Chocolate Perfume and Coffee Perfume

Today’s musings were triggered by Aquolina Chocolovers, which I sampled at Sephora. Nobody loves chocolate more than I do. I consider chocolate one of my major food sources. Chocolovers is a gourmand fragrance, with a sweet cocoa opening and a long-lasting chocolate-dust follow up. It’s redeemed for me by significant red-pepper-type heat in the drydown, which keeps it more in the range of chocolate mole and less chocolate icing.

While I admit that by any objective and subjective measure I found Chocolovers pleasing, is not something I would ever want to wear. Tobacco, iris, incense, or cypress? Sure. But chocolate? No thanks.

I can’t think of a single dessert or food-y fragrance offhand that I love. I keep trying to sort out why. A number of them are toothache-sweet, and I’m not fond of sugar-cookie smells unless they’re coming from the oven.

Do I have some sort of bias against gourmand fragrances? Something deeply rooted in my id or DNA that doesn’t want to smell edible? I like tea fragrances a lot, why not coffee or chocolate? Intrigued, I rooted around in the candy box for more samples to test and found:

CDG Series 7 Sweet: Spicy Cocoa huh. I was fully prepared to dislike this based on the name. It started off as exactly what it’s called — cocoa, with a hint of citrus, like one of those chocolate oranges from my Christmas stockings of yore. But 15 minutes later it does a clever morph into cocoa combined with Versace Dreamer and pipe tobacco, with a big pinch of cayenne. The longer I smell this, the more I like it — but it doesn’t really smell like cocoa for long.

CDG Series 7 Sweet: Wood Coffee Dark, thick coffee, with a tiny bit of syrup sweetness (think Turkish coffee), consumed in Gepetto’s workshop, surrounded by wood shavings. Does that sound unappealing? It’s sort of … attractive. I’m huffing the back of my hand like a blue tick hound, which means there is only one thing left to do:

CDG Spicy Cocoa layered with Wood Coffee Eureka! This adds to the lasting power, too.

Oh, look, here’sAva Luxe Cafe Noir. I’m a little put off by its color, which is somewhere between maple syrup and cranberry juice. On me it is, well, cafe noir — black coffee, with a little spice and maybe a pinch of sandalwood in the base. I could use this on one wrist to clear my nose between sniffs of other things. Again, the Chocolovers Conundrum — it’s a gorgeous smell, because coffee is a gorgeous smell. But if you gave me a bottle of this juice I doubt I’d ever wear it. I want to consume the coffee, the chocolate, the cookie, the pumpkin pie. I don’t want to wear them.

So. Help me out here. Do you have a favorite fragrance that smells like something from the bakery or the coffee shop? What is it and why do you like it?

Image: www.shokoladki.ru (hey, ladies, is that Russian for chocolate? Great word!)