Scentroulette Day 11: Keiko Mecheri Datura Blanche

So I randomly grabbed a little bag of samples and randomly grabbed a vial from it, which is the usual way with Scentroulette (okay, not yesterday, when I happened to have the mini of Rousse at work with me), and the sample today turned out to be Datura Blanche* by Keiko Mecheri. The name, naturally, made me think of Serge Lutens Datura Noir, so although I have never smelled datura by itself, I was expecting some sort of tropical floral.

And how. Datura Blanche is a huge, cloying juggernaut of a tuberose-y white floral with undertones of bitter almond that remind me of Dior Hypnotic Poison (another big sweet scent I can't stand to be around): it's ferociously sweet and utterly overpowering. How can Luckyscent say that the scent features "a watercolor wash of tuberose and heliotrope"? It's not a watercolour: it's a wrecking ball.

I thought about wearing Datura Blanche on one hand and Datura Noir on the other so I could compare them, but then I realized that if I smelled them both at the same time, I would die.

If you like big sweet white florals, then hell, give it a try, why not. It isn't crazy expensive, $115 for a 75-mL bottle, not out of line for a niche scent. But if you're going to wear it, just please keep well away from me.

* Since French nouns are gendered and the accompanying adjectives have to match that gender, it's pretty clear that either Lutens or Mecheri has titled their perfume wrong, because "Noir" is a masculine adjective (the feminine version would be "Noire") and "Blanche" is feminine (the masculine form is "Blanc"). My money was on Lutens getting it right, since he is, after all, French, and that turns out to be the case: datura is a masculine noun, and Mecheri's perfume ought to be "Datura Blanc".

I think. I mean, I'm not French. Maybe there's a subtlety here that I'm not getting.