thePerfume-Reporter

"All I ever really wanted was sugar."

Andy Warhol

Fruity Floral

Say "Fruity Floral" to a non-perfume-person and they'll think, well, who knows what they'll think but it likely will not be good. Today it's hard to pass a perfume counter without getting a whiff of these products. They seem tropical, summery, light, youthful, and fun.

As far as I can tell, there are no true fruity perfumes, that is, a perfume that's all fruit, through and through. Fruit tends to combine with floral elements the best.

If you think about it, even the earliest fragrances used the fruity-floral recipe. The original cologne, the so-called 4711 cologne (from 4711 Glockengasse in Cologne, Germany) is a light floral with strong citrus top notes.

Today, fruits are apt to be more tropical (mango, guava) or earthy (peach, persimmon) or even exotic (pomegranate).

The biggest problem with the fruity-floral fragrance is finding the right balance between sensual, alluring combination of fruit-infused florals and the smell of a fruit smoothie.

When trying on fruity-florals, you really have to wait for the dry down. Many fruity-florals tend to be like little dogs when you open the bottle: they jump all over you but then settle down quickly. I've been fooled by fruity-floral top notes before. So enjoy them but don't assume that your mango-berry-watermelon mix is going to be the whole perfume.

A fruity-floral also runs the risk of getting sweet. Perfumes that use sugar are not necessarily overly sweet, but sometimes a fruity floral can get too sweet. I wouldn't recommend buying a fruity-floral scent that you haven't tried and I wouldn't consider the scent "tried" until you've had it on a few hours.

Featured Resources

Why Does Perfume Smell Like Food?

Is That a Recipe for a Fruit Smoothie or a Perfume Formula?

by Joanna McLaughlin, exclusive to thePerfume-Reporter

For me, perfume is the new food. I used to love food. Now I love perfume. I trade one out-of-kilter love affair for another, maybe, but I figure as compulsions go, perfume is pretty harmless.

The other day I was loitering around the perfume counter of my local department store (I'd say my favorite department store, but that's not the case; it's just close). I was with one of my perfume buddies and we were sampling this and that in a sort of desultory way.

Then it struck me. "Why does all of this perfume smell like food?"

Well, it wasn't like it smelled like pork roast or baked potatoes. Many scents just reminded me of tropical drinks.

I have also noticed interesting foodie notes in perfume. Bond No. 9's New Harlem has some very pronounced coffee notes in it. Spices, even spices associated with familiar foods, have been in perfumes for centuries. But what about sugar scents? I've heard of (but have not tried) a chocolate perfume.

Then I wondered: could our national love affair with food have led to both an obesity epidemic and perfumes that smell like smoothies?

To be fair, I love fruity floral scents and wear them a lot of the time. But I wear them mainly because they have a great drydown and, as we all know, it's all about the drydown.

But the top notes! It's like going into the juice bar at a spa.

Manufacturers spend a lot of time and money trying to hit exactly the right top notes. It's lost effort for a perfumista, since we tend to just try to hurry past the top notes. They're like the handsome guy you see across a crowded airport. He's nice to take in for a moment, but no point paying much attention to him because he'll be gone in a moment.

However, I'm pretty sure that perfumistas do not comprise the entire perfume universe. Granted, we buy more than the average perfume buyer, but the average perfume buyer can be swayed by the top notes.

So top notes smell good enough to eat.

Now I'm on board with all this fruity-floral stuff. I don't always enjoy the top notes, but it's never about the top notes, and a lot of these scents are just delightful, light and summery and playful and exuberant.

Well, this wouldn't be thePerfume-Reporter if we didn't name some names, so here goes. This is my personal list, based on nothing but my nose and robust sense of opinions, as to my favorite fruits:

Groove by Carol's Daughter
Sugar Blossom by Fresh (I prefer this to the other Sugar variations)
Euphoria by Calvin Klein (this isn't a classic fruity floral, in fact it isn't a fruity floral at all, but smell it in this context ... it fits; it's more of an Oriental but I think the fruit is strong here)
Sunset Heat by Escada (this is so tropical and fun-loving it makes me want to go to the Caribbean and throw myself on the beach)
Little Italy by Bond No. 9 (I know, I know, this a citrus scent rather than what a true perfume expert would call fruity. But, wow, what a scent. this is a knockout. One of my perfume buddies said smelling this cured her of the flu.)

Fruit notes in perfume can be delightful, but I get alarmed that they might be leaning toward the delicious. Right now things are OK in my perfume world.

But you wait. Pretty soon we'll have Prime Rib top notes or eau de chili cheese fries.

<take me back to BASICS>

Ingredients: Sugar

The history of sugar involves a lot of scary things.

Believe it or not, sugar is a relatively new addition to the modern kitchen and a latecomer to the world of fragrance. Sugar comes from various plant sources but gets processed and refined to become the white (or brown stuff) that we know.

Sugar plantations in the New World drove some of the push for slavery, since growing and harvesting sugar cane was hot, dirty work. Thus, some historians rightly point to sugar as one of the key factors in slavery coming and staying so long in the Americas (cotton and tobacco were other such crops).

Sugar rapidly found its way into more and more foods. Some food historians and physicians link the increase in sugar consumption in the industrialized world with the rise of certain degenerative diseases (diabetes, among others) and obesity.

Now with all that gloom and doom you would think sugar is a bad thing. Whether or not you care to ingest the stuff is for you to decide.

But it's actually a kind of nice thing that sugar is becoming a popular fragrance ingredient. It's hard to describe the way sugar smells, since it doesn't have much of an odor laying around in the sugar bowl. (Does anybody still have sugar bowls?) But it adds a frothy, sweet element to a lot of scents and works nicely with the fruity-florals that are so popular right now.