Would You Like Something To Drink With Your Patchouli?
By Tove Solander
This smell-alikes post is a little different since I don’t own one of the fragrances and hence can’t do a side by side skin test as usual. Thanks to Chayaruchama, I have a decant of Chanel Coromandel, and upon trying it I was surprised to find the top notes smell just like a soft drink in the vein of Sprite or 7-Up! I hadn’t expected something sweet and sparkling and charmingly childish like that from an exclusive oriental. The rest of the scent is all dry patchouli and, yeah, it works. I get what people are saying about Chanel: they manage to make even a patchouli scent sheer and never heavy like most orientals. Even the sweet top note has the watery and transparent quality of a soft drink and is not rich and syrupy at all. In the drydown, another kind of sweetness appears, a more traditional ambery/vanillic sweetness, and on the whole the scent is a bit on the sweet side for me. I do however love the dry, earthy, evocatively musty patchouli note.
A while after I first tried Coromandel, I finally found a working tester of Prada. All I can say is it’s a perfectly decent replacement. And released before Coromandel, too, which doesn’t reflect too well upon Chanel. Prada has the same combination of dry patchouli and Sprite-like top notes. Perhaps the soft drink in Prada has lost more of its bubbles – it’s more like the soft, synthetic sweetness of apple and pear flavouring that made me not like D’Orsay Le Dandy. Here the fruitiness is more subdued and balanced by the patchouli, however, while in the pale Le Dandy there were nothing there to balance it. I’m amazed something so patchouli-heavy and dry can survive among the fruity-florals, and that alone makes Prada a greater achievement than Coromandel. Sure, Prada might not smell quite as expensive. The patchouli is not as exquisite, and I get more vaguely fruity sweetness than I’d like, especially in the almost gourmandy drydown. But I still think Prada is a better value if patchouli with soft drinks is what you’re going for.
Image source: thestar.com.my, nordstrom.com
13 comments July 3rd, 2007