A Vanilla Roundup
It's fall which means it's almost winter which means it's the time of the year to wear your vanilla fragrances. Personally I can't wear vanillas for most of the year, due to the fact that I live in a hot climate, I usually find them pretty heavy, and also I don't like vanilla. I know, sue me. I just cannot find it in me to enjoy a plain vanilla, it's such a bland note. I can't deny it's a very widely popular base, generally inoffensive, and plays well with lots of notes, plus it's something that many people know. It's an easy touchstone when it comes to notes.
Having said that, I am not immune to a vanilla fragrance. Despite a paragraph saying I don't like the note alone, I can appreciate it blended into a perfume and see merit in the scents. It would be unfair of me to say all vanilla forward scents are bad, just like not all rose scents are good. While I mostly prefer it as a base note and blended in under other notes I do like, let's give some vanilla forwards their due, in honor of cold weather season.
Skylar - Vanilla Sky EDP
Starting off strong with a very vanilla forward scent. The box lists the note as "pure vanilla" and it certainly is. This smells like vanilla extract if you burn off the alcohol, or if you've ever been lucky enough to handle vanilla beans pods. There's very little sweetness to it, just rich, warm vanilla.
The notes list has citrus openers but I personally don't get any on initial spray, it's all vanilla and gentle milky coffee. Within an hour it settles into the skin and I lose the coffee but the jasmine starts to blossom. The jasmine sits very close to the skin, under the vanilla, but the vanilla is what exudes into the air around me while the jasmine is acts more like an enhancer. The caramel warms up into the vanilla after about 3 hours, making the whole composition sweet and heavy, the aromatic version of getting chewy caramel stuck in your teeth. As it melts the sweetness isn't directly on your tongue but diffused around your mouth, gently and completely. The jasmine is still sitting close to the skin, and when I raise my wrist to my nose to take another sniff of the delectable composition, the cedar and sandalwood begin to bleed in, making the gentle white florals airy and clean. These still sit very deep under the much heavier gourmand scents, but they add a levity to the composition that's just for the wearer's delight.
After about 6 hours the air has cleared and I am left with the caramel and vanilla just on the skin, still sweet and warm. The alcohol has burned off and it's tasty vanilla now. While I don't doubt a little bit of nose blindness has occurred during the wear, the air around me is only slightly vanilla scented, the last bits lingering as though someone wearing the fragrance was in the room just before me. The amber is becoming more noticeable, emerging next to the residual caramel. The woods notes have also been subsumed into the caramel, leaving a sweet, heavy residue. This is not to suggest the caramel is overwhelming, but rather that it lasts the longest on the skin, and so all the other notes melt into it.
This is definitely a gourmand's delight, very rich with a touch of sweetness. I don't find that the caramel and cappuccino overlap too much, so you will avoid a Starbucks drink explosion; it's more like you order a slightly weak coffee and have a little pastry with a toasted caramel topper after you finish it. The vanilla acts as the lynchpin, marry the gourmand notes to each other while also providing a way for the white florals and woodsy notes to play a cohesive part, as vanilla is also a flower and bean.
As mentioned before, I cannot deny the incredible versatility vanilla has, straddling the worlds of florals, woods, and gourmands, and this fragrance does a great job showing what a team player vanilla can be while also being a star in it's own right. I can confidently recommend this one for anyone looking for a good, photorealistic vanilla without a ton of sweetness. My only drawback is that unless you take the time to separate the notes and see how the play with each other, this can come off as a very bland and one dimensional fragrance.
The 7 Virtues - Vanilla Woods EDP
Another incredibly realistic and heavy raw vanilla bean note, but this one feels smoky. If I didn't look at the notes list I would swear up and down that this has tobacco in it. It has a very woodsy edge to the initial spray and for about 3 hours it remains that heavy, smoky, raw vanilla smell. It almost has a very cologne like quality to it, not quite Tom Ford's Tobacco Vanille but veering just a little masculine, certainly more widely wearable than Vanilla Sky. It has great projection and really gets into the air around you.
After 3 hours the caramel starts to seep in and starts to smell very cola like. I have Snif's Soda Snob, which is meant to smell just like cola and this leans very much that way. Not full soda syrup, but it is very reminiscent. Still retains that smoke, which keeps it from being too sweet a gourmand. It's less like a caramel candy and more like someone is accidentally slightly scorching their caramel on the stove. I genuinely do not get any rose or pear from this one. Personally I don't mind that too much, I think a rose would've competed very oddly with the tobacco I kept getting. With the woodsy aspect of the vanilla bean and the unintentional tobacco note, this makes me think of the inside of a cigar shop, but the creaminess of the vanilla keeps it from getting too masculine. I genuinely think anyone could wear this one.
After about 7 hours the air around me has cleared and the fragrance has settled into the toasty warm base notes on my skin. I have lost the caramel and the amber is gently simmering on my skin. That smokiness is still there but now reduced to smoldering ashes, nearly undetectable under the amber. It still has me sniffing my wrists for the remnants, the vanilla and amber sticking to me and reluctant to leave.
The tobacco opener and cola mid does make this a very fun and interesting fragrance to wear, the vanilla playing a pivotal role. The woodiness of the vanilla helps the tobacco feel grounded, but it also helps usher in the caramel notes seamlessly, in a way that makes it feel natural to go from a cigar shop to a soda shop. Being on the heavier side, this would definitely be better sprayed with a lighter hand and worn in temperatures where you also need a scarf.
