Youth-Dew

I've been obsessed with Youth-Dew since I was a kid. My kindergarten teacher wore it. It was the first fragrance to really catch my nose other my mom's Oscar, Lauren and Anais Anais, my grandma's Jontue and my father's Aramis and Tuscany. The vintage version is the only ones I have. The counterpoint of the soapy lavender/rose/spice and the sweet musk and resinous base really strike a chord with me. I can't count how many bottles of the bath oil, parfum and edp I've been through. Powder too. BTW the new deodorant and body creams are really good.

I thought maybe after 30 years my nose would appreciate this smell of “youth”but no way.I don’t deny it being some sort of masterpiece but this is absolutely ridiculous name for it.My impression when I was in my 20th and same now.Sorry guys.

I REALLY wanted to like this, i genuinely have had my eye on it for so long now but the second i tried it in stores i nearly fainted. Just smells like straight rotting flowers and decay. So sad :,) Spellbound > Youth Dew

My mama's signature scent and probably the first perfume I ever smelled. Elegant and timeless to me. Proud and complicated. Definitionally beautiful.

Where to start. Youth Dew is an absolute masterclass in 20th century perfumery. It starts out loudly with a punch of dry patchouli, Indian, I believe, and spices. It is unapologetic. The balsams quickly step up and briefly stand in front of the patchouli and spices. Next, the amber grabs these loud notes from behind and pulls them back down while that classic Coca-Cola syrup oozes out and spreads out like syrup over pancakes. After some time, the benzoin becomes apparent with an almost diaper cream warmth and sweetness. And then the vanilla. This is not a modern vanilla. This is a rich, dry and spicy vanilla, melted ice cream with a hint of incense. Remember. I said a DRY vanilla. Old fashioned and sophisticated. Not even remotely related to today's gourmonds. Eventually, on my skin at least, I'm left with a talc-like warmth that is a bit sweet and smokey. Not powdery. Like talc in its rock form. Smooth, soft and warm. If you are a fan of the 20th century, amber bombs and Orientals, Youth Dew will not disappoint. And if you already love Josephine and Estee's brilliant composition, get the bath oil. It came first, after all. Estee was a brilliant marketer. For those of us who know, with the right level of application, Youth Dew can be worn year round. And if you are new to exploring vintage Orientals, start with something easier like the lovely and soft, cola heavy Toujours Moi. If that works for you, something like Tabu or the incense heavy, smokey Revlon Ciara might be appropriate. Though be warned, Tabu's civet might be a bit of a shock. Cinnabar and Obsession would be next and then you might be ready for the original Opium and Youth Dew. Youth Dew is an experience. It's a type of woman who knows exactly who she is and what she wants. No need for insults. It just makes one seem immature.

I got a new bottle of this as a blind purchase, and it is really nice. It is pretty similar to the original YSL Opium, but has a brighter, drier, almost effervescent quality. As a big fan of YSL Opium, I'm surprised to say that I might even prefer this for everyday wear. It's a little less 'pungent'. I can definitely smell the cola note on initial spray, which gives way to citrus, incense and spices. There is also a very dry sherbet note once it really dries down. I get a bit of cedarwood (which CAN lean a bit pee-ish if over applied, I find.) I don't perceive this as particularly 'raunchy' or 'hookerish' personally. It's warm and spicy and smouldering, but not dirty or lurid. I also can't detect the heavy animalics that have been suggested, so I'm guessing that these notes may have been refined down a bit in modern reformulations Overall, a great scent with lots of complexity. There's a lovely moodiness about it; ominous and intense. I really enjoy it.

Just tried this beauty and oh my, it's amazing! It's very sophisticated, sexy, sensual. I can imagine a gal, dressing up, wearing a chic coat and going out, dazzling everyone she meets. It smells Coca Cola, cinnamon and the let down is pure incense mixed with amber and vanilla This is not for Summer, unless in very, very light doses. But during colder months, remind me of Paris, having a glass of wine, wearing red lipstick and feeling powerful, beautiful. I can't believe people's negative comments and reactions. Just try it and let it develop. A truly powerhouse.

