Hey there Fellow Fumie Family.

Today we are chatting about one of Yves Saint Laurent’s newest lineup, the Oriental Collection. These are a new last year, extremely spendy, designer try at regaining some of their lost consumer ground through their own, and enforced, ruthless reformulations and cheapening of many of their products. Here is the big ticket item to lure us back. There are now four in the Oriental Collection with the addition of Splendid Wood this year.

Don’t forget to enter the CB I Hate Perfumes Rare Flowers GIVEAWAY<<<JUMP

Supreme Bouquet by Yves Saint Laurent 2013

Photo Stolen Fragrantica

Fragrantica gives these featured accords:
Top: Fruity notes
Heart: Ylang ylang, tuberose, jasmine
Base: Patchouli, amber, musk

Supreme Bouquet, seems like they have made the bar pretty high, Supreme? Really Supreme? I was already pre disposed to not like it just from the name, which seems both overblown and lame. Who is in charge of this stuff at YSL Fragrance, it just makes me squirm with embarrassment that out of the WHOLE English language (and the thousands of others available) that Supreme Bouquet is the BEST name they could come up with. Let’s wear it and see if it lives down to it’s moniker.

Photo Stolen WikiMedia

Peaches from a can, mango and pineapple? Like a fruit cocktail with added sugar syrup, actually, like the syrup that canned fruit comes in. YUMMY! I am taken directly back to my childhood in the first spritz, sadly this crazy fun, 100% unnatural scent only blasts for about 3-5 minutes before it is lost in a very honey-like sweetness that still manages to be dry, as the white flowers come strolling in with a sinuous, sensuous, insouciant abandon and wrap their lovely coils around the fruit till all you can smell are sweet, buttery, green, fatty white flowers. So beautiful there is almost a fairytale quality, Supreme Bouquet is ethereal but solid and wafting gently around me like a nimbus. It is like you have sat yourself in an arbour of exotic dream flowers that bear only a passing resemblance to anything of this world, more like the flowers I would expect Queen Amidala to cultivate. Sometimes I worry that I have TERRIBLE taste in fragrance, I think these are nearly completely aroma chemicals but still they smell fabulous to me. I love it.

Photo Stolen Wikipedia

The amber highlights and warms the flowers as they start to fade, they don’t really leave but they do become less assertive, relax their hold and give some space to everything else, sadly the uber clean patchouli and musks smell a trifle generic and that lets the whole composition down a bit, after the fireworks of the opening and heart it would have been nice if the patchouli had given us a raspy, earthy depth. It doesn’t.

Photo Stolen Flickr

Further reading: Katie Puckrik Smells and Kafkaesque
Available in department stores (not in Australia yet) UK YSL site £195
I bought my sample from Surrender To Chance from $5/.5ml

OK, so is this the SUPREME Bouquet? Naah, but it is lovely, wearable and sexy, super perfume-y and a look back at fragrances of the past till its slightly boring, but very nice, dry down. Would I pay £195 for a bottle? Probably not. On 50% discount? I’d be definitely thinking about it. Actually, for US$100 I would have been online and purchased a bottle already. It is very nice, great gift for someone but extremely overpriced to me.

Have you tried any from the new Oriental line at Yves Saint Laurent yet?
Portia x