Tom Ford Tobacco Vanille

This is an eau de parfum from Tom Ford called Tobacco Vanille. It's a spicy wood scent, perfect for fall/winter. (One great thing about Tom Ford perfumes, the bottle labels are extremely descriptive! I don't have to look up what size this is, or whether it's an EDT or EDP. Thanks TF!)

I think this is a good opportunity to discuss how perfumes are broken up into "masculine", "unisex", and "feminine" scents. This might SHOCK you (or it might not), but perfumes are always placed into one of these three categories. I don't know if this is beginning to become old-fashioned or if it's still going strong. It's not unsurprising, because clothes and other fashion/beauty items tend to be extremely gendered. At the same time, scents are...just scents. And since you never see them like you do clothes (on celebrities, fashion magazines, run ways, etc) it's like, how do we (as consumers) know what perfumes are feminine and which are masculine? I guess just someone deciding that they are one or the other.

Tom Ford scents are generally considered to be unisex, most leaning male (although I'm not super familiar with every scent from this brand). They're also VERY expensive (lol). So this is definitely a "treating myself" kind of purchase. If you're interested in scents, I would recommend going to a Sephora or Saks Fifth Avenue or some other store and sample a few Tom Ford perfumes. These (to me) are a particularly interesting and pleasurable series of scents (I'm sure I'll discover more as I keep exploring). Even if you're not in the market to buy them, I think they epitomize complicated and high-fashion scents so are fun to try out at any rate.

Here's the scent description of Tobacco Vanille from the Tom Ford website:

KEY NOTES: TOBACCO LEAF, VANILLA, GINGER

TOM FORD REINVENTS CLASSIC TOBACCO WITH CREAMY TONKA BEAN, VANILLA, COCOA, DRY FRUIT ACCORDS AND SWEET WOOD SAP – FOR A MODERN, OPULENT AND HEADY IMPRESSION OF CONFIDENCE AND POWER.

I find this scent to be almost addictive, it's that nice. It's very sweet to me, but it's not overpoweringly so. I think the above description is good (maybe minus the "heady impression of confidence and power"...but it does feel "opulent"). It's very "cozy" to me.

This perfume lasts forever. I have sprayed it on myself and smelled it over 24 hours later. I've sprayed it on myself, got it on my clothes, and smelled it there days later. It's impressively long-lasting. I think this is the main thing which makes it worth the price. There's a lot of good-smelling perfumes out there, and many that are a lot cheaper than this. However, the time it lasts can't be beaten. You would never reasonably need to reapply this within a single day, versus some not-inexpensive perfumes that only last for 30 minutes to an hour.

With a perfume in this price range, it really comes down to "is it worth it for the price" even more so than expensive but more mid-range ones. I've struggled with this since buying this (relatively small) bottle. Obviously I thought it was worth it enough to buy 30ml of it...but would I repurchase? I really honestly adore the scent. I put it on in the morning, (recently I've been applying on either side of my neck) and I catch whiffs of it throughout the day, which is very pleasurable. It lasts for ages so I smell it in the evening, sometimes even in the next morning, or I'll smell it on a shirt I wore a couple days ago. (This doesn't happen with the average eau de parfum, at least in my experience). For me, it's worth it. I think I would struggle to have a large number of Tom Ford (or equivalently expensive) perfumes, since I couldn't feasibly wear all of them evenly throughout a year. But having one, one that I really love to smell, amongst more reasonably priced scents in my small collection, is a dose of opulence (heh) that does bring me quite a bit of pleasure.

The cost for a 100ml bottle is $360 (pictured above is a 30ml bottle).