My split personality experience with Lacoste Essential.

I get the same thing, it's fresh one day and the next day it's sour.

Sour. Yes.

I have a small bottle of this, it's fairly generic to me. I do not get a sour note though

With this one, I think it smells great, but only hours later. I once wore it to work and had a date later that night. My date was jokingly jealous and asked," Who are you smelling so good for at work!" This was about 10 hours after I had initially sprayed some one. I put my nose in my shirt and thought oh I do smell pretty damn good

I think it has something to do with the temperature, sweat of your body.

I would recommend to test it in a rather cold/hot environment to see how it develops.

I have had experience of Essential smelling different. I first tested it from a tester bottle at my local Boots, and this bottle is almost empty, and the juice inside is not at all green, more of the colour of lager Great smell, but reminded me of something, which I worked out was the Eternity for Men tester they have in the same store.

So I did a left arm/right arm test of both, they were distinguishable, but with the same central accord that I liked (and yes, it was a little bitter). The Essential lasted much better, so I bought some from cheapsmells.com.

The bottle that arrived had a less dark, more green juice in it, and didn't smell the same one I put it on, it was much fresher, and you could even describe it as acidic and sharp, then the bottle I had tested from. No bad, just not what I wanted.

So I visited the stores again, the tester bottle at Boots still smelt the same way I liked, went to John Lewis and their tester bottle looked brand new, juice the same colour and same smell as mine.

So I'm quite confident that I have not received a fake... but there can only be 2 explanations of why these 2 tester bottles have different coloured and smelling contents:

1. Essential has been reformulated. The Boots bottle is old, and dates from before the reformulation

2. Essential changes as it gets old... The Boots bottle is now mostly full of air, so maybe the fragrance has oxidised etc. If this is true, then its good because this means Essential gets better with age (and I have a 125ml bottle thats going to last! )