Burberry Brit Rhythm for Women Burberry perfume – a fragrance for women 2014

Burberry Brit Rhythm for Women is a prime example of a perfectly good fragrance bungled by an inept marketing team.

First of all: why is this a Brit flanker? It has nothing in common with the original Brit at all: this is an airy, musky lavender, while the original is a rich pear-almond doll’s-head gourmand. The two fragrances literally don’t have a single note in common. Rhythm for Women is a perfectly good fragrance of its own right. Not everything has to ride the coattails of Brit’s success, and the decision to market this as such shows Burberry’s insecurity about releasing new fragrances.

Secondly: the whole Rhythm thing. It’s clunky, it’s cliché, it’s kind of hard to spell. The black-and-white video, young-edgy-rocker-chick marketing is exhaustingly washed-out and overdone. It also doesn’t match this scent at all. This is a pleasant, airy, musky, inoffensive office or evening scent for a woman who knows how to do her taxes and buys the high-quality soft double-ply toilet paper. This is a clever, comforting scent for a grown up who has her life together and knows precisely what brings her pleasure. She’s wearing this because she likes it, not because she’s trying to say or be something.

Burberry effectively scrapped Rhythm for Women in 2015, replacing it with a flanker of this flanker called Brit Rhythm for Her Floral (and replacing Rhythm for Men with a corresponding Rhythm for Him Intense). The change in naming conventions from Women/Men to Her/Him, the addition of one more word to an already long title full of irrelevant qualifiers, the identical bottles full of near-identically-colored perfume… Burberry was intent on erasing this one entirely, replacing it with an entirely different scent and fooling anyone looking for the old one into buying the new if they’re not careful.

All of this is a shame, because Burberry Brit Rhythm for Women is a high-quality, clever, near-universally likeable scent, predominated by a soft, musky, airy lavender and the gentle, formless floral air of the petalia molecule.

This lavender feels more distinctly aromatic, complex, and herbal than most lavender I come across. In brief moments when I’m not paying attention, it actually reminds me of the fuzzy pale green stems and densely-packed purple flowers of the lavender I have growing at home in the summer. I think this is firstly a testament to the quality of the lavender material used here, no trite repetition of a tired accord but directly sourced from the original scent, and secondly explained by the particular special of lavender used. Rhythm for Women does not utilize the less aromatic French lavender, nor the near-ubiquitous lavandin cultivar made by crossing English lavender with spike lavender which as made its way into every lavender-scented body wash and soap. No, this is entirely English lavender, delicate and faintly sweet yet aromatic and herbal. English lavender produces much less essential oil or frsgrance molecule per plant than lavandin, so the commitment to pure English lavender here really is a commitment to quality materials that is rarely seen today. There is a very mild earthiness to it, with plenty of herbal, light-green nuances.

Rhythm for Women opens with a citrus-y sparkle. It is a linear scent, with this bright sparkle of fresh citrus and fruity-fresh blackberry leaf most prominent in the first few hours and fading continually into the drydown. The presence of the lavender is constant, but this never smells like a pure lavender essential oil of any sort, or even a photorealistic lavender with nothing else to it: no, this is a sprig of English lavender in a petal-soft and fresh lingerie store.

Indeed, something in Burberry Brit Rhythm for Women reminds me instantly of a Victoria’s Secret scent, but not in a bad way. For some reason I’m reminded of the 2007 Very Sexy spray; I think it’s the general fresh sparkle, musk, and blackberry that they have in common. Rhythm for Women, however, is much more soothing and gentle, less a bombastic plea for attention and more of an elegant hello.

