looking for suggestions on layering my current collection or any additions you’d make to create a combo you love! my birthday was yesterday so i have a free $9.95 item in the app and i can’t decide what to spend it on.
the car fragrance refill is currently being used in my car. i only draw the line at the laundry beads. i love book loft specifically because it is slightly musty and therefore very atmospheric aesthetic but i don’t need my clothes to come musty right out of the wash 😂
The Road So Far…
30. Love Unleashed 🍇
29. You’re Cheeky 💋
28. Strawberry Flirt 🍓
27. Pistachio Glaze 🥜
26. Seeing Rouge 💄
25. Getaway Soirée ☀️
24. Loyal To You 🥣
23. Viva Vanilla 🍨
22. Lost In Santal 🗺️
21. Hello Happiness 😊
20. Mediterranean Mirage 💙
19. Imperfect Beauty
18. Oh, Cherry 🍒
17. Infinite Radiance ✨
16. Always Fleur 🍐
15. Petal Parade 🍊
14. Salted Shorelines 🏖️
13. Madame Mystique
12. Free As A Flower 🪻
11. Inner Angel 🍎
10. All Eyes On Her 👀
9. Midnight Addiction ☕️
8. Covered In Roses 🌹
7. If You Musk 📖
6. Floral Fantasy 🍑
5. Eau De Coconut 🥥
4. On The Horizon 🌅
Part 1 (#30-#25) https://www.reddit.com/r/bathandbodyworks/s/lOm22bZa0P
Part 2 (#24-#19) https://www.reddit.com/r/bathandbodyworks/s/RbsOXLSmEM
Part 3 (#18-#15) https://www.reddit.com/r/bathandbodyworks/s/Jaergnts9v
Part 4 (#14-#11) https://www.reddit.com/r/bathandbodyworks/s/2VwGZoxCBa
Part 5 (#10-#6) https://www.reddit.com/r/bathandbodyworks/s/Go8Dvj46hM
Part 6.1 (#5-#4) https://www.reddit.com/r/bathandbodyworks/s/4DPgIkYmKj
Allow me to reintroduce myself, my name is Charli and I’m the Everyday Luxuries Diva. These aspirational FFMs are dreams of higher fragrance for myself and the backbone of my collection. I thought it’d be fun to share how I rank and categorize all thirty.
It’s been a long time coming, but this is my final post of ranking all 30 EDL’s. Since I started this series, three online exclusive mini EDL’s were released that I declined to collect. I don’t like online exclusives, I highly dislike B&BW performing artificial scarcity as a marketing tactic, and more than that… I own enough B&BW, and have largely stepped away from collecting. (Trust, I am still shopping my stash every single day. I love A Theme and getting to dress up down to the fragrance remains an unparalleled delight).
I decided to slightly alter format for this final post – instead of synthesizing paragraphs, I’m leaving you with the fragmented mirror of my thoughts on each of these, my three most adored EDL’s. I think there is a plane where a beloved fragrance transcends verbosity and is better captured in its element of an ephemeral architecture.
To everyone who’s read, commented, or messaged me about this series, I have more love and gratitude than you can ever measure. I hope that I come back some day to again entertain, amuse, and, yes, divide you (haaaa!). I’m open to suggestions for topics and unafraid of research – if you ever need someone to go chasing fragrance rabbits, I keep a permanent mailing address in Wonderland.
The culture is lit and if this is it, I had a ball.
With Notes
✨ Miss Pink Obsessed, you lie like a rug, there’s nothing blushing about your jasmine, made only more intoxicating by a warm boozy base. Donna Born in Roma’s triple jasmine is felt here.
✨ Liking this one was like a light switch flipping on for me, and now it’s kicking off the top three
✨ The nuttiness of cashmere praline captures some of the original’s more oriental tendencies
✨ This is Angel’s Share if Angel’s Share wasn’t trapped at parties in the Holiday months.
✨ Rich heady jasmine atop smoky, charred oak in the bourbon, smoothed by vanilla
✨ For all its warmth, retains a distinct deep pink color
✨ I knew early on it was going to be a tight race between all four aquatic bergamots in my collection. I originally expected On The Horizon to come out ahead, and yet.
✨ As far as I know, this isn’t a “good dupe” for anything – not Acqua di Gioia, and certainly nothing from Tom Ford. What it is, is a glorious, airy floral floating in crystal blue waters.
✨ Salty cedarwood provides the barest suggestion of coastal warmth, but Aqua Hour is a very certain kind of pretty girl, floating on her back in the water far enough out that she’s unconcerned with the worries and woods of the shore.
