Bad Romance? My review of Lady Gaga's perfume FAME.

Recently, I was chosen by People Magazine Style Watch to be a Style Hunter. I often receive products to review my followers. I received 3 perfumes to test out and give my opinion.

Here is the first of this triology of scents:

Lady Gaga's Fame by Haus Laboratories

"Just as Lady Gaga is a mix of light, darkness, and sensuality, 

so too is her first fragrance Fame. The Fame fragrance

represents the pleasure and madness, glory and decadence, power and anger, freedom and obsession of Fame. Fame speaks not only to Lady Gaga's millions of little monsters, but also to the young women everywhere who seek to experience new technology and glamour and femininity of and extremely wearable and unique fragrance." 

I know the most important factor is how it smells. Scent is not always the easiest thing to give an opinion on because different people like different smells. Also, perfumes sometime tend to smell differently on different people after it comes in contact with their skin because everyone has a different body chemistry. 

Here is a quote from Lady Gaga about her new scent:

“[Blood and semen] is in the perfume, but it doesn’t smell like it. You just get sort of the after feeling of sex from the semen, and the blood is sort of primal,” she explained. “And the blood was taken from my own blood sample, so it’s like a sense of having me on your skin.”

Wow! I do know I would not feel comfortable responding with, "Blood and semen" if asked what the perfume smelled like. 

Coty (same producer of Sarah Jessica Parker's scents) mass-produced Lady Gaga's fragrance. This doesn't seem to coincide with Gaga's appeal. Coty generally produced scents that would "sell to the masses, not the classes"...think 35-50 year old women. Gaga appeals to a younger generation, but I dont think her perfume will.

It is priced from $19 (0.5 ounces) to $83 (3.4 ounces), which I find outrageous. I have to completely LOVE a fragrance to want to spend more than $50 a bottle.

I am completely turned off by the symbolism of the scent. I do NOT want to wear Gaga's blood (even if it is just a synthetic compostion) on my skin. The gold claw-like top, black liquid, and just the thought of semen...definitely does NOT work for me. 

With all this craziness wrapped up in a black and gold box, you can almost guess the exact scent. Right? Wrong.

Coty dropped the ball on this perfume because it seems to be less about Gaga than it does about marketing research. Contradictory to its packaging, Fame is a light floral, that’s too sweet and virtually base-less, while claiming a base note of "black incense".  Creamy Orchid is the most overpowering smell, with a hint of violet and apricot.  The incense is wispy and smothered by the sweet, creamy powder. It is one of those scents that will come on strong, like Gaga herself, and then leave before you even realize its gone.

Now to the Scientific Method:

Product: 3 out of 5 Stars

Price: 1 out of 5 Stars

Recommend to Friends: 2 out of 5 Stars

Not a Winner here in My Glam Lab.