Victoria Beckham 21:50 Rêverie

This post was originally meant to go up next week but the fragrance is causing me such befuddlement that you’re getting it today.

This past week we had winter, autumn and spring in a three day period (1 degree Celsius with snow, then 7 degrees C and beautiful sunshine, then 15 and torrential rain with gale force winds). Today, the road into the village flooded – very badly. We’d had a rather mild autumn but now all hell is breaking loose and that’s how it looks going into winter. Sigh.

The new Victoria Beckham was going to wait till December. But, it’s not. I wrote about VB’s first three perfumes here. Tom covered them here.

I was impressed with what she had done given her history as a bit of a lightweight celebrity. These were adult, interesting, a bit unusual, well worth sampling. My fave of the original bunch was Suite 302. Incredibly sexy black cherry. But at £170 for 50ml it’s not going to happen because my heart just doesn’t go gallump, gallump, gallump – and these aren’t available in travel sizes. And it’s hard to find decants.

So, autumn 2024 and her next perfume is released. Again, Jérôme Epinette is the nose. This is a good working relationship – they do good things together.

21:50 Rêverie’s marketing material goes like this: “A sensory seduction. A faraway fantasy. The grounding essence of the earth. Victoria Beckham extracts the luxuriant ambience of Java nights in the memory of 21:50 Rêverie: the grassy scent of tobacco leaves carried by candles in the tropical evening wind; the plush trace of plum on the lips of another; the earthy rawness of vanilla pods and Tonka beans blending with the cedarwood of the land.” Ok. Not half as bad as some materials.

The core of this is vanilla. Everything else weaves around it. If vanilla is your thing Rêverie is well worth sampling.

Anyway, notes list: tobacco leaf, plum, vanilla, tonka, vetiver, elemi and cedar.
When I first sat down to write this, here’s what I said: This is a glorious vanilla beginning to end.

With more sampling it got stranger and more complex. I guess that’s what you expect with well executed fragrances.

21:50 opens peppery, burnt caramel vanilla — but not sweet. Really musky, and that muskiness carries through the whole development but it passes from note to note.

As it moves along, I get a herbal undercurrent, maybe pine (elemi?). And as it opens further, there’s definitely plum. A lovely, musky proper juicy ripe fruit.

Onward, and I think I smell a bit of seaweed. Again, something green, musky – a bit salty. A warm, humid night in … the dunes? the jungle?

And deep in the development, when things have good and hotted up, there’s a hint of Turkish delight.

And one day I even got Band-Aid under the vanilla. I think I’m starting to make things up.

Longevity is stellar. Like 10 hours down the line I can still smell it.

Drydown is where I get really befuddled. I love you? I love you not as much?

Mostly, this isn’t sweet, which is interesting for a vanilla. There is a period in the middle where I was expecting it to go over the edge into bakery but it never quite does that.

So, yes, in the drydown it’s still doing that tightrope walk but no longer bakery and more into malt, like proper malt-vanilla. Gone from hot and sexy to something else – and I can’t put my finger on that ‘something else’. Even after wearing it like 10 times.

I’ve now rewritten parts of this post three times and I give up. It’s a conundrum. An enigma. Do I really really love it or am I simply convincing myself that I do?

End result? I think I want a bottle of this – at least I do right now.

How I’ll feel in three months is another question. But, it will be interesting to see if I end up finding a way to justify forking out £170 for 50ml of perfume.

Ever feel that way about something – that psychological dance around I love you, I love you not? And has anyone else sampled this?
Pics: Pexels, mine