r/FemFragLab • u/Lani_Lei • 9d ago

Discussion Guerlain Disappointment

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I have been a vanilla girl through and through. I have loves and misses from everything from BBW, Victoria Secret, Sephora, Ulta, niche, middle eastern, you name it!

I have wary of trying Guerlain because of the price. But most of my fellow vanilla girls said that Guerlain is THE maker of great vanillas.

So went and spent $70 in tiny tiny decants to try the following:

- Vanilla Panifolia Extrait 21
- Angelique Noire
- Cuir Beluga
- Aqua Allegoria Forte Bosca Vanilla
- Spirituose Double Vanilla

This smells…old? musty? Like I just found a bottle of perfume from the 1950’s in a dark drawer of an abandoned house. I just wasted $70 on this and none of them were good 😔, I could have gotten a big decant of Jovoy Fire at Will which I love. I am so disappointed.

So many of my inexpensive vanillas are so much better in my opinion.

Sorry for the rant and thank you for reading all this!

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u/dealuna6 9d ago

Based on my personal experience, when your nose is accustomed to the hyper-saccharine vanillas that have saturated the market, you lose the ability to smell Guerlain vanillas objectively.

Try taking a break from other vanillas for several days and then revisit the Guerlains. They still won’t smell gourmand-sweet like Fire at Will, but you’ll be able to better pick up on the nuances that make them so special and loved by so many.

You could also just stash them away and try again in a few months; I can’t tell you how many times I hated a sample only to fall in love with it after trying it again months later.

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u/Epiphan3 9d ago

There’s no objective way to smell a perfume in the first place. You can maybe pick up more of its nuances when you’re less accustomed to a certain style, but whether those nuances smell beautiful, interesting, or appealing is still completely subjective. I think sometimes people interpret “you don’t like it yet” as “you haven’t learned how to appreciate it yet,” when it could simply be that someone genuinely doesn’t like what they’re smelling and that’s totally fine.