Blonde

This fragrance is unbelievably gorgeous! I have never in my life had a fragrance like this before. Blew me away. Opens with warm sunshine and stays warm through the whole life of the scent. I don't detect bergamot orange but rather a kind of dark honey and orange blossom. This perfume is linear and not very complex but you do have to really 'listen' with your nose to find it's special qualities. The florals that stand out in this one is the tuberose, gardenia and violet. Sweet, some would say 'much too sweet' tuberose. The tuberose and gardenia pairing are creamy and very rich. The texture is oily like some kind of luxurious exotic body oil. Carnation is really presenting herself too. An ylang ylang flower too. Mainly a tuberose scent. If you are super into tuberose, this one is enchanting. I can't get over this. The perfume fills your head and penetrates you in a good way. The creamy florals are warmed up with incense (benzoin note) and stays so close to the skin so that the smoky white florals don't offend anyone around you. It's an intimate perfume despite being strong and long lasting (all day kind of long lasting). A lover or special someone will have to be real close to you to detect the perfume on you. Rich and smoky. This is so womanly and grown up. This makes me imagine an amazing sunset in Miami Beach. It's a fragrance that was meant to honor Mr. Versace and his mansion in Miami and the blonde in the name of the scent is actually Donatella Versace. So as you can guess this is a classy but 'naughty' kind of a perfume for the woman has everything. She drives luxury sport cars, lives in a mansion, has connections, and the atmosphere of the fragrance is South Florida's big money scene - Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach. Beautiful tan women. Handsome tan men. The dry down is musk and civet. I'm sure it's not real civet but the dirty in a good way kind of musk is what you get at the end. A deep warm skin musk. It turns into an animalic fragrance but it stays sweet and warm and never too dirty for a musk scent. It's a floral musk of high quality. This perfume smells best on the skin and not clothes. It's too oily for clothes. This is best worn in fall and winter to warm up your skin. This is meant to be worn with more clothes on than less. Matches with furs (faux fur) coats and more of a Colorado wealthy socialite than a Florida one. Also due to the smokiness gives the impression of a strong confident woman who knows what she wants and usually gets it, smokes cigarettes with a holder is elegant but fierce. i.e. Alexis on Dynasty 1980s version with Joan Collins not the new reboot series. This is a bold and independent woman's perfume. She answers to no one! This fragrance is changing my life!!! Everyone is respecting me more now that I wear it!!!!! You gotta try this one. It's unforgettable!!

This smells very similar to Fracas de Robert Piguet to me. This perfume though is less bubblegummy than Fracas and it has more of a slightly spicy and animalic feeling to it. There is also a dash more camphor in here too. Blonde by Versace lasts quite a long time on the skin at just over 7 hours on my skin, but I think that Fracas lasts maybe 2 or 3 hours more on my skin. The sillage of this perfume definitely projects at about 6 feet, but I feel that Fracas projects slightly more than Versace Blonde. The neroli and then the bergamot give it a touch of bitterness. This perfume starts with the gardenia and Violet notes, giving me that lovely creamy and mushroomy feeling that gardenia gives and the powderiness and muskiness that violet gives too. The pitosporum note is the strongest here though and gives more of that slightly spicy white floral feeling at the top notes. It's not as sweet as Fracas, since it doesn't have that orange blossom note or peach note that you smell in Fracas. It's less fruity than Fracas for sure. It's all about the heart notes mainly though in Versace Blonde, which to my nose are mainly the slightly camphorous and slightly grapey and indolic tuberose first and foremost and a good dose of buttery and tropical ylang ylang. I then get some of that spice from the carnation and then short wafts of a slightly smoky smell from the narcissus. This is definitely all about the tuberose though and it smells very natural smelling to me here, more than Fracas does. It has some of that camphor that Carnal Flower has from Frédéric Malle, but dialed down and not as intense, mothbally or green thankfully. It's more the sort of camphor and spice you'd find in an actual tuberose flower naturally. Lastly, I smell a good amount of all of the ingredients at the base, those being civet, benzoin and musk. It's a very animalic, sweet and musky base that smells like raw sex and is quite delightful and raunchy smelling to my nose. I could imagine this being a very appropriate perfume for a woman at any nighttime event you go to and a woman being able to wear it all year round. It smells very sexy, bad ass and rebellious but also fashionable, elegant and chic in a non-traditional sort of way. This is a tuberose perfume for the inner blonde rock and roll bad ass chick in all of us! I also find the perfume bottle beautiful with its etched in Medusa face and the pretty crystal bottle cap with the Greek keys. I highly reccomend it to all tuberose lovers and I think it's just different enough from Fracas to warrant a purchase, since it's the slightly skankier and more rebellious version of the more prim and proper Fracas. 8 1⁄2 out of 10 for me.

