thePerfume-Reporter

"Goddess is a great big, pink, floral scent."

Navigation

Florals: White & Pink

Florals are one of the easiest scents to recognize, even for beginners. But floral turns out to be a huge category. So many perfumes involve floral notes, it would be hard to name one that doesn't have at least one flower in the mix. But the term "floral" is reserved for those scents which are mainly or predominately (though not exclusively) composed of floral notes.

White floral refers to scents that have a dominating presence of flowers that are white. Freesia is a good example, but you can also count lilies (including lilies-of-the-valley) and peonies. You don't get to count roses and orchids, too, even though there are white varieties. But the idea is that the flowers in the perfume pot are white.

Pink florals are the subset of florals that come from pink flowers or that seem like they ought to come from pink flowers. Roses fall into this category (although roses are sometimes not-pink).

White florals tend to be "cleaner" than pink florals (roses fall in this categories) but both are strong floral scents.

Featured Resources

Goddess

I got this perfume at the drug store. I normally don't buy perfume at the drug store, in fact, I don't normally go in places like drug stores, but sometimes one's destiny puts one in unusual situations. Drug store perfume sounds disreputable, doesn't it? I'm thinking of a novel that might describe a character as wearing "drug store perfume." Probably the word cheap would be worked in there, too.

Drug store perfume isn't cheap. Perfume is the same price everywhere, at least in my corner of the world. Real estate prices should be this stable.

Anyway, the drug store experience was a bit enlightening in that my local drug store--which is a small chain drug store on a corner in a small town in south Texas (pop. 25,000)--has a pretty nice selection of scents. Big brands, perhaps, but some of that stuff is on my own counter at home so I can't really sneeze at their taste. Of course, in the drug store, the perfume is kept behind the counter like dirty magazines or high-priced items, so you have to talk to the sales clerk to get at the merchandise.

This required me to engage the clerk in conversation, which is actually a cultural oddity here in the deep south. We still talk to each other, not just at each other or to advance our own agenda, but just to kill time or be sociable. So I started to talk to the lady at the counter and before you know it, our corner of the drug store is under a thick cloud of perfume.

Anyway, all that is to tell you how I came to try Baby Phat. I didn't seek it out. The world is so full of perfumes, I wasn't sure I was going to get to Baby Phat that day or even that week.

The lady at the counter encouraged me. She asked me to try out her new favorite scent.

Goddess is a great big pink floral scent that comes in a squatty but atractive little bottle with a rhinestone collar. It's cute, in a youthful way, and it's pink and it's girly. It's definitely aimed at a youthful market. Now that is peculiar since the clerk who recommended it to me was clearly of age to claim her AARP card and I'm not 18 myself. So there we are, two ladies of a certain age, and we're sniffing away at this sort of teenage perfume.

Goddess is actually nice. It's big and pink and floral and it's light stuff. It's light in a lot of ways, light in density and light in complexity. I doubt it will win any major awards and it may be hard to find 50 years from now, but it's really a nice scent.

Sometimes perfume reviewers say that a scent is for mature people or evening wear. I usually refrain from that. After all, one woman's evening is another woman's morning, and I'm not sure that mature is really the euphemism for "old lady" that it once was. But this is something I'd call youthful, light, playful, fun.

<take me back to REVIEWS >

Bottles

Some people collect perfume bottles. In fact, there are active collectors and websites dedicated to preserving some of the incredible art that goes into perfume containers.

Goddess does not come in that kind of a elaborate collectible bottle, but it is packaged in something that is charming. I suspect that some people will be drawn to purchase this kind of scent because of the little pink rhinestone-studded bottle it comes in.

Kimora Lee Simmons

Kimora Lee Simmons is a high-fashion model who calls herself "multiethnic." She is Japanese on her mother's side and African American on her father's side. Brought up in 1980s St. Louis, her ethnic looks and height caused her to feel self conscious. Her mother enrolled her in modeling classes to help boost her confidence. A couple of years later, by age 13, she was under exclusive contract to Chanel and by 14 she was working in Paris under the direction of Karl Lagerfeld.

"Everything people thought was weird about me before was now good," is how Kimora described her emergence as a now-six-foot-tall high fashion model.

Kimora and her ex-husband have a Baby Phat clothing line which includes the Goddess fragrance.