April Violets by Yardley

Dark Curls

this smells kind of old and funky from the bottle but once it makes contact with my skin...just heavenly! This is the violet scent I have been looking for! Pure, sweet, violets with hints of other notes but the main star of the show[as it should be] is the beautifully scented violet. Gorgeous! I am so happy to have gotten my hands on this rare Yardley fragrance.

stellastac

I love AVs I wear it to bed everynight and I fell so clean and feminine it is sweet and powdery but refined too a true violet and one of the only ones I would think I can smell nothing but violet no other notes. I get so sick of rose this is a bit different it takes me back to 1900 an era I would have liked to live in, they used violets in perfume a lot then, sometimes I layer this with a franapanni perfume I have for fresh daytime summer use. AP is hard to get now and I found a big bottle in a small country town I was so pleased love it a true classic Grandma or not who cares.

Balzer

Have used April Violets for years. Really sorry to see it taken off shelves around the world. It is one of Yardley's nicest and enduring perfumes.

rosier

Surprisingly pleasant scent - very feminine, not too "old ladyish", unlike many Yardley perfumes.

9154mf

My mother inlaw recently allowed me to raid her fragrance cupboard and I took a whole bunch of scents Ive never heard of before and that are now dc'd (yay), including this one. Ive heard of Yardley of course but never would I have dreamt of actually wearing any of their perfumes since once when I was a young teen and I think I wore one of their stinky creations like 'Lace' or something similarly horrible.
Anyway this was a full bottle so I sprayed it, immediately thought "OLD LADY" and put it up for sale on Eb@y. Anyway after a couple days I noticed that several people were vying to buy this and the price was creeping toward $100 when this probably cost closer to $10 when it was actually for sale. Now I know dc'd perfumes can cause somewhat of a frenzy but what surprised me most that this old lady pot pourri scent could cause a final sale price of $130!! I can't even sell dc'd Gucci for that much. So I decided to have one more spray to see if I dismissed it too quickly without giving it a proper chance. Once again all I can say is old lady floral put purri in her nursing home room. And YES i have been to visit my 95 year old aunt in her stinky nursing home room with pot pourri and this perfume takes me right back there, Im not just making it up and being critical. After about 10 minutes it smells soapy, like a sharp clean soap. God is this what violets smell like??. I read that the extract used in this perfume is 100% parma violets so thats probably why it is so valuable as not many violet perfumes today use that extract. But still, I dont think Ive ever had a violet scent before because I would remember smelling something so disagreeable to me. To think that those pretty little violets smell like this! Anyway I do not like this one bit, and will update on drydown if anything changes.
UPDATE: I have now had the opportunity to sample Borsari's infamous Violetta di Parma and I think I can understand why my perfume was so sought after. They both use the same violet extract in them and yes they do smell very very similar. I can tell that VdP has some extra notes in there that give the violets a bit of a sweeter edge, and Ithink it might last a bit longer, but apart from that, they are truly hard to tell apart. I still don't like violet scents much, but if I had to pick one I would choose VdP because of the sweetness, but I know that anyone looking for a TRUE violet (which would be more 'green' than sweet) would probably appreciate April Violets more. I got no vanilla at all.

azuriiita

I can sense the vanilla note in this one, and it makes this fragrance more impressive than any other "violet scent" that i smelled until now :) Its fresh, floral, cute... comfortable. Im really like the color of the liquid... and the sensation of a dewed violet near to me. Its also feminine and relaxing
For me, its very suitable to be in comfort reading a book... or to be in comfort with few friends at the house :)