7 Billion Hearts

This perfume haunts me in the best way possible. The opening is heavy with smoke and wonderfully dark vanilla, with a slightly medicinal vibe. As it settles into the skin it warms itself and the medicine fades away leaving a gentle, spicy, woody, smokey vanilla. I read a description once, of someone saying that it smelled like something that had been unearthed from a wooden treasure chest after hundreds of years... that about sums it up, assuming that chest was full of the highest quality Madagascar vanilla. Projection is gentle, but persistent, reminding me how darn good I smell all day without suffocating anyone else. If I could bathe in this stuff, I would. To my complete and utter dismay, I turned out to be extremely allergic to this perfume. After a few wears I started breaking out in a horribly itchy rash that lasted for weeks... So devastated. But I love this perfume so much that I refused to abandon it, instead buying a diffuser necklace and wearing it in a pendant around my neck. This masterpiece needs skin in order to really shine and divulge all its beauty, but I'll take what I can get. This one is too good to give up on. Edit: Forgot to mention this is for the absolut, haven't tried the water-based.

I had a 2ml absolute of this in 2014. God I loved it, and I finished it in a season. It was such a beautiful resinous unsweet-vanilla scent. I kept the little vial just to be able to smell the residue in it from time to time. This had pretty good lasting power and just keeping the vial in my leather backpack scented the pocket for a long time. Anyway, I lost the vial in a move and I'm still unhappy about it because it is TRAGICALLY discontinued (or at least it hasn't been on the site in a very long time). It wasn't cheap in the first place, but perhaps fluctuations in the global vanilla market made this untenable to keep in stock? I know I wasn't the only person who loved this perfume so I still hold out hope it will be available again one day. I would buy a full bottle of the absolute now if I could.

I love every minute of wearing this perfume. The smoke is exquisite. The vanilla is black. This isn't a dessert, it's an event, and it will last all night. The smell is both comforting and challenging. Not challenging in the way people describe an acquired taste, but challenging in that the smoke and vanilla continues to change shades as time goes by, and it demands that I keep trying to describe it. Physically it's not a very loud fragrance, but it demands a strong emotional response. It's like trying to ignore a very small flame flickering in front of your eyes, it's hypnotic but small.

I have the perfume absolute, not the water perfume, and I love it. It's such a rich scent and I like wearing it on days when I might need a bit of aromatherapy. The water perfume is expensive, but I think I only paid around $30 for a little vial of the absolute, which has lasted a very long time. If you like the smell of pure vanilla, I don't think you'll find one that's better.

One of the first few entries of CB I Hate Perfumes, and one of the more popular, 7 Billion Hearts is a vanilla, woody, slightly spicy scent that is very agreeable in that it is not overwhelmingly any one of those descriptors but rather a pleasant cold-weather blend. It's not especially a gourmand in that it's not the often-criticized cake-like vanilla but rather a more subtle vanilla that's well-blended with the other elements. It's a very pleasant scent and clearly well-crafted with consideration and patience, but my main concern would be performance, which isn't tremendous. To clarify, I tried the EDP (water perfume), not the perfume absolute, and the EDP is priced at $135 for 30ml or $260 for 100ml (on the higher end of the CB I Hate Perfume line), so largely the question comes to how much you love it. 7 out of 10