The Lidl effect: Woman Suddenly falls for Chanel No 5 again - and doffs bed socks

The time has come to mention the unconventional boyfriend again, the one who described my eyes - most imaginatively I thought - as the colour of 'foetid puddles', and my legs as 'serviceable'. It was 30 years ago, but I still remember a few salient facts about our relationship. The eight year age gap meant that when I popped a Sade cassette into his car stereo on a long drive north, he inquired brightly: 'Is that Wham?' And after I had my wisdom teeth out, my face was so beaten up that he walked right through the ward without recognising me and out of the hospital again, assuming he had got the wrong one. He also broke into my mother's house once, and left a bottle of port on her kitchen table to thank her for visiting him in hospital. Well, I use the term 'broke' loosely - my mum had accidentally left a window open, apparently. And he gave me some good presents in the course of our four year relationship: a little wooden trinket box, a Barbour jacket, and a copy of the controversial book 'Queer' by William Burroughs. On the flyleaf was this facetious inscription:

'Some in-flight reading. I chose it in 5 minutes. One glance says "this book cannot possibly be dull". And so I hope it proves. In any case, reactions of fellow passengers will offer a secondary source of entertainment.'

Oh, and most importantly he also gave me Chanel No 5. I sense it may have been as snappy a purchase as the book, but it was only the second bottle of perfume I had ever been given, and I was very excited to receive it - to my twenty-something self it seemed the last word in luxury and glamour. I remember the bottle as a sleek, black rectangular column like the one in the photo below, but have no idea if that marks it out as the edt or edp. I wore No 5 happily on nights out, but only as a 'civilian', to reprise Tara's great word for a regular member of the perfume-wearing public, in her comment on my Suddenly Woman 1 post. I don't know whether I finished the bottle or what happened to it, but my interest in this iconic fragrance quietly lapsed, such that when I was smitten by perfume mania seven years ago, my attitude to No 5 was regrettably cavalier - very much one of 'Been there, sniffed that'. Until Lidl came along and launched a smell-alike, that is...

Source: eBay

But before elaborating on the effect of Suddenly Woman 1 on my current perfume-wearing MO and beyond, I thought it might be interesting to do a quick summary of my takes on the previous launches, going right back to 2009:

SUDDENLY FLEURS - I only vaguely remember this - as a sweetish floral that didn't particularly remind me of any other mainstream perfumes on the market. Maybe Lidl hadn't got its act into gear at this point and it wasn't a deliberate dupe of anything. If anyone remembers Suddenly Fleurs and has an idea of what it might be imitating, do let us know in the comments.

SUDDENLY D'OR - a very decent copy of Ghost Luminous, not that I am a mad fan of the Ghost range generally.

SUDDENLY MADAME GLAMOUR - a superb copy of Coco Mademoiselle. I wouldn't bother with the real thing, although I can tell the difference - the Chanel does have more depth - and more patchouli. Suddenly Madame Glamour is sufficient for me, should I ever wish to scratch a Coco Mademoiselle itch. I probably won't though, as it is so darn ubiquitous these days. I would guess Coco Madeomoiselle has overtaken No 5 itself in popularity by now, amongst all age groups too. Certainly on a 'whiffs caught in passing basis', if not in sales terms necessarily.

SUDDENLY DIAMONDS - another very close copy, of BOSS Orange this time, though as with Suddenly d'Or above, I am not a fan of the original, so wouldn't buy either.

SUDDENLY WOMAN 1 - the least similar copy to date imho - of Chanel No 5. For the very first time, the Lidl version has made me want to own actual Chanel No 5(!), and indeed I have now inherited a nearly used bottle from my friend Clare, and also invested in a 3 ml roll on-on Ebay for the princely sum of £6.99.

Coincidentally, the other day I saw an article that explained how people sleep better with fewer bed- and night-clothes on - something to do with optimum core temperatures versus that of your extremities. The article recommended sleeping naked if at all possible, or at the very least swapping bed socks for a hot water bottle, as the latter can be kicked away if you get overheated. The timing of this piece with my Suddenly Woman 1 and No 5 trials seems most fortuitous - indeed the post even mentions that well-known titbit about how Marilyn Monroe was reputed to go to bed in the nude, save for a comforting cloud of Chanel No 5.

