Covet Sarah Jessica Parker by Sarah Jessica Parker, 2007

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.