Moschino Toy 2 Gummy and Yummy Review: Two Bears, No Sale

Moschino Toy 2 Gummy and Yummy came home with me as complimentary 5 ml miniatures from my usual perfumery. Two brightly coloured bears, two chances to change my mind about a line I’ve mostly walked past. Spoiler: no.

I know Toy Boy has plenty of fans in the fragrance community. My own experience with the line is limited, partly because the bottles have never made me want to look closer. I wasn’t much of a teddy bear person as a child, either, so the design has had a long time to win me over. Anyway, I wore both fragrances on skin. I was more interested in what came out of the bottles than in whether I’d want to display them.

Moschino Toy 2 Gummy and Yummy on skin

The names and colours had me expecting two variations on sweets. Gummy more or less delivered on that expectation. Yummy went somewhere quite different on me, with enough citrus to make me forget about the lollipop colours altogether.

Toy 2 Gummy: childhood sweets and a turn towards sour milk

With a name like Gummy I was expecting candy or chewing gum, and the first few minutes were certainly sugary. There was a powdery quality to the sweetness, with a little citrus underneath. It brought back the sweets I used to eat as a child, which would place them somewhere in the Palaeolithic. For a moment I was rather pleased to be back there.

I like sweet fragrances, so the amount of sugar wasn’t the problem. It was the way the citrus sat against the creamy part. For my nose, there were moments when the two together suggested milk that had been left out too long. Moschino lists bergamot and blood orange alongside a heart that includes praline and milk cream, so what I was picking up at least made sense to me on paper. The sour-milk association was mine. Moschino’s Toy 2 Gummy notes.

Gummy had a better spell once the citrus faded. The softness that was left smelled pleasant up close, and I could enjoy the sweetness on its own for a while. After that it settled into a sweet hum that I found hard to describe with any precision. The childhood flashes had already gone, and I kept waiting for something as specific to take their place.

I had to bring my wrist to my nose to catch most of that development. I picked up very little in the air around me, and what I could smell seemed to fade quickly. I may simply have applied too little from the miniature. That was the experience I had on my skin, and I’d need a fuller application to say anything more confident about its performance.

Toy 2 Yummy: bright citrus and the washing-up liquid problem

The blue bear gave me a blast of citrus. It was bright and fizzy, and for a second I could almost picture the rind as it’s being peeled. Then it turned sharp, took on a slightly watery quality and went straight into washing-up liquid territory for me. Once my brain made the connection, it was remarkably committed to it.

Moschino lists yellow mandarin and bergamot at the top, with sambac jasmine, geranium and two peppers in the heart, and Haitian vetiver among the base notes. I wondered whether the pepper had something to do with that prickly opening, but I couldn’t pick it out as a distinct note. The jasmine and vetiver were equally hard for me to identify. Citrus was what I kept coming back to. Moschino’s Toy 2 Yummy notes.

Over time, the citrus lost some of its edge. There was a softer stretch after the opening and I wondered if the florals were contributing to it, although I still couldn’t identify them on their own. The overall impression stayed much the same. I kept hoping for a turn that would give me something else to pay attention to. My brain stayed by the kitchen sink.

Would I wear either again?

Gummy came closer. I’d happily revisit the brief moment when it smelled like the sweets I remember, and there was something genuinely pleasant about the soft drydown. Yummy had its moment right at the start, when the citrus still smelled like peel. Neither gave me enough of what I enjoyed to make me reach for it again. Both miniatures can go back into their boxes. I’m glad I had the chance to try them, and I’m quite happy to leave the full-size bears at the perfumery.

Read more of my experiences wearing fragrances in Fragrance Reviews.