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Viktor & Rolf
Four years ago today, my good friend, Nick Gilbert and I embarked on an exciting perfume project with a view of turning the world of fragrance reviewing on its head. We set out to use the medium of Twitter to create entertaining and bitesize reviews in 140 characters or less – the result was @FragrantReviews – our smelly baby that launched both of our writing careers.
Writing these reviews is surprisingly challenging. It’s tough to dissect and truly represent a fragrance in such a small medium, but it’s also immense fun and I think I wouldn’t be speaking out of turn if I said that both Nick and I really enjoy putting these fragrant tweets together. They can be funny, they can be poetic and they can occasionally be mean, but one thing they never are is boring.
We’re now at over 3,000 followers, and to celebrate our fourth birthday, I’d like to share with you ten of my favourite Fragrant Reviews – five from Nick and five from me. They range from the olfactory time capsule of Eau de Toast to the utter hideousness of Viktor & Rolf’s BonBon and capture some of our big loves and a number of our, well, not-so-big loves. I hope you enjoy this brief retrospective and will have a go at chiming in with your own 140 character reviews in the comments box.
Click here to check out Nick’s favourites.
I can’t believe it but it’s the end of 2012 already, which means that it’s time for us perfume bloggers to put together our lists of the very best and very worst perfumes of the year, honestly, where did the time go?! This year I’m affectionately entitling my awards ‘The Candies’ as a short, punchy alternative to The Candy Perfume Boy Awards. Neat huh?
Across all genres there have been many interesting, exciting and unique perfumes unleashed on to the market along with the usual amount of celebrity dreck, dud flankers and down-right-bizarre niche offerings. All-in-all it’s been a busy year with over 1,300 launches. Impressive but exhausting!
Below you will find my awards for Best Masculine, Best Feminine and Best Unisex Fragrances for both niche and mainstream houses. In addition to this I’ve also included awards for Best Flanker, Best Celebrity Fragrance and Best Ad Campaign. But we’re not just celebrating the very best of perfumery in 2012 here, no sir, we’re also highlighting the very worst with the Sour Candy Award, reserved solely for the naffest perfume of the year.
So I hope you’re wearing your very best frock (or tux for the boys, or frock if you prefer, it’s up to you really) and sipping on some fine Champagne as The Candies 2012 are underway…
The Scent a Celebrity Series is my vain attempt at picking perfumes for those who don’t know any better, yes I mean celebrities. Let’s face it, most celebrities are incapable of choosing decent clothing/boyfriends/girlfriends/movies/insert-celebrity-mistake-here let alone having the ability to make decisions about something as important as their scent – that’s where I come in. Never fear my dear schlebs, I will ensure that you are appropriately scented, all you need to do is listen.
In previous instalments I have successfully scented a wide range of celebrities and characters ranging from the loveable lunatics that are The Muppets to the hip schizo-rapper Nicki Minaj as well as Icelandic Siren Björk and super-glam glam-poppers Scissor Sisters, even The Royal Family haven’t been able to escape my scented clutches.
I have mentioned before that I am a hardcore fan of The Simpsons, I watch it nearly every day (it’s always on when I get home from work) and I confess to having seen every episode, perhaps more than once! The inhabitants of Springfield are a fascinating bunch and over the course of both parts of Spritzing Springfield I hope to select fragrances that befit their eccentricities and play to their incredibly human characteristics.
Viktor & Rolf have a chequered perfumed past. Their debut fragrance Flowerbomb is a good concept disappointingly executed, their second feminine Eau Mega is dull and their first masculine Antidote is an abomination. They appear to follow a high-fashion approach to their packaging but have yet to show any substance within their fragrant compositions.
Although I haven’t been particularly overwhelmed with their past offerings I am always intrigued to see what Viktor & Rolf are up to, if not simply for the visual aspect of things but also in the vain hope that maybe, just maybe they will hit the ball out of the park. Their latest fragrance Spicebomb ever-so-nearly achieves that much-needed home run.
Spicebomb is Viktor & Rolf’s second masculine and follows the absolutely atrocious behemoth-lavender of Antidote. It has been created as a male counterpart to Flowerbomb and is billed as “a cocktail of virility, crafted with refinement” [1] that “finds the perfect balance between strength and elegance, intensity and subtlety.” Where Flowerbomb was all loud and proud with her sickly sweet explosion of flowers and candy floss, Spicebomb is quiet, warm, cosy and handsome.
The Candy Perfume Boy 