Most of my Saturday Questions are positive, so I hesitated for a while about whether I should even ask this one. I hope that nobody will feel too hurt if a perfume they love ends up on someone’s “can’t stand it” list – after all, we are all so different in our olfactory perception.
Saturday Question #292:
What Was The Most Unpleasant Perfume You’ve Ever Smelled?
Was it a “hate from the first sniff”? Did you put it on your skin? Was it a scrubber, or did you endure it through the development? Did you do it more than once?
My Answer
My knee-jerk reaction answer was Oriza L. Legrand‘s Chypre Mousse. But then I remembered that I’ve previously used that perfume while answering another SQ about the spookiest perfume I’ve ever tried. So I decided to search my daily use database for more offenders. One of the standard reactions that I can select to classify what I thought about perfumes I wore or tested is “I hated it” – that was the filter I used.
Interestingly, in 15 years of recording my reactions, only 23 perfumes have ever deserved that harsh option. And it was unexpectedly hard to decide which one of them to name the worst. I decided to go with the one that I dared to put on my skin 3 times, hoping to change my mind.
Serge Lutens Miel de Bois. Many years ago, when Lutens’s perfumes were both hard to get and highly cherished by perfumistas, I got a sample in a swap. I had read such high praise for that perfume that I expected it to be magical. It wasn’t. It was quite unpleasant on my skin. I wasn’t ready to accept that, and once the memory of the off-putting encounter softened a little, I would try it again. With the same result. After the third attempt 10 years ago, I finally conceded defeat and purged the sample so that I could not even think about subjecting myself to that torture again.
How about you?
Undina's Looking Glass 
Just lately I find a lot of perfumes pretty horrible to my nose! Especially the nauseating sickly sweet types that you can’t scrub off. Nothing as hideous though as I found Poison when it launched, although I suspect that these days it might not seem quite as bad in comparison with what has come after. But I still wouldn’t wear it or want to be near anyone else wearing it.
What made Chypre Mousse smell spooky to you? The fragrance I always thought spooky was Messe de Minuit …. it smelt of damp crypts and decay; it quite literally gave me nightmares about corpses!
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A tie between CdG Jaisalmer (though I loved the rest of the Incense series) and SL Mandarine Mandarin. They don’t smell like each other, but they both smelled spicy, sharp, and unwashed to me.
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Ooooh! Good question Undina,
nowadays it’s MFK Baccarat Rouge and all the copy cats. Nauseating
Portia xx
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