Bread + Roses

i never wear gourmands but i'm such a rose girl, so i was interested in getting my nose on this as soon as i read the name. oh i'm in love with bread + roses: it lived up to every expectation! i agree with everyone saying that the opening is super yeasty. it dies down pretty fast into this cozy, toast-like scent that's balanced really well with a sweet, fresh rose. i get a little more rose than the gourmand notes for most of it. i don't get much cacao (which is a note that i was unsure about) or orange other than some extra sweetness, and the nutmeg just boosts the warm & cozy factor. it's hard to review this one objectively because the easiest way to describe it is just... me! my girlfriend smelled this on me and told me "it smells like you!" not in a skin scent way, more in a "this is your exact vibe as a person encapsulated in a scent" way. this may be replacing my current signature scent, at least for the fall and winter. my reviews are usually more concrete, but i can only think abstract for this one. it feels like adding extra milk and sugar to your morning tea and opening the nice jam for your toast. like simple comforts and relishing the little things.

FYI, I hate rose forward fragrances. I find them to be boring, vintage, and overdone. Enter Pearfat Bread + Roses... Wow. I love all stages of this perfume. The opening has this unique bread scent. I never knew what bread as a note would smell like and I still am perplexed if this is how it smells. I think I'll go and open my bag of Orowheat and take a big whiff. I digress. If this is what bread smells like I'm here for it. I'm so glad this didn't start out with rose being dominant. The bread note is not like freshly baked bread aroma right out the oven. It smells like the bread they give you at restaurants as an appetizer. Already sliced and cold. This stage lingers around for quite a bit and I felt like it would be a linear fragrance, but no. All of a sudden, I get wafts of the most juiciest jammiest rose. This is when it hit me. I actually DO like rose, but a specific kind. Not freshly cut realistic rose. I like the fruity tart kind. I don't know what exactly makes this one jammy as I don't see any berries listed. Maybe the sweet orange? I don't know, but this makes my eyes roll back. Now I'm obsessed. My gateway to rose scents. I'm on the hunt for more.

This is coming from a certified rose hater, this is a very very lovely rose scent! The opening of this has a very sweetly candied rose aroma which I was worried about but it quickly turns into a freshly green and stemmy aromatic rose. You also get a hint of that orange but it’s a bitter orange. Then you get the bread, and wow is it a lovely note! It’s like a rye bread, it’s dry, it’s earthy, it’s doughy and it’s warm. Mixed with those green roses it’s such an odd combination that really works to smell like a loaf of bread with roses baked into it and there’s virtually no sweetness here, but again it works. Now the dry down has some of that cocoa mixed in and this is where you do get some hints of sweetness as it offers a very powdery chocolate dusting above the loaf of rose bread. Such a lovely, lovely scent profile that I’d love to upgrade to a full bottle.

I bought the sampler set plus samples of Up North, and pushed Bread + Roses for last because it sounded just meh to me and I had recently gone on a massive rose kick and was just over roses. Well, I can confidently say Up North and Bread + Roses were my 2 favorites of the bunch. The opening of this one made me say out loud, “OHHH! THIS IS NICE!” The rose is a very green rose, the bread is freshly baked and it’s just unlike anything I’ve ever smelled. It’s sweet from the cacao, a little spicy from the nutmeg, I can detect the labdanum (a little bit leathery) only in the background, and it kind of just holds everything else together. I get moderate projection, others nearby can smell me, but it’s not massive (none of Pearfat’s offerings are). This is such a fun and different perfume!

wow, Pearfat perfumes are quite an experience and I mean that in a good way. Testing out the discovery set and loving most of the scents but even the ones I don't love, I still enjoy for the uniqueness factor. This is one of my favorites so far. I don't like extremely strong rose scented perfumes, but this is not overly strong in the rose because it's melded so beautifully with the bread and cacao notes. I would put this a a mildly gourmand category...it's not super sweet or cloying but the "food" notes are definitely present. This scent is warm and cozy. If you are looking for prominent rose, you won't find it here in my opinion. The rose is only a background note on my skin.