Bond No. 9 "Hamptons"

I've never been to the Hamptons, mainly because I view it as Cape Cod for Famewhores. Celebrities who want to have an actual vacation go to Nantucket or the Vineyard; celebrities who want to be available to Page Six photographers go to the Hamptons. That said, I've always imagined the environs are similar (bar the Hamptonsesque stench of collagen and desperation).

So "Hamptons" was familiar, mostly. Bug spray (but the nice sort), an unlit citronella candle on a wooden deck, sunscreen faint on your skin, a breeze coming in off the ocean through the dune grass and maybe a hint of seaweed drying out on the sand. Nice and a little reminscent, even if I think that the bottle is naff.

Here's the thing, though: after a couple of hours, I suddenly noticed a salty sting in the back of my throat. And not sea salt. Table salt. A doctor once told me to gargle with salt for a throat infection, and that weirdly stale salt coating is right there now at the back of my throat. I'm not sure if this has somehow changed my sense of smell, but suddenly I'm getting an undertone of black sand (the churned-up, foul-smelling, probably rotting-shellfish-based sand that gets exposed at very low tide). But... with whiffs of beach flowers on top. So that's salty, sickly-rotten and super-sweet-flowery all on one wrist. It's not got a patch on my personal Perfume Archnemesis, "Angel", but for me this is just not happening.

Verdict: Starts off fun and genuine and clean and breezy, only to end up as thinly-masked corruption that literally leaves a bad taste in your mouth. "Hamptons", indeed.