Scrubs: CSP Coco Extreme

Have you read about the to-do in FragranceBlogLand? You can read about it (and get a few other links to other writings about it) here, but the upshot is that a few fragrance bloggers were theoretically paid in money or free scents to write positive reviews.

My first, instantaneous thought was, "Well, hey, if someone wants to give me free stuff, I could do that!" But then I realized that I couldn't. It's not that it would ever come up: I'm a nobody, and there aren't any freebies coming my way except for the samples (rare and ever-rarer) that I can scrounge. But I wouldn't be able to write a positive review for something I hated, not even for money. I don't think I'm an inordinately moral person: I just couldn't misrepresent myself that way. I'm sure I have a price, but it's more than they'd be willing to pay, and it would have to be for something a lot more important.

If the lovely people at Comptoir Sud Pacifique sent me a carton of all their scents and asked for some positive reviews, I could do that, but only for the scents that I'd have given a thumbs-up to anyway (or already have--Amour de Cacao, Vanille Abricot, and Aqua Motu, for starters). If they asked for a positive review of Coco Extreme, I'd have to pass. They don't have enough money to get me to praise that.

I wrote about Vanille Coco a year ago, and I wasn't altogether impressed; it's boring. When I heard about Coco Extreme, which is supposed to be more complex and much more coconut-laden, I thought it sounded like just the thing.

The official notes are

Island flowers, coconut flesh: almond, creamy hot milk, powdered sweet coconut flakes: candied sugar, "gentle tropical breezes", black vanilla pod.

Doesn't that sound nice? Some people love it. But it's cloying; it's almost nauseating. The coconut note is stronger than the original Vanille Coco, all right: it's so strong and so perseverant that you feel as if you're surrounded by it and can't escape. The other elements--tiare flower, almond, and lots of sugary vanilla--only add to the suffocating nature of the scent.

Coco Extreme is an attack fragrance. It owns you. It jams itself into your nose and it will not go away. It's what they call a scrubber: something you want to scrub off your skin as quickly as possible. (Even that won't work: scrubbers are notoriously hard to get rid of.) Is it the worst thing CSP has ever produced? I don't know, because I haven't smelled all of them. But it's certainly the worst I've ever tried from their line.