Perfume Review – Illuminum White Gardenia Petals: Kate Middleton’s Wedding Choice

Posted on January 15, 2013 by Kafkaesque

What perfume does a bride chose to wear on her special day? It’s often a difficult decision because you want something that makes you feel really special. But when a bride is going to marry the future King of England before approximately 3 billion people, it may be an even harder decision. In Kate Middleton’s case, she chose White Gardenia Petals (henceforth “WGP“) by the British boutique house, Illuminum.

Illuminum is a relatively new perfume house launched in 2011. Its founder is Michael Boadi who also created the line’s sixteen perfumes, each of which falls into four main olfactory groups (citrus, floral, oud and musk). There are four perfumes within each of those four over-arching categories and, supposedly, none of the perfumes contains more than “eight carefully selected ingredients.” According to an interview he gave to Fragrantica, “[t]he Illuminum collection is for those days when you are in the mood for something exquisitely simple and stylish.” He answered some of Fragrantica’s questions about the scent and also explained his vision:

Creating a fragrance from merely eight ingredients was a real challenge, especially if we know that some fragrances include more than 500 ingredients. Finding the right eight ingredients that fit together perfectly, can even take a couple of years of careful planning. […]

Illuminum is the future of Fragrance due to its pared-down nature. If you are looking for minimalism at its purest, then look no further. If you want to smell ginger and pear, that is exactly what you will discover when you explore the Ginger Pear from Illuminum.

Kate Middleton’s decision to wear White Gardenia Petals on her wedding day was a huge coup for Illuminum. According to the Daily Mail, the perfume sold out within minutes of the news of her choice! To get a small idea of the scent (and the massive global obsession with the royal bride), yet another gushing Fragrantica article simpers:

White Gardenia Petals is a perfect choice that really suits the charming and feminine Kate, her beautiful wedding dress and her grace. The notes of this fragrance highlight the refined and very fresh breeze of gardenia, which is a guiding scent of the composition. Unpretentious gardenia is embellished in the heart with a fine trace of coconut, ylang-ylang, jasmine and lily of the valley, laid on the base of amber wood. The fragrance is available as 50 ml and 100 ml EDP.

Michael Boadi announces that White Gardenia Petals at the moment isn’t available anywhere in the world and that the waiting list for the purchase of this fragrance is three months!!!

The Illuminum website describes the perfume as follows:

White Gardenia Petals is as fragrant as a vase of white flowers, quivering in the breeze by an open window. This is a delicate and refined scent – the top note of lily evokes a summer ambiance, whilst heart notes of gardenia, ylang ylang, lily of the valley and jasmine breeze are sumptuous and feminine. Amber wood underscores this light bouquet.

Top notes: Bergamot, Cassis,

Heart: Jasmine, White Gardenia, Ylang Ylang,

Base notes: Precious Woods.

Fragrantica gives very different top notes — namely just coconut and nothing else — but it matters not one jot to the final impression which is: synthetic, floral, air freshener; soap; hair spray; and cheap shampoo. Given that Michael Boadi began as a hairdresser before making it big, I find it sadly coincidental that a man who left that world to create perfumes ended up making something that is a full-circle return to hair salons. And I’m far from alone in that sentiment. In fact, I’m being much kinder than some commentators. On the Fragrantica entry for White Gardenia Petals, one poster compared it to a “toilet cleaning product.”

I’m not sure I would go that far, but I found White Gardenia Petals to be utterly revolting. It’s not anywhere close to being as bad as Montale‘s Lime Aoud (honestly, I doubt anything ever will be) or the stomach-churning nausea induced by L’Artisan Parfumeur‘s Passage d’Enfer, but it was pretty godawful. As many of you know by now, the note that I abhor above all others is soapy and clean, particularly if the fragrance evokes laundry detergent or fabric softener and is expensive to boot. I simply cannot handle it. And, yet, a predominantly soapy scent may be (just barely) more tolerable than Illuminum’s WGP. (I shall have to ponder their relative ghastliness.)

