Elizabeth & James: Nirvana Bourbon
Elizabeth & James is the designer brand owned by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. I’m not particularly inclined to follow fashion much so I have nothing to say about their clothes, but the perfume is totally in my lane. So far Elizabeth & James have four fragrances on offer: Nirvana Black, Nirvana White, Nirvana Bourbon, and Nirvana Rose. In my opinion, all of them are great scents, particularly for the price point.
Nirvana Bourbon opens with a smoky-sweet woods accord. The opening is like a fantasy sugar maple campfire--warm, smoky, and woody with a good dose of syrupy sweetness, but completely devoid of the acridness or sharpness of real wood smoke. As the scent dries, however, that sharp note of true wood smoke becomes more apparent, along with the vanilla. The boozy sweetness recedes, but doesn’t disappear. In dry-down, all the notes remain basically the same, but their balance shifts to be drier and less sweet.
Despite the listing of tuberose as a prominent note, this is most emphatically not a white floral. I really can’t detect the tuberose at all, though I’m sure it influences the composition. Nirvana Bourbon is a smoky vanilla. It’s the scent of fall campfires and bourbon vanilla. The perfume definitely lives up to its name, and achieves a good balance of sweet, smoky, woody, and boozy. It would smell great with a leather jacket.
Notes include: oakwood, vanilla bourbon, tuberose
