Tag: today’s scent

Categories
Beauty

Oriflame Volare Perfume

crystal roses

I am not the one to throw around statements beginning with ‘every woman wants’. Every woman is different, I’ve got no idea what all y’all ladies want – aside from less bullshit and more respect.

But.

Every woman wants a crystal rose on their vanity.

I’ve got three.

Okay, well, two. One of them is gold.

oriflame volare past bottles

My relationship with Oriflame Volare started by proxy – it was my grandmother’s favourite perfume to give to my mother. Since then the perfume bottle has gone through a couple of redesigns. I am not sure how many there were in total, but I believe the rose-shaped bottle is the third version. At least, it’s the third design I own. I’ve included the two previous incarnations of Oriflame Volare for reference.

classic oriflame volare

Together with the bottle, Oriflame has altered the scent. From where I stand, the third incarnation of Oriflame Volare EDP is lighter and easier to wear, but I know there are a lot of people out there who disagree with me.

oriflame volare

Volare EDP

As you might just guess by the shape of the bottle, Volare certainly has notes of rose in it. They’re on top for me, shifting to leather rather quickly, and then moving on to something woody. This is the perfume I wear when I want to play grown-up. It is a very ‘have to be in the mood’ scent for me. I have to really feel it to wear it.

amber rose

If you quickly flip through some Fragrantica reviews (old/ new), you will see that the scent of Oriflame Volare EDP is quite polarising. Some people hate it, some people love it. I find it classic and beautiful, undoubtedly partially influenced by the bottle. Though I like it and use it, I don’t think it suits me well.

volare forever

Volare Forever

One of the recent variations of Oriflame Volare. Still very rosy, but a lighter kind of rose. Whenever I scent this, I think of a big bouquet of white roses. This time around it shifts into citrus, and then goes into something a bit musky and a touch aquatic. Volare Forever is lighter and therefore easier to wear than the Volare EDP above, but still requires a certain mood from me.

oriflame volare forever

oriflame volare gold

Volare Gold EDP

Released to celebrate Oriflame‘s 50 year anniversary, Volare Gold has notes of peach, rose, and salted caramel. Again, you can certainly scent the rose, and I suppose the underlying sweetness that is so attractive for me in this perfume is peach.

I have a peculiar relationship with sweet perfumes. I love them – but they need to be, in my understanding, properly done. For example, I love nearly all Escada perfumes. They’re sweet as all fuck, but man I could bathe in them. What I would do for a bottle of Rockin’ Rio or Magnetism just about now, you have no idea.

And I love peach. One of my favourite scents is easily the least sophisticated one out there – Victoria’s Secret Love Spell, I’m looking at you. Again, I could just bathe in it.

volare gold

Oriflame Volare Gold reminds me of both Rockin’ Rio and Love Spell. It is heavier than either of those, with rose still being the main accord, but Volare Gold is indeed my favourite one out of the three perfumes in the Oriflame Volare line. It is a little too heady for the blasted heat of Moldovan summer days, but I can picture myself wearing it on a cooler summer evening, preferably somewhere close to a big body of water, or a gentle spritz or two to the Arctic conditioned office.

volare magnolia

Volare Magnolia

I have a teeny tiny bottle of Volare Magnolia, a limited edition Volare scent in the second incarnation packaging. My bottle – as any bottle out there, really – is old. Directly from it, these days I mostly scent rubbing alcohol in it. However on my body it opens up rather nicely. It is a very light scent, lightest of them all, and reminds me of walks under the blossoming trees during the warmer days of spring.

volare 15ml edp

Volare EDP 15 ml

Although supposedly the same scent as the Volare EDP above, this tiny bottle smells different. To my nose it’s much more powdery and quite ‘older’ than the rose-shaped bottle of Oriflame Volare EDP.

beautiful perfume bottles

Have you tried either of these?

Categories
Beauty

Today’s Scent: Oriflame Cocktails & The City Party Queen.

oriflame cocktails and the city party queen

There was a time in my life in which I have, for whatever reason, decided it a brilliant idea to take pictures of products against a notebook with lined sheets. Let us not speak about this tragic period of my existence in detail.

… Though truth be told, I kinda like it.

Anyway, the scent.

To me, this is pretty much honey and lemon in a bottle, and I bloody love it. Everything about it – from packaging to scent – suggests otherwise, but it’s easily one of the favourites out of my rather vast collection of perfumes.

I know it’s cheap. It probably even smells cheap to many. Most people who sniff it, make a bit of a face.

I know it doesn’t last long.

I know the packaging is nothing to write home about, and the design is more that of a deodorant than an eau de toilette.

But I don’t care.