The opening seconds of White Gardenia Petals on my skin was a sharp note of pure rubbing alcohol, only rendered floral. Then, there is an explosion of a thin, artificially airy — but simultaneously heady — shampoo note, with a heavy backdrop of Dove soap. The rubbing alcohol impression is tinged with a faint lemon note, making me wonder if we’re going from bathroom products to dish-washing liquid next. But no. It stays as a sharp burst of white flowers with shampoo and soap. I think Suave makes a white shampoo like this, and I know Dove’s soap is quite close for the soap notes here. The two things are separate “clean” scents in my mind, and they combine most unpleasantly with the very indolic, cheap gardenia and muguet (or lily-of-the-valley) notes. I think Bath & Body Works makes better versions of airy white florals which lack White Gardenia Petals’ strong similarity to hairspray. (It’s almost amusing to read the endless litany of “hair spray” comparisons in the comments on Lucky Scent.)

To be honest, it’s a bit hard to dissect some of the notes for the first hour because I’m overwhelmed by a screeeeeeeeeechingly loud, persistently plastic-y note that is often a dead give-away of something synthetic in a perfume. An even bigger give-away for me personally is the sensation I consistently get from very cheap additives: a feeling of tightness high up in the bridge of my nose, making me feel as though I have sinusitis, along with a faint burning sensation. I suddenly feel as though a headache is around the corner — and it’s been a while since a perfume made me feel that way.

The perfume continues its olfactory equivalent of assault and battery. I don’t smell ylang-ylang at this point, but I do get a strong impression of iris and/or violet. Perhaps my brain associates those notes with powdery fragrances, and White Gardenia Petals has got a definite powdery vibe. The powdery vibe is a bit different from the soap and shampoo/hairspray aspects. It stems more from the musk element which starts to make its presence known about 10 minutes in. It is cloying, and calls to mind Narcisco Rodriguez‘ For Her — only on steroids and amplified by a thousand. For Her is one of the few “clean” perfumes that I would wear if I had a gun pointed to my head, but there is something distinctly unpleasant about White Gardenia Petals’ twist on musky clean. Perhaps because it is all just one cacophonous mishmash of white florals, rubbing alcohol, indoles, powder, musk, synthetics, soap, shampoo, and cotton.

Oh, did I not mention cotton? Because I also get a very strong note of fresh, clean cotton. It sharply calls to mind the Clean line of perfumes (no, I’m not joking) and of their Cotton T-Shirt fragrance in particular. (How I wish I were making all that up.) It is at this point that I write in my notes, “please God, kill me now,” and I go to find some aspirin.

I would have felt like a character in Jean-Paul Sarte’s No Exit if it were not for one thing: this discordant cocktail lessens the volume of its assault, sooner rather than later. After an hour, the sillage is very low, such that I have to sniff my arm (sometimes forcefully) to assess how the fragrance is transforming, if at all. And it does. Many of the clashing notes fade away as White Gardenia Petals turns into simple gardenia scent with a faint undertone of creamy, custard-y, banana-like ylang-ylang. Alas, the soap still remains, as do the hinting wafts of cheap hairspray.

Though its sillage may have become demure, White Gardenia Petals’ persistence is a source of deep misery. Ten hours in, I can still smell some form of cheap, floral soap on my wrist. They say perfumers love synthetic additives because they multiply the longevity of a perfume (I think it may be because of the shape of the molecules), in addition to being a cheap shortcut. It must be true since all the synthetic soapy smells last on me for an extraordinary amount of time.

White Gardenia Petals is meant to be “a vase of white flowers, quivering in the breeze by an open window,” and clearly meant to suit someone like a bride who doesn’t want to be overshadowed by her fragrance. All that is fine and dandy. If people want to wear light florals with a fresh, clean note and demure sillage, all the more power to them. But I find it rather outrageous to charge £70.00 or $125 (on Lucky Scent) for a small 1.7 oz/50 ml bottle of revoltingly synthetic notes combined with florals that Bath & Body Works, The Body Shop, and some others can do as well — if not better. And that’s totally ignoring the fact that you can smell like Dove soap for about $1.25!

