Lush Gorilla Perfume Tuca Tuca

My mother does not wear perfume. She and my father are (allegedly) allergic to it. When I excitedly showed her my new bottle of L’Artisan Safran Troublant last month, her only comment was “It’s not terrible.” (You don’t even want to know what she said about L’Heure Bleue.) My mother has only really connected with my love of fragrances on one occasion: when I asked her to try a discontinued perfume, Guerlain Meteorites. Upon smelling Meteorites, she gasped and said that it smelled just like a violet-scented doll that she had as a child. She even compared it to Proust’s beloved madeleines.

Tuca Tuca will be practically Proustian for anyone with happy memories of violet-flavored confections like Parma Violets or Choward’s Violet Mints. This gorgeous perfume is as instantly cheerful as its name. Violet fragrances are tricky. They tend to be unbalanced, skewing either too sweet, too powdery, or too green. Tuca Tuca skillfully avoids each of these potential pitfalls. Tuca Tuca is one of the very few perfectly candied violet perfumes, and is no doubt the most easily accessible and inexpensive of the lot. At a criminally cheap $29 an ounce, I consider this a must-try for anyone seeking a sweet violet fragrance.

A word of caution: I like Tuca Tuca best in the solid perfume formulation. The liquid version is a little screechier.

Ugh, I should’ve tried it in the solid version I guess. The liquid version smelled SO BAD on me that even the lady who worked in the store and sprayed it on my arm pulled away from me in disbelief that she had just inflicted that on me, funny, isn’t it?!

I have it on now – in the spirit of scientific inquiry rather than any spontaneous inclination – and I am with your mother on this one.. It is candied violet as you say, in high definition, 3 D and Dolby Surround Sound. It is a hyperrealistic violet vortex into which I am being ineluctably sucked. No really, it isn’t half bad if you like that sort of thing. It is violet verisimilitude. A Lushified Meteorites, pretty much – yes, I’ll go with that.

The good thing about these posts of yours is that you are making me take down that brown paper nose bag from the shelf above my desk (pictured in my New Year’s Resolutions post), and get the Lush samples out at last. So thanks for that – it might have taken me longer of my own accord.

To speak of “favourites” would be premature, but this Vanillary one I promised to retry is really quite okay. I think I smelt the original formulation and there was something odd / OTT about it. Now I did like B-Scent as I recall, while Lust and Ladyboy were moderately terrifying.

It depends on whether you like powder or not. Meteorites is much more powdery, and is also much harder to find. Personally, I like Tuca Tuca better- I actually returned my bottle of Meteorites eventually.