Floaty Virgins (Cacharel: Anaïs Anaïs, Eau de Toilette)

Member Name: MagdaDH

Product:	Cacharel: Anaïs Anaïs, Eau de Toilette
Date:	27/10/09 (36 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: pretty, not too cloying

Disadvantages: too young for me

One of the pioneers of the fresh florals that in the last 20 years or so multiplied beyond reason, Anais Anais was launched in the late 70's to appeal to the adolescent market - or at least those who wanted to style themselves as young at heart.

Thirty years on, it still smells good, and, surprisingly, much less airhead-saccharine than one would expect.

The bottle is a simple, flower-painted white porcelain. I like it - but in a distinctly "not my kind of thing" way. It brings to mind healthy, long-haired blonde girls in chintz-curtained cottage attic bedrooms, with a water jug on a frilly washstand: reformed Colette meets English Rose. The scent is really not very far off this image: a fresh, rather prim and virginal fragrance with a clean, powdery soapiness to it.

I always had a bit of a dissonant feeling about the name of this fragrance: I associate "Anais" with Anais Nin, not a particularly virginal persona - and every time I smelled Cacharel's fragrance, I was initially surprised at its fresh innocence.

I am not very good at detecting individual floral notes, but there seems to be a lily of the valley there. I couldn't distinguish any of the meatier flowers like lily or tuberose - although a whiff of a sanitised (i.e. non-indolic) jasmine, hyacinth and - obviously - a pale rose could be imagined.

At first, the floral is very bright, even with slight note of bitter sharpness. Later on, and particularly in the drydown, it's just very pretty ambery: not actually sweet, but it could be called "sweet" figuratively - I would call it "cute" if this word didn't make me want to throw up by association (and Anais Anais doesn't).

I sprayed it on for the first time in many years and four hours on it was still there - this is a fairly rare event for me, as my nose doesn't seem to be able to detect most fragrances past the first couple of hours. It was still pretty, but it also felt embarrassingly youthful - and I felt like mutton scented as lamb.

I don't think I would wear it now, in the same way as I didn't actually wear it when I was of the age closer to its target market: neither my temperament nor my looks go with floaty cotton voile garments and I have a strong feeling that that's how you need to dress to wear Anais Anais: but it can work very well on a right person.

***

I have just read the wonderful Perfumes: the Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, and thus became inspired to try a few scent reveiews with my own untrained nose. B ekind, this is the first one.

Summary: fresh floral for pretty girls