✨ Just a brilliant, stunning, light but not disappearing, airy fragrance that I think one improvement would be just a delicate touch of lavender
✨ This is the one. The one where EDL’s stopped being novelties and became chasers. This fragrance made me a fig girl for life. If only Father Figure had even slightly better staying power than the body mist alone.
✨ Pair with Pink Obsessed for a creamy, warm but sunshine bright and green-fresh experience.
✨ Bury me with a bottle of this, my diva, pure genius across the pyramid: Fig nectar, lush jasmine, creamy musk. From a fragrance, not an insane tortured complex narrative and thematic statement I’m making as an artist through fragrance, this is more and all that I could ask for. Something fresh, addictive, and not seductive but certainly enticing, inviting.
✨ Guilty As Fig is a fragrance you can never have too much of, it’s a star that pairs beautifully with fellow figs and jasmines alike, and it’s just stunning. If there’s anything in my collection I’ll never get tired of, it’s this darling, right here. Perfect fragrance, I wish it filled every room it entered.
With all my love, across the airwaves and through the ether.
- end of line -
Since summer is winding down and I finished weeding my collection, I thought I’d show off what’s left and what I’ve been wearing for this season! I’m definitely all set on FFMs for another summer or two 😂 Excited to break out my Fall collection!
I officially have way too much B&BW. I will never use all of this, and having this hoard in the house has been a really big mental weight. Looking for advice on doing a cleanse — any advice on organizing, deciding what stays and what goes, and where/how to donate or resell (which I know is not allowed on this subreddit — I’m not trying to sell anything here !!) would be greatly appreciated 🖤
Allow me to reintroduce myself, my name is Charli and I’m the Everyday Luxuries Diva. For the past two months, I’ve been going through all 30 full-sized EDL FFM’s, ranking them, and discussing my thoughts and experiences with each scent. For lack of a better word, I lost my “spark” for fragrance for a while, but I still want to get the final five reviews out to you all. In the interest of still wanting to post and share, while also acknowledging writing is hard for me right now, I’m breaking down the top five into two posts. This is #’s 4 and 5. A shorter post, but I sincerely hope you enjoy <3
With Notes
EDC is a white/blonde fragrance from beginning to end. The scent moves past the strikingly dry tropic musks of coconut milk, into an intoxicating, slightly spicy white jungle floral. Finally, the vanilla sandalwood base is one of, if not the, top performing sandalwood fragrances of the last six months. The sandalwood dries rich, woody, and lactonic, providing a steady foundation for the soft tropics of a coconut rind, overall creating a subtle Polynesian white musk that dries beautiful and creamy on the skin.
While it was initially a close contest with Salted Shorelines, EDC emerged and remains my favorite of the 5 new Spring 2026 EDL’s.
I’m going to open my review of On The Horizon with a claim: This is the best dupe in the Everyday Luxuries collection. More than Maison Margiela Sailing Day, OTH achieves something a lot of B&BW scents are claimed to do but always fall short: as a former WDW attractions cast member, I’m telling you this smells like the tulkun scene in Flight of Passage and Fiji in Soarin’ Around the World. This is a fragrance of deep water, beautifully captured by colors of seaweed as opposed to simple sea salt.
Now it’s possible I have only some experience with ambergris, but I think somewhere in the purported “driftwood moss” base, On The Horizon develops a waxy, musky, almost mineral animalic. At least for the world of B&BW.
Blue Lotus, however, is the true heart of On The Horizon. Exotic, faintly oriental, the flower bundles crisp aquatic with a honeyed floral that gives the fragrance the quality of a sunny summer day somewhere in the Mediterranean, as opposed to overt sweetness. I love this fragrance.
Thank you all so much for reading my little thoughts and I hope you all reap only the good intentions I’m sending out to you over the ether. You all are truly the kindest audience I’ve ever known.
Broadcasting my love live over the airways,
Charli xx
hey it’s charli the everyday luxuries diva if anyone remembers those ranking/review posts. i’ve taken a step back from the community for mental health reasons/feeling like i’ve lost my “spark,” but i do still plan on making the final post. for now, here’s how im getting through still another “down day”.
i’d love to hear how y’all use fragrance to change up a day (~:
sending all my love over the airwaves,
Charli xx
i mean four different aquatic bergamots? in a collection of 30? one in about every eight? i love aquatic bergamot down myself but. what’s the story here 🤨🕵🏻♀️?
as a day one perfumehead: “what does tonka smell like”
as a month five perfumehead: “what do ghosts smell like?”
