When I was reading Perfume Legends II by Michael Edwards last fall it occurred to me that perfume was the less expensive luxury purchase. Throughout the history of modern perfumery fragrance has been in that place. Things have been changing especially over the last few years. There are lots of budget-friendly options to add perfume into your life. I do my best to cover those as well as the luxury lines. Thanks to one of my readers I was pointed to a line I didn’t know existed. That was how I discovered Good Chemistry Queen Bee.
The Good Chemistry line was created exclusively for US department store Target. It debuted at the beginning of 2018 with 16 releases. They were partitioned into different four fragrance collections. They were called Confident & Charming, Cool & Collected, Good & Grounded, and Vibrant & Playful. It is in that last quartet where the concept of Good Chemistry comes to life.
I can’t find anything on who the creative directors or the perfumers are. They have done an amazing job at making modestly priced perfume which smells great. In doing my research it seems like the most popular of the original releases is Queen Bee. One reason is it has more of a development to it than some of the others. Many of the Good Chemistry perfumes are well-blended accords which are linear in their development. The ones in the Vibrant & Playful collection all seem to have tried at something more.
Brainiac is a peppery citrus sweetened with a hint of vanilla. Daydreamer takes the popular pineapple ingredient and pairs it with ozonic and blond woods for a nice fresh scent. Wild Child is a woody coconut beach perfume. All of these are ideal to pack in a beach bag for when the sun goes down. Queen Bee is the last of the collection.
If I have a consistent issue with fruity florals it is, they can be too cloying. Queen Bee is the kind of fruity floral I enjoy because it finds itself in the other direction. It isn’t exactly the transparent style so popular now. It has more presence than that, but it is lighter in tone. It begins with citrus and black currant as the fruity piece. The citrus attenuates the berry just enough. The floral is the fresh scent of peony. This finds that lighter berry and together they radiate a sunniness. It ends as that sunniness drops below the horizon with some warm amber. I suspect that last ingredient is supposed to evoke honey. It arrives more as a comfort note.
Queen Bee has 6-8 hour longevity and average sillage.
If there has been a democratization of perfume because of its wider availability, then Good Chemistry is one of great results of that. I can see that a Target shopper might find their way to a new appreciation of perfume through it. Queen Bee might be that first step for many.
Disclosure: This review is based on a bottle I purchased.
–Mark Behnke
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