There is a delightful muskiness to Rhythm for Women, largely couched in the rich lavender itself, which feels mature, confident, and luxurious, rather than screechy, simple, or wanton. This is a rich, layered, complex scent worn by a confident, mature woman to the opening of an art gallery. She is not necessarily an artist, but she is visiting and enjoying the experience of something new. She carries herself with confidence and strength and embraces the things that bring her pleasure without shame. Perhaps this woman is the persona around whom I would have built the marketing for Rhythm Women. Certainly, nothing about this is rocker chick. Nothing in it is rebellious, or even particularly young and naïve: Rhythm for Women does not feel old, but it does feel like an evening (or maybe even office) scent for confident adults in their thirties with regular jobs and 401ks. The Rhythm woman is not rebelling: she simply knows what she likes and embraces it wholeheartedly and with confidence and pleasure (though, perhaps, that is the greatest rebellion of all).

The general airy balance of musk and citrus-blackberry-leaf fresh aldehyde sparkle here feels very much like the sort of scent VS would snap up and sell along with their lingerie, except for, perhaps, the bold presence of the English lavender. There’s no citrus listed here, but I’m imagining a hint of something like mandarin at the top, along with plenty of sparkling fresh aldehydes and the slightest prickle of pink pepper that is not spicy, but merely touches the nose in that gentle perfume-y way. I don’t think there is any actual citrus here, but my nose is playing tricks on me, and the combined freshness, sparkle, and slight prickle of something in the opening, along with some background fruitiness, reads to me like there might be a hint of mandarin there.

The body of this scent largely is made up of petalia, that odd synthetic molecule that smells like florals but not quite any actual flower. It’s perfectly light and airy, suggesting gentle, fluffy, light-pink floral clouds without any of the harsh edges that real florals sometimes carry with them. It’s fresh and feels slightly fruity to me — this might be the influence of blackberry leaf or something else, but something about Rhythm is unmistakably a fresh fruity scent. It is no flower at all, perhaps most closely related to an already-soft peony with any distinctive edges shaved off.

This sounds disparaging, but really the petalia is quite a pleasant scent, fresh and diffusive. It feels quite light and airy, matching the sparkling top of aldehydes and pink pepper. Both of these accords counteract the grounded, aromatic, slightly earthy musky presence of the lavender. The lavender keeps the rest of the scent from floating away, becoming so light, airy, and inoffensively commonplace as to hardly be more than a VS room spray, while these lighter, sparklier, designer-perfume-ier elements wrap the lavender up and make it perfectly crowd-pleasing and safe.

I don’t detect much wood: this scent is so linear that, some respectable six hours in, I can still smell the overall shape of the fragrance, from opening through middle notes, with very little room left for any base notes to really shine. There is definitely musk, although I would argue it is paired with the lavender more than hidden in the drydown as unnecessary, uninspired musk so often is. I can see hints of vetiver and cedar adding to the overall fresh profile of this fragrance, but nothing about it feels strongly woody to me at any stage.

All in all, Rhythm for Women is gentle, diffusive, inoffensive, musky, and pleasant, carrying a Victoria’s Secret style mall perfuminess while miraculously avoiding all of the headache and much of the cheap cliche those often fall into. On the other side, it features and highlights a rare high-quality lavender, with facets that are more aromatic, varied, realistic, and slightly masculine than most lavender scents I’ve gotten to smell. The combination conveys confidence and maturity to me, while retaining a sparkle of laughter and fun that I’m tempted to call youthful, until I correct myself: nothing innate about youth owns these qualities. This is a grown-up adult woman having fun.

This is not a rebellious rocker teen scent, but a celebration of little pleasures for real adults. It lasts some six hours with projection that is slightly more faint than that of many designer fragrances released today, but this likely helps it avoid the headachey overwhelming qualities of those scents. Rhythm for Women manages to be light as air and play within the boundaries of designer scent tradition while featuring some fascinating notes.

Overall, this is a very pleasant scent that I think appeals to a wide range of professional women, and it’s a shame Burberry bungled the marketing so severely as to kill it. If you can find it and you like soft, gentle lavender fragrances with a touch of aldehyde sparkle, give Burberry Brit Rhythm for Her a try.