Last night, Tanuki fell asleep before all the excitement of going out to a little music theatre to see Thom play a show with Steve McKay. It was a good night for music, so it was pretty appropriate that I was trying out the next Harajuku Lovers perfume called Music.



Music is named after the Harajuku Girl, Music - although she's Japanese so she calls herself Ongaku-san ("ongaku" is the Japanese word for "music" or "melody"). She's actually from Okinawa, which is a really interesting part of Japan, because of its interesting cultural crossovers between Japanese culture, the ENORMOUS American army base there, and the island's history of the Ryukyu kingdom before the Japanese took it over in the early 17th century. The Ryukyu were a separate island culture that were more like a cross between Polynesia and China. So Okinawa today is a very interesting place. I spent a few days in Naha (Okinawa's biggest city) when I was in Japan last February, and it was a very striking change to get off the plane. It didn't feel like Japan at all, even though we were definitely still in Japan and everything was still in Japanese. There was a much more laid-back island attitude, the dialect was WAY different, the weather was much more tropical, and there was that enormous American army base in the middle of it all!

Okinawa also has a very distinct musical tradition from the rest of Japan, using a slightly different musical scale and variations on the traditional musical instruments. Okinawan folk music was played all over the place when I was visiting, and it was definitely different from the Japanese music I'm used to!

So Ongaku-san (birth name: Rino Nakasone) is also a very interesting and varied character, as you'll see in this little interview! She's a quirky girl and I liked her immediately upon watching this.

There was a lot going for me to like this fragrance. I was interested in the woman who inspired it, my favourite colour is blue, and also I lo-oooooove music, so I thought for sure this would be my favourite fragrance.

However, I think it was also victim to the sample-bottle problem that Love was. I don't think I got a proper application of the perfume because I had to just overturn the sample bottle on my wrist instead of having a proper spray. Lil' Angel was somehow potent and bright enough to overcome that, but Love and Music are fruitier, richer, and in an in-between place between bright and dark, so they're harder to detect when not sprayed properly (I think).

I could tell that Music is an interesting scent, although it wasn't as evocative as Lil' Angel. It's not a very complex fragrance but it is still a unique structure when compared to most mainstream perfumes that I've tried. To me, it smelled like strawberry champagne. Fruity, sweet, bubbly, and kind of alcoholic. (I wonder if a purer form like an eau de parfum would smell less champagne-y than the eau de toilette.)

As the day turned to evening, the perfume dried down and got more and more floury and less wet and champagne-y. By the time I was going out for the night, it smelled more like strawberry shortcake, which is a nice smell too. It was very faint though, probably because of the way I had to apply it.

I polled two people about the scent: JM, who also smelled Lil' Angel, and my friend Mandy. Reactions were a lot less enthusiastic, probably because it was harder to detect the fragrance. Mandy actually said she didn't like it, because it smelled too perfumey and she's not a fan of perfumey scents.

So, Music was a bit of a disappointment, but I'm not willing to commit to this judgment because I think mostly the problem was not being able to spray it on properly.