My dearest fellow frag lovers & connoisseurs, I need your help. Please 🙏🏻 . Sorry for the novel in advance.
During the winter of 2021, after countless hours of reading up on some of the most iconic fragrances of all time, I walked into a Macy’s one day and got a test strip of Hypnotic Poison (unfortunately we weren’t allowed to have it sprayed on us due to the store’s COVID protocols at the time). The smell of Hypnotic Poison on that test strip that day has haunted me ever since. I cannot – nay, I SHANNOT rest – until I find something else exactly like it, or at least something very closely similar to it.
What happened was that I went home to think on it before diving into the big decision to buy a whole bottle of it, but then I didn’t end up buying a bottle of it until 6 months later, and only after spending multiple months doing research on frag notes, etc. by way of Fragrantica and elsewhere, and only after sampling multiple other iconic/popular frags. After all those samples failed to compare to HP, I finally gave in and bought a bottle from Macy’s, but the tragedy here is that the bottle smelled nothing like what I had sampled in-store.
I’m aware that Dior reformulates their fragrances from time to time, so idk if I’ll ever get a chance to smell or wear the scent that I happened upon in-store ever again. I really don’t think it’s my nose that has changed, either, but I guess I won’t rule that out completely.
To me, that day, HP was one of the most seductive, sexy, mature yet youthful (i.e. “not-outdated,” “timeless”), elusive, sophisticated, chocolatey/coffee-but-not-too-candy-like, sweet but not sickeningly so, beautifully gourmand fragrances I’ve ever smelled in my entire life.
When I finally bit the bullet and bought a whole bottle of it 6 months later (it was summer at this point), the bottle I received smelled like play dough (yes, I also accounted for the change in weather, but honestly I don’t think it would’ve made a huge difference because I couldn’t get past the strong play dough smell). I was so desperate to find the original HP that I had initially fell in love with, I even bought a small decant of an older version of HP from The Perfumed Court — but when I finally received the decant, I was again disappointed because, though it did smell different, it still had that undeniable “play dough” smell to it. It wasn’t just my nose – my partner at the time also smelled the play-dough smell in both the HP bottle and the HP decant and he despised it. And like me, he ALSO really liked the original HP scent that we got on that Macy’s test strip 6 months earlier.
I am so sad. If anyone knows of a similar scent to what I described, please help ya girl out! Even if someone could point out some frags I could layer, that would be very much appreciated. Thank you 🥲🙏🏻🫶
