Favorite perfume

[Pallas]

I haven't been into perfume much, but the one time I got any it was this: https://www.fragrantica.com/perfume/...horia-253.html

Between it lasting all day if you spray just a little bit, and my hiatuses in wearing perfume at all (hearing various reasons not to, using scented lotion, etc.) it lasted quite a while. I even looked up to make sure I wasn't wearing some sort of goofy high schooler perfume and nope. Getting it was a great story since it was one of 3 perfumes at the mall that wasn't for old people and the other two were in a ladybug and a daisy bottle and smelled like different kinds of citrus, and then there's Euphoria by Calvin Klein™, and I was just like "That's more like what I'm looking for..." I ended up getting a lot of compliments on it so at least I can be glad I can wear the more "mature" and "sexy" perfumes easy. But I feel like if I got a new one I'd probably get a different one (I liked this one a lot but I want to try more, but still no fruity dish soap fragrances ).

Love how over-the-top the reviews on this site are:

Whenever I am in the mood for a darker fragrance I reach for Euphoria. I think the name is kind if ironic because to me Euphoria is a deep, dark and somewhat melancholic scent. But that is not to say that I don't love it, I truly do. It has a special place in my wardrobe for dark, damp days when I just want to wallow in the darker aspects of life. It is a bitter sweet symphony. It opens with very dark red berries, which lends this perfume the strange element of alternating between juicy sweet and immensely bitter. On my skin I do not get any of the lotus, only orchid. Not white or pink orchids, but I imagine them to be a bouquet of dark red and dark purple orchids. Then the mahogany makes it's appearance which is just a very beautiful. The entire scent feels somewhat gothic. I get the seductive aspect, but it is a different kind of seduction. It is the bitter pleasures of a forbidden seduction. I can imagine a beautiful gothic looking vampire lady pulling this scent off. I get deep reds and dark purples from Euphoria, a sweet yet bitter forlorn melancholy. This is a beautiful scent to wear during cold rainy days when you don't feel like a bright cheery perfume to contradict the weather. If you want a dark scent to suit your dreary day then reach for this. Perhaps there is some often overlooked euphoria in the darker, hidden aspects of life.

This has not been reformulated. It smells exactly like the rollerball I have from like... 10 years ago. So I really don't get what people are talking about. If it's been reformulated, it's definitely not the smell, might be the quality of it that's changed.

It's sexy and dominating, and it fits a woman with a masculine side perfectly. Or a very bossy woman. I like Forbidden Euphoria more, but this is also good. A big like from me.

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.