Britney Spears’ "Curious"
A Perfume Review by Nona Polichick
Yesterday I took my daughter to the drugstore to shop around for one of those home blood sugar monitor kits. Lately we’ve begun to notice that serious drops in the child’s blood sugar level causes intense mood swings (e.g., homicidal urges), so we’ve decided that owning such a monitor will be a good way to avoid one of the bloody rows that my neighbors have grown so familiar with over the past few years. After pricing these kits – which turn out to be hellaciously expensive – we conferred and agreed that approaching the doctor about insurance reimbursement might be in order. So we began idly browsing around the store, allowing our uteri to lead us, like homing pigeons, to the perfume and makeup aisle.
My kid is at that dicey age – she’ll be 12 next month – where she wants to start wearing makeup, but no matter how lightly she applies it, she always ends up looking disturbingly like Jody Foster in "Taxi Driver." However, we always have fun in the makeup aisle at the drugstore, gazing reverently at the wares and occasionally leaning in for a closer look or whiff that probably makes bystanders think we’re at our own version of the Wailing Wall. Whenever possible we like to sample the colors, rubbing them on the insides of our arms so we can walk out of the store looking like Technicolor junkies or victims of an exotic skin disorder. These days, though, the drugstore refuses more and more to provide testers for the cosmetics colors, and the regular packages are sealed, so most of our sampling is limited to that trusty staple of the drugstore cosmetics aisle - the cheap perfume tester bottles.
Have you noticed that cheapass drugstore perfume is named more often for celebrities these days? Standbys such as Tabu, Jean Nate and Alyssa Ashley Musk worn by our mothers and grandmothers are being shoved aside in favor of Celine Dion, Jessica Simpson and Britney Spears. Celine Dion’s perfumes smell like exactly what Celine is, an aging French Canadian lady who spends too much time in Vegas. Jessica Simpson’s perfumes all smell like candy and food, which is odd considering that her ineptitude in preparing food is well-documented. Then there’s Britney Spears’ "Curious," which doesn’t appear to be selling very well, at least not at my local drugstore. There was a huge display of it with not one but five separate tester bottles, so my daughter and I decided to have a showdown and start spraying each other with it.
You’ve probably seen the ads for this stuff by now. The ads suggest that the perfume smells sexy enough to drive the guy in the hotel room next to yours crazy with lust. Britney and some guy stand pressed up against their respective sides of a door that adjoins two suites, looking like they’re getting ready to start humping it like those two puppets at the beginning of "Being John Malkovich." Now, if the perfume were to accurately reflect what we know of Britney Spears’ actual personality, we’d imagine smelling like a combination of county fair fried dough, cigarette smoke and "Bub-O-Tape" bubblegum, with endnotes of sweaty backup dancer. But it’s actually not that bad. As my daughter shot a toxic jet of the stuff directly into my face, I detected elements of rose, jasmine, magnolia and vanilla. After the initial blinding sting wore off, a faint aroma of the magnolia lingered. Like all perfumes, the chemical composition smells different on all different skins, so the fumes that rolled off of my daughter as we were escorted from the store were heavier under the vanilla.
All in all, I have to say that if I were going to buy a perfume, it would be Chanel No. 5. But if you’re going to have a perfume-squirting fight with a low-end perfume, "Curious" is a better bet than any of Jessica Simpson’s "Dessert Treats." It still isn’t as good as "Ninja," the famously cheap knockoff of Dior’s "Opium," but then again, the only reason I’m partial to "Ninja" is that it smells just like my freshly-cured harvest of AK-47.
So, yeah. "Curious." It comes in a cool bottle. It’s fun to have a squirt fight with and it lasts a while. Buy it if you want, I guess.
