Note: I'll keep the drawing open until 7:00 PM EDT on Tuesday.I'm still not feeling much like blogging, even after sampling the latest from Bond No. 9, Union Square. This is the second in a series of offerings themed around the artist Andy Warhol:
"'My favorite smell is the first smell of spring in New York,' Andy Warhol once said. Perhaps in a similar spirit, Warhol began painting and silk-screening a series of highly stylized, phantasmagorically colored flowers during the 1960s. He returned to this age-old painter’s subject in 1970, when he developed a portfolio of vibrantly colored flower screenprints at the first of his two studios on Union Square."
The notes for Union Square are:
Top: lily of the valley
Heart: green stem notes, sweet blue freesia, white birchwood, amber
Base: silver-cloud musk accord
Okay. I love the bottle. In fact, there's a whole portfolio of bottles offered with this scent--and I'd be happy to own them all--but don't think you can pick and choose. Like any art produced in a series (as with Warhol's art), these are sold together, ten bottles for the stunning price of $1500. Problem: I can't think why anyone would want to buy ten bottles of this perfume.
As for the scent, Bob really liked it. He said it smelled "fun" and "like a smile." Me? Well...Union Square is a cheery, uncomplicated scent, and it is green--green not so much like the outdoors in springtime, but green like Astroturf. Yes, that's it. Green like Astroturf populated with those little plastic pinwheel flowers that blow in the wind. The lily of the valley, green notes, and freesia are the most prominent notes on my skin. It feels rather cold and synthetic to me, however sweet and cheerful it is. I wore it for two days, and while it POPS, it feels distorted, like bad reception on a technicolor television.
Some part of me thinks this perfume is pure genius, because it truly does so readily evoke pop art. And like pop art, I appreciate it conceptually without really liking it. Also, it doesn't last very long. It is relentlessly colorful and then it seems to just fall away, all at once. I wore it both days and got about four hours out of it each time, tops. It's rather light, so it would be easy to reapply and not offend anyone, but it's awfully expensive for that, I think.
I'm going to give Bond the benefit of the doubt and hope that conceptually, this really was what they were going for, this over-the-top Technicolor spring. And because I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and I think it's worth sniffing, even if just for fun, I have a nice amount of my Union Square sample left over to give away. If you're interested, leave your name in the comments and I'll draw for the winner tomorrow.
*image provided by Bond No. 9
