TotalBeauty.com average reader rating: 9.8*
Why: Readers say to "give it a shot." "I love this scent! It's a wonderful honey, vanilla, woodsy scent. It's very feminine and not too strong — just right. My boyfriend and myself love this perfume so I will continue buying it." One woman says, "You would never associate this scent with a teen star. It's fruity, light and not overbearing." Another woman says she found this perfume in "one of those inserts in a magazine. I saw the name of whose scent it was and as a 30-year-old woman, I crinkled my nose. But, it smelled sweet, so I opened the flap, inhaled and I was hooked. Instantly I got in the car, took a little trip to the local Target and snatched up the nearest bottle I could get my hands on. It is my go-to scent." Another reader said she was "pleasantly surprised. This is SO not like other celeb fragrances. It smells sophisticated — like an actual perfume should, not like a tween spray!"
Perfume pop quiz: Who created the celebrity fragrance model? (Cue the "Jeopardy" theme song.) Give up? Answer: Elizabeth Taylor in 1988 (source). Yup. Nowadays, literally everyone and their mother has their own perfume (or line of beauty products), and you can't pick up a magazine or drive down Sunset Blvd. without seeing a scantily clad starlet, spooning or straddling her life-size, eponymous fragrance. So the question is then, do all of these celeb perfumes stink or are some shockingly wearable?
We'll spare you the trouble and headache of trying on 47 different fragrances — because our readers already did the nose work for you. While some women "only bought this because it was Gwen Stefani's" (or one of their other favorite celebrity's) other reviewers were "a little nervous to buy something with Britney Spears' name on it" (or felt skeptical about a tween star's perfume), but were pleasantly surprised to discover that "it smells good enough to justify admitting in public that I wear a Britney Spears scent." One woman confesses that she is "not a big Paris Hilton fan, but I could bathe in" her perfume. Another reviewer gushes about Hilton's scent saying, "I could drown myself in this perfume and still not get tired of it." Bathe and drown? Wow, that's some pretty hyperbolic language there, ladies. As for the worst ones, a reviewer who is "a huge Mariah Carey fan... had high hopes for this one" but it "smelled overwhelmingly sweet, but not in a good way." And other readers found some of the stars' fragrances to be "BOOOOORING!" or "like granny perfume that has been sitting on the dresser for 40 years." Ouch.
But of course, the true litmus test for an overwhelming amount of our reviewers is this: Does the boyfriend/finance/husband/significant other think it smells good? If so, readers dab it on twice a day; and if not, it pretty much gets thrown to the dogs. And not to take two steps back in the feminist movement, but one woman sums up the overall sentiment of most reviewers by saying, "my husband can't stay away when I wear this, and to me that's the real measure of any fragrance."
