided to make my first (and so far only) blind purchase.
I must admit the first sniff was a bit disappointing: this vanilla came across as somewhat tipsy, and I’m not a big fan of alcohol notes in fragrances. However, a very prominent vanilla note unfolds, supported by brown sugar, which is also detectable. I can smell a hint of flowers, but they remain very subdued. The scent is present from the very first moment and stays that way for hours, although for my perception, only the vanilla and brown sugar are noticeable after a while. The consistency of the fragrance feels smooth, like plastic, and thus somewhat cool and self-contained. I don’t have the feeling, as I do with other fragrances, that this one merges with my skin. This creates a slight contradiction for me with the tendentially warm, somewhat sticky-sweet scent. The fragrance is well perceivable for hours, and the sillage is also good.
Although I find other fragrances in my collection more interesting and attractive in terms of the scent experience, I still reach for Vanilla 28 quite often. However, I only use it at home or in combination with other fragrances, by spraying it on my underwear and using the actual perfume I selected for the occasion on my neck and wrists. I can also imagine Vanilla 28 well as a perfume in the true sense for younger women.