Viva La Juicy by Juicy Couture is one of the world’s most popular perfumes with one fragrance selling every minute! Since its launch in 2008 this floral, fruity gourmand perfume quickly rose through the ranks to become one of the top 10 prestige fragrances in the US.
Viva La Juicy is created by Juicy Couture, an American designer brand known for its glamorous, irreverent, and fun-loving clothing. The company was founded by Pamela Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor in 1997 and quickly became known for its sassy clothing and whimsical edge to its designs.
In the 2000s the brand gained instant popularity when celebrities started wearing their tracksuits, making the brand famous for turning the velour tracksuit into an iconic fashion statement. The luxury Juicy Couture tracksuit was seen on every it-girl in the 2000s from Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears to Cameron Diaz and Hilary Duff.
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Viva La Juicy: Fun, irreverent, and playful
Hot on the heels of their successful tracksuits, Viva La Juicy EDP was launched in 2008. The playful and alluring scent, inspired by a more mischievous side of a woman’s personality, is still the brand’s most successful fragrance to date.
The fragrance is an invigorating mix of mandarin orange and wild berries with heart notes of floral honeysuckle, gardenia, and jasmine. The delicious base notes of caramel, vanilla, and praline grab the attention while amber and sandalwood add a sophisticated feel. What makes the scent special is that it keeps its complexity, the notes mix together seamlessly and one doesn’t overpower another.
The scent is inspired by the idea of a young woman in the afterglow of a wonderful evening. Someone who gets dressed in Juicy Couture, goes out to a party, has a great time, and possibly gets into a bit of trouble. Over the years, this fun-loving woman has been personified in the Viva La Juicy ad campaigns by top models like Sasha Pivovarova and Candice Swanepoel, featuring their just-kissed lips and broody dark eyeliner with an attitude of not taking themselves too seriously.
The scent you cannot forget
Viva La Juicy is known for its nostalgia factor and it is probably the main reason it continues to make a comeback. The scent became a classic favorite in the 2000s to a younger generation of perfume lovers with its sweet, playful mix of caramel, praline, and berries. Fast forward 15 years and the candy-like, floral scent smells like the best years of high school to a whole generation.
For this generation, there is an innate nostalgia to this scent that takes you back to days long past. This is in part the secret behind the enduring success of Viva La Juicy, a perfume so tied up in memories of youth that it becomes symbolic of an adolescent bliss you want to hold on to.
Today the scent is loved across generational boundaries, intoxicating to the young with its mischievous and almost edible aromas while appealing to older generations with sophisticated amber and sandalwood, reminiscent of an eagerness to have fun.
Traveling in time through scent
The sensory experience of smell can trigger a rush of memories that may have seemed forgotten. The smell of a scent can instantly take you back to a beach holiday, or when you first fell in love.
Science helps us to understand this unique link between smell and memory. When we smell a scent, the molecules travel through the olfactory system and stimulate the limbic system. The limbic system includes the amygdala, the area of the brain responsible for processing emotion, and the hippocampus, the area responsible for memory and cognition.
The sense of smell is the only one of our five senses that travels in such a direct path to these centers of the brain. All other sensory inputs travel via the thalamus in the brain first. Scents bypass the thalamus and reach the amygdala and the hippocampus in just a synapse or two!
The result is an intimate connection between emotions, memories, and scents. This is why memories triggered by scents, as opposed to other senses, are so evocative and emotional. Studies show that as much as 75% of our emotions are triggered by the sense of smell.
New research even found higher brain activity when women smelled a perfume they associated with a positive memory from their past compared to a perfume they had never smelled before.
Creating a lasting memory in scent
It is with great creativity and sensitivity that perfumers take us on a journey through our memories by employing our sense of smell and emotions. This cannot be more true than for Honorine Blanc, creator of Viva La Juicy Noir EDP and Viva La Juicy Gold Couture EDP, who says she does not smell her fragrances, she feels them.