Probably the most disgusting and nauseating perfume out there!

It smells exactly like my grandma, and it’s excellent. Some of you need to have more respect for your grandmothers. Mine is the most elegant person I know! The complexity of Youth Dew is really impressive. It doesn’t become one wall of scent like some many-note ‘fumes. You can pick out so many elements. It’s more patchouli- and incense-forward than I expected, with definite, crispy Diet Coke. For me the projection is too much to wear in public, but I work from home so will douse myself liberally and float on a spicy, witchy cloud all by myself.

Youth Dew smells nothing like youth or dew, but I loved the bath oil when I was a girl yearning to see exotic places. Too distinctive and controversial to wear like other perfumes, I sometimes spray a little inside my clothes just to get that classic, bewildering vibe. Once a colleague here in Cairo commented that I seemed to embraced Arabian perfumes. She couldn't believe that it was a pedestrian, if powerful, American relic.

the great article of Elena Vosnaki invited me further in what I already intended to do. writing a review for the perfume I have known since 1974, so fifty years ! it was love at first sight. from what I guess is the x-th bottle of Youth Dew but again also a somewhat older one, for that is the result if you have a large collection of perfumes, I am now enveloped in a warm and cozy Clôche of her Perfume. when I started to wear it again for this review and spritzed the spritz the first thing I smelled was an unmistakable piss smell. I had the feeling but also irrevocable sensation that this was yet civet for what else could have produced such infringing but for me acceptable and even desired component which was very quickly taken over by the irrefutable founding characteristic of Madame Youth Dew: the Spiciness. if there was civet it isn't listed and they also have civetone but it shall be if a central, then also submerged in a great variety of other components, with this furry sensation rounded, perfume. the perfume is rather specific in her Oriental Amber Spiciness. inmidst a lot of other 'co-perfumes' I realised, also with the help of Elena's article, that Youth Dew actually always got to be judged retro-actively, as being one of the girls: Cinnabar, Obsession, Giorgio, Poison, Must, Coco, Opium, 'Karl Lagerfeld' (the perfume), all from the 1980s. so she has become one of the 1980s unbelievably intoxicating, lush, flowery, dense, presentiste, alarmiste, nuclear hooker perfumes which made the 1980s unsafe for aquiline allergological endeavours. (and lovely and fabulous for me.) but as this is also understandable, it is also a bit unjustified because Youth Dew made her own headlines thirthy years before these witches appeared. so I now try to get her own Character which also Elena did. by inserting Elizabeth Arden's Blue Grass in her text, with even the resemblance of its bottle with the first rendition of the one for Youth Dew, in a misleading Baby Blue Coloured Bath-Accessoires Flacon, we finally got a glimpse from her beginnings. she also begun as bath oil which bottle I evenly also acquired once. and applied it as perfume. it was scentsational but also the doublure of the perfume. then I have the feeling Blue Grass is something really out of the 1950s, rather more in a catfight with for instance Helena Rubinsteins Apple Blossom (but that was a 1930-er) where Helena after all still had Barynia (1985) but if there ever were two women fighting for world-hegemonia, then these were it. [Rubinstein & Arden] yet Estée was no wallflower. of course all these Madames (Chanel) were Great Personalities and they fought like Alexis and Krystle, like Helena and Elizabeth Arden, Chanel and Schiaparelli, finally perhaps Nancy Reagan with Mme Raisa Gorbatchov. Krystle who got her own perfume (Forever Krystle Charles of the Ritz) and Alexis as Joan Collins launched Spectacular. Mme Estée Lauder was rather the Personality to reckon with. so I have thought in which setting I needed to see the Arrival of Youth Dew in her then (early 1950s) misleading baby Blue coloured softly sculpted flacon and prissy name, while she appeared to be a Lady Leopard with (Chanel Nail Lacquer Vendetta) Vendetta Lacquered Fangs. (although Estée Lauder certainly had her own lacquers to cover Fangs with. (I remember Estée Lauder's Parallel Red as a Heralding and Scathing Red from the 1980s.) I was thinking the Launch of Youth Dew was unrivaled with as Ms Lauder threw a bottle of Bath Oil to the Entrance Floor of Bloomingdales (if it wasn't Saks). but these histrionics had all been done before and after. yet not so much after the 1980s. Youth Dew came as a Meteor with her Spicy Amber with Ample Flowers, Spices which kept her in the pure feminine, if Boudoir athmosphere. with a Jardinière of Flowers to match. Narcissus, Lavender, Ylang-Ylang, Rose, Jasmine, Lily of the Valley, Orchid. these were all smothered in Spices whereas the Spices were smothered in Flowers. this was sort of the opus moderandi for all the Witches Brews that followed.