We are in the middle of a cold snap here in Britain, so I don't think I could possibly countenance sleeping in the buff. But now that I have re-bonded so unexpectedly with this famous fragrance, I will seriously consider wearing a nocturnal spritz and losing my bed socks, especially if they go the way of the last pair any time soon...

'Oh Sienna!' Lidl Suddenly Diamonds review: a BOSS Orange dupe for a Paltrow sum

Regular readers will know that I have been a bit of a champion down the years of the discount grocery chain Lidl's perfume range - I have featured three so far on Bonkers: Suddenly d'Or (a close match of Ghost Luminous), Suddenly Madame Glamour (a masterly copy of Coco Mademoiselle), and in the men's arena, G Bellini X-Bolt (a convincing dupe of Hugo BOSS Bottled). Some people might have moral reservations about such parasitical copying of designer fragrances, though the whole concept of supermarket 'own label' products is predicated on the imitation of their more expensive brand equivalents - to varying degrees of flagrancy.  So speaking for myself - and coming from a food marketing background where I once presided over £11m's worth of own label coleslaw(!) - it is a commercial strategy to which I am pretty immune.  Moreover, the Lidl perfumes are such remarkable copies that I feel somewhat in awe of the perfumer responsible, assuming it is just the one.  All I know is that the range is made in Switzerland, and it took me forever to ascertain even that.

So anyway, I was in Lidl at the weekend buying pork medaillons and whatever else caught my fancy, whilst trying very hard to resist the domestic security alarms, walnut veneer-lookalike coffee tables, home gyms, twin packs of shocking pink vests (more shocking than they look in this photo, trust me), cosy 'leisure suits' (size 16 only), remaindered Valentine's baking moulds and Dumbo books - when I spied the latest Lidl perfume release - Suddenly Diamonds - another women's fragrance this time.

The first thing that struck me was that they had changed the bottle design - it was a chunky rectangular bottle this time rather than the cheap, plasticky teardrop-shaped one used for the previous two Suddenly scents. It was reminiscent in fact of the bottle style of a number of designer and even niche perfumes, so that was an improvement right off the bat.

The name 'Diamonds' proved to be a bit of a misnomer, mind - well, in fairness ALL the Lidl scent names to date have been misnomers(!) in the sense that they are not remotely suggestive of the perfumes they are copying.  Suddenly Diamonds is not an imitation of Emporio Armani Diamonds, for example, but the orange writing on the bottle pointed instantly to BOSS Orange.  After all, G Bellini X-Bolt was a dupe of a BOSS scent last time, so maybe the marketing people at Lidl thought they were on a roll with poor Hugo!

BOSS Orange edt and edp in Boots

But Boss Orange??  That would not be my pick, unless it is in fact a runaway bestseller and I simply had no idea. Admittedly, Coco Mademoiselle was always going to be a hard act to follow - Chanel No 5?  Marc Jacobs Daisy?  Lady Million? One of those annoying Be Delicious scents? - I don't actually know what the best sellers in the market are these days.  It would probably upset me if I did.  Maybe BOSS Orange is particularly easy to copy, because having got hold of a sample of it and the Lidl I am very impressed at the likeness.  More between the BOSS Orange edt and Suddenly Diamonds than the smoother, more rounded edp.  Hey, I didn't even know there were two!  Both the BOSS Orange edt and Suddenly Diamonds have that bright citrus opening, followed by a syrupy orange-y cotton candy, musky drydown, which kicks in pretty soon in fact. The Lidl scent is in a slightly 'deeper register', if that makes sense, ie is slightly less fruity and bright and kind of 'flatter' and more musky maybe, but I am splitting hairs really, as the resemblance is compelling.