As with many other Oriflame scents, the top notes disappear pretty quickly, and you’re left with the middle ones – honey in this case. I like honey, but I’d never thought I would enjoy it in a fragrance, probably because my usual fare has always been something ‘milk-and-honey’ themed.

As unsophisticated as Oriflame Cocktails & the City Party Queen is, to me this fragrance is pure happiness in a bottle, much akin to Victoria’s Secret Love Spell. They’re nothing alike scent-wise (Love Spell is all peach), but they both share a lack of complexity and both are equally successful in putting a smile on my face.

Save

Categories
Beauty

Today’s Scent: Love Chloe Eau Florale.

I had a small size of this, and gave it away after a single spritz.

I don’t know what it is with me and this perfume, but it grated on my nerves like nobody’s business. My cousin, who usually loves green tea notes, wasn’t a fan either, and I couldn’t really smell any green tea in there at all.

On the other hand, my opinion of this seems rather unpopular, because my father loved it and said something along the lines of probably gifting bottles to several female acquaintances. And the person I gave the sample to was happy with it as well. For me, though, it totally didn’t work. Odd, because it’s got both powdery and white floral in it, according to Fragrantica, something that I easily fall for.

Read more Today’s Scent posts here.

(Image credit: Fragrantica.)

Categories
Beauty

Today’s Scent: Guy Laroche Fidji.

guy laroche fidji

When I read reviews of Guy Laroche Fidgi on Fragrantica, it’s all summer, beaches, palms, and all other islandy fun. After all, the fragrance is called Fidgi.

For me, however, this is a late autumn to winter scent, and it’s also very grandmotherly. As in, it’s one of my grandmother’s favourite perfumes, so I associate it with her and with long evenings and newspaper reading and family gatherings in the living room.

My use of Guy Laroche’s Fidji is more sentimental rather than pure personal enjoyment. Grandmother wasn’t a huge perfume wearer, so I can pretty much remember all the occasions she used it on. Occasions is a wrong word, though, — sometimes she’d just have a day where she’d decide to wear perfume.

It’s a very homey and grown-up perfume for me. I wear it occasionally, but I don’t think it particularly suits me. The bottle I have is rather weathered – it belonged to my late grandmother, actually. There’s not much left, as you can see. I will use it up and keep the bottle for personal reasons — and also because I’m a hoarder who keeps empty perfume bottles, because they are all pretty, oh so pretty.

Definitely a warm, grown-up scent.

Read other perfume-themed posts here.

Categories
Beauty

Today’s Scent: Escada Especially.

escada especially (2)

(Just a bit of a heads up: I’m not a ‘nose’, nor even a domestic fragrance connoisseur. I know buggre alle how to talk about scents, and can’t even use them most days because of my headache spells. I just love how pretty they are on my vanity.)

At random, my father gave me a bottle of Escada Especially about a month ago. Couldn’t even try it for the first few days, because I was felling headachey. Those who suffer from migraines and trigeminal neuralgia will understand that trying out new perfumes — or wearing old, for that matter — when there’s even the slightest chance of a headache is no go. There’s always a probability of ‘pain association’ developing even with the nicest and most favourite of scents.

escada especially (3)

So my father kept asking, and I kept saying that I haven’t tried it yet. Then I opened the box, and got a tentative whiff without even spraying, and put the box away, and decided that I’m just going to call my father and say how I love it, but then never, ever, ever wear it, and maybe spritz a bit of it in the kitchen before his visits or something.

Then I decided to at least give it a proper chance.

I sprayed it on my wrists and on the back of my neck. Then I closed my eyes.

escada especially (4)

Olfactory triggers are one of the deepest one, as far as memory goes.

This one transported me right back into childhood. I could clearly see being picked up by my mother in my bedroom in our old flat. I could see spring outside the window and sunlight patterns on the carpet and myself in the mirror trying to plait my hair for the very first time tying it up with clumsy blue and pink polka dot bows. I could hear grandmother calling after my very first pair of kittens.

I never wanted to stop smelling my wrists ever again in hopes that it would just keep me enveloped in that perfect childhood memory forever.

escada especially (5)

I wish I could end this post by saying that I’ve worn this perfume ever since all day, every day, and even to bed, but that would be a lie. There’s something in it (its aquatic notes, I think) that are too much for me on most days, and I have to be really careful with my headache predictions to be able to wear this one. But I enjoy it. Love, it even. It paints that golden-lit perfect childhood afternoon in my head with such precision, it’s almost scary.

I gave my father a reserved ‘thank you’ and a promise to wear the scent. I’m kinda pants at expressing genuine gratitude.

escada especially (6)