Hmmm. Perfumes are a difficult one to review. It's not like I can swatch it for you guys to have something tangible to gauge from it. Never the less I can take you on a literary journey and hopefully your imagination can assemble a sensory picture of how delightful this fragrance is.
To get an idea of what sort of fragrances tickle my nostrils in comparison to your own, here's a list of my favourite perfumes in no particular order:
Christian Dior Hypnotic Poison, Viktor & Rolf FlowerBomb, Tom Ford Black Orchid, Stella By Stella McCarney, Loverdose by Diesel, Kenzo Amour, Calvin Klein Euphoria.
So you get the idea, I like deep, multifaceted, cloying, musky and vanilla scents.
As with all great finds I stumbled across this on a casual stroll during my lunch break. Some of you may have heard Marks and Spencer have recently introduced beauty halls into some of their branches. They have scoured the world high and low to find the best beauty and fragrance products available. It was there I found a range of perfumes by Les Senteurs Gourmandes.
The perfume line heralds from Western France where its founder spent many years developing a line of scents centred around Vanilla. There are twelve different vanilla variants of this collection but the Vanille Bourbon has to be my favourite. The intial spritz leaves a a slighty bitter scent but as it dries down you have top notes of vanilla Bourbon, followed by caramel and red berries at the heart and coconut and white musk are at the base. It's like a freshly baked vanilla cupcake which over time develops cocoa undertones.
The sillage (the trail of scent you leave behind) on this pefume is amazing. People often ask when I walk past whether I'm wearing cocoa butter, I've even had candy floss before. I can still smell the scent on my blazer the next day on a few occasions.
The packaging could have been slightly more flamboyant, I think I expected a little more from a French olfactory connoisseur. The perfume however makes up for this slight downfall.
Overall there is nothing multifaceted about this scent, you pretty much get a good one dimensional traditional vanilla fragrance. It's a safe scent you can wear on a daily basis without being offensive because what's there to be offended by a Vanilla Cupcake?!
I purchased mine at Marks and Spencer but I know you can get it in the U.S.A at Sephora:
Les Senteurs Gourmandes Vanille Bourbon EDP: £22.50
GlitterButton rating: 4/5