Oh, how I love this. Who would have thought I would fall in love with a buttery tuberose, but here I am, someone who hates buttery florals, head over heels for this. Maybe it's a psychological thing, but buttery florals almost smell oily to me, as if I'm smelling a tub of butter. It kind of creeps me out. But that's not happening here. I'm perplexed by some of the negative adjectives I've read over the years used to describe this fragrance. Raunchy, trashy, dirty, skanky? It's what put me off to even trying this perfume in the first place. I don't think it's trashy (not that I don't appreciate a little raunchiness in fragrances at times), or dirty, or even necessarily loud. I think it is just perfect, somewhat big, but not extroverted, like Madonna or Fracas are to me. There's also a softness here which is a nice contrast to the voluptuous, full-bodied tuberose, and a touch of sexy from a dash of civet. And while tuberose is the most prominent note, it is not the only one. There's a fruity ylang; a lovely daffodil that's ever so slightly dirty to shake things up, (maybe that's the skank some are referring to?); a sultry jasmine; a spicy carnation; and a sweet, creamy gardenia, among other notes. But the tuberose is the star, shinning like the sun, and just like the sun in our solar system, all the other notes revolve around her. And what a tuberose it is. Big, buxom, sexy, and golden as if the flowers were sprinkled with gold dust. Blonde, yes, she's a golden blonde, but not a brassy one. Believe me, I have nothing against Donatella, but she doesn't spring to mind when wearing this fragrance - Marilyn Monroe does. Yep, this is Marilyn in a bottle! Voluptuous and soft at the same time - just like Marilyn! I'm so delighted with this fragrance that I now own an edt and an extrait. But the way I have been dabbing and spraying away tells me I am going to need replacements soon. Which will become harder and more expensive to do, now that it is discontinued. “Shame, Shame, Shame!" We should be screaming at the person who made that crazy decision.

Dear Reader's ♥ I will forever mourn and have fond memories of my former lush and provocative signature night perfume by Gianni Versace that I owned and loved from my adolescence to early 20's. Long ago in the mid 90's, when I was just sweet 15 yr old youth looking for a night perfume. I found out about this perfume and the ancient Greco -Roman elegant glass bottle had touch of lalique glass style enchanted me with its carved faced within the bottle because it was none other face but of the cursed gorgon Medusa, that left hypnotized . Luckily for me ,my mother bought it for me that day as an early birthday gift when we went to the department store♥. The magic started when I started to use this scandalous elixir , the perfume and my chemistry created the marvelous alchemical marriage and a force to behold and be adored. my chemistry brought out a warm, juicy , jovial and wild flowers out that enchanted the senses and the sillage was intense And now seeing it had musk, this explains why it made men's appetites wet and made me into a total man-trap. The memories of my past admirers, situations that brought intrigues, scandalous encounters in the realm of love, all created by this perfume, it brings giggles and smiles when I reflect back.♥ The horror came of the end of beauty and splendor came when Donatella pulled out the Versace jean's line, the cosmetics which the casings were fabulous and last out of all the perfumes her brother made, she beheaded the one perfume that was dedicated which was Blonde. And with that action she did, left us Blond devotees out in the cold and in mourning for years .R.I.P the original founder Gianni Versace for creating a beautifully lush ,modern and provocative perfume like Blonde that was cut to short- much like its creator. ♥

This is a difficult perfume to review. I am reviewing the parfum version. At first I thought, wow, pure gardenia! Today I compared my blooming gardenias with Blonde, and no, it is a heady combo of tuberose/gardenia. I suppose if it had the subtle green notes of real gardenias it would be worth its weight in gold. I've never smelled any gardenia based perfume that came close in subtlety to the real thing. That being said, it is very nice and does have some subtlety to go with cloying tuberose. This is almost the antithesis of modern perfumes, the edps of which are so watered down it's shameful. It is full bodied, cloying without any synthetic notes, but also just complex enough to keep it from being cheap. It doesn't have enough sillage to be offensive; but it definitely has some sillage. It isn't for the faint of heart. It isn't for everyday. It is a flowery sexpot perfume, probably the civet enhancing it. Any lady wearing this is absolutely screaming, "notice me!" in a positive context. On me the perfume lasts a good six hours, which is excellent. There is still fragrance there after six hours, but by then it is a skin scent. It is nice without knocking people down across the room, as compared to Norell, for instance.. All in all, for the brave few who still love real perfumes, this is great. Cloying and sophisticated at the same time. I got a great deal from one of the internet perfume monster outlets even though it has been discontinued. I suspect .5 oz parfum will last a long time, and the bottle is lovely. I love reading all your reviews and I hope this helps.