Juicy Couture “Juicy Couture” **

What I was busy doing back in the summer of 2003 is now lost in the sands of time, but what I can remember is that I didn’t have a television back in those days. So I was only vaguely aware of the fact that 2003 was the summer of Beyoncé and the summer of “Crazy in Love.” I mean, sure, I saw the iconic album art. Surely I caught a glimpse of the video with her and her magnificent thighs somewhere—at a friend’s house, on the street. I might even have been able to hum a few bars.

But the years of misspending my youth following what was what on MTV were long past me. And as much as I was aware of Beyoncé at that time, her impact in my consciousness was as “The One” from Destiny’s Child. So what I’m saying is, while I was aware that “Crazy in Love” had gone mega out there, it was not of my world. I just didn’t think it had anything to do with me.
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Fast forward to early 2009. Tucked comfortably into my

early-middle-age-hood, I attended an Antony and the Johnsons concert in San Francisco. Now, I am a HUGE Antony and the Johnsons fan—I am a Bird Now is one of my all-time favorite albums. I think Antony Hegarty is a gender-annihilating angel sent down from heaven to see us all through these troubled times.

Antony’s voice, as compelling and intimate as it is when recorded, is all that plus being expansive, thrilling, and wild in performance—if you ever get a chance to see A & the Js live—go.

So this one evening, they were most of the way through their set when the Johnsons sat back quietly, and Antony turned away from the piano and began to sing a cappella:

“Got me lookin’ so crazy right now/
Your love’s got me lookin’ so crazy right now”

You could feel the audience ripple, giggling nervously. Was this a joke? No. Antony closed her eyes, opened up her voice, and started to rock, swinging her head from side to side as she does, when her music takes on the cast of religious devotion.

“Got me lookin’ so crazy right now your touch’s
Got me lookin’ so crazy right now
Got me hopin’ you’ll page me right now your kiss’s
Got me hopin’ you’ll save me right now
Lookin’ so crazy your love’s got me lookin’
Got me lookin’ so crazy in love.”

Tears sprung to my eyes. Suddenly this song, which up until then, if I heard it at all, just sounded to me like another in a long list of hip-hop entries filled with empty boasts and mindless litanies of carnal conquests, was shown to me to be what it was: testimony to just how crazy it feels and how crazy we get when we are crazy in love. When she finished, the concert hall erupted in the loudest applause of the evening.

Needless to say, I went right home and put “Crazy in Love” on my ipod, where it has become a staple for me at the gym as I work out my own magnificent thighs.
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I say all this as prelude to my experience as, let’s just say it, a bit of a cultural snob. I don’t know where I get my impressions

of certain companies such as Juicy Couture, but whatever my impressions are, I reject them as simply uninteresting to me.
(Ask me what I think about Juicy Couture: Put bastardized

British heraldry, velour tracksuits, the concept of “candy,” and Pepto Bismol in a blender. Purée into a pink smoothie. Pour all over teenaged girls’s heads in malls everywhere.)

So when Chandler Burr, (former?) perfume critic for the New York Times happened to casually mention Juicy Couture’s first scent as “a surprisingly restrained glamour—a starlet wearing pink flowers in the cool Los Angeles air,” I was more than surprised. I just expected that he would want to have no more to do with Juicy Couture than I would—in fact, probably even less, if that’s at all possible. I, at least, was a teenaged girl at one time.

So I made a mental note of this critical anomaly. Then, one day, while I was going down the line at Sephora, having that experience that I do when I test a bunch of stuff, saying to myself “Eh. Uh huh. Nope. Don’t get that.” I saw the silly bottle, and I thought to myself, well, what the hey? And then when I smelled it, I said “Hey!”

“Hey!” as in—hey, that is surprisingly good: a crisp, unfussy fresh tuberosy/gardenia-y thing—maybe some green apple, maybe a little berry. Normally, reading the scent notes (“a fruity/floral blend...pink passion fruit, watermelon, princess lily, precious woods”) I would say to myself bring on the Pepto Bismol, but thankfully, I don’t smell most of that. I’m guessing the “caramel crème brulé” is what smoothes out the tuberose and brings it closer to gardenia territory, which is a smell I like a whole lot.

“Juicy Couture” will never be my go-to light indole fragrance; Apothia “If” got there first, and I just can’t get enough of its bright green grapefruit rind wrestling the buttery tuberose into submission. And JCJC goes through a high screechy phase on my skin after about 45 minutes where the indolic element starts moving perilously close to ammonia (cat-pee) territory. When it finally does relax again, it settles into a perfectly non-threatening soft orange-blossom-ish-thing that I don’t have to think about very much.

But I smell a whole bunch of stuff out there that I like a whole lot less than JCJC. It’s nice when someone gets you to try something fun that you’d otherwise not give the time of day to. A tastemaker whose opinion I cared about told my inner fourteen-year-old to go get her learner’s permit, gave her the keys to the car, and, buckled in tight next to her, (“Hands at ten and two!! Check your mirrors!! Signal!!), Beyoncé cranked up to 11 on the radio, and rode with her to a perfectly enjoyable afternoon at the mall.

Image credits here.