VIW - a few months on.....

Its not a bad scent but its not worth the price i think. The only respect that VIW garners today is purely because of the Creed label behind it.

To me it smells like Pina Colada. Its sugary,syrupy and coconuty. I find it fairly linear as i can smell the coconut within seconds of spraying and the coconut dominates throughout the wearing.

Longevity is good. I remember getting whiffs of it almost like 12 hours after i sprayed it. I don't think it pumps out a lot of sillage though.

Initially i thought i should get rid of it as well, however my recent fascination with Creed's held me back. Overall its a pleasant scent but if i hadn't bought it blind i would've never blown US$145 on a 4oz bottle.

It would be a good buy for someone who gets it cheaply from someone who doesn't like it in the first place.

Just wanted to add that i wouldn't wear this on a very hot day because the coconut mixed with sugarcane juice can get cloying. Obviously the best time to wear this would be when temperatures are not extreme. Cool evenings could be a good time i guess. But most people think of this as a 'beach' scent. Not for me though.


gupts

Wearing it less frequently, just because this was my "signature" summer scent. But still love it. It is so much more than "Pina Colada" on my skin. In fact, the lime and the rum really stick out for me, and a the floral elements are closer behind. I get some coconut, but it's very subdued and acts to ground the scent almost like a "vanillic base" rather than the "coconutty overtones" one finds with a suntan oil.

I'd also disagree with gupts' assessment that VIW only gets its respect from bearing the Creed name. If anything I think that has played against it. Sets it up for higher scrutiny and more people willing to say "I don't like it" when they mean "I don't like it at that price"

In a nutshell, it's the best, most realistic lime I've found yet (well, alongside Selection Verte, which I bought the same day).

VIW is more complex than it initially seems to be. Its easy to dismiss it as irrelevant because its just another citrus or because "its a Creed" but VIW needs repeated testing to reveal its full effects.

I have tried it in a variety of conditions and have found it to be a lime-coconut-rum scent, and at other times it comes off as a frag with mandarin top notes, a bit of floral in the middle mixed in with some lime and a musky base with a transparent layer of coconut which is perceptible yet never overbearing. I have never experienced an overwhelming amount of coconut in VIW (I have been testing from a 1 oz. decant), but I recall that I used to get a lot of blackcurrants from a SMW sample (and a heavy boring tonka-ambergris accord from a Santal Imperial sample) while my bottles were a different case entirely so it might be an off/unbalanced sample that might be causing this effect for some. I also don't get the "herbaceous notes" that Creed lists in the notes pyramid of VIW - they might be phantom notes doing some behind the scenes work. VIW also has a long extended drydown .. it doesn't have a lot of sillage, but the rum+musky drydown only reveals itself after 6 hours on my skin and the frag is long lasting.

To me no other niche house has mastered the art of constructing impressive citrus and citrus based fragrances like Creed has, and VIW is another example of this. Their control over the usually ephemereal citrus notes is excellent, and as Luca Turin mentioned in his review of Erolfa they used this to great effect to "solve" the problem of rendering an "aquatic" note efficiently in Erolfa. As the perfumer Thierry Wasser said in an interview with Chandler Burr, citrus fragrances are more challenging to create than "denser" fragrances and aren't any less complex.

In the end, if you don't like it, you don't like it and you move on

Well, as rentboy previously stated - Virgin Island Water is inextricably tied to my memories of Summer 2007 (my vacation to Puerto Rico, etc) that now I find I'm applying it less and less and might even shelve it til next Summer.

I always found VIW complex: the lime is dry (how I like it) and salty; the coconut is naturally sweet and subtle; the booze (rum) accord is not too strong or 'oaky'; the longevity is amazing.

One thing, though: I can't get out of my head, the image of 'buttered popcorn' when I apply this now. I had read a few people who mentioned this note when VIW was released and I couldn't relate to this at all. But after many months wearing it, I 'get' it now. It doesn't ruin the scent for me. However, it triggers an inner laugh in me - and honestly makes me feel like I've walked into the lobby of a movie theater (the popcorn popping in that big metal pot, the sticky buttered glass, salt...) and then the coconut/lime kicks in and I smell both. A strange, olfactory experience, almost CBIHP-esque in execution.

For me is VIW the best release in 2007. The notes are so real...the lemon is sooo juicy...the coconut comes every ten minutes through...and i love the drydown (i think it is the ginger and rum, which makes it wonderful)...this scent don´t fits everybody.
This one last the whole day with just 3 sprays. Amazing Creed fragrance. I love it.