marc jacobs splash cucumber review

Before I dig into this post, a quick reminder that my book and fragrance drawing and giveaway is still in full swing. don’t forget to enter your name here if you are interested!

This review is probably about 5 years behind the times. Remember when cucumber notes were all the rage, in dish soaps, detergents, shampoos, and perfumes? It was a puzzling phenomenon then and I still don't understand it now. I remember one time I was cleaning up the kitchen and I reached for what looked like an ordinary, slightly old cucumber sitting on the counter, and, as I picked it up, I discovered to my great disgust that it was not solid at all. It had liquefied entirely inside—it was like those fairy tales where the heroine reaches for a perfect fruit from a magic tree, takes one bite, and discovers that it is crawling with maggots. It was disgusting, and the most disgusting part about it was that it smelled almost exactly like the standard-issue cucumber note that was all the rage at the time. This is the problem, I suppose, with the whole phenomenon; the cucumber notes were too big—too round, and didn’t smell like fresh cucumbers at all. They smelled, I realized, like rotten cucumbers, a category of vegetable I hope never to encounter again. Although I had been sitting on the fence about my attitude towards the cucumber-smelly fad, this event pushed me right off of it into the field of cucumber scent haters. And that is too bad, because I love cucumbers as a vegetables (well, I guess they are technically fruits, but whatever.)

All this is a long preamble to my review of Marc Jacobs Splash in the cucumber limited edition, something I avoided for years because I was not happy about the rotting cucumber-smell phenomenon. The cool thing about this EDT—I discovered today-- is that it doesn’t really project too much cucumber, and certainly not that odd synthetic rotting corpse of a cucumber I have come to know far too intimately. It’s rather more about fresh watery notes of all kinds—water lily, lotus, very light-scented woods as a base, and, yes, cucumber, but a well-behaved one that really doesn’t stick around too long, but happily moves out of the way so the other notes can swim about. And these watery lily notes are very nice, mermaidlike, and shimmering, and they do stay around for a few hours at least. It is fresh, cool, and very nice for hot humid days like today.

Plus, it goes really well with drinks out on the patio, especially gin-based ones like the one I am enjoying right now. I am pleased I bought this on a whim, for now I have something sort of light and foodie for sociable hot afternoons just like this one. I intend to keep it in the fridge, since it is light enough to be used as a cool refreshing splash. All in all, very pleasant, and a very good deal as well!

UPDATE (June 25):

I was wrong, oh so wrong about this fragrance in my review. After a few hours, a synthetic cucumber returns with a vengeance, and hangs around with nauseationg tenacity all evening. I wishe I could run away from my own skin for a while, which is NOT a comfortable feeling. This is what I get for breaking my rule of try three times always before reviewing. Shame on me. I am sorry to say I no longer appreciate any cucumber scent!

CREDITS:

cuke image: Original book source: Prof. Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz 1885, Gera, Germany. digital image courtesy of wikimedia commons

mermaid print image: Von dem Meerfröuwlin, picture of a double tailed Mermaid in Gaius Plinius Secundus (dt. Plinius der Ältere) book: Naturalis historia, German edition, Frankfurt 1565, page 309? digital image courtesy of wikimedia commons

 

 

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