Sy’s murmurs and mumbles

They have arrived! My little fragrance samples from Demeter.com are here!

If you’re just tuning in, my initial blogosphere post about these guys is located here: Eau de Thunderstorm

I didn’t have anything better to do on my lunchbreak today, and UPS tracking said they’d been delivered at my place that morning, so I swung by and picked them up in the middle of the day. (read: I nearly shouted out loud at work when I saw “Delivered”, and rushed home in a lather. It happened to be lunch-time.)

So here goes:

The one everyone’s most curious about:

Play-doh

I am very disappointed to report that this does not smell like Play-Doh. I had the pleasure of sniffing actual Play-Doh recently, and it smelled just like I remembered it did. It smells kinda salty, and with that special Play-Doh fragrance they give it. This cologne smells nothing like it. It smells a little like cake, actually, and something else. Something else that is also not Play-Doh. This makes me a very sad panda. I was just so sure that if I hated most of them, that they at least could get Play-Doh correct. *sigh*

(note: I did actually wear this for about a half hour, to see if somehow it just didn’t smell like Play-Doh in the bottle, but it magically might if I wore it on my skin. No dice. It continued in its infuriating lack of resemblance to Play-Doh. I washed it off.)

Grass

The stuff in this little bottle bears a very slight resemblance to short, bladed plant material. But it’s pretty slight. This is supposed to smell like Centipede Grass, (as mentioned in my other post) which I have almost certainly never sniffed, but unless this special grass smells very much like a perfume, I doubt that the odors are identical. The scent is slightly grassy, as I know it, but it’s far too sweet, and resembles much more closely some sort of cleaning product, which one I can’t put my finger on. Final analysis: I don’t really like it. =/

Lychee

The lychee fruit is a fragrant and special treat. Its flesh is translucent white, and the consistency is very much like a grape. The perfumy smell is that of, well, lychee, and also of rosewater, interestingly. It is delicious and exotic.

My main concern with this Demeter fragrance is that the sweet fruity part of the smell is there, along with a too-large percentage of roses. If you sniff straight from the bottle, you can smell the fruitiness. But the tiny amount of leakage on the outside of the bottle, when sniffed with the cap on, smells only of rose. I can only assume that it would do much the same thing on one’s skin. This is truly a shame! The fruity bit is my favorite part, but the rose component really overpowers and outlasts it, in this cologne. Bummer.

Rain

As one might well expect, Demeter’s Snow and Rain share a common element. Unfortunately, it is the “Old Man” element. =/

It is brighter, crisper, and sniffing it out of the bottle, it almost reminds me of mandarin oranges, but when worn, it loses that. On, it smells like a cologne. This is definitely a cologne that has been given a fanciful name, “Rain”.

Being a city girl, I associate the smell of rain with the peculiar way that rain smells on cement and pavement, grass, and beauty bark. I rather like it. But I have smelled rain in the country and the forest on many occasions, and I think it’d be safe to say that nowhere in the world, does rain smell like the perfume in this bottle. It is not extremely unpleasant, but I would not wear it, either.

So, all in all, I don’t like the bulk of these, and I don’t like any of the ‘weird’ named ones. I think I’d have relative confidence that Demeter can reproduce the myriad of one-note flower and fruit scents that they have, but anything too odd, and my confidence falters.

I can’t decide at this point if I should return them, or perhaps send them to friends who want to smell, but the idea of mailing them (and thus spending more money on them) is kind of a bummer. Perhaps I could drip them on paper or something and mail them like letters. Hmm! If you want that, please let me know, that’d be hella easy.

I’m sorry this couldn’t be more of an exciting report, but c’est la vie.

~fin~