Guest Author - Deborah Markus
I don't wear perfume often. It's expensive, for one thing. And I know a few people who wear so much that it hurts my eyes to be in the same room with them. I'm always afraid that if I indulge in scent I'll end up just like them, and won't notice that what I thought was a mere dab or two behind my ear is causing people to keel over into perfume-induced comas all around me.
I also tend to get tired of flowery scents -- they seem so artificial. When I do wear perfume or cologne, I like it to smell like something edible. I was years ahead of the vanilla craze, and got teased for running around smelling like a warm cookie before my friends finally figured out that actually, that was rather a nice scent to sport.
Now that I specialize in chocolate, I decided to look around to see if there were any chocolate perfumes.
Of course there were. If you can think of something, you can bet that at least a hundred other people have thought of it, too, and at least a handful of those have gone ahead and invented whatever your idea was. So I had several chocolate scents to choose from.
I do most of my shopping online, and I couldn't afford to shell out for a big bottle of perfume sight unseen -- or, rather, scent unsmelled. Fortunately, I found a company -- Lucky Scent -- that sells tiny, inexpensive vials of perfume. So I ordered sample tubes of the chocolate perfumes they carry.
I liked all the perfumes, but was especially struck by one called Chocolate Greedy, by Montale. I loved the name, of course. I couldn't wait for someone to ask me what was the name of my perfume, so I could give them a wide-eyed stare and say, "Chocolate Greedy" in my best four-year-old voice.
Leaving the name aside, I liked the perfume because it was chocolate, but grownup at the same time. This is a serious perfume -- as serious as a 77% cacao dark chocolate bar. If you've ever tasted artisan chocolate and stopped to chew it slowly, you know that all those snooty-sounding allusions chocolate writers make to hints of fruit, wine, wild berries, and other non-chocolate sounding things have some real truth to them. Small-batch, single-bean dark chocolate is complex and eye-opening. So is Chocolate Greedy perfume.
Its cocoa scent is as rough and wild as a mouthful of cacao nibs; but it also has a sweet side that takes its time to surface. This perfume has staying power, so a full-sized bottle is a good investment -- the tiniest drop will do for a day, or an evening.
If you're looking for a chocolate-scented product that's a little more sophisticated than that tube of Tootsie Roll-flavored lip balm in the bottom of your purse, Chocolate Greedy perfume is a chic grownup treat.
