I'm taking a little holiday break from daily blogging, so I thought I might run some old fragrance reviews that readers of this blog may have missed.
Always a fan of Oriental-type fragrances, I fell in love with Coco the moment it was released in 1984. I knew that I needed to own this gorgeously warm and spicy fragrance for myself. The price was a bit prohibitive for a gal in her first year of college, so I satisfied myself with occasional department store spritzes and lusting from afar.Knowing my infatuation with the scent, my younger brother bought it for me for Christmas in the early 90s, at close to the same age I was when I first experienced Coco. To him, making his sister happy was far more important than having the cash. He bought an EDT gift set which came with a tube of body creme and a large sized logo print makeup bag. I used up the fragrance part of the gift years ago, but still have the makeup bag and use it as a travel kit.
Around that time I had a gentleman friend who was a little on the snooty side. We took ballroom dance lessons together and went out most Fridays to trip the light fantastic as the youngest couple on the dance floor. We also went to museum exhibition openings on a regular basis, the occasional opera, and had dinners at his parents' club. And during this time I cloaked myself in the rich scent of Coco, almost as a disguise, so this Polish gal from a rough neighborhood could appear to be as fancy as those around her. She smelled good, even if she didn't fool anybody.
One of my Dad's gifts to me this Christmas was a gift card to Sephora, which I immediately earmarked for a bottle of Coco EDP. I knew it would be different from the EDT, but not as noticeably different as it actually is. The overall impression of the scent is the same, of course, but the mandarin and jasmine are much more obvious to me, as is the leather note in the drydown, which I didn't notice at all in the EDT. Of course it may be age and experience that leads me to detect differences. Before I started learning about notes and drydowns and all that, perfume enveloped me as a cloud of homogenized scent. Now it's a wonderland of notes, some of which I am truly surprised that I can detect.
Notes: mandarin, orange blossom, Bulgarian rose, Indian jasmine, tonka bean, sandalwood, leather, wood, vanilla.