Even if the process starts from a visual brief, like an image, she will still wait for the image to trigger an emotion, and is from there that she creates. For her, creativity is attached to her emotions and whatever triggers emotion becomes her source of inspiration. In her mind, every fragrance has a different emotion and story and she will never rush the development of a fragrance. It can take anything from a month to many years.
This emotional and psychological field of fragrance development has always been the driving force behind her decision to become a perfumer, for her it was never about glamour or prestige. Blanc is fascinated by what fragrance does for people, and how it can transform how they feel or what they think.
When shopping for a fragrance her advice is to take your time to understand fragrance. She believes that it is important to wear it, feel it and understand it. Her advice is to wear a fragrance many times, on different occasions, and see what happens…
Meet the Viva La Juicy perfume family
Juicy Couture’s Viva La Juicy perfumes are carefree and fun and while there have been amazing limited editions over the years, a few fragrances have joined the original Viva La Juicy perfume to form part of the permanent collection.
In 2013 Viva La Juicy Noir was launched to captivate the senses by intensifying the syrupy, dark berry notes of the original, making this perfume more of a sensual rich nectar. The ingredients are the same, just treated in a different way explains Honorine Blanc, the perfumer. Viva La Juicy Noir shifts away from the fresh sparkle of the original to a tempting and ultra-feminine scent with gourmand accords.
Viva La Juicy Gold Couture was launched in 2014, offering a more glamorous and decadent version of the original. The scent is a sensual interpretation of Viva La Juicy with less prominent berry notes, giving it a stronger, more luxurious blend of golden amber, melted caramel, and vanilla.
Viva La Juicy Rose highlights the honey-like, pink blossoms of rose, giving a lighthearted dreaminess to this version in the Viva La Juicy range. This vibrant fragrance was launched in 2015 with dewy jasmine notes to give it a sparkle and sensual amber to add softness.
Launched in 2022, Viva La Juicy Petals Please is the newest addition to the Viva La Juicy family. This lush, floral fruity scent focuses on the “power of the petal” and is an explosion of florals with notes of water lilies, pink freesia, magnolia blossom, and jasmine.
A gourmand fragrance: good enough to eat
Gourmand fragrances are known for their deliciously edible aromas. These good-enough-to-eat scents primarily consist of great-smelling candy-like notes such as chocolate, vanilla, caramel, and honey.
While this food-inspired fragrance category is still relatively new, it is such a great match for floral compositions that it has carved out a nice of its own. Gourmand notes melt into floral notes, delivering sensual femininity and intrigue, giving depth and sweetness to a scent.
Often described as an olfactory dessert for the senses, gourmand notes manage to keep your interest in a fragrance with intense flavors like burnt sugar and creamy, buttery toffee. These scents entice the senses in the same way a dessert would: rich, creamy, and irresistible.
The prime example of a gourmand fragrance is Angel by Thierry Mugler. When the fragrance launched in 1992, it was one of the first perfumes in the category and it overwhelmed the senses with delicious notes of candy floss, chocolate, toffee, and vanilla.
Gourmand fragrances are warm and wearable in cooler seasons, a fragrance to snuggle up to while feeling a little mischievous and hedonistic. Viva La Juicy does not disappoint in its offering of mouthwatering notes and makes sure it holds your interest for a long time, with addictive notes of caramel, praline, and vanilla.
A charming first impression remembered forever
Juicy Couture’s Viva La Juicy takes you back to the intoxicating days of your youth with deliciously fruity, freshly floral, and enticing gourmand notes. This unforgettable scent gives you an undeniable energy of playfulness, high spirits, and vibrancy, whether you are smelling it for the first time or reminiscing about the past.
Viva La Juicy, a modern, sweet but subtle scent, has managed to become a firm favorite of women of all ages, all around the globe. One spritz of this charming fragrance with its hot, pink, fuchsia bow and it is clear how it has managed to appeal to so many women.
Try Viva La Juicy with Scentbird here: https://www.scentbird.com/perfume/juicy-couture-viva-la-juicy
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