Aloha!

It's been twelve years since I've been to Hawaii, but I still remember the smell of the flowers, whether around our neck or framing the pool. While we don't have plumeria or tuberose growing around here, we do have gardenias (lots of them!) and jasmine. Much like my love of cherry tomatoes in the sun, the wave of jasmine on a warm day or cooling off at night is one of my favorite parts of summer.

I recently bought Kai Fragrance's signature perfume oil, "Kai", the Hawaiian word for ocean. It's got a long list of celebrity fans, including our favorite Miss Tyra, but that's not the only reason I wanted to check it out. It really is the same as lying back and enjoying the heat of an afternoon with a warm breeze sending the scent of warm white flowers your way.

If you've been looking for an easy tropical fragrance for summer that isn't too overpowering, this is a good one. It's pricy for a little roll-on bottle of oil (around $45), but I tend to prefer oils and solids to sprays, as I've been choked by other people's perfumes before, and I don't want to be "that guy". I don't want to kill anybody with my perfume, thank you.

Again, I'm not really much of a perfume blogger ("it smells really pretty and you can carry it with you!"), so check out Now Smell This' review of Kai for a more in-depth analysis by the real perfumistas.

The real test would be me flying out to Hawaii and comparing directly, of course, but alas, not this summer. Maybe next year... ladies?

Kai can be found at several brick-and-mortar locations, as well as numerous online fragrance shops such as b-glowing.com (based in Portland), lacremebeauty.com (based in Seattle), and luckyscent.com.

image from kaifragrance.com