Ranking All 30 Everyday Luxuries - Part 5 (#10-#6: The Honorable Mentions)
Allow me to reintroduce myself, my name is Charli and I’m the Everyday Luxuries Diva. And this… is no longer a ranking. Not totally. It’s a blog post – about my fragrance journey since my last post as well as these next five fragrances, my thoughts on them and my reasoning, and the ways they’ve fit into my life, and the journey I’m on chasing the fragrance of my dreams, which I’ve entitled On The Run, made in part by layering B&BW FFMs) previously alluded to in my Salted Shorelines review. If all you’re interested in is the ranking, it’s at the bottom of this introduction. This is a long and personal post, but I believe Perfume is Art (B&BW perfume, too), and what is art for if not its transformative power, and its capacity to be lived with and debated and discussed.
With Notes
The truth is, if I were to redo this project, AEOH would slide down somewhere in the range of twelfth and fifteenth place. When I made my ranking, some of the fragrances had not long been in my possession, such that I had not truly sat and dove as deeply and with such nuance into them as I do now that I’m doing the writeup. In transparency though, this post is genuinely the first time I’ve felt a fragrance needed its position modified from the original layout. That is to say – this is not going to be a glittering review singing the praises of AEOH. I like it. I use it. What I actually have to say about it is mostly critical anyways, because its a Burberry Her dupe, and not what I dream a blackberry-jasmine-sandalwood could or should be.
Lord knows I have my problems with Burberry Her, Burberry, and British luxury fashion in general. Someone, in the most perceptive comment I imagine I’ll ever receive, observed on the last post that I write like someone who listens to a lot of Lana Del Rey. This is accurate in ways you’ll never know. I could explain it, I even wrote that out but. We don’t have all day. The point is, in my insignificant way, my pen participates in a lineage, is of a DNA if you will, that is profoundly, even obnoxiously American. And I can’t escape the American need to pour the tea in the harbor a little bit. So this is me, making fun of Burberry and denigrating their stupid strawberry EDP and their ugly tartan. I invoke Lana’s haunted confession that she herself is still looking for her own version of America. Art is political, perfume is art, a self-revealing art at that, and everywhere I go in the art world, there I am. Anyways.
You all know I don’t believe the notes listed on the back of the B&BW bottles reveal the whole story. However, if only one note could be plucked from Her’s top of “sunburst” berries for this fragrance, I’m glad it was blackberry. I am, at my best, ambivalent about berry notes in my endless rallying against the too-sweet. Darker berries win more points. Nevertheless, this fragrance smells like B&BW put all their chips on the blackberry opening. As a blackberry, it is better than Touch of Gold. As a fragrance? I’m less sure.
AEOH is slow to evolve, and when it does, it transforms into a jasmine and a sandalwood that both underperform. Or, at least, are neither my dream jasmine nor my dream sandalwood.
Whoever at B&BW dubbed the jasmine note in this “bold” needs to go sit in the corner and think about their life. I love jasmine. This jasmine, and the jasmine in Her, are jasmine grandiflorum. This jasmine isn’t bold compared to the (imo) superior jasmine sambac. Indeed, of the four jasmines in this collection alone (AEOH, Pink Obsessed, Guilty As Fig, and Floral Fantasy – none of the others we’ve gotten to yet, you’ll notice), this is far and away the least bold jasmine among them.
As for the sandalwood, I think I’m a little spoiled. In stores right now are three paragonal sandalwoods – Forever Cherry Blossom, Aurora, and Eau De Coconut. Even compared to Lost In Santal’s smooth heart sandalwood, I find the sandalwood here to merely provide a shaky base to a fragrance that doesn’t know what it is besides Blackberry. Slightly warm, maybe a bit musty.
But we don’t have all day.
Besides Inner Angel, this was the other fragrance at SAS, back when I was at the top of this rabbit hole, that pushed me around a little, despite my wanting to like it.
Five months out, Midnight Addiction is a seductive stunner I’m glad I grabbed when I did. I’d call it narcotic if I wasn’t reserving that word for a later entry to this list. Plum is a dark crushed velvet dress, even subtly boozy. Almond flower balances the line between jasmine (sambac) and licorice. This is definitely a fragrance where I believe more than just a three note stack is happening in the confines of the bottle.
Despite Black Opium’s woody vanilla cashmere base (which this fragrance does capture accurately), Midnight Addiction offers a true coffee bean note in my mind, as a sort of smoky cocoa. Maybe not totally photorealistic, but a far cry from the milky, brewed espresso of Vanilla Cafe, available in copious amounts during SAS (I never bought a bottle, but I compared the two plenty).
