Burberry Women

OK people. After reading all the reviews, here is a quick tip to know if you're reviewing the old formula or the new one : OLD SCHOOL ORIGINAL FORMULATION : the best Burberry women is the one in bottles with the low flat ridged caps like on the picture above, that comes in a pale, plain yellow box with a line of tartan/plaid at the bottom of the box only. The original says made in France on the box. NEW REFORMULATION : the new reformulated version came out in 2020; it's the one with the tall and thin cap and the plaid covered box. That one says made in Germany on the box. REVIEW OF THE ORIGINAL RIDGED CAP VERSION : After years of wearing Burberry women, I still love it as much as I did the first day. The peach-vanilla-cedar-oakmoss combination is just beautiful, rich and juicy. The oakmoss is present and grounds the fullness of the perfume. It is stunning! It has a nice sweetness that comes from the fruits and vanilla but nothing caramel or cakey or anything baked goods, just a natural sweetness that doesn't overpower anything but plays nicely with the other notes. Now because one person's "lightly sweet" is another person's overdose of sugar, I'll use my personnal Sweetness scale from 1 to 10 to put things in perspective, with Ralph Lauren Safari being bone dry and not sweet at all at a 1 and Lancôme La vie est belle being a gag inducing diabetes in a bottle level of sugar at a 10. Burberry women gets a 3.5-4 on my scale. Longevity of the original is stellar, I get 8-12 hours without issue and the scent lingers on clothes for a long time with 4-7 sprays. I think anyone of any age could wear that one. Burberry women is sexy in a subtle and classy grown up way, like a woman with a messy bun wearing an oversized cream cashmere sweater that drops on one of her shoulders and showcases her clavicle. That woman knows that sexiness is about being comfortable in her own skin. REVIEW OF THE NEW REFORMULATION : the richness, fullness and the juiciness of the peach is almost gone and the oakmoss is toned down to almost nothing, leaving the cedar note to be very present, making it a bit scratchy down the throat when you smell it. It's now more of a fruity green cedar perfume. People who have never smelled the original could actually like this a lot for what it now is. Lovely and wearable, very office safe fruity-woody perfume. Longevity of the reformulation is abysmal. I was lucky to get 3-4 hours out of this one on my skin. FINAL THOUGHTS : original ridged cap bottle of Burberry women is stunning and very much worth hunting down on ebay for a reasonnable price (under 100$).

I would be curious as to whether any of you ladies out there who tend to dislike florals in general make an exception for this one as I do. I was one of the first in my set to ditch things like Anais Anais and jump on the unisex frag bandwagon of the early 90s... although I did Dior's Eau Sauvage as I found CK One too soapy. Eau Sauvage ushered in for me a lifelong devotion to the unisex citrus; it's my winter frag in that vein, while Goutal's Eau D'Hadrien is my summer. I also have a few other eaux, a chypre or two, and a bottle of Arpege that I keep so I can occasionally smell like my Nana. No matter how much I might enjoy florals on other folks or how much fun I have trying them on at Bloomingdale's, I always come to the conclusion that they are not for me and end up regretting purchases and giving them away. Other florals would enter my life courtesy of a beloved uncle who would purchase bottles for the ladies in the family every Christmas. We would pass them around and sample and trade. I must have sampled at least fifty bottles of florals that way over the years! Generally speaking, I would let them go to someone else, though, knowing that I'd eventually find them too sweet, too overpowering, or too allergenic (I am allergic to about 80 percent of scents I sample as well as to fragrances in many household cleaning and personal care products). One Christmas in the mid aughts, I claimed a bottle of Burberry Woman in the annual Christmas smell and swap. I figured eventually I would pitch it or give it away, but there was something in the initial spray that captivated me sufficiently to make it my own. I've gone through five bottles since! Why does my olfactory apparatus make an exception for this one? I've no idea. I smell fresh peach and vanilla immediately upon initial spray, then the cedar and sandalwood emerge for a warm woody accord. Vanilla persists into the drydown after the "papery" smell dissipates and blends with an emerging musk. I don't quite get the green apple, and I do smell a hint of the jasmine, but fortunately not enough to trigger a major allergy attack. This fragrance gives me the overall impression of taking a luxury day off in the fall to visit a reasonably empty art museum, or perhaps arriving at work to find that everyone else took a sick day and I can get paperwork done while sipping a nice peach-vanilla herbal tea. It's quiet, feminine, non-allergenic, peace! I'd welcome any recommendations from the board for other florals I might like, given that I generally don't like them on me and make an exception for this one.

