Chloé, as many of you already know, rejoined the land of the living, perfume-wise, in 2008 with the launch of their eponymous perfume, Chloé Eau de Parfum. I still remember smelling it for the first time and laughing to myself, thinking: ha, that’ll never sell… Of course I was wrong, it sold just fine and then some, and it swept the 2009 fragrance awards. I have nothing to say in my own defense except that even I don’t think I know the first thing about what will sell. I am wrong more often than not on that score (and on countless other scores as well). At any rate, I did not review Chloé Eau de Parfum then and I am not going to review it now; let’s just say that I thought the conclusion in Perfumes: The Guide (“a dilute, dishearteningly synthetic muguet-rose good enough to grace a non-abrasive bathtub cleanser”) was just about right.
So anyway, Chloé followed that up with the Eau de Fleurs trio, which I liked marginally better than Angie did, but not so much as to consider paying actual money for any of them. And now we have Love, Chloé.
Love, Chloé is meant to be about “radiant, generous, spontaneous femininity”, and more specifically about “the olfactory vocabulary of cosmetics”.1 In other words, it’s meant to smell like cosmetic powder — or as they put it, “a lingering powder halo nestles into the skin like a feminine aura…” — and that is precisely what it smells like…