Product Review: Ellis Brooklyn Sci-Fi Perfume

Ellis Brooklyn is a Green beauty, all-natural, indie fragrance house founded in 2015 by former New York Times beauty journalist Bee Shapiro. While pregnant with her daughter Ellis, Bee's knowledge of the cosmetics industry and sometimes harsh synthetic ingredients found in beauty products and especially most mass market perfumes began to scare her and she started to seek more natural-based but still complex and finely-crafted fragrances to give her the scents she craved without any of the worry. This search ultimately led to her creating her own line of now 8 highly unique, sophisticated fragrances that are chic, modern, vegan, cruelty-free, and cleanly-made. I have tried nearly every fragrance in the collection and have been impressed by all I've sampled, but to me, the most standout one is Sci-Fi.

On paper, Sci-Fi is most likely going to be characterized as a gourmand because it is a vanilla-based fragrance. True to its name, however, this is a highly unusual take on a vanilla in that this fragrance is not warm, musky, and cozy but instead quite clean, etheric, and... cold? Yes, this Sci-Fi is actually a cooling, aromatic fragrance that wafts over you like an icy, refreshing cloud without at all being sugary or childlike. If blue light or starlight had a scent, this would be it.

The other dominant note in Sci-Fi is green tea, which serves to somehow both simultaneously further freshen up the vanilla and also give it a slightly more earthy and botanical vibe, On the initial spray, you get a burst of light bitter orange mixed with a dash of bergamot, which almost always gives a fragrance a distinctive effervescence and a bubbly quality, In Sci-Fi's case, this airiness just adds more of that otherworldly, untenable quality that floats across the skin as you wear it. Hints of a floral note sprinkle lightly throughout the fragrance's life, and according to the notes, they come from freesia. I normally do not care for freesia in a perfume at all, but this is a very light addition of it, to the point where it doesn't read to me as specifically being freesia at all, just a touch of indistinct floral to give it a hint of femininity.

Sci-Fi, along with most of the perfumes in the Ellis Brooklyn range, does not read as heavy and wears pretty close to the skin without a lot of projection. This is very typical of a lot of Green Beauty fragrances because the chemical extenders that make conventional perfumes really sing out and away from the skin are often synthetically produced and most mostly natural perfume companies tend to stay away from them. For this same reason, many Green Beauty fragrances can also fall short in how they long they last when stacked up against their conventional counterparts. Thankfully, though with SciFi and most other Ellis Brooklyn perfumes, I get about the same length of wear as with any other fragrances about 4-6 hours total and perhaps up to 8 with more sprays and in cooler weather.

If you are a vanilla fragrance lover and are looking for an inventive, unusual interpretation of the note or even if you don't typically care for vanilla but are willing to experiment with this little marvel of a fragrance, I definitely suggest giving Sci-Fi a try. I think this beauty would especially be a great choice for the hot weather months, but it could also make a crisp, refreshing winter fragrances to play along the backdrop of the chillier weather,

Sci-Fi being a Green Beauty perfume is made in slightly smaller batches is, therefore, not available in as many sizes as most traditional department store fragrances. Like all Ellis Brooklyn fragrances, a full bottle only comes in a 3.4 oz size that retails for $100 USD, but for a smaller, more budget-friendly way to try, a 0.33 oz travel size is also available for $30 USD. The travel sizes spray lightly and a little perfume will go a long way, so these do last quite awhile. You can find Ellis Brooklyn fragrances at Sephora and Sephora.com , where there are also sample sets available with curated collections of all Ellis Brooklyn scents.