BOSS Orange edt

Top notes: red apples 
Middle notes: white flowers, African orange flower
Base notes: sandalwood, olive tree, vanilla

BOSS Orange edt and edp testers cosying up in Boots

If BOSS Orange is your thing, for £3.99 you really can't go wrong.  It will cost you about eight times as much in Boots, say. Oh, and the 'Paltrow sum' of the title is a bit of artistic licence, for Gwyneth is of course the face of BOSS Nuit pour Femme, while Sienna Miller features in the BOSS Orange campaign. But they are both Boss girls, so obviously I couldn't resist it.

Now I absolutely hated BOSS Orange when it first came out - in fact the musks gave me an instant headache.  When I tried it again in the interests of this scientific inquiry it wasn't as bad as I remember, though absolutely not what I would wish to wear.  I don't hold with assigning demographic parameters to fragrance as a rule, but this does smell 'young'.  Younger than Sienna, even, and she is just the wrong side of 30, I see.

I must say I am rather disappointed by Lidl's rather lacklustre choice of BOSS Orange after the completely brilliant coup of choosing Coco Mademoiselle, and it has got me wondering about what scent I would like them to imitate in future. Well, I'd be interested to see what kind of a job they made of No 5 at that price point, hehe, though my guess is that it's more likely to be another ho-hum designer scent again... ;-(

In closing, I would like to pay a special tribute to the BOSS Orange bottle, which would cost a bob or two to replicate, even if the Lidl folk were that bold, and I am sure they wouldn't be.  It reminds me of those lovely nobbly glass bricks you get in hotel bathrooms.

Source: antrad.net

Lidl Suddenly Madame Glamour - Sniffing Out Stocks For The Big Sniff Off

On Monday I reported on the remarkable news broken by the News of The World that discount chain Lidl's latest £3.99 perfume, Suddenly Madame Glamour, was preferred by 150 women in a blind test to Chanel's Coco Mademoiselle, which costs 15 times as much. Since then, I have spent quite a bit of time on the phone to several helpful people at Lidl Customer Services in a bid to track down the new scent in a store near me. Stocks arrived in Cannock yesterday, some twelve miles away, but the Stafford branch of Lidl had none in its delivery this morning, and I was advised to call again on Saturday to see what had turned up in the next shipment.

But that's the problem, you see - the stores don't seem to know what is going to come in the next drop: it might be perfume, it might be salami, and it might equally well be a rotary clothes line, a motorcyle helmet or flippers. Now you'd think there must be some kind of a method in this merchandise madness, for how else could an individual store replenish its stocks of milk, say? It seems unlikely on the face of it that the deliveries of all categories of goods could be totally arbitrary, as opposed to just the discretionary items like all the above...and, er...perfume?

Given the vagaries of the Lidl distribution system, and the fact that I was afraid I might be racking up a phone bill to the 0870 number of Lidl's Customer Services that far exceeded the cost of Madame Glamour itself, I decided tonight to seize the initiative and drive to Cannock. My main contact at Lidl had tried valiantly to speak to the manager on my behalf to confirm that there were still stocks left, but had not been able to get through by the end of his shift, so it was a calculated risk to go that far on spec.

Well, as it happens I nearly didn't make it, for my satnav had one of its funny turns and kept taking me to Church Street, Bridgtown (an outlying district), instead of Church Street in Cannock proper. So in the end I just switched the darn thing off and started asking passers by, particularly anyone carrying shopping bags. A mere three people later (the photocopying quest in Poland was excellent training!), I turned into the car park of Lidl, seven minutes before closing time.

Imagine my disappointment to find the perfume fixture all but bare!: just three lone bottles of Suddenly Fleurs were left standing, looking a little lost on their own in the large cardboard tray. Instinctively I knew there was no point asking the staff if they had "some more out back". As with T K Maxx, I always assume with discount stores that what you see on the shelf is all there is.

