Hi there Posse! Portia from AustralianPerfumeJunkies in the Posse and thrilled as always to be here. So the Northern Hemisphere is smack bang in the middle of spring, your trees are green, bulbs have flowered and you are probably in the middle of Azalea season. Down under we are packing away our summer staples and bringing out the winter warmers but today I found a sample that I’d been given back in January 2013 while in Budapest with Jin on our European winter wonderland vacation. It’s been sitting on its card in a bag since then, thank goodness there is almost nothing natural in a Montale fragrance to go off…

Soleil de Capri by Montale

Photo Stolen Fragrantica

Fragrantica gives these featured accords:
Top: Grapefruit, kumquat, citruses
Heart: White flowers
Base: Musk, spices

ZZZZZING!! Soleil de Capri opens with a sizzling, bitter-sweet citrus that is also slightly furry. A lovely synthetic grapefruit with definite hints of kumquat but it smells like the leaves to me not the fruit. It’s jammy, marmalade-ish with a lovely bitter green backbite. Cool, fresh and glittering like the hot summer sunlight glittering over the waters inside a cave that is marginally cooler than the roasting heat outside.

Photo Stolen Flickr

The white flowers have a coconut tinge for me, it’s a lovely clean white floral bouquet with almost no breathy or animal background, just fresh, prim white flowers and a tiny hint of milk, or milky sap. People complain about how synthetic Soleil de Capri is but I find it a happily synthetic fragrance, very cohesive and it smells great to me. Even through the floral heart there is still a zesty citrus weaving through that pops out unexpectedly to the forefront and then to background. It keeps the whole fragrance interesting in the first hour and into the second.

Soleil de Capri then calms down. You get a smattering of flowers that continue for a while but what you get most is white musks. Very clean laundry musks that hum along quietly for ages, I’m at 6 hours and they are still going strong except they aren’t strong just present. Very simple and generic white musks that you find in loads of things, all alone. No spices, citrus or flowers. Musks. It’s a bit of a let down after so much fun in the first hour and a half but nothing bad, just a bit boring.

Photo Stolen WikiCommons

Soleil de Capri, or Capri sun, yes I can kind of get it. Maybe the end is the afternoon when the whole day seems to cool but before the evening when Capri gets exciting?

Further reading: Scent for Thought and That Smell
Neroli Budapest has €75/100ml
Surrender To Chance has samples starting at $4/ml

Montale, some people love them and others hate them. Where do you stand and are there any you particularly like?
Portia xx