Oh, Madame Glamour!
As cheap as chips, and fragrant —
You fade all too soon.

Lidl, who do so much for us already — the ‘American Style’ peanut butter is a guilty pleasure, and they do a delicious bottle of prosecco for, like, no price at’all — have given us a bargain fragrance that does not smell cheap.

Smelling cheap… well, it’s best to be avoided, isn’t it? Oh, God, the scents I used to wear in my misguided youth! I like to think that Coco by Chanel came along just at the right time to save me from all those drugstore brands {chemist! the power of nostalgia! I forget my new words!} that came on strong and faded away in the blink of an eye, or rather, the twitch of a nostril.

Lidl’s brand is called Suddenly: Madame Glamour. I take the colon to be implicit, because otherwise this has two names. Anyway, UK-based Lidl enthusiasts have been merrily spritzing away with this, to the tune of £2.90-ish, since May, and the perfume arrived on Irish stores just in time for Christmas. It’s been making a splash, both over there, and here:

Two independent consumer panel blind tests carried out in the UK by the Perfumer’s Guild on the Lidl Suddenly Madame Glamour perfume against the hugely popular designer branded perfume revealed incredible results – 50 women in the first test voted overwhelmingly for the Lidl Suddenly perfume with 89% saying they would prefer to wear it over the designer brand.

And, 90% of the 100 women who blind tested the perfumes in the second round said they also preferred the Lidl perfume. A blind test was also carried out on Newstalk’s Tom Dunne Show on Friday 2^nd of December with the Lidl fragrance beating Chanel again live on air.

I love the design of the bottle: it’s delicate and feminine, and perfectly handbag-sized. The thing is, you will have to have it to hand, because otherwise, you’ll find that in a short time, you will be fragrance-free. Which is not the point of wearing fragrance.

Okay, seriously, at €3.49, you can buy enough of these to rig up some sort of perpetual spritzing machine, but is even that low a price a waste of dosh? I wouldn’t go that far, because the scent, which apparently contain ‘citrus and floral notes, incorporating bergamot and jasmine’* is really refreshing, and… optimistic. Yeah, it is really quite youthful, yet confident, and I love that about Madame Glamour. I suppose if there was a body cream of the same scent, that layering might help with the staying power… just an idea…

*I would like to learn more about how fragrance works. Is there a course I can take???