“Smell that? You smell that? Viva La Juicy, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of Viva La Juicy in the morning.” – Robert Duvall, Apocalypse Now (1979)

I was innocent… odourless… aside from a mild draft of hungover BO seeping through a thin veil of my cheap deodorant. Underneath the feverishly fluorescent commercial LEDs, Christmas music crawling up my spine, I discovered something pink. My new North Star—my olfactory addiction, a scent powerful enough to send the Pope into blissful cardiac arrest: Viva La Juicy.

Hands shaking, I pressed a hundred dollars and some change into the woman’s palm; the coins came spilling from her hand onto the glass counter. I took my bottle and turned before the final quarter stopped its deafening rotation. 

At home, I sat shirtless on my floor, spine curled, a milky wisp of drool suspended above its pinstripe box. I unsheathed my one-ounce bottle of Juicy Couture’s latest batch and ran my hand over the flask. 

The falcon is dressed in a pearl pink bow, complete with a faux diamond cap, and stamped with the Crown Royale Canadian whisky insignia. I circled the pump with my thumb, closed my eyes, and pressed.

With no exaggeration, Viva La Juicy comes out like napalm. The true horror of napalm is that you can’t get it off, no matter how hard you try. A composition of 21% benzene, 33% gasoline, and 46% polystyrene makes the formula completely insoluble in water. It sticks to you like forty ripe bloodhounds hot in heat and all you can do is pray while you wait for it to burn out.

Viva La Juicy wraps the host’s face in an acrid sweetness. Upon my first inhale, I felt my gums loosen and my teeth soften. Imagine one of those plastic five gallon Home Depot buckets, half filled with wilting vanilla and squishy molding mandarin oranges. Add an equal portion of industrial hand sanitizer, a little bit of oil based primer, four Doja Cat Funko Pops, and leave the mixture to fester under a hot porch for a season—that is the stench of Viva La Juicy.

They say scent is tethered to memory, and Viva La Juicy feels like one enormous ball and chain fastening me to adolescent car sickness, hairspray, and something pink spilt in a middle school locker next to faux fur. It reeks like a cunty personified version of the WHMIS warning labels wearing a plaid mini skirt and fat-tongued DC skate shoes, offering something wet for hits off the box mod. There are unmistakable notes of chemical synthesis, boiling caramel, and the plastic puke bowl stored deep in the bowels of your parent’s cabinetry.

More fascinating than the aroma itself is the body’s physical response to Viva La Juicy. The scent clings to your respiratory tract, coagulating somewhere in the upper bronchi. It restricts your blood vessels, your breath falls shallow, and you begin to feel light-headed and dreamy. It’s as if you’re doing a whippet while wearing nothing but a pink g-string—everything is cold, but you’ve never felt this sort of heat in your life. After a moment, you can’t discern whether your eyes are open or closed. Your tongue feels fat and numb and you feel your spine coiling up like a cretaceous ammonite. If trauma is anxiety for one’s past and nostalgia is longing, the feeling that Viva La Juicy evokes sits somewhere between the two. It’s a sensation that you will learn to love, and soon, you’ll pray that it never stops.

Depending on your application and body weight, you should come to roughly three to three-and-half hours later. I find I’m sweat-drenched and covered in purple bracket fingernail imprints. You also wake up hungry—hungry for more. 

Please… this is a cautionary tale. Viva La Juicy starts as a joke. You buy the bottle because of its funny name, its wacky colours, or its punch-in-the-face sweetness—but please beware, Viva La Juicy ruins lives. Now, I can’t leave the house. My flask is empty and I don’t dare venture out into the world without my juice. People used to respect me. I had a job, a dog, friends, benefits, a whole life ahead of me. Not anymore. Now all I crave is the sick carnival nausea of my Juicy; salivating like a dog at the sound of the atomizer. Please, don’t make the same mistake.

Fun, feminine, sweet, and bright! A perfect perfume for a day at the mall, or night out on the town. Thank you Juicy Couture!