YSL described Black Opium as a rock’n’roll interpretation of the Opium series. I honestly haven’t worked with the different Opiums enough to have an assessment of that. But by Bath and Body Works standards? In the context of this line? Sure. Midnight Addiction is unequivocally a creature of the night. What kind of night she’s made for, I think, is a decision for the wearer to make. She’s as classy or as trashy as you choose to be. But she’s a night to remember.
God, here she is, Miss Delina, Miss Made the Jump to Core herself. What is there to say about Covered In Roses that hasn’t been said? Even by me already? I’ve previously remarked, besides my body butter, I will only buy the EDL version of CiR. When they repackaged it, I swear to you the formula changed – the EDL version features fresh, young buds of rose rolled in sharply crystalline sugar. Sweet, but not candied. The repackage brings berries, in their infinite capacity for juiciness, to the front.
Pink, or “blush,” amber, I think, is the unspoken heroine of CiR, capturing Delina’s incense, cashmeran, and Haitian vetiver base in one masterful pass. I do think the deeper pink, almost red, of the new packaging is a more accurate depiction of the “color” of this fragrance than the EDL original or even Delina herself’s bottle. This is a warm, opulent, almost oriental rose. Her sisterhood with Infinite Radiance (Valaya) is perhaps not intuitive, but decidedly apparent. Her aura simply has a certain glassy sparkle.
In the first draft of my ranking, Covered In Roses was one spot higher than If You Musk. I think most people would choose CIR over IYM. But IYM holds a special place in my pantheon. If you’ll recall, there was a fragrance tiktok trend around the start of the year where people would share their “elemental power” – the note they collect the most. Mine is musk. Despite B&BW’s best efforts to slip vanilla into EVERYTHING, I have more musk fragrances than I do anything else. Let’s not worry about just how many, I’m guilty. But if this fragrance grants “If you musk…,” then I really Must insist that I do, indeed, Musk.
I love all my musk fragrances, god knows I do, but as a musk? This outperforms them all. Powdery, warm, slightly earthy, a cool purple in color but with the texture of an old but well kept book in a warm attic.
If there was a conscious moment I started working on On The Run, I don’t remember it. The first piece of the puzzle, the foundation of the whole thing, is unequivocally the Honorable cologne (thank you 75% off SAS table), but I think I was weaving musks into Nocturnal Rose for months before I brought Honorable off the shelf and started applying what I’d learned about how different musks play from NR. Even then, it was Honorable x Fresh Musk x Honey aromatherapy, as I would not receive my bottle of IYM until early March, but the switch was made basically the day I received it. That “crisp” bergamot (which would ultimately get reintroduced by Salted Shorelines in a modified form anyways – “dewy bergamot” instead) had no place in my vision of lurid humidity in turn of the century Louisiana. But this warm spice that smells like a lover biting skin? Another creature entirely. This is the musk I’d been trying to squirrel out of B&BW since December. And frankly? It mops the floor with all three members of the current musk line, as cool as I think it is we got a “musk line” at all.
Covered In Roses is unequivocally a beauty queen, but IYM speaks to something deeper that I’m looking to find in my fragrances. IYM is experiential. Yes, a function of art is beauty. But I’d argue art’s capacity to evoke and transform, to create escape to somewhere into the artist’s soul, their pain or their ideals (On The Run speaks to all this in me, and someday maybe I’ll make a post that shares it), is a higher calling. So If You Musk gets the spot ahead of CiR. It’s my ranking to make unpopular personal choices in.
This fragrance. Broke me. Twice. (Only fair play after I dropped my bottle and screwed up the atomizer).
The first time this fragrance broke me, I was taking a preliminary crack at this post and when my nose finally hit FF, my eyes went wide. Per the above conversation of certain scents I hadn’t yet worked extensively with when drafting the ranking, I had not previously sat for a long time with FF, and it struck me – what On The Run didn’t need was the rose it had, it needed peach osmanthus. That shook me up and felt like I’d perfected the notes pyramid.
