Lesson 1 - don't judge a perfume by its bottle. (Calvin Klein: IN2U for Her, Eau de Toilette)

Member Name: louiseypees

Product:	Calvin Klein: IN2U for Her, Eau de Toilette
Date:	03/06/08 (100 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fresh, summery scent without being too sweet

Disadvantages: Hideous bottle

I want to get one thing out in the open straight away: I love perfume. Because of this, I have far too many bottles, but always feel like I want more anyway. I go through perfume phases, where I become obsessed with one scent and won't wear anything else. On the flipside, I sometimes get so fed up with a perfume that I just can't wear it anymore and my bottle will be confined to the back of the shelf. If it wasn't for perfume and shoes, I'd be a very rich lady.

As I've got older, my perfume tastes have matured a bit, and I've been moving into stronger, headier perfumes such as Agent Provocateur and anything by Chanel or Dior but shunning my younger scents - the Lancome O Oui, the Cacharel Anais Anais, etc. So naturally, I was horrified when I unwrapped my birthday presents last year and I discovered a bottle of CKIN2U perfume.

Of course, I was polite. I acted thrilled. I should be on the stage. Inside I was cringing. Everything about this perfume made me want to hate it:

- I've never liked any CK perfumes. Ever.
- I hate text talk. The fact this was called IN2U wound me up a LOT. Eats Shoots and Leaves is my bible.
- It looked really summery and fresh - not quite Agent Provocateur-y.
- I'd been given a massive bottle of it - with no receipt. It was clearly quite expensive.
- I'd never smelt it before - I'm quite precious about perfume, and my dad had got it - without even giving it a sniff - because it was on offer in a duty free shop. Charming.

But it was my birthday! And they were all watching! So I had to give it a squirt. And to my great surprise, I didn't hate it at all. It actually made quite a nice change to wear a fresh perfume. As my birthday is in July, it suddenly seemed more appropriate to be wearing this than my normal domanatrix-style scents.

So I stuck with it and continued to use this as my daytime scent throughout the summer last year. And I grew to love it. This is a casual scent. I would not wear this out for a formal evening do, or for a romantic dinner a deux - this fragrance suits summer afternoons, happy and carefree days, and casual evenings with friends instead. I find this to be a very "happy" fragrance, and it does seem to boost my mood as soon as I spray it on.

Ok, a little about how perfume works, for the uninitiated. When a fragrance is created, it will generally contain a number of "notes" - yes, like a musical chord. The "top notes" are the ones that you will smell first, as soon as the perfume is applied. The "base notes" are the deeper, woodier fragrances which will linger on the skin for most of the day. Many perfumes will also have "middle notes", which are scents that will remain on the skin for a few hours before wearing off. So if you are finding that a perfume seems to wear off after a few minutes, then you might be having difficulty detecting the middle and base notes in your fragrance.

CKIN2U (honestly, it still winds me up that this has such an awful name!) is classified as a "floriental" perfume - a neat little word invented by the industry which means a floral oriental perfume. Considering the citrussy notes in this fragrance, I would say that floriental is not quite the right classification for it, but never mind.

Notes in the perfume are:

- Pink Grapefruit
- Bergamot
- Red Currant Leaves
- Sugar Orchid
- White Cactus
- Neon Amber (I think they've made this one up!)
- Red Cedar

Pink Grapefruit and Bergamot are the top notes in this fragrance, meaning that upon application you will be struck with a citrussy freshness, which will fade fairly quickly. The next couple of hours will see the fragrance develop into a more floral, but still fresh scent, as the Sugar Orchid and Red Currant Leaves come out. The lingering base note that you will be left with is a light woody fragrance, with traces of the floral middle notes.

This fragrance is now my preferred daytime scent in the summer, and I do use it to cheer myself up on a miserable winter's day when I have to go to work. The citrus top notes seem to linger a little longer than most top notes do, and the choice of grapefruit instead of any other citrus scent for these means that this will never smell too sweet.

CKIN2U comes in a rather unattractive bottle, which looks like a man's deodorant. The bottom of the bottle is shaped glass, and the top part is covered with white plastic, with "ckIN2U" cut out around the main part of it. Truly hideous. You will find this monstrous bottle in a much better looking gold and yellow shiny box. I have the 100ml version, which retails at about £33; it is also available in 50ml, which you should be able to find for under £20 - so it is pretty reasonably priced.

Summary: Don't be put off by the bottle - just keep it in the box!