A Wren Says

Okay, it is the end of the year and I am feeling reflective, so let’s give Vanilla 28 another try.

I previously tried this Kayali fragrance and was confused as to how it had developed a cult following with multitudes raving about it on social media. More specifically, I had expected sweet gourmand and got a quickly disappearing floral fragrance that started to smell bitter after an hour. I wrote that review in September of 2022. I got a new sample and decides to retest. The new vial got pit against the now much more mature sample.

Spraying that old vial now, it behaves way differently. It smells like vanilla, it lasts for hours, and dare I say it smells good. The new vial doesn’t smell nearly as deep and fades faster, but it doesn’t kick off that bitterness that I was getting before.

If you already own Vanilla 28 and didn’t really like it, continue to let it mature then try it again. If you don’t have it already, I still don’t recommend it.

I don’t want to buy a fragrance and then hold it in the box for one year hoping that then it will finally smell good, that then when it way past the return window I will like the way it smells. That still seems very ridiculous to me. The issue I think, rather than it just being something about me and my skin, is quality control. I don’t believe they are giving these batches enough time to mature before putting them out. Maybe they are just moving too fast and bottling things before the right time, in hopes that it will ripen en route, like a crate of bananas. Or maybe they don’t have good recordkeeping to  keep track of how long each batch has had to macerate and mature and which ones should be send out. Either way, something needs to change to get the quality and consistency up.

I don’t know, until I can be certain this has been handled, that I would spend my own money on this brand. But hey, if I go into Sephora and smell testers or get a free sample from somewhere, I will let you know what I think.