Originally Posted by
aquarius_moon
If you’re considering buying Euphoria, don’t merely test it but wear it for a couple of hours before you decide. I, for one, was nearly misled by the opening, which seemed to promise such a gorgeous oriental that I thought, “Where has this retro beauty been all my life!” In less than fifteen minutes, I was thinking, “Hmm, maybe too retro after all, and common, and my actual 80s scents are far superior.” Soon after that, I was slouching my shoulders, hoping no one could smell me. Rather than retro, Euphoria became to me cheap and suffocating, and that way it stayed till the end, changing neither in character nor in volume. It didn’t so much progress as shed the mask.
For my own curiosity and so as to be informative rather than rude, I wish I could find the culprit among the notes, but I’m stumped. We all know that listed notes bear merely a poetic relationship with scents, but in this case, I can’t even begin to reconcile them. If I had to make my own list, I’d probably come up with something like ‘rose, carnation, patchouli,' and the rest of it I’d ascribe to imaginary notes I’d call 'molasses' and ‘Venus trap’ or other carnivorous plant. (Who knows if the copywriters thought along the same lines when they came up with ‘orchid.’)
Since I can’t discern what this perfume smells like, I’m lost in a flurry of unflattering clichés it brings to mind. My first impulse is to call it ‘the quintessential old lady scent.’ My second impulse is to call it ‘a perfume a streetwalker would refuse to wear on the grounds of it being too vulgar.’ To reconcile somewhat puzzling ideas of cheapness, vulgarity, and old ladies, I even came up with a story or two. In one, a young woman palms off an unwanted gift on a benign great aunt, and the unsuspecting old lady wears it out of sentimentality. In another, the old lady is a tragic former showgirl falling to dementia, this one to the tune of Lola, the character from the old Barry Manilow song.
If these descriptions reek subtly of sexism, it’s where Euphoria takes my mind. Far from being ‘too masculine’ or ‘power woman’ as some reviewers perceive it, to my nose it's grotesquely ‘feminine’ in the way a misogynist 19th century thinker might mean it. It's like a portrait of femininity seen as a sticky mess of neurotic emotions, carnal desires, and some base seductive cunning, with added strokes of decay, melancholy, and schmaltz. I don’t like this portrait, and I don’t like Euphoria. ‘Masculinity’ (in the most abstract sense, as opposite polarity) may be precisely what it lacks—some yang to cut through all the yin, balance the composition, and make it less one-dimensional in its attempt to woo the senses.
It goes without saying that these are just my (idiosyncratic?) impressions, and I hasten to add that I’m not on the hate-Calvin-Klein wagon. I like a number of the older releases and Beauty among the newer ones. The best I can say for Euphoria is that it doesn't smell 'chemical' or cause headaches.