Oh. What a bag of mixed pleasures. When I first started reading this manhwa, I was so in love with it! So unabashedly feminine, so baroque and so incredibly beautiful! And with perfumes! Loved it from frame one and hooked easily on it. Then I decided to wait for it to finishing it's run and read it in one swoop (yes, I don't read ongoing manhwa from week to week anymore, it simply was too confusing, I only read completed manhwa from first to last chapter as I like without the waiting). And then... My whole opinion of it changed.
While it's a gorgeous manhwa with stunning visuals, the storyline went from a girl empowerment one (that I liked), to a completely non nonsensical high fantasy story. WTF is Khan, and all the stuff around his experiments, how Ariel and Cedric were both in his program when they were kidnapped as children, how he wants to rule the world and so on. Simply terrible. Intensely disliked it from the beginning and it only turned worse. This was a happy go lucky, enjoyable josei manhwa, completely suitable for adult women (the heroine wasn't a high schooler and love wasn't the only topic of the plot) and it turned into a really bad, cliche, undeveloped seinen manhwa.
Saving grace was the very touching, realistic way the showed Cedric as a guy who slowly falls in love with a woman who was borderline crazy in love with him before, he ditched her, and then the tables have turned, with his crazy in love and she more or less completely uninterested. His shame, his uncertainty, his emotional instability in those difficult times were palpable and left me breathless. And some of the Ariel/Cedric romantic moments were cute and endearing.
What I liked was how Ariel built her business from the ground up, and how she creates new perfumes. Sadly, even this was marred by over-the-top antagonists and cheap and repetitive plot devices. But I was hooked until the Khan storyline came. Then it just all fell apart. And trust me, this hurt, since I rarely find such unique manhwa with much a strong feminine slant that is not shoujo but josei. To have this, and then to lose it so obliquey was a bitter pill to swallow, in terms of my manhwa reading life.
Overall, not a rec. Maybe worth looking at the art and checking the perfumes, but what a missed opportunity!