My favorite hand creams are Bath and Body Works's travel-size body creams. They're powerfully scented with your choice of perfume from their fragrance stable, and the formula gets richer every year as the Bath and Body Works laboratories perfect the mathematics that will allow for body cream that is more than 100% shea butter. I blind-bought a trial size of Whipped Vanilla Chiffon cream when I needed a tube to throw in my purse. I liked it so much I went back for a full-size cream and coordinating body mist.
Whipped Vanilla Chiffon wants to share a vision of a warm spring day through notes of wild vanilla bean, spun sugar, and peach blossom. I don't know the difference between wild vanilla beans and domesticated ones. Maybe what's wild about the vanilla beans is that they ran away to join a traveling carnival. The fragrance smells like a tasty midway treat. It makes me think of funnel cake with honey and cotton candy (spun sugar basically is lo-tech cotton candy). It's interesting how this could have gone either way, as a figurative painting of spring or a literal painting of summer.
Note lists can be misleading or confusing, but there are no lies here. When you spray Whipped Vanilla Chiffon on - or smear it on, if you got the cream - it's peach blossoms, vanilla, and toasted sugar, in that order. The juicy honey scent of peach blossom hits first. Vanilla and a general toastiness catch up within a few minutes. The composition holds like that for the duration. It's a warm but sheer scent that really is springlike in its attitude, funnel cake notwithstanding. It's golden the way sunlight is on reeds - which may also be a literalism, now that I think of it, since water grasses also have vanillic aromas that are released when they warm up. Springtime by the creek?
So, how long is that duration, anyway? At least two hours! That's pretty impressive for a fragrance mist and/or lotion. I sort of wish Whipped Vanilla Chiffon had gotten an EdT or EdP, but it performs well enough that I guess it doesn't really need one.
Coty had two vanilla smash hits back in the '90s, Vanilla Fields and Vanilla Musk. Whipped Vanilla Chiffon smells like a lost triplet to them. It's somewhere between the two in terms of sweetness and more foodlike than either in a way that fills a need rather than sticks out like a sore thumb. The vintage style helps it stand out from the other Bath and Body Works vanillas. I like those, too - I really can't have too many vanillas - but Whipped Vanilla Chiffon is a little more special. Naturally, it's discontinued. Maybe it'll come back, though, like springtime. Or the '90s.
- 11/12/20