Prada Candy by Prada, 2011

It opens with that caramel taste that you get when it's stuck in your teeth, that juicy sticky caramel. But it has a fruitiness in the background, almost like there is fruit water somewhere there. It is interesting how the caramel is ambery and is almost too sweet, but this is balanced out pretty well by the wateriness that feels like a mist of water drops has somehow mixed with it. Please note: This is only from the wafting - I haven't got to how it smells close to skin yet! When I put my nose close to my arm, I get the familiar dry licorice wood of Serge Lutens Un Bois Vanille in there, and there's something almost salty in there. It must be the dryness of the wood that is making me think of salt. Either way though, the scent is much rounder and fuller on skin than it is when it wafts. I will be honest; on my skin, the wafting could get cloying for a fussy person near me. Other reviewers disagree, but then everyone's skin is different. It dries down to a drier vanillic resin. The caramel is always present, but I find the drydown (which occurs pretty quickly) very very similar to Un Bois Vanille (yes, I'll keep mentioning this one), but with a slightly saltier and less rounded drydown. I do like this part, but because I have something similar, I keep wishing the juicy caramel lasted longer. It's just as well though - I might get a toothache if the sticky caramel stage lasted too long. I will say this: The fragrance doesn't change too much on my skin, but it does do something very unfortunate; it gets eaten by my skin in a very short time. Now, this would be alright if it were a cheap fragrance, but it's 50 Euro for only 30 ml!!! Now that would be worth it if there was a) many hours of pleasure and b) some sort of complex development - but there isn't.

Caveat: While I love drag queens, I tend not to like dessert-like gourmands. Just not my thing. Pradas Candy is in many respects a super-gourmand. Its cotton-candyish, its caramellic, its vanillic, and it gains sweetness as it goes. Much seems to have come out of Pradas PR about the benzoin and therefore the oriental genre. Yes, theres benzoin, but the name of the perfume tells you about the perfumes true affiliation: the dessert/gourmand category. I see people referring to Candy as complex, the complexity implying a big, successful outcome. I find Candy more of a kitchen sink gourmand. Its a busting-at-the-seems stuffed perfume. It hits the prominent notes of the big players in the gourmand game from the past few years. But if youre trying to capture Candy by describing its scent, you run the risk of giving a description that might apply to any other dessert perfume. Heres how I see it: If you liken a sweet gourmand perfume to a straight, femme women, then Candy is the glam drag queen. The femme gives a certain portrayal of gender. The drag queen and Candy both take that same femininity as a starting place, then turn up the volume until the distortion sets in.