Narciso Rodriguez for Her
Narciso Rodriguez (2003)

This has been one of my mom's signature scents and maybe I am biased, but I like it too. I would describe it as the ultimate grown-woman perfume. At first, it felt a little too typical and like nothng special, but if you wait twenty minutes, it turns into this rich, skin-like amber and musk. The longevity is great and it lingers on my clothes for days.

I'm a devoted lover of this gorgeous perfume since the decade of its origin. To me, it is the embodiment of refined, yet ordinary domestic life, skin-like, and intimately personal, but also elusive and aloof. While I think of Narciso Rodriguez For Her as a daily omni-occasional perfume, I associate this perfume with extreme wealth and luxury because when I first fell in love with it, it was unattainable to me. At a time when life was bleak and rent was increasingly hard to pay, this was the perfume I visited at the glittering beacon of the Neiman Marcus stores, smelling so strikingly different from anything else then on the market. I eventually bought it at the airport, traveling on someone else's dime, on a trip that at that time in my life felt so much at the height of luxury as to make air travel and brightly lit duty-free shops seem like the most austentatious decadence known to mankind. The bottle was sleek and glossy, and felt good in my hand, and the fragrance matched the wan black and white full-page ads in its classical, minimalist ballet aesthetic. It even evokes, just the slightest bit, the smell of fashion magazines themselves. The warm, sharp, creamy, powdery, austere emination from the bottle evoked something to me so feminine and so almost bodily, as to rebel against both the girlish gourmands and fruity freshies on the one hand, and the opulent, ornate but ageing masterpieces on the other. It whispered of the hushed, naked sensuality between the clean white sheets of the privilaged class.

I don't think this perfume suits very hot weather, and it should be said that it's easy to become anosmic to it. I find it sort of comes and goes, and I can easily forget I have it on, and then be enveloped once again in its ethereal cloud at various times throughout the day.

I only fell out of love with this fragrance briefly when I thought it was too sharp, and the patchouli, once subtle, had developed a sweaty undertone, and the whole composition gave me headaches. But then I discovered that's only because I had been slowly using the same 100 ml bottle over the last decade. The plastic cap had long since started to crack, and the scent was no longer glorious. But I bought a new bottle (the 50ml this time) and it's exactly as I remembered it years ago. If you have an old bottle and feel that it no longer effects you as it once did, it could be that you just need a fresh bottle.

Of the sample set I got several Christmases ago, this was my run-away favourite! Amber-y and sexy, with just enough sweetness to balance it. Not too heavy or too light. By hour four I start to get some strong creamy vanilla notes. For being an EDT the sillage and lasting power are wild! My mom could smell me all the way across the room, and I could smell myself all day, even under my winter coat. I can also see this one being fun to try combining with vanilla or floral body sprays. This is one I’d love a full bottle of.

For now I really have to throw my hands up at all the glorious raves the Narciso Rodriguez line gets.
On me all I get here is a shrill soap that turns to a wilting attic smell I find quite repulsive. It's tenacious.

Narciso Rodriguez is one of the few brands I’ve encountered where it seems that every fragrance created for this house, shares a common thread. Even if it was developed by different noses, each one feels related to the next, despite having a different scent. What I’m saying is that there is a recognizable dna, like how if you smell a chanel perfume, you know it’s chanel. For Narciso, it’s musk. Fluffy, soft, clean, and elegant yet understated.

It’s really hard for me to detect specific notes in this beyond the obvious signature musk. I can tell it has floral elements, and that’s pretty much it. I can’t pick any specific flower out, but I love the soft, feminine musky floral.

I feel like Narciso is pretty much a staple that every woman should own. And this one in particular is an absolute must have. This is like the t-shirt and jeans of the fragrance world. A casual, clean, and pretty.

Distinctive - yes, but does it smell good? That depends on how you perceive the factory musk in this orange flower bouquet. To me it smells like bad breath, glue and plastic. A shallow and linear scent that sticks and lingers.

To borrow from the art critic Robert Hughes, Narciso for Her is 'a little feat of novelty'; it represents everything that's wrong and ugly about modern perfume.