Cruel Intentions, tempt me
Kilian (2007)

I always wanted to like this one, but I never seemed to get the same thing that others described. It was mostly a straight-forward rose scent to me, with maybe a touch of synth oud accord in the base to give it a bit of woodiness. No vetiver, no complexity. Just a simple rose that leaned more feminine than masculine on my skin.

Starts of dark and waxy; violet leaf is leading the way with papyrus and rose as supporting notes. The dark part is given by the mix of oud and a slightly dump vetiver note. The rose comes up within the second hour and the blend is a bit sweeter, but still waxy with a hidden oud like note. By the 4th hour I can barely smell it on my skin, it has remained a powdery dark rose.

1.

new dress new heels new
job new purse new lipstick new
roses new trouble

2.

"Of course she smells great,
you moron. It's the smell of
your money burning."

3.

Devoted father,
son, husband, brother, uncle,
and friend to many.

Smells like lipstick. Nothing else mixed with the lipstick smell like other fragrances that have this note, just pure lipstick. Projected very well and lasted all day so it has great performance if you enjoy the smell.

By Kilian Cruel Intentions is not my sort of thing, a slightly sweet modern synthetic-oud harsh chemical smell.

The preponderance of mixed reviews here on Basenotes makes me feel better about my own ambivalent attitude towards Cruel Intentions. This fragrance is fantastic in theory: the elements of bergamot, rose, and vetiver sit right in the center of my personal fragrance wheelhouse. Styrax and Oud can only be good things here, right?

This description would lead me to expect an earthy but super-smooth fragrance, something a là Maison Francis Kurkdjian. This may have been the, ahem, intention, but it's difficult to tell. This fragrance seems so stubbornly closed up on itself that even a very generous application reveals little, besides a curious dried rose petal note and a hint of dried vanilla. It's almost as if only the tightest, most difficult olfactory elements of this perfume's constituent parts are present at all, and they are all somehow smothered beneath a barrier that mutes them even further. This is too bad, because what I can smell is intriguing, animalic, earthy, rose-and-dry-vanilla that I would happily pay good money for--if I could smell it. (As it is, the name (that wretched movie. Oh, the humanity) and the almost indetectable scent could almost have been paired up into one of Etat Libre d'Orange's particularly sophomoric efforts).

It's entirely possible that my sample has gone off, but it has smelled like this from the time I received it. I'm not giving Cruel Intentions a thumbs down yet, only because I want to be sure this is really what it's supposed to smell like.