CB I Hate Perfume A Room With A View

My friend who is experienced in perfume turned me on to this brand called "CB I Hate Perfume". This is a simplified version of the story, but basically it's owned by a perfumer who worked at a high profile luxury brand and due to various circumstances left and created his own brand of Very Interesting Scents. Two things I really enjoy about I Hate Perfume are first, how challenging and different a lot of the scents are, and second, how they resemble "real life" scents in a way that I haven't experienced before.

I have tried several samples of I Hate Perfume scents, each deserving of their own post, so I won't go into details here about those. Just to give you a taste, some of the most instantly interesting scents they stock are "In The Library" (based on the scent of books), "CB Beast" (based on the scent of roast beef), and "Black March" (based on the scent of dirt and rain). There are other perfumeries that I'm aware of that make scents like this...one thing I really like about I Hate Perfume is that, although a lot of the scents are based on like "real life smells", they're still deeply connected to "perfume" as an art...so it's not a cutesy or gimmicky "oh this smells like rain!" it's like "it smells like rain, and that's just one aspect to the dynamic scent profile, crucial to the feelings that the perfume is meant to evoke".

This specific scent is an eau de parfum called A Room With A View (based on the E.M. Forster novel). The description on the I Hate Perfume site is:

This perfume captures the scent of the hills above Florence - the vineyards, the wild grass, the finocchio, the hot dusty Florentine earth. And of course a torrent of Violets...

This perfume is earthy and green. It's a sweet scent, but not like, sugary...more plant-like. It doesn't come across as particularly floral to me, either; it leans more into sweet grass or freshly picked vegetables. To me, the smell is overwhelmingly one of fennel (the finocchio). I enjoy the smell of fennel; it's not something I would have picked out as a perfume scent before this. Overall, it's a very enjoyable smell, very unique but not overly "challenging".

I didn't actually buy this bottle for myself--it's a gift for my dad. He seemed to really like it when I was sharing the samples I bought with my family (asked me a couple times if he could wear it!). I was very proud of myself because I had guessed that he'd like it (he loves licorice and fennel seed, so it seemed like it had potential to be a home run). Hopefully he'll like it enough to wear it semi-regularly...either way, it's a nice bottle you can display in a bathroom or on a vanity (laugh). I really enjoy A Room With A View but I would not have gotten a full bottle for myself only. I did accidentally drop and smash the remainder of my trial size bottle though, which I'm still >:^| about. I was gonna use that...

The cost for a 100ml bottle is $138 (pictured above is a 30ml bottle).