Review - Angel (Thierry Mugler)

Top notes are melon, coconut, mandarin orange, cassia, jasmine, bergamot and cotton candy; middle notes are honey, apricot, blackberry, plum, orchid, peach, jasmine, lily-of-the-valley, red berries and rose; base notes are tonka bean, amber and vanilla, patchouli, musk, vanilla, dark chocolate and caramel.

First whiff, chocolate, then a big WHOMP of omg is that DEWBERRY? Which has always smelt of wintergreen on me anyway. I'm not a big foodie scent fan, I have to say, so this is always going to be a bit of a stretch on my skin. It doesn't smell as terrible as it did on Faun's skin, but that damn dewberry smell kicks everything else out of the ballpark for me at the moment.

Which is a pity because I can smell something nice behind it if I sniff REALLY hard. Still hardly a surprise bearing in mind the way my skin eats up soft fruit smells. All I'm really getting from this to start with is a really sharp nasty THING that smells aritificial and chemical. I've only got it on one wrist too and it's quite heady, almost eye-wateringly so.

*Sigh* I wish I could get a proper idea of this damn scent. I need to sniff it on someone else. My sample doesn't have an atomiser so I can't even spray it on a blotter. The daft thing is, I can almost see/smell what Angel is about, but it's nebulous, fleeting. While I know it's not for me I still keep going to sniff my wrist.

What it isn't is inept or ugly. Somewhere there is a lovely musky chocolatey smell on my skin just waiting to erupt and I imagine for the right skin chemistry this slicks and slides all over the fragrance shop. Amazingly the lily-of-the-valley isn't shouting at me, but that's because that weird wintergreen thing is still hawking it's wares, gettin gintpo my eyes and down my throat.

(I'm not sure why I'm being so nice to Angel, by rights I should be ripping it to shreds, but on my skin it doesn't even warrant that. I "meh" it more than anything.

Finally, after about an hour the tonka bean start to emerge, blinking into the sunlight, making me want to *whomp, tackle, hug" the life out of it. That weird note is STILL there, like, well, a bad smell, to be be frank. FINALLY that smell buggers off and I'm left with a sub-Organza Indecence vanilla hot chocolate.

Poor Angel never really stood a chance on my skin, so if you like foodie scents, and something a bit out there, if you've never tried Angel before, then you probably should and you'll probably like it!!!

Many thanks to Han who sent me her 5ml bottle. I feel bad that I didn't like this more...