Everything: Bulgari Omnia

I was reading a new posting on Just Smell This and had gotten to the comments when I was astonished to read this exchange:

Writer A) someone needs to come out with Eau de Eau - featuring ice water accord - maybe throw in some humming refrigerator accord, glacial accord....

Writer B) I have some I could sell you this very instant, in an attractive green glass bottle for, ooh, just £25 for 250ml. I'm taking a *small* markup of course.

Writer C) Bvlgari have already tried this wheeze. It's called Omnia.

Writer D) *weeps for my poor Omnia*

Writer C) *rolls eyes* Just cos you are one of the Favoured Ones who can smell the stuff! (I'm still not convinced, LOL).

I'm flabbergasted that anyone can't smell Omnia by Bulgari. I mean, anything is possible, I suppose, but Omnia has real presence, and it just seems strange to me that anyone mightn't be able to distinguish it from water. It''s an oriental scent with all the warmth and body that that entails, but it's also unlike anything else on the market. (The same is true of that stunning bottle, a pair of eternally linked circles. Some people hate the use of plastic in the bottle, but it doesn't bother me a bit; sometimes you have to make compromises for your art, and that includes fragrance-bottle designers.)

Omnia is marketed as a women's scent, but there's not a thing in it to mark it as such. It's completely, maybe show-offily, linear: it heads out of the bottle as a warm, soft, buttery-smooth mixture of white chocolate and sandalwood plus the medicinal warmth of saffron, studded with tea and bitingly spicy notes (black pepper, mostly, plus ginger and cardamom), and that's how it stays. It's a wonderful balancing act: each half, the spiky and the smooth, perpetually threatens to overtake the other, but never quite manages to until the very end, when it trails off with a sigh of sandalwood and vanilla.

It not only sits well on my skin: it suits me perfectly, without fail. It seems to reflect my personality. Some days I wear a scent depending on how I feel, and other days I wear one to make me feel the way I'd like to be feeling (something like Catalyst for Men to give me confidence, or CSP Vanille Amande to smooth out the rough edges): but Omnia is in a small group of fragrances that always makes me smell exactly as I want to smell.