by Gail Kavanagh

Created on: July 31, 2010

Kylie Minogue’s Showtime tries hard to live up to its name. It comes in a round ‘disco ball’ bottle, and is topped with gold and a pink ‘jewel’ that quickly loses its luster. The same can be said for the perfume.

It all looks ravishingly pretty when new, and looks great on the dressing table. But soon the ‘gold’ and the pink ‘jewel’ lose their shine, and it looks like something you picked up at the dollar store. You know, “if you love Chanel No 5, you will love the price of this poor copy”.

If the bottle starts to look cheap after a while, the perfume doesn’t even wait that long. The pink liquid inside the bottle purports to be perfume, developed by parfumier Vincent Schaller to Ms. Minogue’s specifications. Schaller is the ‘Nose’ behind such fragrances as 4711 Acqua Colonia and Max Mara, but his famed proboscis did him no favors in concocting Showtime.

The top notes hit this nose like cotton candy mixed with nail varnish. Soon this settles down into the middle notes, which have an overpowering sickly sweetness. Finally it fades away to a faintly sweet note, as if you have been hanging onto a bar of candy for a while. It’s just as well this fragrance doesn’t last long, as you could go through the whole night smelling like you’d been caught raiding the candy jar.

So what in the world does it consist of? Apparently not sugar, water and pink coloring, as I first surmised. The top notes are all fruity – Mara des Bois, blackcurrant, and loganberry, as odd a set of top notes as I have ever heard played in a bottle. Mara des Bois is a hybrid strawberry, so all it needs is the cream really.

The middle notes are mostly floral, consisting of roses, blue freesias, lilacs, tiare flowers, and liquorice. Liquorice? How did that get in there? That accounts for the fact that you can smell no floral at all, only more sweetness. He must have used Barrett’s Liquorice Allsorts.

Finally, the scent you are left with is vanilla, rosewood, and some musk, all indefinable except for a faint hint of musk, and this fades to nothing at all within a couple of hours.

Don’t get me wrong, I admire Kylie, but if this fragrance sums up her showtime presence then it misses by a mile. Kylie is sassy, sexy, and long lasting. This fragrance is sickly sweet, cheap, and doesn’t last as long as a few dabs of essential oil.

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