Burberry Women is a beautiful musky peach, with a hint of vanilla warming and sweetening the fruits, and a dash of oakmoss toning down the sweetness. Peach is not a note that works for everyone; it has this milky/lactonic quality that can seem sour on some skin (like sour milk). I had so much fun today comparing Burberry Women with several other peach-centric fragrances that I have -- Guerlain's Mitsouko, Lancome's Tresor, Burberry Body, Guerlain's Nahema, Elizabeth Taylor's Diamonds and Rubies, and of course, Jessica Simpson's Fancy Love (peach blossom). While I can definitely smell peach in all of them, a couple of them are actually rose-peach: Guerlain's Nahema's juicy rose-peach, Lancome Tresor's and Burberry Body's dry and dusty rose-peach, and Elizabeth Taylor's spicy cinnamon rose-peach. Guerlain Mitsouko is that austere oakmossy chypre peach that Burberry Body references in a more contemporary, wearable way, with its bitter wormwood operating like the heavy oakmoss. I wish I weren't out of warm and yummy Gucci Rush, so I could've included it in my investigation. But overall, it was pretty darn peachy at my house today! Burberry Women is fruitier than all of my other peachy offerings, and warmer than any except for Diamonds and Rubies, with all those spices, and Gucci Rush. In spite of the mess of fruits in the top notes, with Burberry Women, peach is the star. Also, although the peach is in the top note, it dries down peachy, too. I do also smell some cedar and musk, and a hint of vanilla, in the drydown. It's so lovely -- not too sweet, with a soft and fuzzy cozy sweater feeling. Jessica Simpson's Fancy Love, which definitely resembles Burberry Women, has more fizzy effervescence and lightness ("champagne" note) up top (vs. fruitiness), and is overall a more delicate scent, with a little less depth and complexity (though I love it, too). Actually, the notes of Fancy Love do not include peach, but rather peach blossoms, lending it a more delicate quality than Burberry Women. I think Burberry Women has better staying power than Fancy Love, but they are really similar, sharing that cozy musky peachiness. Peach is one of my favorite notes in perfume and Burberry Women is such a lovely offering. It's an easy wearing, cozy, fresh, happy fragrance that I wear year round, day or night. <3 <3 <3

The original round cap Burberry was everything, so iconic. I had a pre-IFRA bottle back in the day and the compliments always flowed when I wore this, albeit mostly from middle-aged women, and I was probably a bit too young to wear this. It would be considered a dated scent now. I prefer the term "timeless" myself. If you talk a scent handmade for plaid scarves and rainy days, this was THE scent, hence the iconic packaging. It was my signature Fall/Winter/rainy Spring fragrance until my bottle ran out. Sigh...the new formulation is only a sad little whisper of the OG beast mode, sexy, mossy, cedar goddess she once was. It smells exactly the same sniffing the bottle, but on the skin it has no depth or richness like the pre-IFRA, pre-synthetic juice. The OG would morph and become more complex on the skin, the reformulation doesn't do that, for me at least. Poof! It's gone in half an hour, just evaporates off my skin before having the chance to develop. The OG would linger on a scarf I had not worn for a week, I could pick up a jacket I had not touched in days and the scent would still waft heavenly off the collar. With my newer bottle, I can deliberately douse a scarf in the evening, the smell has completely disapated by the next morning. Does not matter the time of year, I have sat on my bottle for three years allowing it to oxidize and tried it in all seasons, I just can't get by without having to spray and respray. There is also something in the reformulated version that turns to doggie doo on my skin 3 minutes after I spray this. Legit icky poo smell. It can't be a bad batch or a bottle that has gone off, because Burberry Touch is the same for me. I could not have ended up with two bad bottles. I know some people's skin/noses are sensitive to indoles, lending to the poo smell, but I have several indolic perfumes and none of them give me any fecal odor whatsoever. One of my ultimate fav perfumes, Jean Patou - Sira des Indes, seems to have a bad reputation for giving off poo smells to some people, but my skin loves it. Only the reformulated Burberry perfumes don't work with my chemistry. Maybe I am living in the past, but I much preferred the OG. The reformulated version is sadly poo juice on me.

GOLDEN NECTAR in the FOREST... Like jar peaches in a light syrup on a wooden serving board framed with wisps of forest. I've loved this scent since it came out, and I agree with MihelaN below that it's still lovely even after reformulation, only the performance is more moderate from what I remember. Signed by perfumer Michel Almairac, this beauty opens with a peachy-apricot burst that dries down into a sheer golden veil of soft woods and vanilla. With time, it's gotten a lot stronger. The woods are coming more forward now with that sweet peach-apricot on top. I love this a lot for some reason, although there's a simplicity here. Leaves an oily sheen on the skin that takes a few minutes for the sillage to wake up. It's the woods that make this a winner imo. Overall: Beautiful golden peach syrup & woods scent profile, and the moderate performance makes it versatile enough to wear any season. It's a longtime love for me, Enjoy! Contrast to Fancy Love Jessica Simpson: My first impression was that I'm smelling Burberry Women, and there are striking similarities, but these are different. Fancy Love has a faint sparkling quality and better performance. As with Burberry Women, overall I get a syrup-y apricot/peach, like jarred apricots & peaches in light syrup. Update 02/08/25: Funny thing, when I sprayed this yesterday, after awhile I started to notice the oakmoss much more than I had before. I'm tempted to say this is the fly in the ointment as I have a love/hate relationship with oakmoss. Some people go crazy for it, but for me it's usually a challenge. Here I think oakmoss helps makes the scent what it is, fruity nectar with wisps of forest, but if I over-spray the oakmoss bothers me. Still love it, but next time I won't put as much on. Performance is gotten really good; it's still here on my hoodie the next day. Batch No: 1211 (2021-07-30)