Covet Sarah Jessica Parker (2007)
by Sarah Jessica Parker

Well, first off, this scent is excellent. I’m flabbergasted. I bought a sample on a lark, due to CB’s The Perfect Scent. I was expecting nothing.

Instead I am confronted with a fougere with intense depth. Scent opens citrusly, with a spearmint twist, yet in the background lurks a decided warmth due to a floral/spice accord. Am I also smelling a touch of orange? Happily, the floral accord stays in the distance, just enough to smell pretty as it waves at you from across the room.

As the scent develops, more warmth comes out. I do smell the chocolate, perhaps some pepper. Unlike some reviewers, I find the scent nicely cohesive. Green elements from the opening are still present in the drydown.

Dare I say this is an accesible intellectual fragrance? (and btw, this frag layers beautifully with Malle's L'eau d'Hiver...)

3rd November, 2011.

It took me quite some time to appreciate SJP COVET, which to my nose is a "mystery, wrapped in a riddle, inside an enigma" perfume. When I first purchased a bottle (scent unsniffed) a couple of years ago, I was very disappointed and confused. After a single wearing, I relegated the beautiful bottle filled with a strange peridot-colored liquid to the "Mistakes Were Made" shelf of my armoire.

Months later, when I decided to give this perfume a second chance, I was pleasantly surprised. There was something resiny and complex and enticing about this unorthodox composition. Greens and chocolate and honeysuckle and lavender and lemon and amber? What? Well, yes, somehow they work together very well in this perfume, which in addition to containing better-quality components than are typical for celebrity scents, is also unique. I know of no other perfume similar to SJP COVET.

Today, on a 91F afternoon with relatively low humidity, I am happy to be able to report that COVET is holding up extraordinarily well and may be even more appealing than I found it to be during the winter. But I should say that it changes radically with all sorts of environmental factors, and therefore defies objective description. Different notes become salient under different conditions. How to convey the beauty of COVET? I think that this is a clear case where words cannot do justice to the perfume. I find it quite compelling and yet too weird too describe. I might say that the chocolate is dominant, but then that sentence would be rendered false (and me, therefore, a liar!) a few seconds later. The notes of COVET wax and wane and undulate in a manner that could only be modeled using a very complex differential equation. Around every corner is a new twist throughout the course of COVET's reasonably lengthy life on my skin.

Like the perfume, the bottle, too, is unique; smooth and hefty with an odd shape I've not seen before. Even the color of the liquid--perodot--is rare in perfumery and unique in my collection. Happily the color has not degraded or faded since I acquired my bottle two years ago. But the best part of all is that the juice inside continues to smell really great.

It took some time, but I finally sniffed the splendor and saw the COVET light. COVET is a "challenging" perfume in the way that the films of Werner Herzog are sometimes said to be "challenging". However, COVET is not, for me, at all difficult to wear, now that I've cracked its hard outer shell.

17th July, 2011.

There is a seaside candy shop two towns south of me where you can buy individual lavender chocolates for 25 cents each. I usually buy five dollars worth and hoard them for a few weeks. I spend up to half an hour nibbling each button- sized piece.

Covet is nothing like my precious floral confections. It starts out as a bag of smirking lemonheads but something in the mix of florals, musks and fruits in the heart and drydown just smells like an improvisational powdered drink cocktail - An unappetizing concoction where the last packet of lime kool-aid is stretched with the inclusion of 3 varieties of crusty two-year-old instant iced tea, a bit of chocolate powder (oops) and too much water.

A scrubber.

26th June, 2011.

Covet to my surprise is a very nice fragrance. It's not a WOW perfume but a nice one. It is very green but at the same time the dark chocolate in this gives this green beauty some dryness. It does sparkle & I would have to give that credit to the honeysuckle?! But @ any rate, it is nice for every day wear, to an office or just a day in the park, young women & old can enjoy this & men. This last between 6-8 hours on my skin & it projects ok. For the price of this set you can not go wrong. I see no reason how you can offend someone with this particular scent.

If green valley's, honeysuckle, & dark chocolate are your thing, then you DO NOT want to miss out on this. It does it's job well for what it is. Also it is very affordable. Nice!

28th May, 2011.

This is a definite improvement from Lovely. An interesting scent with a slight musky-ness about it. However it smelt very similiar to Believe by Britney Spears when mixed with my skin chemistry. I didn't get a lot of flowers in this fragrance. I found it to be a lot more spicy and oriental-like. I would have considered buying this if I didn't have Believe.

26th April, 2011.

I was really taken by this the first time I tried it--I had just gotten back from a trip to Southeast Asia, and was pining for a whiff of lemongrass in my chilly northern clime. The opening of this fragrance is nice, and it works better than you'd expect after just reading the composition. But then, by the time you get to the drydown, it's completely falling apart. Gone is the power that the initial burst of citrus has to hold everything together, and you're left with an incoherent mess--like grandma in lavender and grandpa in Old Spice (fragrances that my actual grandparents wore, in fact,) bickering over who gets the first piece of some freshly-baked brownies. (Though, to be accurate, G&G never bickered over baked goods.) I keep it around in my frag-wardrobe, but can't decide whether to wear it in summer for its cheerful, citrusy opening, or in winter for its high-calorie drydown...so it just decorates my shelf year-round.

26th April, 2011.