Van Cleef & Arpels Féerie: A Review

I’m thinking violet is the new iris. Or the new pink pepper, lychee, you know how the perfume industry is, the new trendy note du jour. It just seems like everything is coming up violets lately.

I must be the only person on the planet that hates this bottle. The top of it looks like a weapon; you could injure yourself with that thing. It just reminds me of a cheapie novelty gift one would buy at Walt Disney World…Tinkerbelle from Peter Pan…that’s what it makes me think of. I like Lolita Lempicka’s enchanting little bottles, but this one just doesn’t do it for me. It seems gaudy not classy.

Féerie is described as a woody floral with violet as the predominant note developed by perfumer Antoine Maisondieu.

Van Cleef & Arpels lists the notes as:
Top: violet, red berries (black currant), Italian mandarin;
Heart: Bulgarian rose and Egyptian jasmine;
Base: iris butter and vetiver.

It opens exactly as the top notes are written, in that exact order. I smelled sweet violet, then berries then citrus. It remained a “berry sweet violet” on me for awhile, perhaps a full hour. Someone who loves sweet violets will love this. As you might imagine, it’s very girly and makes me think of springtime. I waited for many hours and never did smell the supposed “woodsy” quality. After the dry down it became a bit less sweet and perhaps I could smell a smidgen of iris if I really really focused but had I not known what the notes were, I would have simply thought it was violets and berries.

In a nutshell, Féerie is a pretty and sweet violet fragrance. It’s basically Creed Love in Black minus the edginess. Féerie is an easily worn and very mainstream fragrance.