48 out of 48 people found this review helpful.
Flowers and Frosting: Estee Lauder Pleasures Delight Eau de Parfum
Date of Review: Mar 15, 2008
The Bottom Line: This would be a five-star product if the scent lasted longer. It's a nice floral gourmand scent but the scent only lasts about 3-4 hours.
When I saw the magazine ads last year for Estee Lauder Pleasures Delight, a new-ish fragrance, I stopped temporarily to take a look at the ad. There was Gwyneth Paltrow, riding a bike, and in the basket of the bike were flowers and sweet treats with frosting on them. I kept moving past that ad, though, and didn't really have the thought that the Pleasures Delight scent might smell like those sweet treats. Fast forward a month or two and I happened to read online that Pleasures Delight did have sweet notes of what others were interpreting as frosting. Off to the Estee Lauder counter I marched. If something smells like frosting, I'm wearing it.
Product Details:
Estee Lauder Pleasures Delight is an eau de parfum, meaning that it has a higher concentration of fragrance than a cologne or eau de toilette. It comes in a very pale pink-tinted glass bottle that is fairly heavy for its size. It has a metal cap made of silver brushed metal.
This fragrance comes in two sizes: 1.7 oz. and 3.4 oz.
There are a lot of fragrance notes in Estee Lauder Pleasures Delight:
Top Notes: Juicy pomegranate, fresh greens, freesia, strawberry meringue.
Middle Notes: White peony, lily, muguet, heliotrope.
Base Notes: Sugared rose petals, caramel, marshmallow, vanilla, patchouli.
This fragrance has matching body products: Body Lotion (8.4 oz.) and Bath and Shower Gel (5 oz.).
My Experience:
A lot of my friends and co-workers tell me that they don't like most of the fragrances I wear. I have a lot of sweet-scented, vanilla-based fragrances because florals give me a headache within just a few minutes of applying a floral-scented fragrance. There are quite a few e-tailers out there that have created frosting-scented, cinnamon bun-scented and apple pie-scented fragrances that have made me virtually headache-free for several years now. I am also not a fan of purely fruity fragrances, so the e-tailers have been a God-send to me.
When I went to the Estee Lauder counter to try out the Pleasures Delight fragrance, I didn't expect to like it. I loathed the first Pleasures scent and used to work with a girl who bathed herself in it daily. So I expected to hate the Pleasures Delight scent. Imagine the major surprise I got when I took a whiff of this scent and fell in love with it immediately! I bought a bottle on the spot (the 1.7 oz. size) and happily smelled it the whole way home.
The scent of this fragrance is sort of complex - I can smell some of the individual notes, like the freesia (which is a scent I really do not like on its own), the lily, the greens, the marshmallow, the vanilla and the caramel. It really does smell like the magazine ad I saw - flowers and sweet treats topped with lots of buttercream frosting. It's really a floral scent and a gourmand scent. I like that I can apply a floral scent but it's still foody and I'm not going to have a headache within ten minutes.
I love the bottle that this scent comes in. The pale pink-tinted glass bottle is pretty and the brushed silver cap is also nice. The bottle is also weighty and has the feel of a high-end fragrance. This bottle looks nice sitting on my dresser.
Estee Lauder Pleasures Delight is strong when it's first applied. You can smell both the foody notes and the
floral notes at the same time. As the fragrance dries down a bit, the floral part is a bit more noticeable, but the vanilla, marshmallow, caramel notes are still there. Thankfully, as this fragrance dries down, the freesia note does not come out more, which was something I was initially afraid of.
The big problem I have with this scent is that it does not last all day. I barely get half a day of scent from one application. While I'm at work, I find myself having to re-apply around lunchtime, and I'd rather not do that because it's a bit strong when it's first applied. I'd rather spray it in the morning and then leave for work and have it dry down some and mellow out by the time I get to work. I even bought the matching Body Lotion (which is ridiculously priced at $38.50 and does not moisturize very well) to try to layer the scent to get more lasting power from this scent. But it doesn't help much at all.
I still like my Estee Lauder Pleasures Delight scent. It's more of a spring and summer scent for me, though, and I didn't wear it much this winter. Once spring really gets here, I'll be wearing it more. I'm disappointed that it doesn't last like a lot of Estee Lauder's fragrances, though. I do like this floral gourmand scent and will continue to enjoy its combination of floral and foody notes.
Price and Purchasing Information:
Estee Lauder Pleasures Delight is $45.00 for the 1.7 oz. bottle and $65 for the 3.4 oz. bottle. The matching Body Lotion and Bath and Shower Gel are a bit pricey at $38.50 and $27.50 respectively. These products can be found at Estee Lauder counters or online at EsteeLauder.com.