My depressing experience trying to buy a nicer similar fragrance with more lasting power (you’d think flowerbomb, but there’s actually no peach in that, I wanted peach) led me to Glossier You Fleur and Kilian Good girl gone Bad. Other than skilful marketing, packaging, and copywriting, I have nothing good to say about these fragrances except some love to Fleur’s salt note. Expensive and vanishing. FF outperforms them both. Which led to break number 2. My evolution is not B&BW → Sephora. Its BB&W → Niche microscopic avant garde concept houses. So that’s what I did. I returned all the Sephora and ordered Meleg’s tester set, ft Honey Deer Musk made from real deer musk. This joint isn’t about the luxury or the brand name for me. It’s not about fragrance that costs $410/50mL that you can wear as a boardroom compliment getter. It's about dreams and ideas and art and making something that not just makes passerby question their perfume but question what perfume is for. It’s about emotion. The truth about me is I’ve been trying to express myself through fragrance for years. It's not about the thing with the most mass appeal. It’s about telling the truth about myself — and right now, that truth is metaphysical loneliness. Like Daisy Buchanan, I’ve had a very bad time… and I’m pretty cynical about everything. I spend a lot of time in haunted ballrooms and other ghost stories and twilight zones of my own creation, ignoring the persistent pull on my arm to become a ghost of myself. Little sunlight can reach where I am. So I’m fighting to get my humble little broadcast signal out, on here, and literally “on the air” around me, in the language of the art we call perfume, and Floral Fantasy motivated a major revision to my transmission. Peaches, an idea co-signed by Miss Sasha Fierce. Live on the air here at midnight, to reach all points unknown.
If you’ve read this far, I’m in awe of you. I appreciate you. I don’t know what or when the final five looks like, but none of them have huge stories or connections with On The Run, so in theory it should be snappier, now that I’ve left everything and my soul on the field in this post. Anyways. Wasn’t that crazy?
Okay, bye! Charli xx
i know, i know, my getting a bottle of good girl gone bad is crazy after all my positioning myself as god’s strongest soldier in the crusade against kilian because i’ll never forgive them for inflicting LDBS on the world but this one is so…. Paradise Lana Del Rey. “narcotic” perfumes are, well, narcotic to me. the next part of the EDL series is probably going to come tomorrow because it’s taken me days to put 10th-6th place into words, Floral Fantasy most of all. That peach osmanthus x jasmine sambac x warm patchouli is just a one way ticket to the second ring of hell. because of it, i originally went to Sephora thinking i’d walk out with flowerbomb but flowerbomb just wasn’t hitting the same as FF with that fleshy NASTEA peach on top. thank you Floral Fantasy for giving me the framework to find the heartsong i’ve spent the last four months trying to get my fragrance to sing.
I could not BELIEVE MY EYES seeing that the Rapunzel lip gloss restocked, much less that they had Rapunzel MINIS left this late!! I grabbed the last two and I’m ecstatic!! All they had left for Princess minis were these, a bottle of Snow White, and three of Tiana. Besides Lovely Dreamer and my #1 EDL (which I won’t give away just yet), Rapunzel is the only B&BW scent that makes me wonder… “what did they PUT in this?? is it CRACK?? did they put crack in this fragrance???”
I’ve really been pushing my restraint against wanting Gingham Fresh and Peach Blossom & Nectar but at $3 each for small bottles that are less daunting to tackle finishing, I finally just caved. PB&N’s photorealistic fuzzy peach skin just gets me every time. And I don’t have anything with a daisy note yet even though I’m awash in pears. The mini of LAF was a regrettable impulse snag but I just wanted so badly to complete my set of all of the stupid Disney scents.
And now I have Strawberry Flirt!! Which puts me at 27 EDL FFMs + Seeing Rouge in body cream. The only two I don’t own in any capacity are Love Unleashed and You’re Cheeky — both of which I’ve smelled, along w Love Don’t Be Shy and Carolina Herrera GGB, multiple times, so don’t come for my crown as the EDL diva 😂🖤 All love. Have a great day y’all and happy minis sale!!
Live On The Air with All My Love,
Charli xx
Allow me to reintroduce myself, my name is Charli and I’m the Everyday Luxuries Diva. These aspirational FFMs are dreams of higher fragrance for myself and the backbone of my collection. I thought it’d be fun to share how I rank and categorize all thirty.
I’ll be honest. This is the post where I get realer than just a narrator, you’ll understand me probably better than you ever wanted in this post. For that reason, this post is also long. I’ll put a “too long; didn’t read” summary of my opinion at the end of each fragrance’s section if you’re not interested in the how and why.
With Notes
Content Warning: Co-Written by Sasha Fierce 🐆
So. I have kind of a weird relationship with Salted Shorelines. Yes, B&BW is my gateway to fragrance, yes it’s just about all I can afford besides my monthly 10mL from Sephora, but if it’s not apparent yet, I am very serious about this hobby and this art form. Even though all I have is layering, which is not the same thing, I desperately aspire to DIYing perfume someday – but for now, I have layering, B&BW, and my imagination.
