Chypre d'Orient, Pêche de Vigne by Molinard (2007) {Perfume Short (Reviews)}

Truly bad-smelling perfumes are a rarity. Atrocious-smelling ones even rarer. One finds many mediocre perfumes, simplistic ones, decent ones, and as Jean-Paul Guerlain remarked once, there are so many good perfumes in the world!

The two new releases by Molinard this year - admittedly in a low-priced line but it is no justification for even bothering to bottle such caricatures - Chypre d'Orient and Pêche de Vigne are positively and without ambiguity, the worst perfumes we have smelled so far this year. Molinard repackaged their perfumes into new art deco bottles, dressing them up in other words, but it seems that their efforts have concentrated on external appearance rather than on the scents themselves. The bottles are just OK and the juices are frankly absurd......

Both scents smell plastic-y and are headache-inducing. Chypre d'Orient smells like a fougère near the bottle and both on skin and paper reveals a fresh character allied with a chypre personality with a warmer oriental aspect. Wait, but to say these things is really meaningless because we only want, once more, to grab a bottle of aspirin after our third testing and third headache (just to make sure we were not dreaming). The two first words that came spontaneously to mind the first time we tried it, pardon the unedited bit, were "sock juice" ("jus de chaussette" in the original French).

If the new Mitsouko eau de toilette made us think of a ghost of its former self, this one makes us think of the shells-and-mollusks covered pirate zombies in Pirates of the Carribean. It is simply unnatural.

The Pêche de Vigne is like a vision of one of the pirate zombies covered with plastic peaches and sprigs of fake mint, wearing nail polish, all over his body. And it is not as interesting to look at.

The concentration of oils in both perfumes is very low and after a while you have the impression of wearing some kind of warm ,very clear soup on the skin. On paper it smells even worse. The raw materials are absolutely terrible.

We do not know what happened because these perfumes should have never left the corners of the mind that blended them - maybe a robot's. Are they meant to be tourist traps of the coarsest order? It is incomprehensible to see such a low level of quality control be deemed acceptable by Molinard. Granted, they are considered to be a perfume house geared in great part towards the tourist trade, but these are souvenirs you will not necessarily want to bring back home.