DKNY Be Delicious Fresh Blossom (Donna Karan)

The 2000s was the decade of the Be Delicious range by Donna Karan, under her rack store DKNY label. I remember the first two Be Delicious frags when they appeared on shelves in 2004 (one feminine, one masculine), but I could not keep up with the endless onslaught of little glass apples. They weren't really flankers, they were simply perfumes in a uniform line, all sharing the same aesthetic, all eschewing a unique identity. They were perfumes for people who don't want to think about perfume, but would rather just spritz on some random fruity floral, and be done with it. If it's pink, all the better.

Fresh Blossom (2009) was aimed at the Japanese customer, who prefers soft and coy over big and bold. This is an example of that, a lite puff that barely registers, even after generous application. There's a wan but transpicuous apple and peach top note, followed by six or seven hours of greenish apple blossom and peony, over a base of (stifles a laugh) "woodsier" Honeycrisp and Red Delicious accents, which is really just more of the same silky-pink organza wispiness. It's polite, you can wear it in close quarters without offending anyone, it smells a lot like expensive shampoo, and it's as fresh as it gets without going full-bore aquatic. If there is some platonic ideal of cleanliness, it's Fresh Blossom. 

My girlfriend hasn't commented on it, although it reminds me of Bond's Chelsea Flowers, which she says smells "perfumey," her way of saying it's too loud. But Fresh Blossom has the timbre just right. It's present and accounted for, but easy to ignore. Freshness, shower-gel soapiness, transparency, all of these qualities make for a fragrance that your girlfriend can tolerate sitting next to you on a love seat. Women enjoy wearing this stuff, but in my experience, they prefer it on their boyfriends instead. Freshness rules.

DKNY Be Delicious Men (Donna Karan)

We live in an age of hybrid perfume. There are many examples of formulas that incorporate multiple structural forms into one fragrance. Halston Z-14 is my favorite in this category, a classic oriental/chypre in which a cinnamon-spiced floral amber is conjoined with a simple bergamot, rock-rose, and moss accord. Creed's Orange Spice is often labeled an oriental, but in truth it reads as more of a barbershop "fougeriental," with brisk citrus, clean clove, animalic musk, and a highly-blended and dry-powdery amber, which one could liken to the coumarin in Brut and Canoe. I had a chance to wear DKNY Be Delicious Men recently, and was a little surprised to find that it's a three-way hybrid, to my nose a cross between a fruity-floral, an aromatic fougère, and a gourmand oriental. Because of its complexity, you would think Be Delicious Men would smell positively fascinating. In truth, it smells pretty blah.

Some concepts don't even look good on paper. I have to think that Be Delicious Men was an experiment that went awry in practice, but ended up coasting on a brand name (long enough to ensure continued production, apparently). Its note pyramid has me scratching my head. There's a big apple note, yes. Then coffee, oceanic notes, grapefruit, juniper, patchouli, jasmine, and "wood notes" according to Fragrantica. Coffee? Sea notes? There's normalcy in seeing most of the woody notes together, but coffee and marine notes seems like an adventurous bid for what perfumers must call "the new unified odor impression," that virgin, Z14-esque accord demarcating an undiscovered territory, never before visited by professional and amateur noses alike. Since Be Delicious Men's release, Thierry Mugler has taken this gourmand-aquatic idea and pulled it in a dozen different directions, but perhaps in 2004 it was still relatively new. It's only new if it's a novelty that works, and here it doesn't. The apple is reddish and smells like someone bit into it and left it in the sun for a few days, turning its sweetness into vinegar. The coffee is stale and damp (must be all those water notes), like a cold, forgotten-in-the-car cup of McCafé. The aquatic notes are gingery, damp, bitter, unpleasant. There's some cardamom crispness in the woody drydown, but I lost interest by then.

