Tainted Love Tokyo Milk Parfumarie Curiosite for women and men

uninteresting synthetic smelling sweet floral vanilla with sandalwood. thumbs down. This is the first in the tokyo milk dark collection I've disliked. The vanilla smells sorta fake and cheap and its get very powdery the longer you wear it. It gave me a headache. It does last long, but when you don't like something..that is not necessarily a good thing ha

I do like this, BUT no, not unique. The name and the scent just don't match one another - this is not dark, dangerous or "Tainted." (I know, I get the 80's song reference.) Been a vanilla perfume connoisseur for a long time and this is a really familiar combo. I like the name and the bottle, but honestly, out of what I have and have smelled, the cheapie bottle of Dana's French Vanilla I have had for years smells almost identical, if a little sweeter. Not bad for the price, though, and the bottle IS cute. A safe, pleasant, generic vanilla-based frag, with some light woodiness at the base that becomes powder a couple of hours in. Blendable/a good base for other scents, but don't get this expecting to be wowed. Good for those new to vanilla frags who don't want something overly sweet or foody/gourmand. At least it's not overpriced.

Later: Okay, so wearing this a few days, I find that this smells like it's missing something, it's unfinished, just goes straight to the drydown. I have tried layering a couple of other scents from the Tokyo Milk line, and find that Kabuki with this smells really nice and adds some missing complexity. It adds nice creaminess to the really sweet-tartness of the grapefruit in Kabuki.

Tokyo Milk Dark TAINTED LOVE is a rare case of a Margot Ellena combination of notes which has already been done so many times that it calls to mind literally dozens of middling mainstream oriental fragrances. It's the sandalwood and vanilla which doom this composition to redundancy. Sandalwood and vanilla probably smelled new and exciting at some point, but now, after a couple of decades of launch after launch after launch after launch, it all just seems tired and trite.

At first when I donned this perfume I was trying to rack my brain to figure out what it reminded me of. Then suddenly it dawned on me: every average oriental mass market fragrance launched in recent history. Although the orchid might have come to the rescue, it is not strong enough to compete with the well-entrenched sandalwood and vanilla combination. White tea is very lightly scented, so no surprise that it did not save the day. Désolée.

Smelled unique, smoky-floral, exotic for all of two minutes- a divine two minutes- then just vanilla.

Right out of the gate, I snapped up two of these Tokyo Milk Dark perfumes, Tainted Love and Bittersweet.
Now I know its about the juice and not the bottle, blah blah-blah-blah-di-blah, but in this case, its totally about the uber fab goth-ish little matte black bottles with the simple white images and text on them. I confess that they are so reasonably priced and so cute that if I had even one more square inch to spare on any surface of my bedroom, I would purchase the entire collection and display them all together!

But enough of my crazed decor fantasies, and lets get to Tainted Love's advertising blurb's much touted "unusual fragrance of rich and exciting dark components": yeah, no doubt - if vanilla is your idea of dark and exciting. Vanilla, sandalwood, a cup of tea and "orchid", aka what I suspect is all purpose perfumese for "exotic" but really, in my opinion, another name for vanilla, since vanilla IS the seed pod of an orchid.

Tainted Love is spectacularly unexciting as a fragrance, but its a decent stab at creating a Guerlain's Samsara ultra. ULTRA lite, something for the masses to wear so as not to be too threatening to each other. It lasts decently - about 6 hours - drying down to a warm sweet scent, and remains dramatically innocuous throughout.

In order to darken this up, you can drop the name of it a lot -"Gee, have you noticed I am wearing TAINTED LOVE today?" - or hum a few bars of the eponymous 80's song, or whip out the doubtlessly fab little black bottle and sigh a lot.
That may make Tainted Love a lot more dark and exciting, but in the end, its really just a Vanilla fragrance.

Yaaay/Yawn.