Raise a Glass: Demeter Irish Cream

As is generally the case with a Demeter scent, the name tells you everything you need to know. When you put on a scent called Irish Cream, you are not expecting it to smell like a sun-dappled meadow of wildflowers or a torrid evening in Miami or whatever fantasies the advertising usually directs you towards: you are expecting it to smell like whisky, creamy coffee, and vanilla sugar, heavy on the creamy, and by god that is exactly what Demeter Irish Cream delivers.

Eventually the whiskied coffee starts to peter out, and what's left is sugary vanilla and cream, and you find yourself wondering it maybe it isn't just a little too much, cloying and oversweetened, but then perhaps you start to think: well, isn't that kind of true of Irish cream liqueurs anyway?

The genius of Demeter is that they ransack the Western olfactory database for things that inherently smell good, or at least interesting, and put them in a form that you can wear. Everybody knows that cream liqueurs smell good, but the idea of deliberately smelling like one is novel and charming, and whatever the flaws of Irish Cream may be — it's plainly synthetic-smelling, it gets a bit too sweet at the end once the grownup elements have wafted away — it's fun, and that's the whole point.