Beauty

by Calvin Klein, 2010, so-so


Calvin Klein keeps trying to make scents for the classy mass-market, all things to all people. Sounds like a recipe for failure, no? Surprisingly, Estée Lauder has made good, interesting scents doing this very thing, but unlike Estée Lauder, CK usually falls well short of success. Yes, even CK One. And its gazillion flankers. 

(OK, ok! Obsession-was-one-of-the-greatest-scents-ever-please-get-off-my-back!)

It should be no surprise then that Beauty is also a disappointment. It comes off classy and mature, a refreshingly grown-up scent unlike the sugar sweet everything else on the sales counter. It’s floral, in an indefinable way, that at first reminds you of classic perfumery, where the perfume smells of itself, not its ingredients. It mellows, it rounds, it develops, …then it completely evaporates, in about an hour. Gone. Poof! Nothing there, nobody home. Right before it completely disappears, its scent thins, cheapens, bears a striking resemblance to the public-restroom-detergent cheap nag-champa smell of Mugler’s Cologne (without the necessary tongue-in-cheekiness), then disappears. What’s left? A thin layer of vague cheap white musk & bad candy vanilla, and I’m not sure that’s not left over from the Belle en Rykiel I wore a couple days ago.

This is so not worth the money, even if it were a cheap drugstore scent (it isn’t), even if it’s on sale (it won’t be anytime soon), even from a discounter (why bother?). The most you can say is it’s inoffensive, it has the same quality as a Perry Ellis or Hugo Boss scent: safe, bland office-wear, so you can completely blur into your beige cubicle.