As one Fragrantica commentator noted, “Illuminum feature themselves in the media as a brand of the royals, like Creed does.” I’m happy for them. But if Kate Middleton had not chosen to wear this scent on the day she turned into the Duchess of Cambridge, I highly doubt that anyone would queue to spend the kind of money that Illuminum is charging to smell like cheap hairspray. If you want something light, fresh, airy, floral and bridal, try Issey Miyake‘s L’Eau d’Issey Miyake. Try anything, but I wouldn’t recommend this.

Perfume Review – Robert Piguet Fracas: The History & The Legend

Posted on January 8, 2013 by Kafkaesque

“There are perfume legends, there are perfumer legends, and then there are perfumes that become obsessions. Fracas is all three, which is a hat trick less common that you’d think.”

Fracas Eau de Parfum.

Thus begins The New York Times‘ review for Fracas. It is a five-star review by the highly respected perfume critic, Chandler Burr, for a perfume that he rates as “transcendent.” And I couldn’t agree more. [Clarification: this post and piece is about vintage Fracas, both the very original versions and late 1990s Fracas, not the horribly mangled, modern reformulations.]

As a very small child of six or seven, and one already obsessed with perfume, there were two fragrances that I loved above all others: YSL’s Opium and Robert Piguet‘s Fracas. Out of the vast array of expensive French bottles littering my mother’s mise à toilette, out of all the Lalique jars and containers filled with various mysterious, adult things, out of all the things that made being a woman seem so fun and magical, there was really only Opium and Fracas that mattered to me. It was the 1970s, we lived in Cannes in a villa on the side of the mountain, overlooking the whole city below. There were exciting and often turbulent things going on, new things to explore, and make-believe adventures to be had. And, yet, I was always drawn back to that table. To be honest, it was primarily for the Opium which is still, to this day, my favorite perfume in all the world (in vintage version). But Fracas was a close second.

It was the empress of all white scents. It was a perfume that, as I recall, brought every man who passed by my mother to a stumbling, stuttering halt as they wondered what was that marvelous, incredible, hypnotic smell. It was a scent that I always thought was exuberantly joyful and happy, but which seemed to seduce whomever came within ten feet of it. It seemed like some cloud of happy white magic, all in one jet black bottle. It was the perfume worn by Marilyn Monroe (when she wasn’t wearing Chanel No. 5), Rita Hayworth, and Brigitte Bardot. And its modern die-hard fans range from such polar opposites as: Madonna to Martha Stewart, Ivana Trump to Courtney Love, Princess Caroline of Monaco to Bianca Jagger. It intoxicated them all. And it intoxicated a tiny seven-year old, too.

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Review En Bref: L’Artisan Parfumeur Nuit de Tubereuse

Posted on January 7, 2013 by Kafkaesque

As always with my mini-reviews, this post will be a brief summary of my impressions of a perfume that, for whatever reason, didn’t merit one of my full, extensively detailed reviews.

With Sephora now carrying seven L’Artisan Parfumeur fragrances, I thought it might be time to review one of those: Nuit de Tubereuse. As some of you know, I love tuberose, but I’m significantly underwhelmed by this 2010 creation from the legendary nose, Bertrand Duchaufour. Actually, to be completely frank, I’m not a fan.

Nuit de Tubereuse is an eau de parfum, and Fragrantica states that its notes are as follows:

cardamom, clove, pink pepper, black pepper, citrus, green mango, angelica, tuberose, orange blossom, ylang-ylang, rose, broom, musks, vanilla, sandalwood, palisander, benzoin, styrax.

Nuit de Tubereuse opens green. It’s green tuberose and it’s unpleasantly medicinal. This is not the mentholated, camphor and eucalyptus green of Serge Lutens Tubereuse Criminelle, but something much more unpleasant, like sulphur. I also have a distinct impression of aspirin, along with an astringent note that strongly calls to mind rubbing alcohol, cheap vodka or cleaning products. Some comments on Fragrantica describe a very similar experience.

For fairness sake, however, I should add that a number of people on Fragrantica seem to like this perfume, in part because it is nothing like traditional tuberose scents like Fracas. There is none of that warm, buttery smell that one finds in the more traditional tuberose scents like Fracas. They find it much lighter and more manageable, though some think that it can be quite masculine. I don’t think it is masculine, but I do find it surprisingly strong for a L’Artisan perfume which — in my experiences thus far — have been rather light, sheer, gauzy and without great projection.