I don’t strive to be a mass market perfumer. I strive to make cinematic, experiential perfume – a moment, a single celluloid frame, cut from a strip and captured in a bottle. My concepts don’t pull towards sunny florals or friendly pistachios, they’re the stepping stone between Maison Margiela and Etat Libre d’Orange. Memory in a bottle, that doesn’t apologize for being loud or raw or confrontational because it is Itself. Maybe a dream of Itself.
I’m an artist and I’m sensitive and, like I said in an earlier post, I think perfume is about telling the truth about yourself. And a hard truth about me is I’m surrounded by people who love me, but I harbor a soul-deep loneliness. Human intimacy inspires me and I take its artistic merit very seriously, no pearls to clutch. I apologize to those who will cling to their pearls at this thought, but Salted Shorelines is warm, damp, and salty. The fragrance pulls almost toward seaweed drying in the sun to me. And for that, I use it to imbue one of my elaborate (5+ bottle) layering projects with the scent of sweat on heated skin, because that’s just one element of this shot in my head that tortured me to the point of creation. And, in my limited resources, Salted Shorelines comes through perfectly. I think of layering not just as a 2 or even 3 part combo of compatible notes, I think of it as a multiplane camera. Every element introduces something new – sometimes literal, vetiver telling of dry grass; sometimes symbolic – clove bud for the scent of a freshly fled crime, some moral grit.
Maybe one day I’ll post the full combo (three parts B&BW; three parts Lush; one part Phlur) to this subreddit with the full essay Explaining It and Myself. If I ever manage to put that into words. It’s a heck of a story. Perfume in Widescreen.
But I’m getting off topic.
TLDR: I loved Salted Shorelines from the moment it launched, for the many months it was just a Jo Malone dupe for me, before creativity shifted its weight. If Eau De Coconut wasn’t so amazing, I’d consider this the best of the five new EDLs. The warm sage is comforting and this is a unique take on B&BW’s many and multitudinous saltwater profiles. Pairs great with Nocturnal Rose.
I’m not typically a berries person. Any fragrance with a berry note is coming out of the gate pushing its luck. I can’t stand Life’s A Fairytale. Which is funny, because in theory, this is the same fragrance – berry floral woods. But the result is different. The rose helps, the floral in LAF is not a rose (it’s some monstrous, pour all the ingredients in the same pot, super frankenfloral to me), so that distinguishes it, but I think the appeal for Madame Mystique for me really is some characteristic of the wood note.
YSL Mon Paris’ base is a settled blend of patchoulis, musks, vanilla, ambroxan (think dry musky amber), and cedar. Madame Mystique is a big part of why I don’t believe, though B&BW may only list three-five notes per bottle, that every fragrance that says “[adjective] woods” is the same ingredient bottle labeled “woods” in a lab somewhere every time. If that was true, the dupes wouldn’t be as good as they are.
I think the adjectives, while evocative marketing, do point to more nuance in the formulation than credit is typically given for. The woods in this does not smell like the woods in Tiana does not smell like the woods in Lovely Dreamer. At least to me.
TLDR: There is indeed a sultry, musky, almost creamy quality to the drydown of Madame Mystique for me, even in the FFM. It’s certainly the warmest (not darkest, warmest) rose I have, and I have a lot of roses. Ranking all 13 of them (I know…) would be a whole other series. I think I’d like it more if the top note leaned more pear than berry, but for the middle of the pack, this is very nice.
The funny thing about FAAF is that I bought it having forgotten I had a half-empty 10mL of Libre at home. It’s not that it's a bad dupe, the DNA is transparently obvious, I just didn’t have The Nose yet. Do I think Libre is tired and overdone and if it gets one more flanker I’ll scream? Yes, I do. Do I still think the marriage of orange blossom and lavender is just ingenious for some reason? Yes, also. And creamy vetiver? Vetiver the dry grass root?
Lavender is one note that, surprisingly, I don’t think B&BW has completely done to death. Separating it from Libre, if that’s possible, I think FAAF is fun, light, springy without being basic (ironic, I know. I mean by B&BW standards.), and a little bit unexpected. I love this one. It doesn’t make any big statements or evoke any dramatic scenes, but it’s just really lovely and a little bit demure. I do think its particular shade of green makes it the ugliest bottles in the series. My apologies.
Ah, yes. We’ve reached it. My very first Everyday Luxury and, in a larger sense, my gateway drug into perfumery as art. This one challenged me. The first several times I tried it, when I didn’t even know enough to know tonka is not, in fact, a type of vanilla, I didn’t like it, I think because I didn’t understand it.
