Just discovered Parfums de Marly & I’m in trouble. (Long-winded review.)
I’ve always loved perfume in a practical sense (not a professional sense!) but been super picky with it. I pick one signature and stick with it for a long time, because I’m so picky that even when I buy something new I end up not liking it. My sister worked somewhere that gave her endless amounts of high-end (but very commercial, not niche) perfumes as a benefit of the job, so I always got to smell the best new fragrances that came out from all the major houses and hated them all with a burning passion.
In high school I rode or died Givenchy L’Interdit EDT (NOT the EDP), in uni it was a random jasmine extract I found from the shops for some time and then Elie Saab Nuit Nour for some.
I recently wanted to switch to a new fragrance finally after getting bored with Nuit Nour (which I still love), and went to a store to smell Delina since it’s so highly rated. I only test on the papers because again, I cannot stand most perfumes and hate to spray on my own skin something I’m not familiar with.
Oh my I can’t describe how badly I fell for La Rosée. It just smelled like waking up in my childhood summer home on a cool early morning and walking around, hearing the fountain, smelling the flowers and roses. Smelling the fresh air. Bathing in the faint dawn sunlight. I don’t want to say otherworldly, because it smelled more like going back to the world I lived in as a child, with a glowing filter of memories that tend to dress the happiest moments in our lives after we move far away from them. I bought it without even thinking more for a minute.
Then the salesman was kind enough to give me 2/3 samples each of the OG Delina, Delina Exclusif, Oriana, and Cassili. Over the next few days I took my time testing them out and expecting to hate them because I didn’t quite like them in-store. But on my skin… they were each a delightful sensory and personal experience, sometimes so beautiful that I can’t quite put them into words…
Delina & Delina Exclusif - Beautiful, special, but not otherworldly. I would buy them sometime in the far future just because I love them and already it’s rare for me to love a perfume. OG Delina smells like how I would love to smell on a day out indoors, and Exclusif smells like how I’d love to smell on a night out, with the guy I like. Just simply beautiful and lovely. But again they are how I’d love to smell like for a specific occasion, and not necessarily what I’d love to smell all the time, unlike La Rosée and ******* (I get to it in the end lol).
But now… Oriana and Cassili…
Oriana was just beautiful as well, refreshing somehow while smelling like candy. I can’t stand candy smells usually but this was just so fresh and clean underneath it all that I WANTED to smell like this incredible tide pod effervescent brand of candy.
And Cassili… A whole other concept in itself. This is the other scent I would absolutely love to smell all the time. I can’t believe nobody talks about it as much as the others. It smells so basic but so aggressively joyous. It smells like such a normal scent that magically acquired an indescribable quality, like it was touched by a fairy. It reminds me of my best friend when she laughs. What a beautiful, beautiful scent. I don’t like buying more things than I need, but perhaps next year, this will be the perfume I buy. It smells like a fairy passed by and dumped fairy dust on it.
For practicals, their longevity on my skin is horrible except for La Rosée, which still has terrible sillage. Exclusif is the only one that has good sillage but was only the best of the worst in terms of longevity. DelinaOG-Oriana-Cassili went away completely in an hour or two, but I sprayed La Rosée at night and it stayed on me till noon the next morning. Yes I know this is opposite to what everybody says, but my body chemistry is haywire and all perfumes disappear from me even when I’m moisturised. I’m grateful La Rosée has a monstrous staying power on me for whatever random reason, since I cherish it the most and people online somehow say it’s the fastest to vanish.
(Note: I lowkey don’t care about sillage because I buy perfumes for me and I don’t want to subject everyone else to a scent they may not like. I also don’t care about lasting power because 99% of scents don’t last on me.)
And my question is, how does PdM do this?? I’m annoyingly picky with perfumes, most of them make me want to barf, and it’s not for a lack of perfumes I’ve smelled. But with PdM it was one after one perfume I LOVED deeply, the fb and all four testers I was given?! All their perfumes so far have a sparkly, dreamy, quality background to them, and I’m not pro or knowledgeable enough on perfume terms and techniques to know why. Especially since everyone and their mother in the parfum community says PdM is a glorified clone house at worst and an overpriced niche house making basic commercial scents at best.
Well to me, their scents are unlike anything I’ve ever smelled. They smell fuller, like I imagine other scents (even ones I love like L’Interdit and Nuit Nour) being small beautiful paintings, but PdM scents being HUGE tapestries with much more detail and things going on, and somehow the elements of the tapestry are moving around in 3D.
That is all :) thanks for reading this far down if you have! I’m going to go enjoy my fb & testers and try not to put any more money on them till I finish my bottle or genuinely enough time passes. It’s going to be hard