Perfume Review: Guerlain Colours of Love and La Prairie Silver Rain

I love the work of Jason Brooks, the British fashion illustrator, whose images I have used in various posts (see Amouage Ciel and Rich Hippie). If ever a cartoon is made out of my life (ha ha), I want Jason Brooks to draw the super-glamorous, ultra-chic, uber-gorgeous version of me. Apparently The House of Guerlain are big fans too, since it was Jason Brooks who designed the packaging for their Love is All and the recent release, Colours of Love. Call me humorless, grumpy and wary of change, but I think that those images and those colors are just plain wrong to be used by Guerlain. I understand that Guerlain is trying to keep up with the trends and to appeal to a more youthful audience…But I wish with all my heart that they did not have to do that. Now that I have taken that off my chest, on to the scent itself…The juice is sadly much less attractive than the packaging. It is a Pink Fruity Floral, in which the bright, tart and sparkling notes of grapefruit and kiwi clash in a disagreeable manner with the powdery and sweet notes of violet and mimosa. I kept hoping that the bothersome fruity notes would subside leaving behind the lovely flowers, but the grapefruit and the kiwi stuck around till the end, messing up and watering down the composition. Because of that watery, almost-aquatic quality, I found Colours of Love to be not just an unremarkable clone of Escada’s Limited Edition summer scents, but actually quite unpleasant. As far as I know, Jason Brooks was not involved in designing of the packaging of Silver Rain by La Prairie, but in this case, he really should have been asked to draw an ad for the scent. If he had, it would have looked like this: Much has been said about the discrepancy between the name, the packaging and the scent of Silver Rain, and I agree that this sparkly, fruity compote does not evoke rain or color silver. This incredibly overpriced concoction smells to me like a cross between Angel, with its heavy, sweet, gourmand accords, and Baby Doll, with its bright overload of grapefruit and berries. Silver Rain is not bad smelling at all, in fact I find it a little more agreeable than, say, Colours of Love. It is a sparkly little disco scent that might be fun to wear in a night-club in Ibiza. However, given the fact that Silver Rain smells like a legion of other Angel/Baby Doll smellalikes, I find the price of this scent to be almost offensive. Colours of Love used to be available at Sephora, $51.00 for 50ml, but seems to have been already discontinued there. I believe it should still be available at Duty Free stores. Silver Rain can be found at Nordstrom, $135.00 (!) for 50ml. The ad for Colours of Love is from scandlines.de. The second image, called Warhol, is from Jason-Brooks.com, where you can also view his other works. *** And the winner of the prize draw (drawn by my little daughter from her pink panama hat) is Mark (from Australia). Dear Mark, please send me your address using the Contact Me link on the left side or on the bottom of this page. Thank you very much, everybody, for being the part of our Mother's Day fundraising event and for reading my blog!