Mariah Carey Lollipop Bling Honey (2010) {Perfume Short (Review)} {Celebrity Fragrance}

Lollipop Bling Honey by Mariah Carey was launched in 2010, one out of a trio of scents inspired by a romantic episode steeped in candy lore: the engagement of Mariah to Nick Cannon, her current husband, father of her twins and mastermind behind the Lollipop Bling engagement episode in which he hid a diamond ring inside a Lollipop Bling candy wrapper while proposing to his future wife as she was contemplating "the Empire State Building lit up in pink and lavender, her favorite colors, to celebrate her 18th #1 single". Elizabeth Arden reportedly fell in love afterwards with an "obscure" song of hers, Candy Bling from Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel and upon learning about the "sweet fantasy" engagement anecdote felt that would translate well into perfume. As Marc Jacobs and Kim Kardashian are both about to release honey-based perfume this year, we thought why not check out this one meanwhile...

The fragrance is signed by perfumer Laurent Le Guernec of IFF who knows how to do gourmand usually but in this case, the allotted fragrance budget let him down.

The edp opens on a juicy blend of "passion fruit" and "pineaple", which is particularly so, as if you had just opened a bottle of Snapple too quickly and it splashed out. Then the fruits which smell also of pear to my nose, get folded into white vanilla and a mighty white musk accord, like a white musk accord of the laundromat variety for beginner readers who are still spellers.

This is such an obvious fruity-floral, you wouldn't be able to miss it at a 100 feet. It's as if you didn't know what a perfume is, were blind-folded and were hit in the face with the impression PERFUME in the most basic sense of the word. This is very much for kindergartners, meant to trigger laundy-musks, canned-fruit-salad and colored-candy recognition, all at once.

As slightly sexier musks and woods surface, you are now graduating to mid-school. The honey note by now is better felt. It is sweet but not particularly flavorful or pungent. In other words, we can assume we are faced with a fake honey accord. By this we mean not the fact that the honey accord is invented, which it is, but that it mimics mainstream American honey, which is mostly heated, filtered and edited out of its naturalness.

Lollipop Bling Honey, you want to say, is about a blinged out honey in the sense that is loud, and clear. The vanilla softens the composition a bit but mostly this is about a glaringly neon honey with little subtlety to it. 

The fragrance does not smell "bad", but certainly debased and plastic, if not of plastic. It is a very simplified form of fine perfume, bearing the mark of its industrial origins and destination: rather undemanding fan base.

The brand said then that these were "not your typical teeny-bopper fragrances," and that while the scents "take a candy element as a thread to be woven in a fragrance," they do so in a way that "elevates candy into a prestige environment,". "Prestige" is overstating it. It is just a notch above awful if you know good perfume.

Only the base notes, which take on a certain pleasant mellowness explained by the "frosted musk" effect imitating the softness of taste of cake icing, and slightly off-beat floral-frutiness thanks to the linden blossom note, could move me into spraying some Honey Bling on again, but why would I if I don't need to review it? There are so many more better perfumes out there. Take your pick. 

Notes: lemon drops, passion fruit, pineapple juice, fresh ginger, Amazon lily, white freesia, frosted musks, linden blossoms, honey.