Perfumed Court recs, anyone?

[lunabee34]

For my next adventure in perfume, I want to move beyond BPAL and test some more traditional, alcohol-based perfumes. The Perfumed Court seems like a cool place to get sample sizes of those sorts of perfumes. So, I guess I have two questions for y'all.

1. Have any of you purchased perfumes from this site, and what was your experience?
2. This site seems pretty extensive, specializing in a lot of classic perfumes. What should I sample? What's the top ten list of classic perfumes that I should smell?

Comments

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Guerlain's Vetiver is gorgeous and quite wearable as a unisex frag, but I'm a vetiver fiend so my bias there is obvious.

And Angel is worth trying at least once, even if gets a bad rap sometimes - it's very strong and has massive sillage, and it's suffered the curse of a lot of uber-popular fragrances of many people having had bad experiences being around too many people who wore too much of it at the height of its popularity. But it's interesting to experience just as a historical thing, as it pretty much established the whole modern gourmand category, and it's just much more complex and interesting than a lot of the sticky-sweet pink cupcake foody fragrances that flooded the market in its wake. (Among other things, it has a TON of patchouli in it, which gives a nice earthy-skanky grounding depth and dirtiness to help balance to all the sweet candied notes.)

A few interesting reviews:

http://boisdejasmin.com/2011/03/thierry-mugler-angel-perfume-review-and-fragrance-poll.html

http://www.nstperfume.com/2010/01/07/thierry-mugler-angel-an-appreciation/ (some great discussion in the comments, too)

http://thisblogreallystinksperfume.blogspot.com/2011/03/perfume-review-angel-thierry-mugler.html (check out the links to sites like Fragrantica and Basenotes to see more of just how polarizing the scent is to its fans and anti-fans)

It's worth checking out on skin to see how it reacts on you, and I say this as someone who really dislikes most of the sticky-sugar modern gourmand scents. Just remember to use a *very* light hand when testing it. ;)

[lunabee34]

I smelled Angel on paper this weekend, and I liked it more than I thought I would. I need to test it on skin. I didn't expect it to smell so dark. I expected something on the lighter end of sweet.

I also smelled Chanel No. 5 and was pleasantly surprised to see vetiver as an ingredient in that fragrance. Apparently I've always loved vetiver! LOL

Thanks for all the links; those were great reads. :)