With the success of sweet, sunshiny fruit fragrances like Dolce & Gabbana's Light Blue, other designers have come out with similar scents with a citrus and/or apple vibe. Take Moschino I Love Love, Paul Smith Floral, and DKNY's Be Delicious, and Red Delicious.
2006's Nina, by Nina Ricci is another.
Not to be confused with the original Nina, a green floral from 1987, this new fragrance by Perfume designers Olivier Cresp and Jacques Cavallier represents a:
" ‘young woman living under a lucky star’. This graceful, romantic ‘fairy for our times’ is looking for an unusual fragrance, ‘a magical elixir’ with sweet, fruity and mouthwatering waves of scent. For her, Nina Ricci invented Nina, a fairy-tale fragrance in a love-apple shaped bottle."
Notes: lime caipirinha, Calabrese lemon, red toffee apple, moonflower, peony petals, white cedar, apple tree wood, cotton musk
Like a citrus cocktail of sweet and juicy lemon-lime scents, the opening notes give way to a equally sweet caramelized apple note and a slightly toasty cereal note. Is it Froot Loops or Apple Jacks? Seriously now, the perfume is sweet, but not overbearingly so. It's obviously geared towards a younger woman, but I would wear it. Plus my husband likes it a lot (he tends to like these caramelized scents on me.
Unlike Light Blue, which retains the citrusy/apple quality through the drydown, Nina becomes more floral, yet still sweet, and has a suggestion of light woods. Sometimes I detect them, and sometimes I don't. Hours later, the musk becomes very noticeable; I would imagine that "cotton" musk is a clean white musk-type, but the musk in Nina is a bit more sexy than that.
I kinda wish the citrus notes would linger a bit longer, and that they were more tart, but overall, I like Nina. And the bottle is quite pretty, don't you think?