Dazzling Gold (1998)
by Estée Lauder

This was awful on me. Just another cheap smelling, totally indistinct floral. It's very very flat and dull.

I wanted to love this perfume, but it smelled just like every other perfume out there. Nothing to make it stand out, but nothing to make it a true stinker either...Its just not one to wear if you want to be noticed.

Dazzling Gold is not exactly dazzling - more like burnished to a warm glow, if you ask me. It's also not entirely interesting; in fact, it easily falls into the class of just-another-fruity-floral-for-the-cooler-months type of fragrance, nothing to write home about. It is, however, definitely one thing - much, much better than its counterpart, Dazzling Silver, which should be subtitled "choker." Anyway, Dazzling Gold is a soft and relaxed scent and the honeyish fig topnote gives it some potential to be at least a little special, but that potential ends up being squandered on the pretty ordinary heart of lily and orchid. (Don't let the fancy names fool you - they're just lily and orchid.) Orchid, when left to its own devices, can bring down the more finely-tuned calibrations of any fragrance and I feel it does justthat here. It smothers all the other notes and just sits there being boring and heavy. Orchid doesn't even strike me as a very golden flower - instead, it brings to mind light mauves. And it also makes Dazzling Gold just another run of the mill floral. Too bad.