Infloriental

Sappho is definitely very retro. The opening is clean, powdery jasmine, but it fades into the background after half an hour. If Lush Lust is dirty, lively Jasmine, this is the polar opposite (which doesn't have to be bad, I usually find Lust too much) - dry, very respectable, clean.

After that the fragrance is dominated by tonka and tobacco and becomes very heavy and sweetish. Sappho is still not smoky, on the contrary, and the sweetness is definitely not gourmet, but sometimes even reminds me of washing powder.
The sandalwood shimmers through every now and then, then again the jasmine powder, but both cannot get past tonka and tobacco. So the scent lasts for several hours, in this time it also has a very neat sillage (and since I am used to lush scents, I only sprayed once). It has hints of Tom Ford's Tobacco Vanilla, but at most as a light inspiration - Sappho is also much more powdery and heavy and contains hardly any vanilla.

In the end, Sappho gets smaller, he melts into a classic "generic lush after-scent", in which he smells what lush scents sometimes do, simply like a store mix, but very close to the skin. In this form you can still smell it the next day, but you can't be sure if it's really the perfume, or maybe a Lush soap or body lotion.

All in all it is a very nice, heavy scent, definitely something for the winter. I also find it rather feminine, but that's probably my bias as well - there will definitely be men who can wear it. I would advise everyone to try it, although I find it very difficult to test lush scents in the store, because the whole store smells so strong.

I really wanted to try Cairo because I'm a huge fan of Halfeti from Penhaligon's Trade Route Collection and the description suggested similarities. A certain similarity exists in any case, also here in the center is a spicy oriental rose surrounded by woody notes and frankincense.

However, Cairo is "harder" than Halfeti, much more masculine, but not quite so dark. The rose often recedes behind the resins. Honestly, Cairo reminds me very much of Oud Ispahan of Dior. I love this fragrance, even though Cairo seems a bit more "sedate" than Oud Ispahan, with more resins and woods.

Compared to Halfeti I have to say that Cairo is also less complex and less round. Actually, the scent hardly changes, except that sometimes I have the feeling that the scent is almost scratchy-medical. But I must confess that I have worn it only on relatively warm days so far and believe that Cairo benefits from cooler weather.

In my opinion, it is more a fragrance for men than for women, and also nothing for very young gentlemen. The fragrance has a moderate sillage (it's definitely not a skin scent but you can't smell it across the marketplace) and lasts about 6-8 hours. I like him, but I have to say that he's definitely not groundbreaking in his fragrance, but that I've tried a lot of similar fragrances that he's hard to distinguish from. All in all, I think that's a bit unfortunate, because Penhaligon's Trade Routes Collection actually has very interesting fragrances and the bottle is also totally pretty.

Halfeti is the first rose fragrance that actually knocked me down. Every time I wear it (and that's rare, because as a student I'm actually quite broke and can't afford a whole bottle...) I feel like I'm floating. The scent is so heavy, dark, somehow mysterious. Breathtakingly elegant. One of those perfumes that actually make me another person

I honestly never really understood the Rose hype that way. In most perfumes it smells rather banal to me, somehow sweet or compulsively fresh. Not in Halfeti. That's a rose that deserves to be called the Queen of Flowers. You don't even notice green notes or bergamot with me. On the contrary, the rose is so dark that it is almost black, framed by precious woods and spices.

And oh, the spices! Of the things you put in the food in the kitchen, they have nothing to do. They smell exotic, of something that could happen in a bazaar in a foreign city somewhere in the British colonies of the turn of the century, flanked by leather and incense. Dangerous in a seductive way. Exactly the line between mystical and sacral.

I have no idea exactly what kind of person you have to be in order to do Halfeti justice. Spy maybe, in a tailor-made Savile Row suit, in a town you know you'll never see again tomorrow. Or femme fatale in an evening gown, at a rendezvous with powerful, nameless lovers.

I wear it when I want to imagine I'm such a person. And since the durability of Halfeti is indeed so incredible that even days later I suddenly get a wave of the scent of my scarf or jacket in my nose, I sometimes sit in the subway and feel as if I know a secret that no one else knows about.

I don't know if it's my skin or my nose, but for me Rappelle-toi starts with peach. It's not in the notes, nobody else seems to smell it, but in me it's very clear, fruity ripe peach. A bit like the peach body butter from The Body Shop or really juicy peaches at the end of August. Besides white flowers, gardenia, a little honey.

The peach remains for a very long time, but in between, especially in warm weather, it mixes with an Indolic note that reminds a little of cat urine. She's not exuberant, but she always wafts in the background with where she annoys me, which is why I wear Rappelle-toi around springtime rather now.

The fragrance then slowly fades into a gentle, sweet musk-honey construction with hints of sandalwood. It's a. Very beautiful fragrance, incredibly feminine, it lasts about six hours on me.

But I really wonder why I am the only one who smells the peach...

It's a bit of a cliché, but I think everyone has a perfume that was worn by a beloved member of their family during childhood and that has become an absolute symbol of perfume. For me, that was the little bottle of vanilla perfume from The Body Shop that my mom owned. That was in the 1990s, before there was The Body Shop in Germany, and long before they reformulated it into a watery-synthetic abomination that almost makes me cry again and again. No, at that time the perfume was brought from London and it was so sweet and at the same time so gentle that it lay like a protective umbrella over my childhood memories

I've been smelling every vanilla perfume since, hoping to find at least a glimmer of that smell again. Today I did it!

Vanilla Caramel smells infinitely sweet, but it also smells warm, it is definitely not an inconspicuous perfume, but at the same time it smells somehow timeless. It is a pure vanilla, without any attempts to make it "dark" or "mysterious", no rum notes, no exuberant spices, but nevertheless it has a certain heaviness.

I'm absolutely in love.