smellsgood | Fig Perfumes, Round 1 (review of 6 scents)

After reading about Surrender to Chance on the comm, I ordered their Fig Figgety Fig Fig sampler of 10 perfumes containing fig as a note. The order process included the option of having Amazon as an intermediary in the payment, which I did because I order lots of things through Amazon. My sampler arrived 3 days after I ordered, in very good shape. The 10 little vials (the same sort BPAL uses), all clearly labeled, were in a tough little ziplocked plastic bag, inside a small cardboard jewel box, complete with the cotton padding, and then that box, with the invoice papers wrapped around it, was inside a padded mailer.

CB I Hate Perfume Revelation Perfume

Top: fig leaf
Middle: honey, spices
Bottom: labdanum, virginia cedar, amber, cypress

In bottle: honey, flowers
On skin: honey, sweet: amber and maybe the labdanum?, Not really smelling anything leafy or woody: just the sweet resins.
Drydown: more sweet resin - very sticky-smelling. Doesn't last very long at all.

Diptyque Philosykos

Top: fig leaf, fig
Middle: coconut, green
Bottom: cedar, woody, fig tree

In bottle: Fresh, crushed foliage over the alcohol note
On skin: very botanical - woody and leafy
Drydown: more of the same, but fainter. Also slightly headache-inducing. Perhaps something in the "green" scent element is doing that? It fades out to a slight woody sweetness fairly quickly. I was disappointed: I'd had a number of recommendations for this one.

Hermes Un Jardin en Mediterranee

Top: mandarin orange, bergamot, lemon
Middle: orange blossom, white nerium oleander
Bottom: cypress, fig leaf, musk, red cedar, juniper

In bottle: Woods, faint floral
On skin: Warm woods, citrus surprisingly faint - mainly as a tangy note over the wood and the sweetness that may be the florals
Drydown: Bergamot more distinct ("Earl Grey!"), warm, sweet, woody; perhaps faint hay fever symptoms (the juniper, if I had to guess). I rather liked this one.

Fresh Fig Apricot

Top: apricot, peach, lychee
Middle: fig leaf, petitgrain, dandelion
Bottom: musk, sea water, green tea

In bottle: generic "perfume" smell
On skin: vague fruity-woody smell (petitgrain?) that develops into a definite apricot after a minute, plus musk. And I started sneezing, so I washed it off. Maybe I'm allergic to the dandelion? I looked up petitgrain, and it comes from citrus, so I don't think it was that.

L'Artisan Premier Figuier

Top: fig tree, asafoetida
Middle: fig, sandalwood, almond milk
Bottom: lime, coconut, dried fruits, sandalwood

In bottle: generic "perfume," wood
On skin: generic "perfume", and … ? And now I am being transported back in time and space to the Bronx in the 1960s, where I am being embraced by various great aunts, and there's a smell like this, and WAAAAAAUGHHHH, get it off of me!

I think maybe that was the asafoetida. Oh God, was this a scrubber. Ugh. I never smelled any of the other nice things that this one supposedly had. And it got into my skin and stayed there, because when I tried something else on that spot the next morning (after a shower plus 24 hours), that ugly, garlic-ish scent came up again.

Parfums Delrae Bois de Paradis

Top: citrus
Middle: rose, blackberry, spices, fig
Bottom: amber, woody, resins, incense

In bottle: sharp citrus-incense
On skin: sweet, incense, wood … faint smokiness?, maybe a little fruit
Drydown: amber coming out, perhaps a little rose, incense, wood. It was mostly gone before half an hour had passed, and almost nothing remained after a shower.

I'm a little sad that so many of these were failures. I guess I'm picky?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Thank you so much for including info about the ordering process and the packaging. I really, really like getting those details. :)

I don't think being picky is a bad thing. Scent is so personal and we use to evoke so many things. To me it's different than makeup or even a haircut because other people viscerally react to the way we smell in a way that they do not often react to our eye liner or our lack of bangs.

Also, I think maybe you're overestimating the number of things that will work on you. I know I'm guilty of that. When we made our first BPAL order, I thought that out of 12 imps, maybe two or three would be no goes. LOL and I was seriously wrong.

It sounds like your main problem with many of these (which is mine too with a lot of what I really like) is the staying power.

Scent is so personal and we use to evoke so many things.

i read somewhere that scent is a big memory trigger. smelling something that your grandmother used to make, for example, will take your right back to that time.

also, the scent (from perfume, soap, whatever) is with you all of the time, until it wears or gets washed off, so one should be picky about that. IMHO.

Yes! I completely agree with you. One of my most intense scent memory incidences happened when I was studying abroad in Spain in the nineties. I had gone to the botanical gardens in Madrid, and it contained a multitude of flowering trees that also grow in the American South. It smelled so intensely of home.

And I agree with you about the constancy of the scent. It's enveloping and inescapable, so you better like it. LOL

Edited 2014-05-20 02:17 (UTC)

Yeah, the memory thing: that combo of floral perfumes and asafoetida really did take me back to visiting elderly relatives in small, dark apartments when I was a child.

Just a note on the potential allergy reactions you had with a couple of those - don't leap to assume that the likeliest suspects are botanical-sounding notes like dandelion or juniper, because those fragrances may not actually contain anything sourced from real dandelions or junipers at all. Unless you're buying from a specialist line that notes up front that they only use naturally-derived ingredients, then the odds are high that any scent you're buying, especially in conventional perfumery like these lines, is going to be composed of a mix of both natural and synthetic fragrance ingredients. And the listed notes of a perfume don't necessarily correspond directly to actual ingredients; many notes are actually accords, specific ingredient blends that when combined in the right proportion give the olfactory impression of some other thing entirely.

That's kind of distressing ... I was hoping to figure out what to avoid without actually subjecting myself to the offenders every time!

Fig Perfumes, Round 1 (review of 6 scents)

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject