Marie, the Danish champion for finding great mainstream scents, was kind enough to send me a large spray sample of With Love, by American Disney Star/Pop Star/ Actress/all-around Celebrity, Hilary Duff. Celeb-U-Scents do NOT get much love in the blogoshphere, and for good reason: most of them are dreck, the juice being secondary to the peddeling of the star’s identity.
I’m not wholly opposed to celebrity scents, or to mainstream scents; it’s just that the very few I’ve tried haven’t given me a reason to doggedly try more. However, the voice of reason(able spending practices), our lovely commenter Marie, decided to take action, and introduce me to some of the best mainstream stuff out there. And I’m grateful.
With Love is surprisingly good. It’s what I hoped Estée Lauder Sensuous would be, but I am, alas, anosmic to that particular wonder.
Sweet, but not too sweet, a little creamy, a little exotic, a little spicy, and I smell what the Estée Lauder copy-writers would call “molten woods”. A low, rumbling smolder, sexy, yet perky. Kinda like Ms. Duff herself.
It’s the Disney princess all grown up, and I’m a fan.
Available almost everywhere, for around $30
beauty on the outside 
$30? Wow, that’s freer than free!
If I found a celeb scent that I liked, I would wear it. My sister loves the first Kate Moss perfume (I don’t know what it smells like) and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t really care about Kate Moss…it just smells good! That’s what it’s all about, right? 😉
Yep, sure is. I think I’ve heard that the Kate Moss perfumes arequite fine.
I wore SJP’s Lovely for ages, and still do sometimes in the summer. I like it a lot. That is the sum total of my ventures into celbuscents tho’, unless you count Givenchy’s L’Interdit (Audrey Hepburn) …
Lovely is… lovely! I passed my bottle along to my mum, who likes it more than I do (those musks are tricky on me), but it is truly a very nice fragrance.
Actually, even cheaper! I found a bottle on eBay, new in box, for $12.99 and free shipping… for 50mL! That is practically paying me to take it.
I’m thinking of picking up a bottle, just because it might be fun to have a bottle I could actually display guilt-free on my dresser (I don’t have one of those yet!).
Like you, I have not smelled the Kate Moss offerings. With Love is good… maybe even really good. I think that if someone had sent it to me labeled as an Estee Lauder scent, or even something niche, say, Etro, I would have been fooled. It may not resemble a classic Guerlain, but it smells like a lot more than twelve-bucks! 🙂 And, as you say, that’s what it’s all about!
So dee you are officially, definitely, not a snob 🙂
Thank you Tara 🙂
Nah… I will be a snob: I prefer my perfumes to be inspired by dead women (if any) 😉
LOL!
Huh, my comment must have vanished…
It was brilliant and immensely insightful and would have brought you joy, wisdom and peace of mind. Sadly I am not able to reproduce it so it remains lost forever…sue WordPress! (just joking, lovely WordPress people being alerted by their surveillance bots now, we love you and would never sue you).
ROTFL! I’m sure it would have been magical, had it not been lost 😉
Yes! You’re right! This is what I wanted Estee Lauder Sensuous to be. Not bad at all.
🙂