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| Basic Victorian Bitch |
There's fine perfumery, and then there's Basic Bitch Juice.
Let me make the distinction: fine perfumery entails the complex and abstract blending of accords that, when conjoined a certain way, create something moving on both a sexual and intellectual level. Think Mitsouko, Catherine Deneuve's signature, and picture her naked in a bathtub in Pola X (1999). Mitsouko = Not that Basic.
Basic Bitch Juice is bright-fruity meets intense, sugar rush vanilla, followed by six hundred sprays and an influencer vid gushing about the compliments she gets wearing it. Sweet, saccharine, edible, evoking only calories and candy. In other words, even a coma patient would find it agreeable, but nobody finds it particularly interesting.
Such is Lattafa's Victoria. It's trashy in a good way. Often compared to lemon meringue, I think it smells closer to shortbread lemon squares baked by a chef with a fondness for ethyl maltol. I smell Victoria and immediately think, "Basic Bitch." She never stopped celebrating her "dirty thirty." She shops at Poshmark. Spends $150 a week on Starbucks. Pulls her hair up in severe ponytails all day, every day, instead of just getting a pixie cut. Melts for other people's dogs but shudders at the thought of having children. And she exclusively wears perfumes that smell like cotton candy. It doesn't smell good to her if it isn't identical to what she can stuff in her face and feel guilty about as she goes for seconds. Hell, she's even named Victoria.
With all of that said, I should be fair to Victoria (the perfume); while it won't win awards for originality, it should get noticed for being incredibly well made, and well heeled. The box is studded with leather siding meant to resemble the corinthian style of Victorian fainting couches, and frankly it looks great. The faux marble patina on the box and bottle evoke cold marble staircases and gothic horror. If I didn't know better, I'd look at it and think I was in for a dusty rose chypre. Instead, the fragrance opens with a pert blend of fizzy lemon aldehyde and d-limonene, which I feel leans into an orange character as it dries, with distinct nuances of neroli and petitgrain lending greenness and depth. Maybe a careful dose of something like valencene is in there. Clearly they were going for a Meyer lemon, and they did a fair job. This smells convincingly edible-citrus.
Eventually, a pastry-like accord shows up, and this is where the fragrance begins to resemble a graham-cracker-crusted lemon square to me. Its subtle florals still wisp along in the background, undergirded by an ever-present ethyl-maltol sugary sweetness that is probably the only annoying aspect of this thing, at least in its first hour. As a creamy vanilla accord wells up in the base, this spun-sugar effect begins to cohere better, and by the five hour mark, it's basically a great big fluffy vanilla with a halo of candied lemon. Projection is modest and longevity is longer than a CVS receipt, so you'll get a work day and then some out of it. Victoria is both fresh and warm, another plus, as it works well in both winter and summer. It's like a splicing of traditional lemon cologne and vanilla cookie candle, or perhaps just the cookies, an unadorned and direct gourmand.
It does smell good, overall. There's no arguing that. And the floral facets of neroli and petitgrain do inject some much-needed sophistication into an otherwise Basic scent profile. The vanilla is very foody and overly sweet, what with the ethyl maltol and whatever other candy flavoring is in there, and you really have to like gourmands to wear this on a regular basis. Not really my thing, but every once in a very blue moon, I get the urge to wear a good vanilla, and Victoria is definitely a good vanilla. To me, personally, it reads as a serviceable post-shave fragrance that strays well over the border of common 20th century citrus-vanilla barbershop tropes, and thus is worth having around. I find it works pretty well with Limacol aftershave/cologne splash, which basically smells like one-note mentholated Meyer lemon (and is severely underrated imo).
It's a quality perfume, but it leaves me wondering, why? Who briefed this thing? Who woke up one day and said, "Lattafa, you must clone Dolce&Gabbana's Devotion, and put a Caffè Sicilia spin on it!" Then gussy it up with cod Victoriana and a blue-marbled bottle that looks like a prop from a Roger Corman film. Why, Lattafa? Why?