As moments pass, the astringent green tuberose and aspirin is joined by a lot of pink peppercorns, some clove, soapy musk, and a faintly sour, green edge that most reviewers attribute to the mango. If so, it’s definitely green mango. The whole combination sounds a lot more unpleasant than it actually is — but it’s still not a particular joy. The tuberose is cold. Stone cold. About 30 minutes, I smell something that calls to mind fruity bubble gum. In slight disbelief, I look up some other reviews and, yes, reviewers like Now Smell This and a few others commentators have noted “Juicy Fruit.” I sigh, and start to wonder if I actually like Bertrand Duchafour fragrances.

After an hour, Nuit de Tubereuse turns into a jasmine and ylang-ylang fragrance on me. Mostly, it is just plain jasmine, even though that is not actually listed as a note. Yes, there is a faintly earthy edge to the jasmine, but it is nothing like the earthiness mentioned in a number of comments, both on Fragrantica and Basenotes. I had expected quite a bit of it due to the inclusion of angelica. I have a bag of angelica powder for cooking, and its earthy pungency always makes me reel and re-evaluate making that recipe. (Angelica is in Serge Lutens Ambre Sultan and it is, I am convinced, why some find that scent so unpalatable.) In any event, I expected a lot more earthiness in Nuit de Tubereuse due to the angelica and the various online comments. But, no. It’s just plain jasmine with ylang-ylang. It’s nice, but I’m utterly bored to tears. So much so that I’m relieved its sillage is moderate to low (about 30-40 minutes at strength, then close to the skin), and that the longevity is about 4 hours on me, though most report far greater length. I can’t wait to get this off and try something that is actually faintly exciting or enjoyable.

A lot of reviewers have stated that this is not really a tuberose scent as much as it is a floral and spiced fruit scent that just happens to have tuberose in it. I agree. And some perfume bloggers, like The Candy Perfume Boy, have done “a big 180” on this scent and have ended up really liking it. That will never be me, I fear. I’m far too turned off and bored to want to give this umpteen chances until it finally sways or bullies me into submission. In fact, I’m starting to think that I simply do not like green tuberose, or modern twists on tuberose. (Perhaps I was too imprinted in my childhood with Fracas, and can’t move on?)

I can’t decide if I would recommend Nuit de Tubereuse as a starter tuberose to those terrified of the more traditional indolic, buttery, overpowering tuberose scents on the market. Some commentators on Fragrantica think it would be a great way to tiptoe into this floral sub-category. But, after some thought, I don’t think it would be a good idea. That opening is simply too unpleasant; and the rest of the time, Nuit de Tubereuse is merely a linear fragrance that is quite boring. If I had experienced some of the earthly, woody base notes, perhaps I would feel differently.

That said, body chemistry is a funny thing and enough people have liked Nuit de Tubereuse or noted the earthy, woody dry-down for me to suggest that you may want to give this a potential sniff if you happen to pass by a bottle at Sephora. After all, it’s not completely hideous or revolting. But I would certainly never recommend that you blindly spend $120 on a 1.7 oz/50 ml or $165 on a 3.4 oz/100 ml on an impulse purchase just because you think you like tuberose. Please, don’t do it.

Perfume Review: Guerlain Shanghai Les Voyages Olfactifs 05 from the “Une Ville, Un Parfum” Collection.

Posted on December 25, 2012 by Kafkaesque

Guerlain has an exclusive, limited distribution collection of unisex fragrances entitled “Une Ville, Un Parfum” or “A City, A Fragrance.” Confusingly, the line is also often referred to as “Les Voyage Olfactifs” (An Olfactory Voyage). Until recently, the cities were Moscow, New York, Toyko and London.

Shanghai

In October 2012, Shanghai joined the line as Les Voyages Olfactifs 05 and the press release quoted by Fragrantica states that the scent is “noted for its freshness and delicacy which are the hallmarks of the collection.” The bottle was designed by the legendary designer Serge Mansau and depicts Shanghai’s famous Oriental Pearl Radio and TV Tower with a big squiggly “05” to represent its numerical place in the collection.

