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| "You're a real peach, you know that?" |
I'm always wary about brands that lavish extraneous effort on packaging. If it looks like two hundred hours and the entire crew of the Queen Mary 2 went into designing and manufacturing your box and bottle, how much energy was left for the perfume?
By Kilian goes above and beyond to ensure their presentation is top-tier, and Forbidden Games comes in what is probably the most eye-pleasing bottle I've ever seen. This stuff looks so royal, all bedecked in gold plating and glossy white lacquer. Surely the perfume inside is extraordinary? Well, it's a basic fruity-floral. But, it's a superlatively made fruity-floral, so at least there's that. It opens with a mouth-watering explosion of juicy and extra-sweet peach and plum nectar, and then swirls into a crisp apple juice accord that literally smells like a Mott's bottle for the better part of two hours. Eventually a touch of rose and powdery vanilla try to balance out the intense fruit, but this happens after the peach has returned in force, so no dice. This thing is a guided missile of fruitiness, so take cover.
Its stones and pomes are loud, bright, vulgar, and the spare nuances of floral and vanillic notes aren't enough to level things off. Forbidden Games boasts some of the most extreme fruit notes I've ever smelled, but with a Tang-level opacity that reminds me of better high and low-end alternatives: Spring Flower by Creed, and Fruit by Al Rehab.