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Saturday, May 14, 2011

Rahät Loukoum by Serge Lutens



This is one perfume that forever will rub in the fact that the smell that comes out of a bottle might be very different than how that perfume will smell on your skin.

When I open my vial, out comes a strong whiff of bitter almonds. On skin the bitter almond note lasts only for a second or two. Then there are toasted almonds for about 10 seconds. These turn to sweet marzipan, but within a few minutes the whole almond thing dissappears, making place for cherries. The scent keeps on morphing, inpersonating among others cherry liquorice, cherry liquor, marshmallows, cherry nougat and vanilla pudding. This lasts for about two hours. After that there is mostly musk and vanilla. Rahät Loukum is the arab name for Turkish delight, "Candyshop" would also be a decent name for this scent.

My first thought when trying this one was "Oh my god, this is way off my sweet-o-meter, far into diabetic zone, I can't wear this". But since then, I've found myself reaching out to this scent several times. Today I wore it after first using a coffee scrub, leaving faint bitter-sweet notes of coffee and dark chocolate all over my skin. In my opinion, that bought out the best in the Rahät Loukoum. Layered like that, I got deeper and darker notes like cherry tobacco and Kriek, Belgian cherry beer, two party staples when I first started uni. I'm no big consumer of any of them nowadays, but I loved catching a whiff every now and then, reminding me of happy, carefree days :)

Rahät Loukoum is most wearable gourmand scent I've tried so far, but still, I wouldn't wear it out of the house. Or, well, actually I did today, and I felt rather uncomfortable doing it. This is not a scent when you want people to take you seriously, but great when wearing your slouchiest clothes, realxing around the house. So, I'm rating this a 4 out of 5.

Picture: Cherry Almond Nougat, yum

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