Commedia dell’Arte

What to say? I’ve had this for over a year, and after several attempts to wear it still can’t decide if I hate it and want rid forever, or if it intrigues me enough to stick with and use every summer despite my misgivings. By turns it’s buxom and tasty and youthful and spine-tingling in the way something naughty or sexy is when you’re growing up; but by others it’s rank and twee-trite, difficult to like and even a bit stomach-turning. Orange in the top is splendidly done, here—it’s a soft, wet, pulpy, very ripe, ultra-sweet, big-as-your-head Italian orange dripping juice all over your fingers. Pity that the lemon & bergamot don’t come through half so strongly or so well. I also enjoy the strong heartbeat of the honeysuckle here, present to start from petal to pollen in an almost fleshy and cozy capacity. It presents such a vivid and pretty fresh summer’s day to open with, that I want to remain in that space through the scent development. It’s the holiday in the hanging gardens of which anyone would dream... ...alas. Now, with the caveat that I am testing this one with a few good spritzes (which is too many—one will do you fine, I promise), in the muggy British summertime 2021, on my warm-running skin after vacuuming for an hour and running around the house/garden, and results for you may vary—after just an hour, the underlying musk, honey and stone-fruit creep in like malevolent villains and ruin the mood, turning the scent rancid and stale and sugary. The vile combination puts me in mind of a teen/college party, where the kids all reek of B.O., vomit, unwashed clothes, hormones, the drying stains of sickeningly-sweet fruit alcopops, and cheap floral body spray. It’s vile, enough to make me go and splash/towel off then change my shirt. I don’t often have such strong negative reactions to middle notes, but this was too awful to ignore. As I’m fairly new to fragrance, I’m unsure if it’s just that honey & fruit don’t agree with my chemistry/temperature in general, or if they don’t work in this scent, but it’s not something I get any pleasure from sitting through. Once mostly washed off and wicked away leaving just a trace (that I covered with herbal deodorant), the remains of the scent calmed and faded away to an easygoing ticklish plasticky synthetic-vanilla (the type they use to scent kids’ toys, flavoured lube, or car air fresheners). It’s so faint and inoffensive in the third act, that it makes you wonder if you hallucinated the preceding two. The sinister shift of this scent, from sweet soft innocent nostalgia to sweaty sour hormonal flashback then out with a whimper, makes me muse whether CdA ought really to have been called ‘Romeo & Juliet’ instead. That’s the trajectory—the wide-eyed natural state of childhood in bloom, overpowered by the taste of juicy forbidden fruit, then quickly rushing along against one’s will to a gross and oversexed brief adolescence, then glimmering out into a whisper of the void as if one barely existed as more than a florid lovely name in a storybook. I have studied the Commedia form of drama at University, and I have to say the name-association still eludes me. My best guess, given my personal experience of the scent over a couple of years, is that it refers to the animalistic, bawdy, erotic and chaotic underpinnings of the seemingly-formalised and idyllic settings & characters of the CdA—how, after an hour or two in the Italian outdoors, watching dressed-up actors pantomime cute little bucolic vignettes and silly childish slapstick, you can sense the pulse in the crowd and on the stage, and you intuit the incumbent rolls in the hay to come, skin sticking to skin with sweat and throwing up booze and batting away searching sticky fingers and flies that gather in the aftermatch. You think you were happier the previous morning, by yourself, munching a bit of fresh fruit and wandering around a courtyard filled with blossoming trees and vines, listening to the bees buzz. This orgiastic fun and frolic with painted panting maniacal smiles surrounding you is all a bit much.