When Kida Snow was younger, she’d pluck fresh mint from her grandmother’s garden and stow it in her pocket to smell throughout the school day. This is to say that the Auckland-based perfume consultant has a longstanding affinity with scent. She knows what she likes. Recently, she engaged in a practice gaining steam among fragrance aficionados around the world, spurred on by social media: she bought a fragrance without ever smelling it.
It wasn’t without a lot of research, however, both from watching content creators and trawling anonymous reviews on fragrance forums and Reddit threads. Commenters swore that the scent in question – Cream Velvet by Khadlaj – was a near-perfect “dupe” for Giardini Di Toscana’s Bianco Latte – the latter, a scent with a cult following online and a $NZ300 price tag ($252). Khadlaj’s version was $NZ70. While Snow usually prefers to sample perfumes before purchasing, she bit the scented bullet, swayed by Cream Velvet’s overwhelmingly positive reviews (and the fact that it was a fraction of the cost of the original).