Floral Street - Wild Vanilla Orchid EDP
This has been the lightest of the ones I've tried so far. There is a good amount of floral on the initial spray and the vanilla plays more of a backseat role. There's a creaminess from the orchid on the opener that melts into the jasmine as the fragrance opens up. The base is mostly vanilla bean with some sandalwood keeping it nicely grounded without getting too deep. As a patchouli enjoyer, I didn't really get any on the dry down.
Unfortunately this one just did not do a lot for me. It is a simple, lovely fragrance with some approachable florals and a nice mid tone vanilla, not too woodsy and not too heavy. The bamboo and sandalwood keep the fragrance from getting too bogged down, and the use of vanilla flower to tie in the jasmine and flowers was a nice touch, but unfortunately I just didn't care about what this fragrance had to say. It wasn't rich enough in vanilla to stand up to the other heavy hitters on this list, nor was it floral enough to be a flower forward fragrance. There was no spice from the patchouli and the creaminess of the white florals did little to make an impression. It faded fully after about 6 hours and I was not sad for the loss.
Snif - Vanilla Vice EDT
Personally I think the marketing is a bit misleading on this one. They have pictures and videos of ice cream melting, being licked, sprinkles everywhere, but this does not smell like vanilla ice cream. If you were hoping for that mild, sweet, cool smell of plain churned vanilla ice cream (or soft serve as the marketing calls it, although soft serve and ice cream are two different things) then you will be as surprised as I was to smell how smoky this scent is. Don't get me wrong, I will never turn down a marketing campaign that has hot people sensually licking ice cream cones, the concept never gets old! But this is not an ice cream scent.
It has a very short and simple notes list, very suggestive of richness and this is a heavy fragrance. All Snif fragrances are eau de toilettes and I think if this one had been formulated any more concentrated it would've made for a very potent scent indeed. The vanilla and the amberwood combine to create a note that is very close to toasted waffle cone, which is as close to an ice cream parlor as we come with this fragrance. This is the most noticeable aspect of the fragrance and the one that lasts the longest. The sugar and musk create this beautiful but ambiguous sweet smell, like standing near a cotton candy machine and smelling pure warm sugar in the air. It is overall a fun and tasty fragrance with just enough of a burnt waffle cone edge to keep it from being too bland. It remains roughly the same throughout the wear, with the toasted smell settling after about 4 hours into more of a background note. The musk and Orcanox, which is ambroxan, gives this beautiful depth to the whole mixture. The more the fragrance settles into the skin the more the musk appears, giving it a very pillowy and creamy dry down.
While I understand sambac is not quite as cloying as other jasmine notes, I just did not get any floral from this fragrance. Contrasting it to the uplifting and airy note of jasmine in Vanilla Sky, I think getting a more noticeable jasmine note in this mixture would've helped offset just how heavy and deep this is. There weren't any top notes to give this fragrance any levity. As I said earlier, all the notes here suggest heaviness. However this does make it a very long lasting fragrance, despite the toilette concentration. It lasted me all day and through the gym, the lovely deep base still swirling past me as I moved my arms during my workout, something that made otherwise grueling bicep curls much more enjoyable.
In Vanilla Vice's defense, it was not as aggressive in its sillage as the first two fragrances on this list. Those filled up the air around me and stayed there for about 6 hours before tapering off into their more intimate dry downs. This fragrance is more discreet. It's in the air but I only notice it when I move my arms, wafting it up into my nose before it settles back down. This is one that someone would need to be a little closer to you to smell, but the smoky aspect of this fragrance means that anyone getting that intimate is rewarded with a scent that's a little sexy while being delectable.
Overall
In terms of complexity I think Vanilla Sky has the most to lead your nose through, with Vanilla Vice and Vanilla Woods both having a variety of notes but overall a fairly comprehensive and simple linear wear. Wild Vanilla Orchid was the most simple, just gentle white florals and a medium rich vanilla sandalwood base, generally the same from initial spray to dry down.
I think Vanilla Vice is probably the one I would suggest for someone looking for an everyday, easy vanilla from the pack, because it vanilla forward, is a little toasted and soft for a good interplay of notes, is more interesting than a plain vanilla, but remains a fairly even wear throughout the day. Vanilla Sky would be one I would also feel confident recommending, since it is full on vanilla the whole way through, but is certainly more sweet for those looking for a very obvious gourmand. My only caution on Vanilla Woods is it's a little more masculine with the tobacco and woods, but if you like that, then definitely give it a go. The vanilla is still very prominent, it's just a lot less sweet than most popular vanilla gourmands available. Wild Vanilla Orchid is just to me the most plain of the ones here. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but there's nothing to write home about. A good, simple, easy fragrance that only you will smell for the whole work day and be gone in time for you to go to bed.
I had fun with these. Despite wearing vanillas for a week and seeing a variety of ways it can be blended in with other notes, none of these wowed me, but that's only because of my own apathy towards vanilla, not because these were bad scents. I remain on the hunt for a vanilla that will knock my socks off. If you have any suggestions for a vanilla for me to try, leave it down below and I'll see what the fuss is about.