Shanghai was created by Guerlain’s in-house nose, Thierry Wasser, and is supposed to be a light oriental, though I’ve sometimes read it described as a “woody floral scent.” I was excited to obtain a large sample of Shanghai from Debbie, my olfactory secret weapon on eBay, because I was fascinated by the city upon my visit in 2008. (If my external hard drive hadn’t died, taking with it over 60,000 photos, this post would have been deluged by my photos of that jaw-droppingly futuristic city.) It seems, however, that Guerlain is harkening back to the Shanghai of old, the “Paris of the Orient” of the ’20s and ’30s.

I believe it was Luca Turin who once said that all modern perfumes stem from the benchmark scents of the past. They are all children of the perfumed tree, if you will. As such, it’s hard for modern perfumers to escape the influence — conscious or unconscious — of such greats as Shalimar, L’Heure Bleue, Fracas, Opium, Chanel No. 5, Joy, and the like. It must be even harder for a Guerlain perfumer to escape the influence of the greats within his own house, particularly when creating a floral oriental and particularly given the influence of the powdery greats like L’Heure Bleue.

Shanghai represents something that I am starting to see more and more. Perfume houses updating and modernizing their legendary classics for the modern era. They seem to achieve this through a variety of different ways: by lightening the scent, adding fruity or fruity patchouli accords to appeal to young consumers or to the modern taste, sweetening the scent to appeal to the Angel market base, or by adding fresh, clean accords to comply with that blasted trend towards soapy freshness.

Lightening the scent also achieves something convenient for houses like Guerlain: they save money by reducing the amount or concentration of ingredients; they can market the new result as an even more expensive, “exclusive” line to reap the financial profits; and their brand seems less old-fashioned, stodgy and fuddy-duddy to young consumers. (Guerlain’s Les Voyages/Une Ville perfumes cost $215 for 3.4 fl.oz/100 ml.) Everyone wins, except the consumer’s wallet, classicists like me, or those who cannot stand any of the modern trends that they are applying (which is also me).

Shanghai’s notes, according to Fragrantica and the Guerlain press release, are:

anise, orange blossom, almond, cardamom, ylang-ylang, jasmine, iris, mimosa, cedarwood, patchouli, vanilla and sandalwood.

On its website, Guerlain describes Shanghai as a “woody and floral fragrance” and adds:

Surprising and faceted, the fragrance Shanghai from “A City, A Fragrance” collection pays homage to the ever-changing megalopolis of Shanghai. The initial impression is of a sweet freshness, perfectly reflected by an almond accord, combined with a hint of aniseed. Sweet, sun-drenched flowers, ylang-ylang, orange blossom and jasmine combine to create an exquisitely full-bodied scent that conjures up an abstract bouquet with hints of iris and delicately sophisticated mimosa. This olfactory voyage of discovery is underscored by three woody notes—cedar, patchouli and, most sandalwood—offset by a gentle whisper of vanilla, which adds a softening touch to this composition. The fragrance finishes with a suave, elegant flourish.

Shanghai opens with an utterly lovely note of almond and a subtle whiff of anise. My nose finds the anise seed to be less like the usual licorice smell and more like the slightly green, bitter, woody anise scent that is absinthe. But, again, it’s extremely subtle. The anise seed combines with the milkiness of almond to create a very milky sweet impression of diluted Pastis (or Ouzo, if you’re Greek), an anise drink that is common in Europe.

French Pastis.

The usually strong licorice aspect of concentrated anise is diluted to a pale shimmer, either through the milky almond or through a third note that is raising its head: sweet vanilla. It’s a powdery vanilla but not the true Guerlinade that is the signature of so many of the house’s famous scents. Here, it’s just a shadow, a faint touch. (I think “faint touch” describes almost every aspect of this scent.)

The combination of the almond and the powdered vanilla create an almost patisserie-like impression. If you’ve ever been to a French pastry shop and smelled some of their almond offerings, you’ll know what I mean. That said, Shanghai is not a gourmande perfume by any means. It’s not sweet or powerful enough, and there is none of that almost cloying, overwhelming surfeit of linear sugar that characterizes most gourmands. In short, it’s not diabetes in a bottle.

