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

Ajne Calypso - Embrace Your Inner Nymph(o)!

I had intended to feature Ajne Calypso (or Comme de Calypso, to give the scent its full name) in my 100th post in May. I figured that a review of this, my most expensive perfume, would make an interesting counterpoint to my earlier piece about Lidl's Suddenly D'Or, the cheapest bottle in my collection. For neither perfume appears to have been written about elsewhere. Instead, I chose as my subject Maison de Kurkdjian's APOM pour femme, drawn to the neat symbolism of the phrase "a piece of me" for the way perfume now permeates my daily life.

So, with summer in full swing, this seems like as good time as any to write about Calypso, a tropical floral from the niche natural perfumery Ajne, based in Carmel, California.

Notes: cardamom, frangipani, jasmine, vanilla

If there are any other notes in the composition - I thought I detected sandalwood and ylang-ylang at one point, but I may have imagined it - Ajne is keeping them under wraps. As a rule, its note listings lean to the coy side, as I doubt that all their scents do really contain as few ingredients as those declared.

I own the 15ml gold filigree bottle, which at full retail costs a wallet-busting $225. I did have a couple of gift vouchers to mitigate the pain, but Calypso still worked out (including P & P and customs charges) at 100 times the cost of the Lidl scent: £8 vs 8p per ml. Okay, I hear you all asking: "So does the Ajne smell a hundred times better than the fruity floral, spookily close clone of Ghost Luminous that is Suddenly D'Or?" Well, clearly I am not going to answer that, so let's just say that I like Calypso an awful lot - and more than the other one. It should also be borne in mind that Ajne's scents are made entirely from essential oils, and it isn't inconceivable to me that their raw material costs are in fact 100 times those of the Lidl perfume, whose bargain price may partly be attributable to the knock off packaging and lack of advertising spend.

As the notes suggest, Calypso is a sultry number - a bit like Ormonde Jayne Frangipani but with greater heft. Texturally (thanks to the vanilla?) it has more in common with the demure yet "come hither" style of SL Un Lys, so if you lose the lilies and substitute an even headier duo of frangipani and jasmine, plus a tangy but possibly fictitious hint of ylang-ylang, you won't go far wrong. Calypso is extremely intense on first application (which is of course a feature of essential oils). But relatively soon the scent mutes down to a smouldering tropical blend with no one note dominant.

As for the origin of the name, until now I had associated the word "Calypso" with Afro-Caribbean music, swiftly followed by other stereotypical images of a tropical paradise: cocktails, palm fringed beaches, hammocks, coconuts, avocado trees(?), sea shells, turtles, all-inclusive Sandals resorts, Rastafarian gigolos etc - with the odd spot of gun crime and drug running thrown in to pep things up. The scent is unashamedly sensual - veering to slutty even - but this is high end, sophisticated slutty. Calypso is staying at the Jalousie Hilton in St Lucia. She accessorises her sarong and maxi-dress with metallic flipflops, and is single-handedly - or rather, double-wristedly - pioneering the fashion revival of yellow gold jewellery.

Here is the description of Calypso from the Ajne website:

"Calypso celebrates the magical qualities of a woman. She is at once nurturing, yet independent - confident, yet tender. She will surround you in her mystery, creating a sultry aura of subtle sensuality."

So far, so Bo Derek (minus the sarong, even!). But having dug a little deeper, I think I have found a Greek nymph who may have been the ultimate inspiration for the wearer of this fragrance...

"The Greek goddess Calypso was described in Homer's Odyssey 2,800 years ago. Calypso, who lived on Ogygia, an island near Malta, was unmarried, independent, and history's first documented feminist. There she rescued the hero Odysseus from death as he drifted astride the keel of the his ship that Zeus had shattered with lightning. For seven years she kept Odysseus on her island, passionately loving him and offering to make him a god."

(from www.reverseskinaging.com!)

This account puts quite a positive spin on events, but others cast Calypso more in the role of captor - a sort of one-woman proto Baader-Meinhof gang, if you will. Whatever the truth of the matter (insofar as a myth can be said to be "true"), it seems that Calypso's influence may have had a stultifying effect over time:

"He (Odysseus) is forced to live a vegetative existence, perhaps at first a welcome rest, but then a womblike entrapment. The name Calypso means "eclipse," and indeed, Odysseus' long stay on Calypso's isle is an eclipse of all that he has known of life...and also of his consciousness of himself as a warrior hero and shrewd initiator of action."

So how much of this goddess/nymph back story chimes with Calypso the perfume? Most of it, I'd say. For the goddess and the scent are feisty and feminine, beguiling and comforting - but (as is sadly so often the way...), its sultry charms may pall somewhat if applied continuously for seven years.


Painting of Calypso by Arnold Boecklin, drawing by John Flaxman.