Thierry Mugler Alien- a Freakish Fragrance

At first sniff this smells God-awful. Like some super heady synthetic sludge. Synthetic and overpowering, not nice at all. It has a sweet play-doh-y feeling and a slight woodiness--but the woodiness seems very synthetic and not very deep to me. I can say that it does smell very foreign, and very alien, and that's not just the ad copy influencing me. The question is, is it a good kind of foreignness, or is it just wrong? As those awful and scary topnotes dry down, the jasmine, the best aspect of this fragrance, comes to the front. The Jasmine and vanilla combine to create a sweet accord which to my nose lacks depth. I keep wanting the woods to come out more to play. The first two hours after the loss of that awful synthetic ugh are this lovely jasmine powder scent, which is very appealing. I begin to like it more the longer I wear it. It is like the smell of jasmine soap in the shower when it picks up the unwashed human body smell and becomes sort of tangy and vanilla-y. Alien at this point seems old-fashioned but still synthetic, and it retains hints of that same weirdness that are so disturbing at the beginning.

Unfortunately, just as I was about to add this intriguing scent to my bottle wishlist--I need a nice jasmine-the jasmine pulled away, and I was left with a cheap smelling synthetic on my arm with way too much longevity. I mean, all of a sudden, it started smelling like the more egregiously synthetic abominations of Bath and Body works. Just bad.