100% Love (2003)
by S-Perfume

When my daughter was 8 or 9, she and a friend took over my kitchen to make me a special treat. The girls mixed a chocolate cake batter, and then enhanced it with orange juice, Parmesan cheese, garlic, balsamic vinegar, dog kibble, and a generous sprinkling of crushed black peppercorns. They offered me the resulting cupcakes, (frosted in lurid turquoise,) amidst a torrent of barely suppressed giggles. They referred to their project as “gourmet cooking,” but they could just as well have called it 100% Love.

100% Love is a real freak show of a scent, the olfactory equivalent of Heath Ledger’s Joker in the 2008 Batman movie. The opening juxtaposes a blaring chocolate note and an equally strident and unashamedly chemical floral accord. It’s the kind of intentional olfactory affront that dares you to keep sniffing and see what comes next. 100% serves up pretty much more of the same for the next few hours, before petering out into a very sweet, powdery, clean musk and vanilla drydown.

This scent leaves me in a quandary as a critic: it gets full credit for daring and originality, and in terms of keeping chocolate from smelling like food it’s a complete success. Yet I have to assert that 100% Love is a dreadful fragrance. Not because it's shocking, for it is clearly meant to shock. Not even because I don’t like the way it smells; there are plenty of scents whose quality I acknowledge, even if I don’t enjoy them. The matter of this scent’s merit hinges on one question: are originality and provocation by themselves sufficient?

Scents like Yatagan and Muscs Koublaï Khän are no less challenging than 100% Love, and neither is particularly “pretty” in the generally accepted sense. Yet I believe both to be beautiful – beautiful enough to rank as masterpieces of perfumery. Yatagan, for example, may assail the nose with uncomfortable notes of celery, Artemisia, pine tar, and castoreum, but it evokes a compelling olfactory landscape of hot, parched conifer forests. 100% Love is like my daughter’s “gourmet cooking": it shocks, but it does not cohere. It offers nothing of interest after the initial “Ta-dah!” and hence seems to me more of a stunt than a perfume. If novelty and shock value suffice for you, you may well enjoy 100% Love, but I want more, and I deem it unwearable.

S-Perfume 100% Love

One thing I enjoy in my perfume, from time to time, is the weird and wonderful. The rubber note in Bvlgari Black, the tar in Le Labo Patchouli 24, the dried vomit note in Etat Libre D'Orange Secretions Magnifique; okay strike the last one. Sometimes weird just takes you places you don't want to go . Also one persons weird and beautiful is another's "are you kidding?!". All reviews are a reflection of the nose of the reviewer but it is scents like, Sophia Grojsman's 2003 creation for S-Perfume, 100% Love, that are olfactory Rohrshach tests and each person who experiences this scent will get something different from it. What I get at the top is an intense fruity accord which according to the note list should be a mix of cranberry and blueberry. On me it smells closer to cherry, the cherry smell of sno-cone syrup. Very sweet and treading right up to the edge of my sweet tolerability but not stepping over. The fruit stays firmly in place and it is joined by rose and chocolate. Both notes come in, in equal intensity with the fruity beginning, and you get what for some people will come off as a fruity,floral, gourmand chemical spill but on me instead combines into something that seems almost too sweet but its not, something too floral but its not, and something too rich but its not. Somehow Ms. Grojsman pushes right to the edge with all three notes and together they create an accord that works brilliantly on me. The base is almost diasppointingly pedestrian compared to what came before as a mix of musk and vanilla end 100% Love back in common perfume territory. 100% Love is not a shy scent and carries a lot of longevity and sillage so you better like it if you're going to wear it. 100% Love is definitely not a scent that everyone will fall 100% in love with but it is a scent that is 100% creative.

I am 100% in love with 100% love. Cannot improve on Ayala's review so won't even try!

Puke in a bottle. OMG! The price for this is way out of hand. Have some manners when visiting a store that carries the scent and do not spray this!

The BN notes tell me I should like this. Berries... yeah, I like berries, more to eat than to smell, but why not? Rose and peony... both flowers with very nice aromas, especially (to my nose) peonies. White musk... who doesn't like white musk?

Yet I don't. Like 100% Love, that is. Notes, after all, are approximations, metaphors, flights of fancy. It's impossible to predict what a fragrance is going to smell like from any kind of verbal description. You just have to smell it.

I can imagine what it would smell like to take a piece of rich, aromatic chocolate and a rose and hold them together under your nose. This doesn't smell like that. Not that it's even supposed to, although Luca Turin did describe it as a "chocolate rose." I do get the berries and rose, but I also get something else, something that it's impossible to sum up in a word, but something that reminds me of standing dish water, of the insides of dishwashing gloves, or of an old sponge. I don't mean the smell of dishwashing soap, I mean the smell of watery putrefaction, of something that's not exactly putrid, but not clean, either. The smell of an incomplete attempt at cleaning, of nascent bacterial colonies mixed with water and traces of soap, on rubber or foam.

Doesn't sound very pleasant, does it? It's not.

AYALA has 'deconstructed' this scent so beautifully, I wish I had her nose! For me, 100% Love is not very wearable. On my skin it smells unfinished, almost watered down. The base is lacking, and the musk leaves me smelling not so fresh. As always, try before you buy.