There’s alot happening in Belfast over the next couple of weeks with the Belfast Festival currently in full swing as well as the re-opening of our wonderfully revamped Belfast City Hall so I ventured into the city yesterday to wander around and see some sights.

One thing about Belfast is the great shopping available – all manner of fashion outlets and some fantastic foodie options, I don’t mean this to read like an ad for the businesses there but it really is my favorite place to shop of all the cities I have visited…so far anyway. While I was browsing through Debenhams I did what I usually do and headed for the cosmetics counters – I have a passion for Estee Lauder’s Youth Dew fragrance – and went to get my usual fix of a small squirt before going on my way. I am determined that a bottle of this will be in my Xmas stocking this year as well as a bottle of YSL’s ‘Paris’ and I am dropping plenty of hints to ensure ‘Santa’ gets the message this time round…

I’d been reading the other day that Lauder’s other signature fragrance, Beautiful, is one of the worlds biggest sellers so on an impulse I took a sniff and then a liberal spray on my wrist – and instantly regretted it. Have you ever tried a sample of a frangrance and ended up with a monster headache afterwards…? well that’s what happened to me. For the rest of the day that smell followed me everywhere I went, I couldn’t get it out of my nostrils and my head thumped like mad! this had happened to me once before when I was eighteen and took a whiff – a very small whiff – of that then famous perfume ‘Chloe’. I had a migrane for three days after.

Suffice to say as soon as I got home I washed it off but the melody lingered on. ‘Beautiful‘ is not for me.