So with a heavy heart I started to head out, but something made me ask the check out assistant if they had in fact sold the entire stocks from yesterday's delivery. "No", she replied brightly, "it's here by the till - it's new, you see.". Hallelujah! There were about 10 bottles left, so I picked one up, resisting the allure of Suddenly Madame Glamour's glamorous shelfmates of fruit juice, raisin and chewing gum multipacks, and handed over a fiver. Pocketing my change, I thanked the assistant profusely, a broad grin on my face from yet another tricky mission accomplished...

Back home, Mr Bonkers was standing by to officiate over our very own blind test, albeit one comprising a not terribly representative sample of one, namely me. First of all I put ear plugs in, in case I might be swayed by the sound of differential sloshing noises (the small vial of Coco Mademoiselle vs the 50 ml bottle of Suddenly Madame Glamour). Then I offered up my inner arms to Mr Bonkers (the prime wrist sites having been taken earlier that day by Opium Fleur de Shanghai), and squeezed my eyes tight shut. Mr B did his best to spray jets of scent of comparable force from a similar distance, so that the only thing I had to go on was the respective smells of the two perfumes on my skin.

As the first spritz hit my arm, it wafted up to my nose and I thought: "That's Coco Mademoiselle, I recognise that!", but once the second one was applied, I was not so sure any more, as they were remarkably similar. The second one seemed stronger, with more of a patchouli note to it, so I decided that it was probably the Coco Mademoiselle after all. I actually preferred the first scent, because it was softer, like an EDT version of the Coco, near as dammit. And yes, I sensed that there might also be "less going on with it", but to be honest, my perfume deconstruction skills are so remedial that I couldn't really tell you what I thought WAS going on with the scent I now believed to be Coco Mademoiselle.

After several solemn challenges by Mr Bonkers of the "Is that your final answer?" variety, I settled on my verdict and he confirmed that I had correctly told the two scents apart. I asked him if he would like to smell them now and see which he preferred, to which he replied: "I can smell them both from miles away - just take yourself away, will you?" So no advance on our sample of one, then...

On a whim I doorstepped my next door neighbour, who just happened to be wearing Coco Mademoiselle herself today!! I told her that I was wearing it on one arm and the new Lidl scent on the other, and challenged her to figure out which was which. She smelt my arm with the Coco on and pronounced it quite clearly to be "NOT Coco", and was unable to detect any perfume whatsoever on my other arm! Granted, Suddenly Madame Glamour is quite a light scent for an EDP, but I could still smell it myself. And how interesting that she didn't clock the Coco Mademoiselle on me, whilst wearing it herself. It just goes to show how bamboozling this blind testing lark can be, even with odds of 1 in 2.

Now here's the rub...as the evening wore on, I warmed to the Coco Mademoiselle sample on my left arm: it seemed to have more body and complexity, but for reasons that I could not put my finger on. Pressing into service a medical term typically applied to urinary tract infections, I now believed the Coco sample was slightly superior for "non-specific" reasons that were something to do with its "modern chypre" base.

But I am wary of this shift in my appreciation of the two scents, for I feel that the truest response was the one I gave when deprived of other sensory stimuli like price, brand name and pack design. And while we are on the subject of packaging, I must say that compared with the cut out, "cut on the bias" box Suddenly D'Or comes in, Suddenly Madame Glamour looks more upmarket, though the bottle itself is identical to Suddenly D'Or, bar the opaque cap.

So in summary, to be perfectly fair, you should count me in with the 91% of women in the blind test, because I did genuinely prefer Madame Glamour blind. It is the quieter of the two, and as regular readers know, I am a sucker for quiet. And what I also learnt is that to my nose it is not so much that Suddenly Madame Glamour smells all that expensive (though a darn sight more expensive than £3.99, I will say unequivocally), but rather that Coco Mademoiselle doesn't either...


Photo of miscellaneous Lidl products from infotradegallery.com, photo of Lidl logo from lichfieldlive.co.uk, photo of Coco Mademoiselle sample from cgi.ebay.uk, other photos my own

Lidl Suddenly Madame Glamour: Has Keira's Coco Campaign Been K.O.'ed By A Cardboard Case?

I am interrupting my current slew of travel posts for an important news flash!

