SOTD: Tommy Hilfiger Tommy Girl

Luca Turin presented Tommy Girl with five stars. Like much of the perfume world, I don't get it.

To my surprise, I like the fruity opening. It's pleasant and mellow and oddly childhood-familiar. I can imagine the opening notes as a perfume for little girls, sold in a wonderful toy store in a pink bottle with glass jewels. A faceted bottle. Green glass jewels.

This vision is getting very specific, isn't it? There was a toy store once that my mother rarely took us to - a place of surpassing grandeur in my childhood world. Among its attractions, it featured big glass cases rigged up as miniature rooms with grandly attired Barbie dolls lounging on Seventies-style Lucite furniture and fur rugs, like a very small and entirely respectable Playboy mansion. Tommy Girl reminds me of that store - perhaps there really was a little girl's perfume with that apple-citrus-currant-honeysuckle combination.

As long as I'm listing notes, I'll offer the full, alarmingly long list. According to Basenotes, the top notes are camellia flowers, apple blossoms, black currant, mandarin, and tangerine. Middle notes are grapefruit, citrus orchards, crisp green notes, honeysuckle, and butterfly violets. And the base notes are desert jasmine, Cherokee rose, magnolia petals, Dakota lilies, cedar, sandalwood, and wild heather. Whew.

Sadly, the mellow fruity opening gives way to a high-pitched floral blend that doesn't interest me nearly as much, at least right now - in the winter, it's just shrill, and it stays shrill as time goes on, only reducing its volume with time. Even the honeysuckle, usually a note that I find delightful, fails to save it. So today, I'm unimpressed with Tommy Girl.

But in the summer, that sour floral blend might have some of the appeal of the lemon sorbet from the corner ice cream shop that delightfully blows my eyebrows off. I'll be trying it again on some hot summer Saturday when we're headed for the park - under those circumstances, I might fall seriously in love. Maybe even enough to agree with Mr. Turin.

Review Roundup: Perfume Posse and Sweet Diva and Perfume Shrine and Scent Signals and Perfume Posse again and Basenotes and Fragrantica and MakeupAlley and Scentsate.

Photo: By Andrew Dunn. Wikimedia Commons.