I probably have the worst nose in history. Cause on the initial spray I smell the spices but not even like 5 seconds later its just pure baby powder and I love it I can't get enough of this scent.

listen i don’t own this perfume, nor do i want to. i smelled this at a macy’s perfume counter today and was so appalled that im writing a review on a perfume i don’t own. truly, i cannot understand where people are getting grandma from this. this smells like straight decay, or public bathroom. this smells like you found grandma a couple days after death and her spice cabinet was open. truly offensive. my friend smelled it, called me over for a second opinion, and i felt like i got hit. i’ve never felt physically harmed by a scent before, but it’s giving eau de cadaver

On my queeste to find something close to the original Maya from the 70 ties...I'd like to think I have succeeded. It it not the same, not at all. But the soft green eau de toilette from the large cologne bottle my fathers friend from Spain gifted me as a liitle girl, is immaculatly close. Greenish powdery lavender with a hint of musky sweetness, pinch of clove. Making me think of the Shirley Temple Peonies and coronation in the garden with my planted x-mas tree. I scraped out and smelled the residu from my old bottle and indeed it still does that same round as Youth Dew after a while. My travels went through Shalimar, Cinnabar, Opium, Venice, Ispahan and 8 Jour to Youth Dew. Destination found untill I find a full bottle of 70 ties Maya again.

This smells like dollar store coca cola gummies, pumpkin pie spice, and white vinegar. This is also strong enough to kill a small animal

This is instant headache in a cute bottle. Too much patchouli.

Smells like nothing but tea tree oil. The seventies really was a different time I guess

This smells like a dead body out of the bottle. I am shocked this has even found success as a fragrance. Perhaps with mixed with body chemistry, it is less putrid and offensive... but I was not willing to try.

Wow, I just came across this perfume for women that is a 'classic' being a male, I secretly sprayed a drop in the air and then on my wrist. At first it smells very loud , spicy-sweet, and strong. Reminds me of another 'oriental' fragrance for men, Lagerfeld. but, the dry-down hours later is beautiful. A little powdery and sweet, but, interesting. Can a man get away wearing this sometimes? I'm growing to like it.

Youth Dew has a cult like following but I have to say that I dislike it. I remember smelling a 50's or 60's bottle of the bath oil as a child and it confused me because it seemed like something that was once fresh but had dried up from exposure to the elements over many years. The modern bottle I tried recently was even worse than I remembered, like you spilled a Coke in 1965 and did not clean it up until 1981 and it turned into something viscous and over concentrated but not entirely clean. Or you found an old bottle of something medicinal in an attic and this was the sticky dehydrated stuff inside. It has a quality that makes me feel claustrophobic, as if you are trapped in a small unventilated hot room with a person who has used too much perfume. The bottle, on the other hand, is beautiful.

