LouLou (1987)
by Cacharel

I brought Lou Lou for my 24th birthday this year and love it. I'm a huge fan of sexy orientals that have a different personality to the overwhelming amount of celeb fragrances as they all smell the same. Lou Lou reminds me of a winter's night by the fire very sharp and smoky and mysterious the cinnamon is to die for. Then after a while the scent lingers on and reminds me of antique books,it's good to wear day or night as it's not an overbearing scent, very sexy.

LouLou is a sweet, powdery floral-oriental scent with the texture of a velvet cushion and the mass of an industrial drill press. It opens at full throttle, with orange blossom, tuberose, vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, heliotrope, and plenty of aldehydes. All of these are soon joined by a very rich sandalwood and animalic musk and the foundation is a sweet, powdery vanillic amber. The composition is dense, viscous and determinedly “old school” in character. It’s also smooth, coherent, and well-blended, so while it represents a style that many would find matronly, LouLou exemplifies that style rather well.

This kind of big oriental scent is rarely ever quiet, and LouLou is true to type, with aggressive projection and thick clouds of sillage. It’s “in for a penny, in for a pound” with LouLou. To enjoy it you’ve got to love the kind of retro, “perfumey” scents that granny wore, and you must feel no shame flouting your love. If that’s your thing, LouLou just might be your girl!

A better offering, for women, by Cacharel but it’s still not good enough (and the bottle design is hideous – the smaller bottle looks more like a Kinder Surprise vibrator). The sweet floral opening is heady and attractive but it soon fails to go anywhere interesting.

In a nutshell, LouLou is like a Ferrari with a flat tyre.

[Original submission date: 25 May 2008]

Like the most other Cacharel perfumes, LouLou too has that distinctive, sharp and gradually more and more overpowering note (which I can not quite identify, woody maybe) that gives me an instant headache. Thus, despite I liked this perfume I couldn't really wear it and eventually give it off.

This perfume is rude. That's the first thing came to me when i tried for the first time. But however, a vulgar, but amazingly beautiful one. We all once in a while meet someone like Loulou in our real life. Does not pretend, so very honest and passionate.

A very unique fragrance, on me the smell of iris/lily and incense/vanilla is especially strong, creating a wonderfully strange "innocence vs. decadence" dichotomy.

Some days I love it, other days it bothers me so much, I have to scrub it off. It is so beautifully delicious I can eat myself, it is so powdery, cloying and pungent, it gives me severe migraine. It is strikingly retro, it is startlingly modern. The blue and red bottle is so unusual, bold and sexy - it is also hideous and nasty. You can tell by now I am of two minds with this endlessly fascinating and possibly repugnant perfume. It is however, *my* perfume, not only in name, but an ex simply dropped it into my lap one day and said, "It's you," and the first time I wore it, it was really me.