This is my first ever opinion about perfume. Why? Well, I really don’t wear it very often. I just can’t see the point of spending loads of money on a scent to make you smell nice. I mean, obviously smelling nice is important, but what’s wrong with soap and deodorant? Especially when perfumes are never cheap.

But I have recently re-discovered the joys of Avon, treating myself from each catalogue and building up a wonderful stash of beauty products, face cleansers, make-up and so on. With most brochures, you find you get a free sample of perfume for buying something, so I now have a few of these too.

The perfume I shall attempt to review is called Prowl. It is described in the Avon brochure as ‘woody oriental’ and retails for £8, which gets you a 50ml bottle of the stuff. This is one of the cheaper ones available, but let’s face it, the Avon catalogue is full of reasonably priced gifts and treats – and no, I’m not a rep!

If you are a fan of Prowl, the range extends to a variety of different products – a perfumed talc (£2.25 for 75g), a roll-on anti-perspirant deodorant (£2.25 for 50ml), a moisturising bath and shower gel (£3 for 200ml), a skin softener (£3 for 150ml), a perfumed body spray (£3 for 75ml) and a revitalising and moisturising cooling gel (£3 for 100ml).

The perfume itself comes in a standard bottle, nothing very exciting, see-through with the gold ‘Prowl’ logo on the front and a long slender gold top. The other products have the same logo on them, but are usually in bronze-coloured packaging. They look okay, but there are certainly prettier ones around.

So what did I think to my little sample of Prowl then? Well, as samples go, it was quite a generous little bottle, certainly enough for a few evenings out – especially if you go out as rarely as I do ;-)

Sniffing the bottle, the scent did indeed seem woody, although I’m not
sure about oriental, although it’s so hard to describe what ‘oriental’ smells like – I mean, who wants a perfume that’s identical to egg fried rice and mushroom chop suey anyway?

I dabbed a bit of it on my wrist and rubbed it into both of them. Sniffing madly (as you do!), I decided it was okay, but nothing too wild or fragrant. It seemed quite a gentle, subtle scent, probably something that would be suitable for my eleven year old daughter, who is just getting into this kind of thing. (Well, she knows more about make-up than I do actually!) It doesn’t seem too heavy or too sexy, certainly not something that stinks out the whole house!

So overall, it’s nice enough and I will use my free sample, thankyou very much. But would I buy it? No, although I might try the perfumed body spray in the range.

So how was my first perfume op? Anything I left out? Constructive criticism welcome in the comments section.