At long last, I finally have these two fragrances side by side. My story with Tommy Girl is a bit tiresome (crib notes: I developed an allergy), and I abandoned it in 2014, then gave my pre-IFRA bottle to a girlfriend at the time, and it took her all of five minutes to wear half the bottle down to empty. This kind of thing doesn't often happen to me, but I recall being annoyed that it did with Tommy Girl, especially since I genuinely love the fragrance.
Imagine that you enjoy tea-based fragrances, you enjoy blackcurrant notes, you love green fragrances, and you happen to have more than a passing appreciation for bucolic florals. Then imagine finding all of these traits in a single inexpensive fragrance by an American designer brand once all the rage in the 1990s. Then take that a bit further, and picture the day when you realize you simply can't wear the stuff. You can be near it, on someone else, but your sinuses forbid you from wearing it yourself. What a dreadful feeling that was. At the time, I didn't really blame anyone or anything but myself. I told myself that it had happened because I was too sensitive, and couldn't handle the composition, and also that I had absolutely awful luck, which like a perverse slot machine in some infernal casino meant getting all three pineapples on a whiff of Calice Becker's masterpiece.
The truth was less dramatic than that. My bottle was made before the IFRA really kicked their aroma chemical censorship regime into high gear by restricting and banning floral materials, and the Lauder formula at that time (late '90s or early 2000s) definitely used a few things on their list. I don't often thank the IFRA for restricting and removing perfumery materials, but in the case of Tommy Girl, I'll just lay it on the line: they did a good thing here. The old formula was gorgeous, but it was also overpowering. There was a denseness to it, a radiance that was nearly blinding, and at some point whatever floral components were responsible simply overpowered my immune system and triggered an overreaction. It wasn't the tea base with its papery green svelteness, or the abstracted blackcurrant haze under all the white floral and rose materials, but some element in the bouquet itself, some floral note that was overpowering me.
Fast forward to 2025, and suddenly I find myself faced with a peculiar choice. I'm in a discount retail store perusing the seemingly endless array of "budget" fragrances on offer, many of them actually quite expensive and in some cases egregiously overpriced, when I spot a few bottles of Tommy Girl. It's in the new packaging with red stripes, and it's obvious that the Hilfiger fragrance division has pawned itself off to someone else, with Lauder no longer producing their wares. Why this happened is beyond me, and I don't really care enough to look into it, although I'm sure someone like Derek or Andre have already dug into and explained it, and if they haven't, I'm just as sure that someday they will. But the plain fact is that these fragrances have been reformulated, and are now living in a post-IFRA world. The wheels start to turn, and I reckon that there's a good chance whatever was in Tommy Girl in 2000 is very likely no longer in Tommy Girl today.
So I take a chance and buy a bottle, knowing full well that if I spend the $27 on it and it still gives me a massive headache, I'll have burned that $27. But I suspect that the fragrance will be chemically altered to enough of a degree that it likely will not mess me up, and upon bringing it home and giving it a spritz, am pleased to report many days after the fact that indeed, the floral materials that once comprised the supernova of "fresh" petals are no longer the same, and I can wear Tommy Girl with no after effects. This gives me a chance to do something that I've wanted to do since 2020: figure out in a side by side comparison why exactly Tommy Girl and Chelsea Flowers smell so similar? Laurent Le Guernec's 2003 "niche" floral doesn't share all that many similar notes, yet at the very first spray, I recognized and said out loud, "Tommy Girl!" But why?
Chelsea Flowers doesn't have a tea note. There's no blackcurrant in the mix, and there's a soapy-green aspect that resembles the starched floral bouquets in drugstore refrigerators. But the sweetness of its florals is muted, with its damp, green, stemmy facet dialed up instead. Meanwhile, Tommy Girl is all about green tea, intensely blossomy florals, and blackcurrant, which smells more focused, rounded, and juicy in the new formula (actually miles better than vintage). Becker's composition isn't as finely textured as Le Guernec's, but its texture flows in broad, wonderful strokes, with each whiff of a blossom followed five minutes later by a slightly nuanced whiff of another beside it. Chelsea Flowers, in contrast, smells of grassy greens in a humid environment chilled by artificial rain drops and a cooling unit on high. The faint sweetness of the blossoms exists not becuase these flowers are aromatic, but simply by virtue of their numbers -- there are a hundred of them crammed into a little space, and if you could climb in with them, their collective odor would eventually make an impression. Undergirding all of this is a weirdly nondescript soapiness where in Tommy Girl there is green tea, green tea, and more green tea.
With all of these differences, why is the comparison inevitable? Why, when I smell Chelsea Flowers, does my mind immediately leap to Tommy Girl? No single material or cluster of notes can be isolated and used to identify the olfactory similarities that I experience with these two fragrances, yet it's there. I can only speculate. Perhaps Chelsea Flowers contains a cleverly hidden green tea note? Maybe there's a speck of blackcurrant in there, too, which somehow tilts the overall balance into Tommy territory? Le Guernec's fragrance came out seven years after Becker's, so clearly he was using her work as inspiration when he authored this floral marvel, but what, other than the smell of grocery store bouquets, was he after? Did he imitate the soapy amber and give it just enough of a sweet floral lilt to be evocative of the designer tea floral? Is there a note in Tommy Girl that eludes definition, and is the secret god molecule for making any "fresh" floral smell like Tommy Girl? I may never know. The fragrances are very much abstract meditations on the quietude that surrounds flowers, and in that headspace I zen out, so perhaps it's simply a shared psychological effect gleaned from both compositions.
So, too, might I find answers in noticing what is different about them. Tommy Girl is radiant, but it's also dusky and dry, save for the blackcurrant note. Chelsea Flowers is also radiant, but dewey and wet all the way through, and I can't not think of cheap clutches of hothouse flowers sitting in buckets of water on the floor of a glass fridge in a Price Chopper or Big Y. Tommy Girl is sweet; Chelsea Flowers less so. Tommy Girl uses green tea for most of its "green" vibe, while Chelsea Flowers seems to eschew any obvious tea note in favor of less exotic stems and leaves rubber-banded together. There's a kind of pollen-like quality to Chelsea that Tommy lacks, while Tommy's more blatant watery florals are louder and grander and in no way as peripheral.
It's clear that both fragrances share a fundamental skeletal structure, but in Chelsea, this core is layered beneath elements that set it apart from Tommy. Between the two, I definitely like Tommy more, which is weird considering the price difference. I mean, if I were to pass on paying retail for Chelsea, I could buy about ten bottles of Tommy Girl and have a lifetime supply. With that said, I actually think owning Chelsea Flowers has been worth it (granted, I paid a third of what the going rate is), and I like it very much, and would repurchase it if the price was right. Now that Creed is getting ridiculous with its pricing, and now that tariffs are about to jack those prices even higher (not really, but everyone likes to pretend there's a good reason to increase prices), Olivier's biggest competitor might have an edge, even with me. In any case, I want the world to know that owning both of these is not redundant, but owning one, the cheaper one, is really all you need.