Velvet Pure
Dolce & Gabbana (2016)

Pure? I don't know....whenever I hear the term "pure" - whether men's or women's fragrance - I imagine a very clean, singular and linear scent, usually (but not always) tangy or lavender-y.

Enter D&G's Velvet Pure: Chock full of flowers, and sharing space with a lot of odd saltiness. There's an overall synthetic quality that is fairly off-putting. Quality of ingredients don't smell as high as in other outings in the "Velvet Collection" of D&G.

The final product is a green-aromatic-floral which is hard to pin down in my sensibilities. Keeping in mind that this leans feminine, still I don't know how it'd come across (depends on the lady's skin chemistry). Meh.

This is one of those perfumes where I'm not sure how the notes relate to the actual smell at all. Basically, Velvet Pure is a lily perfume.

The lily is your standard chemical lily smell, slightly dirty, quite green, and vaguely aquatic. The aquatic aspect is bolstered with what must be a cubic ton of calone, because Velvet Pure is extremely mineralic and salty. There's also a quiet hum of white flowers and quite a bit of soapy musk, so the whole thing mostly smells like really salty lily of the valley soap.

Given time, the salty mineral smell progresses far enough to actually smell kind of like concrete dust. I think this is characteristic of what makes Velvet Pure interesting, but I think is also its downfall: an intentional chemical artificiality. Ostensibly, this is the smell of coastal flowers by the Italian sea, but it knows it's not. It's lyrol and calone and chemical stabilizers and it smells like chemicals creating an abstract interpretation of flowers and the ocean. As such, I find it kind of unsatisfying.