I tested this randomly recently at an EL counter. I knew its reputation, so I was expecting something really difficult. Why do I low-key love it? It's not anything like any of the perfumes I usually wear, but I couldn't stop sniffing my wrist afterwards. It's been stuck in my mind. I might just need a bottle of this.

i bought it thinking it would smell like Opium by ysl, which i love. i liked the coca cola note of youth dew at the beginning, but then the fresh spices in it are just too much for me, it smells too old and it will definitly offend your surrounding. so i don't wear it nor use it for the toilet. but, i use it as a bugg spray and spay it all around my window, it works perfectly against fruit flies as they don't like clove scent. won't buy it again

I have a vintage partial bottle from Mercari. I get florals with hay. Then aldehydes. In the dry-down I get the balsam and incense, and it’s almost like being by a fire as it dies down to the embers. I can’t identify the florals, but they smell yellow. I don’t get cola or spices. When I think of a warm, cola scent I think of Kuumba Made Tunisian Opium. Here is my 8yo daughter’s (differing) review: “This is a 1950s wonder. The opening smells like Tunisian Opium, but to the experienced nose, it is not identical to it. Try to get your nose on both. When it dries down it starts to smell powdery. I mistook this for an ‘80s or ‘70s perfume at first. It smells of aldehydes with middle notes of spices and powder. I think it is amazing, and I do not think Fragrantica is correct about the notes. I don’t get the cinnamon, orange, or bergamot they list.”

Youth Dew in 1953 was a fragrance that said: a woman’s body is warm and complex and it deserves something worthy of that complexity. The oriental tradition it drew from — Shalimar, Emeraude, the great French ambers — had been saying this to European women for thirty years. Youth Dew said it to American women in a language they could afford and access and buy for themselves in a Sears department store alongside the bath towels. What has happened to Youth Dew across seventy years is the story of what has happened to that idea. The regulatory environment has progressively constrained the materials that made the argument most forcefully. The commercial environment has progressively preferred fragrances that announce less and demand less from their wearers. The cultural environment has oscillated between wanting women to be powerful and wanting women to be approachable, and the fragrance industry has followed this oscillation in the only way it knows how: by making the powerfuls softer and the approachables more available. Youth Dew still exists. It is still on the Lauder counter. It is still affordable. It is still, in some version, recognisable as the thing Josephine Catapano composed in 1953. That it is no longer quite that thing is the story of every great fragrance that survives its own era — the specific accommodation that must be made between what something was meant to be and what the world will currently permit it to be.

Love it or hate it, this fragrance is iconic. For me, I love this fragrance. It is unapologetically powerful in its initial spray but for me it settles down. I don’t find this fragrance to be as overwhelming as some people make it out to be. Sometimes I think people hear something and run with it. No doubt it is a very spicy, warm, resinous but to me, sweet amber fragrance that I personally find addicting to smell-from the bottle and on myself. For me it’s sweet, spicy and almost syrupy. I can absolutely smell a cola note. But to me, it’s flat. It’s like someone left out a glass of unfinished coke and it warmed up and lost its carbonation. Which for me is probably where I’m getting the syrupy elements. It’s not a fizzy cola note at all. I really find this fragrance addicting and sweet. My absolute favourite way to wear this tho is to layer. I love layering on top of youth dew some gentle mists of outremer Vanille just to amp up the vanille and add some extra sweetness and it’s fantastic. If you have the 2 please give it a try. It’s become almost a nightly ritual for me and no doubt will be during the day, probably after the summer ends. I might have a few more weeks to wear this combo but perhaps once it’a hot out it would be too overwhelming but I’ll definitely try it and see. During the colder or neutral months I think it would be delicious.

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane : The fragrance !

Reminds me of lux towels smell in the hotel in Rome

Just smells like a saudi 86 years old granny she wears only the traditional clothes since she was born and she was raised surrounded by the livestock and lives in the villages up the mountains in the south of the country And she’s from a southern tribe where traditions nurtured her without any education or modern life experience She Used to cook the traditional food everyday which is full of secret spices since she was a little kid while her mother puts on her mid eastern amber attar dabber Shortly this scent captures The life of the countryside in the 50’s in saudi Its emotions and feelings rather than a smell Btw my family doesn’t even know about a brand called estee lauder there wasn’t even any connections to the outside world that time

This perfume smells like someone tried to cover up the odor of dead rodents with baby powder in a French brothel in the 1800's. There are so many notes fighting for the top spot that it is hard for one note to be on top singularly so each one comes out way too strong. It smells like a child went into a cabinet, played chef, mixed everything they could find, and said VOILA! PERFUME! This is a classic scent, but extremely overwhelming and overpowering.