Confidentially, I wanted to like it because the name, the apple note, and the packaging all amount to conjuring up Lucifer from Hazbin Hotel, and that was really funny to me, so I kept trying it. I don’t remember the “a-ha!” moment where this finally clicked for me, but one day around when I actually started googling scent notes I didn’t know (like tonka), I developed a rich appreciation for this one.
Which is funny because, as we all know, I’m not big on Kilian as a brand (my sincerest apologies to the Love Unleashed warriors out there. I did not realize there were quite so… many of you).
TLDR: This fragrance evokes a very specific scene to me – a wealthy holiday party done in wine reds and pine greens with gold trim, warm lights, red wine, hearth fire and snow outside. But for that reason, this fragrance is timelocked for me. I can wear it from November 1st-January 2nd, then it goes back on the shelf. It’s a wonderful fragrance – I love a holiday option with a little more high heels and red lipstick and fur coat than Vanilla Bean Noel (all love to the VBN Army, please don’t eat me).
So that’s it! We’re over the hump, if you read all the way to the end of this one, an extra special thanks to you. Thank you all for letting me share not just my opinions, but my story. Don’t touch that dial, it’s top ten from hereon out!
Sending my love over the airwaves,
Charli xx
Allow me to reintroduce myself, my name is Charli and I’m the Everyday Luxuries Diva. These aspirational FFMs are dreams of higher fragrance for myself and the backbone of my collection. I thought it’d be fun to share how I rank and categorize all thirty.
Oh, Cherry 🍒
Infinite Radiance ✨
Always Fleur 🍐
Petal Parade 🍊
With Notes
I’ve noticed this fragrance can vary slightly between bottles, whether the cherry reads “in a sophisticated cocktail” or medicinal. The word I’d use around my deployment of this scent is “caution”. It is a truly dark cherry, not softened by tonka and its many warm nuances. It does dry to something softer, creamier in the magnolia note, but the dark, boozy cherry remains prominent. This is, indeed, no Sweetheart Cherry. But that’s what I love about it. I don’t care the TFLC DNA is done to death, Lost Cherry was the fragrance soundtrack of my high school experience as a Lana Del Rey stan and I stand by it. Wearing with Covered In Roses, and Rose Vanilla if you have it, will rock your world. Romance embodied.
Infinite Radiance ✨ – The great democratizer. The layer-anywhere. The Moonlight Path of the EDL’s, there’s no fragrance I can imagine that isn’t made better, or at least, sparklier, by the introduction of Infinite Radiance. She is exactly what she thinks she is, “sweet, opulent, sensual”. Certainly high in the range of fragrances that most smell like luxury perfume – and as a dupe for Parfums de Marly Valaya, she should do exactly that. If I’m looking to add a little sparkle to my fragrance of the day, Infinite Radiance is always first on my mind. The sparkly bottle is beautiful, but the different cap drives me crazy. Especially recommend pairing this one with Tiana, or really almost any of the princesses (Cinderella is also fabulous).
Always Fleur 🍐 – After the late winter/early spring rose releases we had, my initial response to Always Fleur was “oh, god. Another rose I need like I need a hole in my head.” (Had a very similar experience with Aurora). But after a few interactions, I just could not help falling for Always Fleur’s cleanliness of gentle soaps and rose bouquets worth thousands of dollars. Always Fleur immediately teleports me to the lobby of the Grand Floridian at Walt Disney World.
Maybe this is a fragrance for a slightly older woman, but it’s classic for a reason, and I have no issue wearing it at 25. This is a fragrance that adds playfulness and youth, not gravitas and years. Developed taste, not wasted time. Unequivocally luxuriant in a way that feels meticulously earned. Great with Madame Mystique for a more nocturnal, mysterious feel.
Thank you all so much for your kind comments and support through the first half of this experience! Fragrance really is my passion and I'm so grateful to you all for giving me space and recognition for my work here, it means the world to me. I'm curious to know -- what's your favorite layering combo using one of the EDL's?
Sending my love over the airwaves,
Charli xx
Allow me to reintroduce myself, my name is Charli and I’m the Everyday Luxuries Diva. These aspirational FFMs are dreams of higher fragrance for myself and the backbone of my collection. I thought it’d be fun to share how I rank and categorize all thirty.
With Notes
I don’t have any Soleil Blanc on me right now to dig into its drydown nuances, but G.S. does settle into something a little less children-screaming-at-the-pool. Eventually, tuberose comes through, and I can almost imagine this scent was what I wished it said it was when it claimed a “solar musk” note – by which I mean, the solar musk we got in Rapunzel (my favorite Disney collab fragrance, if you happen to keep up with my posts), which contains no benzyl salicylate and instead uses amyl salicylate, combined with galaxolide’s musky radiance, to achieve its “glowing warmth” effect. Same goal, night and day result in both practical effect and personal appeal.