Since the early days of Bonkers, I have been a champion of the "way cheaper than chips" range of perfume from European (mostly grocery) discount chain Lidl. I was the first - and quite possibly the only - reviewer to detect a marked similarity between its fruity floral Suddenly D'Or and Ghost Luminous.

Now a 50ml bottle of Ghost Luminous will set you back about £25 vs Suddenly D'Or's phenomenonally bargain price of £3.99. And now it has come to my attention that Lidl may have topped this discount feat with its latest fragrance release, the rather cheesily named Suddenly Madame Glamour. For according to an article in the News of The World, which broke the story yesterday (as we have come to expect the NOTW to do with any matter of vital public interest : - ) ), in blind tests involving 150 women Lidl's Suddenly Madame Glamour knocked the sequins off that iconic stalwart, Chanel's Coco Mademoiselle (with a price ticket of £61). A staggering 91% of respondents - whom we must assume were a representative sample of the population at large - preferred the cheaper scent.

Of course the lavish TV ad campaign for Coco Mademoiselle is fronted by the elfin beauty Keira Knightley, so the NOTW couldn't resist a teasing reference to her brand being "sniffed at". Lidl, meanwhile, doesn't do any advertising that I have noticed, other than to stuff flyers into my local newspaper. It is therefore all the more of a coup for Suddenly Madame Glamour to have apparently trounced a scent with such a luxurious advertising spend versus one which, like most Lidl products, will be merchandised in its cardboard outer case (the so-called "ready to sell" retail concept). Which isn't very glamorous at all, come to think of it!! But there again the price makes you feel like a million dollars. Or makes you feel that you have saved over 50 quid, at least...!

And wouldn't you just love to know who the perfumer is who has gone and pulled off this wizard stunt?

So does it smell like Chanel's Coco Mademoiselle? I infer that Coco Mademoiselle is the scent Suddenly Madame Glamour most closely resembles, or else it wouldn't have been directly pitched against it. But maybe not - Coco Mademoiselle may simply have been chosen as an example of an extremely successful scent from a well known brand, arguably the most famous perfume house of them all.

Sadly I haven't managed to get hold of Madame Glamour yet. With its cheap and cheerful store model, my local Lidl doesn't advertise its phone number, and the central customer service line is (perhaps predictably) "busy helping other callers". If I get a chance later today, I will drive down and see if I can score a bottle, but I fear it may have already sold out, as the NOTW article suggests.

Has anyone reading this tried it? Got a bottle even? Will you let us know what you make of it? My curiosity about this scent is so great that it has unleashed an uncharacteristic flurry of questions!

Now I don't have the note information - I had quite a job getting hold of the ones for Lidl Suddenly D'Or, though I managed it in the end - but the press release for Suddenly Madame Glamour mentions "fresh citrus and floral notes merging to an alluring, exotic oriental accord", adding that it is a "timeless, affordable and classic fragrance".

Does that sound like Coco Mademoiselle to you? Hmmm...not sure...perhaps it was just picked for its iconic stalwartness after all. What is interesting about all this is that I have always thought of Coco Mademoiselle as a crowd pleaser, as a scent that it is awfully hard not to like. It is not as though in that blind test Suddenly Madame Glamour was up against Jicky or Rochas Femme - or Caron Narcisse Noir, God forbid. Or some terrifying oud number of which there are any number of candidates to choose from.

So if Suddenly Madame Glamour has pipped such a universally popular fragrance, that really is quite something...


UPDATE

I have now caught up with this scent and conducted side by side tests with Coco Mademoiselle, to which Suddenly Madame Glamour compares very favourably on the whole. See my later post on 30th June here for the lowdown on the "big sniff off"...!

UPDATE 2!

On Radio 4's You and Yours programme today (28.11.13) there was a feature on cheap / supermarket perfumes that are good imitations of more expensive scents, and Suddenly Madame Glamour got a resounding thumbs up! You can catch the broadcast here.


Photos of Lidl stores from en.wikipedia.org and notbornyesterday.org, photo of Keira Knightley from beyondhollywood.com