Almond Brioche. Source: Atelier Christine.

Twenty minutes in, I think I can smell some iris in the powdery, patisserie, vanilla under notes but it could simply be my imagination. I certainly don’t smell cardamon, ylang-ylang, jasmine or mimosa. I don’t basically smell much, except for anise, almond and vanilla — and the strength of those notes is sharply dropping by the minute. A full 30 minutes from the time I first put on the perfume, the sillage has drastically shrunk; and exactly 1:16 minutes from the start, I smell almost nothing. If I really push myself and plead with my nose, I suppose I can smell a faint tinge of sandalwood in the powdered vanilla dry-down that remains. But I wouldn’t bet money on it. Why isn’t there more to this scent? What the hell happened to the “full-bodied” of the website description? And isn’t this taking “light” to a new level?

I am so determined to try to smell something more than those three linear notes that I start all over again. This time, I spray about 6 squirts onto each arm. Aaah, that delicious opening of anise and almond, milk and vanilla…. it really is lovely — especially when you really spray a lot of the perfume. But the development remains the same: the hint, almost invisible shimmer of anise, strong almond, powdery vanilla and…. er…. Well, I suppose there may be a touch of sandalwood, but really, this is just a three-trick pony. If all those remaining notes (Ylang-ylang? Really?) are a part of the perfume, they’re in such microscopic quantities that they’re essentially undetectable by my nose.

There are almost no full, detailed reviews on Shanghai thus far, so it’s not easy to see if others have had better luck. One of the few reviews that does go into any depth is by The Non-Blonde. She too smells the anise, almond and patisserie notes, but she finds a bit more to the scent than I do:

Star anise, iris and almond are the first things I smell upon spraying Shanghai. Naturally, my first thought was about the inspiration that obviously comes from L’Heure Bleue more than from China. Shanghai is more floral and also lighter in every way: airier, less sweet, and the base is not that much of a patisserie creation, but the resemblance is there, especially in cooler weather. It took me a little while to really like Shanghai. I love my L’Heure Bleue dearly, so I wasn’t all that thrilled with the idea of a modern interpretation in a massive bottle. But the composition is very pleasing, and as I said– it’s easily recognizable as a Guerlain, which is a good thing for me.

There’s some weakness in the base of Shanghai- not as in the opposite of “strength” (the fragrance has an assertive sillage and a reasonable longevity), but in the lack of real creamy sandalwood. Guerlain Perfumer Thierry Wasser did his best with an approximation and fortified it with cedarwood (dry and almost peppery). It goes well with the powdery iris note that seems to be at the core of Shanghai, but some of the exotic element could have used a big dose of the real thing (one can dream).

I didn’t smell any cedar wood my first time round and, this second time, with about double the amount of perfume sprayed all over my arms, I think I can smell it faintly. Perhaps. Maybe I’m just trying to convince myself. Whatever is there is definitely dry, but it’s not the sort of cedar wood that I’m used to smelling, and most definitely not peppery. If I did smell pepper, I might agree more with her comparison to L’Heure Bleue but, as it is, I find the two scents completely dissimilar. I smell sandalwood much more than any cedar, but, given how little there is, that’s not really saying much. In fact, I’m very relieved to know that The Non-Blonde also has trouble with the nature or quantity of sandalwood that is supposedly in Shanghai.

While The Non-Blonde attributes the powdered heart of Shanghai to iris, I think it’s more of a plain vanilla powder. There is iris there, as I noted earlier, but it’s faint. (I’m getting tired of using the word “faint” when it comes to this scent, but really, it typifies everything about it!)

If you’ll note, neither she nor I ever mention patchouli, jasmine, ylang-ylang, mimosa or any of the other notes purportedly in this incredibly linear scent. Because you really can’t smell them. At all! If I keep at this, and keep sniffing my arm with those notes planted firmly before my eyes, I’m sure that my brain can convince itself that I’m smelling them but, the truth of the matter is, I don’t.

