Review by rogalal
Chrysanthemum is one of my favorite essential oils and and I never really smell it in perfumes, which is a shame. Thankfully, Smell Bent is here to turn it into the tea scent it always should have been. Sunshine (subtitled "Mama's Spiced Tea") smells to me mostly like a weird sort of dry brown herbal smell halfway between nutmeg and chicory. This is mixed with a dried orange peel smell, the aforementioned chrysanthemum, and a maybe a tiny pinch of clove. There's a subtly lactic milky quality hovering in the background, too. This all comes together to smell like spicy orange pekoe tea. It's not the liquid tea, but an artful rendering of the smell of a canister full of dry tea. It's not literal, at least on me, because the mystery dry brown herb note, while it goes a long way in suggesting the smell of dried tea leaves, also has a coffee-ish quality to it. The first time I sniffed Sunshine, the combination of the chicory smell and the milky undertones smelled a little weird to me, but it's grown on me with repeated wears. It's kind of a one-trick pony, because it doesn't really do much beyond the chicory orange tea smell - my only real complaint is that it doesn't seem to have much of a base, instead just sort of fading away. But it's still a fun one, and a novel take on the tea perfume genre, which usually relies on what's by now a bit of a niche cliche mixing sage, lemon verbena, and coriander to fake a tea smell.
