Camélia Chinois / Eau de Camélia Chinois 
Maître Parfumeur et Gantier (1997)

A sharp, green tea floral that did this wearer no favours. The components smell el cheapo, the tea note with a citric edge is strident and chemical as it often can be in bargain variants and the florals, well, they're muddled, ‘feminized' (as in what marketers think women like to wear, generically sweet and lacking any contour) and vaguely white. The overall impression was of a scent looking for a scouring product as its home. Warmed up a bit with wear, but still remained a joyless experience.

For the record, my sample from MPG calls this Eau De Camelia Chinois - I don't know if this is a different formulation or if there was just a name change at some point in the last 15 years...

On me, this is mostly a lightly powdery soap smell. It's got fake plasticky rose mixed with cheap plasticky strawberry and fake plasticky lily, so it's sort of an aquatic fruity floral, but it's thickly surrounded by soapy haze. It would be kind of disappointing, but not terrible if this were all it did, but there's a weird confluence of off-notes that really mess this perfume up. For one, there's a very upfront sharpness that reminds me of bathroom cleaner - it's almost like that nose tickle you get smelling ammonia, but all that soap makes it feel vaguely like a cheaply-scented cleaning product. Then there's a weird bathroom smell. I don't think it's civet - it's more like the smell of a restroom with heavy traffic.

The end result of all of this is the smell of a dirty bathroom that's been ineffectively cleaned with some sort of cheap soapy strawberry rose cleaner. Honestly, I can't imagine who would want to wear this. Fruity floral fans will likely be scared off by the dirt, while skank fiends most likely won't appreciate the cheaply-done fruity floral elements.

On paper, Eau de Camelia Chinois has a delicate but bright floral and light exotic fruit ambiance; unfortunately, this is not what I get when it's worn. No, on the skin this is not an “Eau de”… This one is too heavy, too soapy, too over-the-top, and all of these “too's” are going on too long. Eau de Camelia Chinois hits my skin and becomes this basil soapy monster, except that there is some little smell deep down inside it that is totally disgusting. Soon the fragrance morps into a urine smell. The strange thing is that I have never really gotten those urine smells in fragrances infamous for urine smells, but I get them here in this one. My nose gets quickly fatigued from smelling this. I think calchic is absolutely right – it's a skin chemistry thing, and it surely does “things” when it hits my skin.