I also don’t share her experiences with sillage or longevity, but I may not be alone in thinking the perfume dies fast. On Basenotes, there are differing reports regarding both issues, with a number reporting experiences similar to mine. Some posters have noted a generally moderate amount of longevity, even if it’s just simmering quietly in the background.

The Basenotes comments are interesting because, there, Shanghai has generally received praise by those who have tried it thus far. Several people note a woody element to the scent that I didn’t really find. (But, yet again, no-one mentions anything about ylang-ylang, mimosa, jasmine or patchouli, so it’s definitely not just my nose that can’t detect them.) One brief review of Shanghai by a male poster, Mikeperez23, may be helpful to those seeking a different perspective on the scent:

I love the extremely limited Quand Vient la Pluie and in my opinion, there is a ‘part’ of QVLP inside of Shanghai – a sort of sweet, almond, heliotrope-ish note that smells simultaneously nutty, floral and woody. Slightly edible, but not in a full-blown gourmand way. Shanghai is more of a transparent, sheer, cologne-ish version of this accord and bolstered by an anisic top note and a less rich, complex drydown. In fact, this one fades fast, so I have to really douse myself with it to ‘stick’, which it finally does. […] Shanghai is perfect for hot weather because of its sheerness and non-heavy feeling that still allows me to enjoy the Guerlinade I so enjoy. […] Not cheap, in fact I think it’s sort of overpriced considering I have to douse myself with it. But, there is nothing that smells like this (well, except as I have noted above, other Guerlain scents) and it’s unique, versatile and comforting aura is addictive.

Another person went so far as to say that the perfume not only has great longevity, but also great “character.” Her description of the perfume is as follows:

I actually get great longevity out of it. I smell it all day at work, and into the evening. On clothing, it lasts even longer. Not as strong as it could be, but strong enough. And I can wear it more than one day in a row, easily, which I can’t do with all of my scents.

Very versatile. Not too casual, not too formal. Good in the Vegas heat, good in the current cold. Not too masculine, not too feminine. But it has character. Lots of it.

I couldn’t disagree more. But I should point out that the last reviewer states that she adores Coco Noir, and admits to loving a lot of mainstream scents that she says she doesn’t even dare mention, so she’s obviously coming at this from a very different vantage point than I am. Perhaps the only thing I do agree with is that this is not a formal scent and it’s not typically casual either. But that’s about it. In my opinion, this scent not only has very little character but it’s also incredibly linear. (And since this is supposed to be one of the better and stronger scents in Guerlain’s Les Voyage/Une Ville collection, I’m not sure what that says about the other fragrances in the line.)

What little character does exist is simply not worth the price tag. I would never pay $215 for this. In fact, I wouldn’t wear it unless it were about $15. At that price, perhaps it would be worth it for those days when I went to the dog park and fell into a mud pit. At that price, I could drench myself with it beforehand and hope that it lasted 2 hours or more. (And, for the record, Shanghai did last longer on my second go-around when I sprayed a ton all over me. But it’s a matter of degree; maybe 2.5 hours in total, instead of about 1.5 hours.)

Bottom line, I cannot recommend the perfume. It’s simply not that interesting for the price. If it were $45 or $60, I would absolutely recommend it to someone seeking something subtle, versatile, and with a slight twist on the usual floral scents. But not at $215, even if it didn’t have dubious sillage and longevity. Life is too short. Go out and smell something with actual character and some pizzazz.

Details:

Target Audience: Unisex. Men definitely wear this. In fact, men have made some of the more positive comments that I have seen thus far.

Cost & Availability: Shanghai is available on Guerlain‘s website and costs $215 for 3.4 fl. oz/100 ml. It can also be found at Bergdorf Goodman and on their website. The rest of the Les Voyage line (Moscow, Tokyo, London and New York) can be found on the Saks Fifth Avenue website, though not Shanghai. Nordstrom’s doesn’t carry any of the line. Surrender to Chance has samples only of Tokyo, Moscow and New York. The Perfumed Court has Shanghai in different sample sizes with the smallest size (1 ml) costing $5.99 and the largest (15 ml) costing $83.99. Neither LuckyScent nor BeautyHabitat carry Guerlain.