Sherapop
4
Lightly Caramel-tinged Flowers
Caramel and red fruits are not at the top of my esteemed notes list, to put it mildly. So the fact that I would buy Mauboussin MAUBOUSSIN POUR ELLE scent unsniffed speaks volumes about my obsession with this house's bottles. I really love all of them. I might even buy them if they were filled with colored water.
Fortunately, the house of Mauboussin maintains a perfume collection as an auxiliary branch rather than as a source of profit. It seems to exist to humor one of the family members. Well, that's my impression anyway, given that all of the perfumes, even right after they have been launched, seem to pop up at discounters for a fraction of MSRP. MAUBOUSSIN POUR ELLE is less than two years old, and it has already been turned over to the gray market rats, which is just fine with me, since there is no chance that these perfumes will ever be duped. Who would bother? Are Mauboussin perfumes ever sold at full price and, if so, where? I wonder. I do not recall ever having seen this house's perfumes for sale anywhere else but at discounters...
Mauboussin tends to commission fine perfumers, so usually the compositions are interesting, even if not magnificent. Probably if they invested more in ingredients than in the vessels, these perfumes could compete at the niche level. Instead, they struggle on in low designer territory, completely unknown to most perfume consumers because they don't seem to be visible in any of the places where ordinary ( = not perfumistas) consumers dispense with their fragrance wallet share.
This creation is a light floriental with a slightly sticky quality, as though the flower petals were spritzed with some sort of thin caramel syrup. It's not thick and cloying, but it is sweet enough to make me think of caramel. Now that I reflect on this composition, MAUBOUSSIN POUR ELLE may be close to ELIE SAAB without the patchouli. The orange blossom does seem dominant here, albeit dialed down considerably from ELIE SAAB, but there is also a buttery caramel popcorn scent as well. I could see this being gunky in the wrong weather conditions, but it is wearable by me in cold winter weather such as we are having in Boston, with a couple of inches of snow accumulation over the course of the day.
I would definitely recommend MAUBOUSSIN POUR ELLE to anyone who wears celebrity scents such as the Britney Spears collection. This is a step up from those, plus the bottle is a million times better, well, with the notable exception of BELIEVE.