Apple and fresh, minty herbs (lavender, juniper) are a great combo: cool and clean, the stuff of shampoo dreams. Here, grapefruit offsets the pleasantness of the apple aromatic accord, resulting in a sour dissonance not too far removed from windshield-washer fluid. Perhaps the use of lime, with its woody dryness, would have infused into the form a deeper, more resonant woods effect (and might have purified the fragrance into a stronger aromatic fougère), but combined with the aquatic notes, the choice to use grapefruit feels wrong. Also, I'm all for coffee in perfume, but not if it smells cheap. Maybe I just don't "get" this fragrance though, so a second opinion (namely yours) is recommended. Try Be Delicious Men after the feminine Be Delicious, and see what you think - the complexity of the masculine, which is certainly a departure from the feminine, may or may not be a plus. For me, it's a big minus. If you're going to do an apple floral, give me apples and floral notes, and hold the salty coffee for another day.

DKNY Be Delicious (Donna Karan)

It's hard to hear the name of this fragrance and not think of Scarlett Johansson, at least for this red-blooded American male blogger. To my female readers, I apologize, but I've been an admirer of my country's cutest talentless actress for a while. She embodies the fantastical notion of anyone literally being delicious. The dilemma for Donna Karan is that she would be hard-pressed to convince anyone that any perfume, no matter how wonderful, could add anything to someone who looks like Scar Jo. The argument is plausible because if Scar Jo smelled like sweaty b.o. on the red carpet, even with her hair and makeup undone, she'd still be the hottest person within a three-thousand mile radius, or to wherever Emmanuelle Béart is standing.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, let me address DKNY Be Delicious, the name of which plays on two themes: cutesy-pie sex appeal, and Golden Delicious apples. Hard to connect the two, isn't it? What, exactly, makes smelling like apples sexy? Is it sexy? Is it carnally "delicious", or just attractive and pleasant? The postmodernist, Frank Gehry-esque bottle suggests that apple is indeed the core focus of the fragrance pyramid, and it does not disappoint. One spritz, and presto! We've got apples. Barrels and barrels of sweet, acidic, somewhat-green apples. Well that, and aldehydes, along with watery floral notes in the manner of Ivoire, Pleasures, Tommy Girl, and Cool Water. There's magnolia, freesia, jasmine, and white musk, all woven into a snow-blinded gauze of floral freshness, and tied together by an unbreakable strap of sweet apple.

When it comes to this sort of fragrance, I'm usually turned-off by its "samey" and somewhat linear characteristics. Smelling Be Delicious makes me think of all the aforementioned perfumes, and also Ralph, which is equally pomaceous. As Be Delicious' apple note gets sweeter and breezier, I start to think of apple Jolly Ranchers, and that's never a good thing. If I want musky fruit, I'll try to stay on the "mens" side of the aisle, and reach for Pinaud's much-maligned Lime Sec (review pending). It's a toughie for guys to wear something like this (apple is a unisex note), because its combination of sweetness, fluorescent florals, and girlish packaging feels like an ensemble of pure crass. For straight-up manly crassness, it doesn't take much (again, Pinaud Lime Sec), and spending $25 is completely unnecessary. There's also the fact that Be Delicious is a baldly cheap formula, which is fine, except that it follows in the steps of Tommy Girl as being an apple-floral that only works as long as the girl wearing it actually benefits from it.

If you're a naturally beautiful woman between the ages of twenty-one and forty, and you were offered modeling gigs as a teenager, Be Delicious is automatically wrong for you - it really is just plain cutesy, and aims to complement plucky, freckle-faced girls, and make them more desirable to men who drive Audis and buy their luggage from Victorinox. Beautiful women don't need fragrances like this. On their skin, the candied apple-floral-musk effect is best if done expensively, or not at all - perhaps a total departure into the land of languid, Shalimar-inspired orientals is more fitting. Now I don't mean to stereotype or pigeonhole fragrances as being specifically for small subsets of people, especially women, but it's a precarious order of business with a fragrance like Be Delicious, because by nature it is stunning on only the right women, and downright sad on the wrong ones.