Purchased
Every summer, Violette Market puts up their State Fair series of limited edition perfumes (and candles). They're currently in full swing and coming down in mid-August. While I haven't bought anything from this year's batch of perfumes, I thought a review of an earlier vintage of one of the recurring scents, Milk Maid, might be helpful.
Shipping: For domestic orders, USPS first class or Priority; for international orders, USPS International First Class only. To check pricing, I created a sample domestic order with one bottle in it, and the only shipping option available was "Best Way" (I'm assuming USPS First Class) for a very reasonable $3.50.
Samples: None available
Description from the website: "Creamy milk, pale strawberry musk, gardenia cream, light amber specks, home-grown yellow roses, sweet grass, and golden farm hay."
Personal thoughts:
So here's the thing with Milk Maid.
The description sounds lovely, and this is precisely the type of scent that appealed to me when I first started getting interested in perfumes; I think I figured that if I loved to smell all these things in real life, I'd love to smell them on my person as well. Milk! Roses! Strawberries! Gardenia! Grass! Hay!
Unfortunately, I realized with horrible, headachey experience that enjoying a scent (or flavor) in real life doesn't necessarily translate to enjoying it when it's creating a perfume cloud around you for hours on end. Over time, my sweet tooth has shifted and I've found myself getting significantly more enjoyment from non-foody scents. I will still buy basically anything with vanilla or tea in it (this is often not a successful strategy, but I keep doing it anyway) but some of my current favorite perfumes center around darker, dirtier scents I previously thought I hated, like myrrh and patchouli.
It's easy for sweet scents to become overwhelming on me... and this scent is very sweet. It comes across as a very foody gourmand scent, without really smelling like any particular food. The strawberry musk and roses come out most strongly on my skin, a mix of sugary-sweet and "perfumey"--interestingly, this smells lightly smoky to me as well, like sugared incense, which I think is the influence of the amber and perhaps the hay.
The throw of the scent is overpowering while it's wet. If I can survive this phase without getting a headache, or the sweetness turning my stomach, the perfume becomes a bit more pleasant for me. The longer it wears on my skin, the more prominent the cream and gardenia notes become, and it starts to smell almost like gardenia ice cream--not sure such a thing exists, but it should! It still never becomes a scent I fully enjoy wearing, though, so I think my decant of Milk Maid will be passed on to a new home after this review goes up.
If you have a higher tolerance than I do for sweet, gourmand florals, you may want to try out Milk Maid. However, if you're wary of sugar and cream, you may want to go for something different--I've enjoyed the citrus-based Penny Candy scents in the past, so the Coconut Pomelo Creme sounds enticing, and doesn't Smoked Cherry Blossom Wood sound amazing? (and the Penny Candies are only $12 a bottle!) Bourbon Vanilla Rope Bridge sounds fantastic as well, if the patchouli, oak, oakmoss, and dirt notes temper the sweetness of the vanilla.
Have you tried any of Violette Market's State Fair scents? Do you have any favorites to recommend this year?
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