The last time I stood at a Victoria\u2019s Secret fragrance counter and meant it, I was 17\u2014for reference, we\u2019re talking a time period that hit before the turn of the century, back when the mall was still the whole world\u2014and my entire perfume vocabulary was \u201cbody spray\u201d and whatever came as a free sample.<\/p>\n
I gave up on mall fragrance counters somewhere around college, when I decided a scent had to be interesting<\/em>\u2014niche, a little strange, something a chemist agonized over and, above all else, something that did not result in a headache\u2014to be worth a spritz. Victoria\u2019s Secret fragrance, in my head, stayed frozen somewhere around the second Bill Clinton administration, peak Spice Girls, Season 2 of Friends<\/em> and the Atlanta Summer Olympics. A bit syrupy, loud, colorful and definitely the kind of thing that announced itself before you walked into a room and lingered in a way that may warrant a shower (or two).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So, when a bottle of Bare Nectar Eau de Parfum ($80) showed up on my desk, I sprayed it more out of nostalgia than expectation. I was ready to be unmoved.<\/p>\n I wasn\u2019t. Bare Nectar is built around peach skin, honeyed agave and warm sandalwood, creating a fruity-woody scent that opens softly rather than sweet-shrieking. The peach note isn\u2019t candy-peach; it\u2019s closer to the actual fruit, and the honeyed agave settles in underneath it like something warmed rather than poured on. By the time the sandalwood shows up\u2014smooth, a little creamy, no smoke\u2014the whole thing stops smelling like a scent and starts smelling like warmth<\/em>, a true skin scent that sits close instead of trailing three feet behind.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the part that got me. Most warm, ambery fragrances read as heavy on me by hour two, typically oxidizing into something muskier and more aggressive than what left the bottle. Bare Nectar doesn\u2019t do that. It stays, for lack of a better word, \u201cgolden.\u201d And, even hours in, it quiets down to something closer to a memory of the fragrance than the fragrance itself, which is exactly what I want from a scent, especially in the summer.<\/p>\n The real surprise wasn\u2019t the fragrance holding up. It was that I wanted<\/em> to keep smelling it\u2014that a Victoria\u2019s Secret bottle made me reach for my wrist the way I used to three decades ago, except this go, I could actually explain why. Perfumer Adriana Medina described building the fragrance around contrast, \u201cthe sweetness of the agave melting into the sandalwood\u2019s depth,\u201d and that\u2019s precisely what reads on skin\u2014nothing about it is one note doing all the work. Stephen Nilsen, the other perfumer behind the scent, says he wanted to bottle \u201cthe skin of the fruit still warm from the sun,\u201d and that\u2019s the closest anyone\u2019s gotten to describing what Bare Nectar actually smells like on.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also the bottle, which I did not expect to care about. This isn\u2019t a fragrance shape designed for a \u201990s locker shelf, but a warm, sculpted amber glass with a copper cap, sitting in packaging that looks like it belongs on a vanity. It\u2019s the kind of object you\u2019d leave out rather than shove in a drawer, which is its own quiet signal that the brand knows exactly who it\u2019s talking to now.<\/p>\n The collection is built for layering, which is its own small nostalgia trip\u2014the Fine Fragrance Mist ($25) is the lighter, all-over version, the Fine Fragrance Lotion ($25) is meant to go underneath the EDP to make it last, and the Body Glow Serum ($30) is a cream-to-oil formula that melts in fast and leaves actual sheen, not a sticky mess. There\u2019s also a travel spray that\u2019s small enough to disappear into a bag, which matters more than it should when you\u2019re trying to figure out if you actually want to commit to a full bottle\u2014which, for the record, I do.<\/p>\n Victoria\u2019s Secret<\/strong><\/p>\n Bare Nectar Fine Fragrance Lotion<\/p>\n BUY NOW – $25<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The last time I stood at a Victoria\u2019s Secret fragrance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2335,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nichebeaty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2334"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nichebeaty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nichebeaty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nichebeaty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nichebeaty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nichebeaty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2334\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nichebeaty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nichebeaty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nichebeaty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nichebeaty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Shop the Victoria\u2019s Secret Bare Nectar Fragrance Collection<\/h2>\n
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