The too sweet smell of succes

This is the guide to celebrity scents, subjectively navigating through the best and the worst. So who doesn't have a perfume in their name these days? Here is a little list only counting female musicians and actresses who has:

Christina Aguilera, Pamela Anderson, Jennifer Aniston, Mary Kate & Ashley, Victoria Beckham, Beyonce, Halle Berry, Mary J. Blige, Brandy, Naomi Campbell, Mariah Carey, Cher, Celine Dion, Hillary Duff, Carmen Electra, Fergie, Daisy Fuentes, Lady Gaga, Selena Gomez, Salma Hayek, Faith Hill, Paris Hilton, Queen Latifah, Avril Lavigne, Leona Lewis, Eva Longoria, Jennifer Lopez, Madonna, Niurka Marcos, Nicki Minaj, Dannii Minogue, Kylie Minogue, Kim Kardashian, Karen Mok, Kate Moss, Heidi Klum, Patti LaBelle, Sarah Jessica Parker, Katy Perry, Nicole Polizzi, Katie Price, Denise Richards, Nicole Richie, Rihanna, Jessica Simpson, Shakira, Jordin Sparks, Britney Spears, Gwen Stefani, Taylor Swift, Elizabeth Taylor, Dita Von Teese, Shania Twain, Reese Witherspoon.

Most of these women have more than one bottle with their name on and girls like Jlo, Paris, Britney and Beyonce almost launches a new one each years. Britney has been in the olfactory business for more than 8 years producing 11 different fragrances from 2004-2012 and Jlo made a good 50 million dollars on fragrance sales in 2012. Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds was the first celebrity-endorsed scent making it's debut 20 years ago.These fragrances are generic, simple and conservative. If you read the reviews of celebrity fragrances in Luca Turin and Tania Sanchezs Perfumes Guide, most of them get mediocre rating, not being good or bad but just boring. I believe that this is the case concerning most of them.

Celebrity-endorsed perfumes are commonly manufactured by either Coty, Elizabeth Arden or Avon and created from the same formulas by the same perfumers. This makes most of them pretty much the same. Still some of them stand out. This happens in the case where they are either surprisingly well made or beyond horribly smelling. For example I have heard good things about Sarah Jessica Parker's fragrance Covet and some surprisingly positive reviews on Madonna's Truth or Dare. The following is my thoughts on some of the ones that you should definitely stay away from.

Circus Fantasy Britney Spears

What the hell is a ‘Circus Fantasy’? Until she launched this scent in 2009, women everywhere had to cover themselves in popcorn, beer, fried Oreos and elephant dung to properly mimic the sweet odor of circus life. Now women can have it all in just one bottle. So do you have a circus fantasy? If it happens to be a vanilla and apricot smelling trapeze artist or a clown for the day, then Circus Fantasy is the scent for you.

Lollipop Bling Mariah Carey

This scent is nothing but sickening. With ingredients like melon, cucumber and to much jasmine you wished that you had scoured yourself in a random lollipop instead of putting on this shit. New York Times perfume critic Chandler Burr recently wrote “They take the cotton candy molecule, pour it in a condom, add some helium, put it in a bottle, and sell it” reviewing Mariah Carey M. I get a similar vibe from this one.  

  
Royal Desire Christina Aguilera
This is the yuck sensation bottled. Too sweet, too sugary, too fruity and way too many marshmallows. Perfumers experiment with many funky ingredients now a days but marshmallows is not something that anyone has mastered yet. I have no idea how she got the idea to named it Royal something with the subtitle “Fell like a queen”. It's more of a teenage tart desire - if even that.

 

Fancy Night Jessica Simpson

Adam Green once sang “Jessica Simpson where has your love gone, It's not in your music." It's not in her perfumes either. I guess that someone will like it if their idea of a fancy night is jelly shots and a stripper pole. I'm sure that Jessica Simpson doesn't own the largest vocabulary and this shows in the use of words for her fragrances. For some reason they are all called something fancy, starting with Jessica Simpson Fancy and then Fancy Love, Fancy Night and I Fancy You.

Sex ad(dicts)

 

 

What happend to the silent italian?

For almost a hundred years Aqua Di Parma didn’t make a sound. No new fragrances, no changing the formula, no advertising, no nothing. It just stood there on the shelves around ever changing perfume bottles and shinned with its iconic yellow signature. It represents the Mediterranean feeling of Italian sunshine and olive oil and it’s one of the finest fresh, citrus fragrances ever made. Recently it was bought by powerhouse LVMH and they have started to produces new Parma scents, some definitely better than others. Here is a little story about one of them

The best Dior ever did

Mystery in Venice

What to think of the new Coco Noir by Chanel? It's inspired by Venice at night and the time Coco spent in the mysterious water city. Right of the bat the contrast of a floral scent with white musk and Indonesian patchouli is interesting for a commercial Chanel product and all in all it's a well made fragrance, plus the bottle is really nice. But on the other hand if I was to go with a noir perfume, I would properly choose Caron Narcise Noir or Orris Noir by Ormonde Jayne.