Ladyboy (2004)
by B Never Too Busy To Be Beautiful

A confused and misguided foray into boundary pushing perfumery. The story begins with a perfume inspired by the warm weather of Copacabana - Brasil and yet we awkwardly find ourselfs in Bangkok celebrating the gender bluring talents of ladyboys. Banana managed to find a place in Dolce & Gabbana's Sicily where it added a fruity warmth. Here we reference overwrought Banana loaf flavoured with Banana Essence in extemis. I think history is really trying to tell us something here. Maybe Banana doesn't feature in perfume for a reason. I love the street smells of Asian Cities, the combination of the Fragrant and the foul. The idea of fresh sweat, tropical flowers, street food and makeup heavily applied is incredibly appealling to me. This is a 'Ladyboy' smell I would have embraced. But Banana essence with a peardrop chaser and parma violets...no thanks.

18th November, 2011.

I really wanted to like this because it seemed so unusual, and I like all the different notes by themselves, but somehow the combination (especially banana and violet) seems a little overwrought and synthetic. If only the chamomile were a little stronger! If this perfume were a person, he/she would be whiny, dramatic and annoying.
This scent just seems really unsophisticated, and while I've smelled worse things, I definitely wouldn't wear this.

9th October, 2010.

this smells of childrens cough medicine, originally i was attracted to the uniqueness of this perfume, and it is fun and diffrent, but artifical banana runts is pushin it, the violets bring everything to a wearable level, so im neutral with this, i wont buy again, but ill eventally try it again.

6th January, 2010.

Notes from the site:
banana absolute, violets,seaweed

The site mentions of banana absolute hasn't been used in perfume before, which the basenotes directory search proves wrong immediatly. Sure it might not be an absolute, but I doubt what they are working with can be called an absolute either.

They further on say that the banana is responsible for the fruitbasket smell. I bet it is, but it's a decaying fruitbasket. And not even the typical smell of rotten fruit that is too sweet but still kind of nice. This is pure decayed fruitbasket, as in everything is green and it's not really fruit there but more a whole new ecosystem of bacterie and fungus type of smell, with a hint of rotten fruit.

Adding the violet doesn't help either and I never noticed anything of seaweed. While Lolita Lempicka uses it nicely in a warm gourmand way, and many other perfumes are able to use it in a pleasant but notiuceable way. LadyBoy doesn't.

To be honest, the description doesn't match the scent at all, which irritates even more than if the description matches ( read the descriptions on the site for all perfumes, iin this case you have 7 paragraphs on the fictional character of ladyboy or other people who could wear and only one of them goes into how the perfume *actually* smells). So here is my version of it :

Ladyboy would be more a boy who was changed into a woman in some cheap exotic place and during the surgery on his face his sense of smell was damaged so he never noticed the decaying fruitbasket and maybe some dying mammals in the vicinity.

4th August, 2008.

Banana and violet - yikes!
This is not for me.

18th June, 2008.