Anisia Bella: An Update

Yesterday I wrote about Anisia Bella, and I thought you doubters would like to know:

After writing about it, I wore it to work, where, at the morning meeting before the store opened, I was surrounded by delighted women sniffing me and declaring that I smelled amazing, that this was the sort of thing that they would buy for their husbands.

We were sort of busy at the time and nobody asked me what it was called. What would they have thought if I had told them that its name was the not resoundingly masculine Anisia Bella? What would their husbands have thought if asked to wear something with that name? What if those men had put some on and then learned that it was marketed as a women's scent?

Horror and consternation! Or so I would think.

No mind. It is not particularly marked for gender; in fact, it has a cologney feeling about it, with its citrus top, its anisic-herbal middle, and a gently woody drydown that all read very much as a men's scent. Many of the Aqua Allegoria scents seem quite neutral; there have been 18 since 1999, and I would imagine that half of them could have been marketed to men with not the slightest change in their composition. Herba Fresca, Pampelune, and Lavande Velours from the original lineup are thoroughly unisex, as were the following year's Winter Delice and the subsequent Lemon Fresca. (I never tried last year's Mandarine Basilic or Orange Magnifica, but they sound pretty unisex, and I bet there are men who could wear Mentafollia. Not me, though. Ugh.)

It usually isn't a good idea to buy something without having worn it at least once or twice, but if you were going to make an exception to the rule, I think this would be a good scent to do so with.