Eden (1994)
by Cacharel

Urgggh! This one’s too synthetic for my tastes. It attempts to smell like a fresh green but fails miserably.

[Original submission date: 10 April 2008]

Vile rotting vegetable smell, soggy, strong, headachy, sickly. I had to keep going back to smell it on my wrist just to check it really was that bad. I feel sorry for whoever had to share an elevator with me before I managed to scrub it off.

Eden displays an extremely distinctive sweet, spicy, green floral character right from the get-go. Eden expands dramatically as it ages, throwing off a cloud of ever-sweetening sillage for several feet around the wearer. Smooth woods and powder reveal themselves under the sweet florals, and these establish a plush, wooly texture that comes to dominate the entire olfactory experience.

In the succeeding hours Eden’s sweetness and matte finish yield an oddly bland, pudding-like texture that I find tiresome upon exposure – very much like eating too much cookie batter. The first couple of mouthfuls are great fun but by the tenth I’d rather suck a lemon. As the florals drop out Eden’s sweetness takes on a syrupy or dried fruit character and a chemical edge that leave a hollow, artificially flavored candy feel to the powdery drydown.

A day spent with Eden leaves me thinking it loud and unpalatable, yet at the same time oddly insipid. I feel that if a fragrance is going to shout, it might as well shout something interesting, like Fracas, Knize Ten, Black Aoud, or Havana, and not the kind of bland, sugary static that Eden has to offer.

Unearthly dry yet sweet hot laundry accord quite unlike anything else I have ever encountered. Would make a better masculine than a feminine.

Tread lightly... this is an unusual one.
This is about as rich as herbal perfumes get, and you're either gonna love it or hate it. Patchouli fruit compote. Lasts and lasts.

Eden smells like the juice of citruses and exotic fruits dripping in the dust on an outdoors fruit market in the dry period. It hasn't been raining for months and the dust gets in your nostrils and everywhere, but it's not very hot, the sky is covered with a suffocating layer of clouds or smog. The fruits are out of season, haven't got enough water, are either unripe or have been picked unripe and gone overripe and quite bad since nobody wants to buy the poor tasteless things.
Eden is nothing like a jungle or rainforest.
Eden is original, that much I admit. Dry and dusty and stale and musty and sour and sickly sweet unlike any other scent. And strong too - I fear this scent is guilty of many cases of suffocation on public transport, when someone who has been wearing too much of it for too long has habitually sprayed it on. It's odd, and oddly familiar. I've probably smelled it on a lot of women in my granny's generation, which is odd considering the scent is from the 90s, but it "feels" much older, at least like a 70s creation... Perhaps I actually smelled it on younger women when I was a kid? It feels "old" to me, anyway.
One thing that can be said for Eden is that it suits its bottle very well. That cheap-looking plasticky thing with its very retro cool, muted, slightly grey-tinted green hue corresponds to the supposedly "green" scent gone horribly dry and dusty and synthetic.