Stila "Midnight Bloom"

I cannot escape the thought that this is a perfume designed as an evening fragrance for teenagers; the second perfume they've ever bought, the one they start wearing out at night. It's as if someone took a look at the entry-level teenage daytime scent of powder and vanilla and just substituted musk and gardenia for the vanillin. There's not much of a progression with this fragrance: it arrives in a burst of powdery gardenias and stays that way for ages, that giant bloom hanging heavy over any other notes for the rest of the day.

It's a sweet enough fragrance, I suppose, but very basic. The notes smell a little canned, and that gardenia will kill you. There's also an initial syrupy-sweet hiss that is the main development, eventually evaporating into a more typical vanilla note that brings a bit of cedar with it. Six hours on, it finally escapes the looming gardenia, becoming vanilla pudding with a few petals swirled into the dish -- a nice, perfectly pleasant scent and executed really well here, just coming in too late to really make up for the opening. I'd love to be able to say it smells like a trellis of gardenias or something, but the scent just doesn't lend itself to grand imagination. And man, this stuff is strong -- it almost overpowered me in the first two hours, so go easy on the dose. In the end, it hits me as yet another generic, kind of hamfisted design, available in hundreds of incarnations at the nearest pharmacy.

Verdict: A teenager's purchase for her first real date; unfortunately, the stage truly worth the amount of allowance she forked out for it is at the very end.