If you’ve ever read any of my perfume reviews, you know that I am a huge fan of Demeter Fragrances. The company has created dozens–if not hundreds—of single-scent perfumes, and their library features everything from the classics, like Rose, Sandalwood, and Coconut, to the totally unconventional, like Crayon, Pizza, and Sex on the Beach.
(Related: The 6 Most Delightful Lemon-Scented Perfumes).
But perhaps their strangest fragrance—and most intriguing, in my opinion–is Cannabis Flower. The prospect of smelling like weed wasn’t appealing to me, necessarily, but I was super curious: what would cannabis-scented perfume smell like? How would people react to it? Could I actually get away with wearing it in public? To work?
Needing answers, I reached out to the good people at Demeter, who agreed to send me a sample. When the package finally arrived, I eagerly tore it open, popped off the lid, took a whiff, and…Got a nostril full of grass. Dry, freshly mown grass.
Directly out of the bottle, Cannabis Flower smells exactly like the summer of 2002, which I spent cutting my grandparents’ lawn. But when I sprayed the perfume on my skin, the scent of front lawn grass quickly became, well, grass—in the 1970′s sense of the word, that is.
On my wrist, the perfume smelled overwhelmingly like a weed, but a good weed–you know, the kind that I’m talking about–the sweet stuff, not at all skunky or putrid. Once I got over the strangeness of smelling marijuana on my skin, I realized that I kind of liked the scent. It was earthy and powdery and nice in its own strange way.
Although I was cool with Cannabis Flower, I knew the real test would be wearing it out in public. I committed to wearing the fragrance every day for one week.
I quickly discovered that wearing marijuana-scented perfume was a great way to make the people around me laugh. When I walked past two teenage girls in the junk food aisle at the grocery store, I heard one say to the other, “Someone’s got the munchies.” While riding the subway, a man seated behind me said to his friend, “Fuck, somebody just smoked some really good weed. I want some of that.”
On Monday night, I brought the Cannabis Flower perfume to my sister’s apartment for our weekly dinner/wine/Bachelorette night. She smelled my wrist and wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, that definitely smells like weed,” she declared. “But clean weed, if that makes sense. You smell like a clean hippie.”
The next day, as I was getting ready for work, I picked up the bottle of Cannabis Flower and then quickly put it back down. I wanted to wear the perfume to work, but I’m sure you can imagine why I was hesitant to do so. I work part-time for my provincial government, so there was no doubt in my mind that cannabis-scented perfume would not be well-received in the workplace. As much as I would have loved to see my coworkers’ reactions to the fragrance, I was also very afraid of winding up the butt of an Internet joke. I could picture the headline perfectly: “Moron Gets Fired For Smoking A Joint Before Work, Claims It Was Just Her Perfume”.
I did, however, wear Cannabis Flower out to meet a friend for drinks on Tuesday night. When I went in to give her a hug, she stopped me. “Did you just smoke up or something?” she asked. “I mean, it’s OK if you did, but maybe we should go get a burrito or something instead.” (Bless her heart.)
My friend was relieved to learn that the smell was the result of my perfume and not a quick smoke session outside of the restaurant. “I kind of like it,” she said. “Once you get past that whole ‘marijuana’ thing, it’s not too bad.”
And that pretty much summarizes how I feel about Cannabis Flower perfume, too. It’s not bad. It’s not great, and it’s definitely not a scent that I’ll be wearing all of the time, but I’m glad I have it in my fragrance collection. I think it gives me a bit of an edge. And who knows? Maybe one day I’ll meet a beautiful marijuana enthusiast, and I’ll wear Cannabis Flower on our first date, and he’ll fall hopelessly in love with me. In the meantime, I’m going to keep it on my bedside table. It fits right in there.
