Lolita Lempicka 
Lolita Lempicka (1997)

les amoureux Marc Chagall 1928

Definitely one of the sweetest and perfumes I own, but I love this one and consider it a modern classic. This seems to work because it also includes the powdery violet and iris, and some herbs and spice from the star anise, licorice and ivy. Despite being classified as a gourmand scent, this doesn't tip the scales into total food territory. It also manages not to be an Angel clone even though it came out around the same time, but is completely its own thing. The bottle fantastic and is very evocative of the scent, and the advertising as well, this does have a sort of girly, fairy garden feel. It's sweet, fun and easy to wear but still complex and very unique. Good stuff!

As this is the 113th review of Lolita Lempicka I'm not going to run over its highs and lows, others have done that already.

There are now 46 flankers of the original juice, most of them housed in a bottle shaped like an apple, just like Poison, and it's this poisonous gourmand thing that makes LL so interesting.
Back in the nineties, perfume wasn't afraid to use ivy in an oriental gourmand (cf Pavarotti for Men) but today, the 'eat me - don't eat me' dilemma is a challene for mass perfumery. In its day, the contradictory gourmand of LL didn't stop it being a best seller. But since then, perfumers seem to have forgotten that gourmands function best on the boundary of scent and taste. Under pressure to make more commercial things, the trend has been away from the inedible - and towards the tasty. Perfume now tries to hook the consumer through her (and increasingly) his, taste buds.

At first it was candy floss but now it's bigger doses of cheap molecules derived from the flavour industry. As a consequence, the gourmand has lost its uneasy, stomach churning, headache inducing power to fascinate - and repel - at the same time. Somehow, a huge dollop of red fruity syrup with your patchouli seems easier to swallow than parma violets and licorice hidden in the ivy growing on a wooden fence, such as we have here.

LL divides opinion. And that's a good thing in my book; it shows there is a creative spark at work. The mixture of edible and indigestible presents the kind of challenge that music does when the melody is dissonant as well as harmonious.

So today, in the age of the fruchouli jingle, what seems amazing about a dissonant gourmand like Lolita Lempika is - how successful it was.

I'm new to the vast, magical world of fragrance, which means that I'm just now testing fragrances that others have known for years.

I recently sampled Wildfox's namesake perfume and fell in love with its licorice note. Strange, since I detest eating/drinking anything with licorice flavor and find the Wildfox brand supremely irritating. Seeking out other fragrances with licorice/absinth/anise notes, I discovered Lolita Lempicka.

The licorice in Wildfox is almost sparkling yet still smooth due to it's complementary honey note. Lolita Lempicka's licorice is smooth and mysterious, not quite dark, not too sweet, and completely irresistible. I should have been wearing this in 1998 when I first listened to Smashing Pumpkins' 'Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness' from beginning to end, lying on my bedroom floor with my eyes closed and burning incense despite (or, in all honesty, because of) my parents' strict no-incense rule. I was seven years late as a Smashing Pumpkins fan, and now I'm 21 years late as a Lolita Lempicka fan. Luckily, it's still pretty easy to find, and I look forward to adding this to my meager but growing collection.