Lemony Rose (B Never Too Busy to be Beautiful: B Scent, Eau de Parfum)

Member Name: MagdaDH

Product:	B Never Too Busy to be Beautiful: B Scent, Eau de Parfum
Date:	04/11/09 (32 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: lovely

Disadvantages: none

B is the house scent of the B Never Too Busy to be Beautiful (from now on BNTBTBB) and it might be known to all the Lushies out there as the smell of the B Scent Electro soap, which used to be a guest soap at Lush for a large part of the 2008.

The packaging, as usual with Lush (and generally very commendable) is plain and simple: I have a glass atomizer with a black and gold paper label - BNTBTBB provide glass bottles too, but none of them will exactly send bottle collectors into overdrive.

The juice is the point here, and it's a wonderful scent. What hits the nostrils initially are citrus and fennel: a strong, fresh burst of grapefruity lemon with a herbal, anniseed flourish of fennel.

After a minute or two, the fennel very much fades into the background. It's still there if you know what to look for, but not immediately obvious. What follows is a lemony sweetness, warm and fresh at the same time, with emerging florals (particularly rose) growing noticeably bigger . If you know the scent of B Electro soap, this is very similar, but much warmer, less sharp, and more complex.

I love this unusual smell: really captivating, playful, neither cloying nor shrill and endlessly fascinating, a warm lemony rose that keeps winking at me as it settles down into the delicately musky drydown. There are some fragrances that one settles into with comfortable or languorous ease, aware of it but not really engaged with it - like a cashmere jumper, let's say. B scent is more like a brilliant necklace: I keep smelling it on my wrists, sniffing for it in the air, again and again, just like I keep playing with my favourite necklaces.

It's probably better as a daytime scent, and a holiday, summery one in spirit (but do wear it to the office to lift your moods): playful, quirky but not terribly girly: it would suit anybody from an intelectual eighteen year old to a young at heart great-grandmother.

B blurb claims that the scent's creator "wanted to create a fragrance that you would imagine real Parisians wearing, rather than the old traditional French fragrances or modern American single notes" and I think they succeeded: B scent doesn't smell traditionally French, but is by no means American in style; a very European fragrance all in all, like a quirky French girl being kissed by a pretty English boy in a Sicilian cafe.

Summary: great daytime scent