(Review of a vintage bottle c. early 1980s) I get a little chuckle every time I reach for my bottle of Youth Dew. The name "youth" and "dew", the dainty bottle with a bow, all betrayed by a juice that is inky dark brown like a forbidden elixir and appears to have nothing to do with daintiness, youth, or dew. It's intimidating for the modern perfumista's eye, and indeed the juice tells the truth more than the rest of the presentation. If there is any truth to the rest of the presentation, it's the "youth" part of it in that this is the wild and untamed side of youth. Hold onto your organza and pillbox hats, ladies, and keep the hems of your dresses in hand lest they be blown upwards in immodesty. The way Youth Dew opens, or, more accurately, the way it belts with a contralto into the space around you is startling. All eyes, ears, and noses will have their attentions held. Aldehydes, parched woody spices, nose tingling bergamot, and juicy tree fruits explode into a mushroom cloud that releases a shockwave of throat-scratchingly dry jasmine and cinnamon. I, personally, find it very difficult to relay just how much power lies behind the first few minutes of Youth Dew. Every single note has gone past Spinal Tap 11 volumes but yet they don't deafeningly ring in your ear leaving you with tinnitus. A dry and peppery red rose and a starchy yellow-floral ylang-ylang creep in during these initial minutes, providing a baritone rumble to the contralto shockwave. A brown and loamy patchouli swells upwards like a bassy wave, carrying with it enough oakmoss, civet, and ambergris to make a whole other perfume. It is floral, spicy, earthy, dank, musky, woody, green, damp, fecal, salty, and animalic - it is everything, yet manages to be perfectly legible and coherent despite delivering a page's worth of information in the space of a couple sentences. Eventually, the volume dial gets turned down but the power remains even as we dry down to the base; Youth Dew still has the projection and sillage of warfare. This lower volume yet equally powerful base is a carryover of the patchouli, oakmoss, and animalics, the latter of which have shifted to a more leathery character, while balsams and benzoin provide woody vanillics and resins to help pull-on the reigns a bit. Make no mistake though, despite the reign pulling, this is a still a brace of steeds at breakneck power and strength. Youth Dew certainly made a splash in 1953 when it was released. It announced Estee Lauder as a house for the everyday blue-collar woman with its affordable prices, while providing them with French-style elegance and luxury but amplified to volumes appealing to the inherently outward confidence of Americans rather than the restrained sophistication of Europeans. An English friend of mine once said "You can hear Americans long before you see them" and that's an equivalent description of Youth Dew. Its message was well received, loud and clear, even so on the Euro side of the pond though some time later, evidenced by the near-facsimile release of YSL's Opium in 1977 (which really peeved Ms. Lauder and Co). Today Youth Dew is a relic relegated to the Boomerville Museum, though kudos to Lauder for still keeping it in its lineup. This is the other part of Youth Dew that makes me chuckle: many noses born in the 21st century will smell this and immediately dismiss it for being too old, too retro, and not of today's style. Yet Youth Dew is far more complex and intricately formulated than nearly everything else you can buy today for the money, with today's offerings that get anywhere close to this likely costing three times as much; no one else will be wearing it, so if truly being "original" and "unique" in your fragrance profile is important, it's virtually guaranteed that you will not run into anyone smelling like you; if you want a "beast mode" fragrance (eye roll), this is the OG and very little gets close, even today; and, though this was meant to be for women in 1953, thanks to shifting tastes over the generations this is now easily unisex. I still remember the first time I wore this to work, feeling bold and not caring how many people in the district could smell me, and by the end of the day I lost count of the number of compliments and questions I got. I'm pretty certain one employee was intentionally trying to follow me around. And that's the final and most important thing in the case for Youth Dew: it simply smells amazing. It is startling complexity, exquisite luxury, infectious vibrancy, magnetic confidence, and youthful energy all packed into a demur little bottle tied with a yellow bow. I chuckle every time. Long live Youth Dew.