My cousin had received one a few days prior for Christmas, around the moment B&BW became a personality trait for me, and I remember asking to smell it and being struck principally with that bad carrier-alcohol sharpness. Surely, hers was a bad bottle, I thought. Not really. The hallmark of cheap, mass-market fragrance is that stab of paint thinner potency. B&BW usually has this issue well in hand, though the Zodiac collection was especially bad for it, but the EDL’s? I almost never have that issue. Except in Viva Vanilla.
I would no longer say I hate Viva Vanilla, especially with my expanded understanding of just how tooth-rotting gourmand can truly be. But plum holds no special place in my pantheon, and this is really just a plain, warm, vanilla amber. It’s perfectly nice! A little short on personality, for me. There’s better spins on vanilla, that darling of the cult of B&BW, in the lists to come. Great longevity, though.
Eh. Not precisely. It’s certainly nicer than other Santal 33 dupes I’ve tried. Dossier’s “Woody Sandalwood” is galling. I enjoy Lost In Santal, I find it useful in layering masculine concepts, but it isn’t the first bottle I’m rescuing if the house is on fire. I like that dry papyrus and delicate, powdery purple flowers carry over from the original fragrance. Truthfully, this is a beautiful fragrance, a beautiful dupe. I just don’t feel the soul-bond to it the way I do something in the top ten, say, If You Musk? 😉🤫
My other slight tension with Lost In Santal/Santal 33 is Le Labo’s description – “Imagine sitting in solitude on the rugged, wide plains of the American West, firelight on your face, indigo-blue night skies above. There is nothing around save for the soft, desert wind.” There’s nothing technically wrong with this. Le Labo and anyone else can craft whatever perfume they want to capture this scene. But that just so happens to be the scene I’ve spent my entire “career” in perfume trying to put into notes. And it smells nothing like LIS/Santal 33. But that’s another story.
When I was maybe 11 or 12, I was taken to a perfume counter by a relative and told to pick something out for my mom for Christmas. I picked Clinique Happy. For 15 years, she’s been steadily working her way down to the last 15% of that bottle, every special occasion.
But my mom is highly sensitive to fragrance, she’s suffered migraines all her life. So the Clinique bottle only comes out for “perfume occasions” – holidays, dinner with girlfriends. The opportunity to give my mom what I knew would be an olfactory copy of Happy without the kick to her head was a source of tremendous joy to me. And yes, I do steal the bottle back for an hour or two every once and again to do work like this.
Remember my complaint about Viva Vanilla’s nail polish remover note? The vision of alcohol painted by Hello Happiness is not that. I’ll be the first to say B&BW struggles to depict specifically light-colored alcohol in fragrance (Island Margarita, Sunshine Mimosa, and Watermelon Mojito were all skips for me), but they manage to stick the landing here. Hello Happiness is a bubbly, fruity, bright fragrance that’s extremely faithful to its original (I would know), and I don’t care if it's not duping something at the Parfums de Marly level. I just don’t particularly wear it because I’m not much one for champagne accords myself, and because it’s not my fragrance, it’s my mom’s. With all the wonderful memories attached to that. Say what you want about HH, I’m grateful for it.
But the day it came, bundled with seven other new-to-me EDL’s, I watched with a bit of a frown as MM tumbled down to fifth place in the ranking of my shiny new toys. In no way does Mediterranean Mirage offend me, it’s perfectly alright with me, but it has so little personality – especially in view of its vivid name and possession of two of my favorite words in fragrance, “bergamot” and “musks”. Erba Pura’s reputation for projection and longevity has no match in MM. It smells perfectly pleasant in a way that’s rather “me,” but it’s anything but the bold and controversial, heady and bright vacation in a bottle I was holding my breath for.
All the fragrances from hereon out are ones I truly delight in, so, if you’re staying along for the ride, just know it's all up from here! (~: Remember, this is my subjective experience with these fragrances, not moral truth. If your favorite has come and gone on this list already, it doesn’t mean I think you’re wrong or shouldn’t wear it! This effort is a sort of self-portraiture. I believe fragrance is about choosing something from within yourself to tell the truth about each day. This series is not about the truth of these body sprays, it's the truth about me.
I’m overwhelmed and flattered by the response to the first post, and I love reading your comments, even when you’re feverishly telling me why I’m wrong. Lean into that! What do you think? Am I wrong? Do you have a particular EDL you could truly take or leave? Or that you think they were insane to ever make to begin with?
Sending my love over the airwaves, Charli xx