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I am snuggled up in this….
(picture snagged from Joely’s site)
tonight which I got from Joely at DreamaLittleDreamwithMe.com in mocha, watching “You’ve Got Mail,” with my husband studiously avoiding any sappy girlie movies and instead indulging in manly war computer games, which is so cute. This is the best way to see in the New Year, curled up and likely asleep.
Happy New Year!!!
On the 7th day of Violets….
God created Bois de Violette. Serge, Sheldrake, God, whatever — God made them, so he gets credit, mostly because it is just heavenly. This is violet perfection, created by Christopher Sheldrake.
Cedar, violet leaves and violet flowers, it is a sparkly violet confection with that Cedar engine powering its composition. It starts out a little sweet, but on me it immediately goes to that wonderful deep woody violet that feels like you have just laid down in a violet patch in the middle of the woods in your best dream.
My all-time favorite violet. The only thing that compares for me, but is different because of the rest of its notes and it doesn’t concentrate quite so much on the violet, is Ormonde Woman.
On the 6th day of Violets….
we tried Laura Tonatto E. Duse, named after the Italian actress Eleonora Duse.
Reading her biography is interesting and necessary since I just spritzed and need to allow for drydown. I have heard this name before, but really did not know anything about her. She lived from 1958 to 1924 and was very well-known and much admired for her style of acting, which was more natural than the current French style of emotionalism and overacting — think Girard Depardieu (sp). She acted without makeup early on, relying on her talent instead of the methods of the French school of acting (I’m not copying that quite word for word from the Encyclopedia Britannica, honest, but it’s not a very original sentence, if you know what I mean.)
This is one quote I could find attributed to her easily — the drydown doesn’t take that long:
The one happiness is to shut one’s door upon a little room, with a table before one, and to create; to create life in that isolation from life.
Hmmm. Eleonora, as you might have found out, and to use another quote, “That way madness lies.”
She did not go mad, but she did become quite ill and was no longer able to act without makeup. While bringing the troupe she had formed to the U.S., she died here.
George Middleton met her and wrote “The Lady with the Beautiful Hands” about their meeting. This is where I love this babe with all my heart. Mr. Middleton apparently produced plays, and while watching one of his plays populated with very young, beautiful women actresses on stage, she said to him, “‘Yet there seems to be nothing but beautiful women in your theater.’ And as she pointed to a famous star in a bathing suit she added with a shy smile: ‘That is not art, that is nature.’”
Ah, now we have had enough time for the drydown, though I have found another Old Babe Icon, which is a tremendous thing to get on a Saturday morning. E. Duse the perfume is a lovely creation, my favorite from the Laura Tonatto line so far. Violet, vanilla and amber, this is soft and beautiful. I’ve been trying to ignore this one’s siren call for days as I spritz it and hope I don’t have to buy it, but it has beautiful sillage, just feels like a warm summer day. An excellent violet rendition from a perfumer who is often more interested in infusing history or art into her perfumes than good smells. This one achieves both. I think Eleonora would have worn this happily.
Miss K, beauty addict tagged me with this, and it does look like fun!
Four jobs you’ve had in your life
Parts Department gopher (raking plastic off of parking lot was the highlight of my employment)
Court Reporter
Waitress
Vice President Operations
Four movies you would watch over and over
Poseidon Adventure
Titanic (last half only when the ship is going down)
Saturday Night Fever (if one person so much as snickers, I will kick your butt and then sit down and cry
Grace of my Heart (best movie ever)
Four places you have lived
Hoxie, Kansas
Salina, Kansas
Coffeyville, Kansas
Not in Kansas anymore
Four TV shows you love to watch
Lost
Project Runway
America’s Next Top Model
Rescue Me
Four places you have been on vacation
Milan, Italy
Vail, Colorado
Sanibel Island, Florida
Providenciales, Turks and Caicos
Four websites you visit daily
Now Smell this
Perfum Smellin’ Things
Beauty Addict
Marbleblog
Bois de Jasmin
I visit lots more, but I only get to list four! I cheated and put in five, sue me
Four of your favorite foods
My Mom’s cinnamon rolls, no other can live up to it, except my sister’s when she’s in the mood
Steak
Pepsi One it is a food if you can survive on it for more than a day
Chicken and Noodles, but only the ones my mom makes, and only if they are on top of mashed taters. There are not enough numbers to count all the carbs in that.
Four places you would rather be right now
Nowhere. I love the life I have, and I am content wherever I am in this world
So I’m not going to tag anyone deliberately, but I think you should all play too!
My best of 2005. These are all scents that were new to me and not just released in 2005.
Guerlain Attrape Coeur - ultimately this scent is not for me. It is beautiful and stunning, but something of the animalic base or perhaps overdoing it when I first got it has put it out of my arm’s reach. But it is the best because it is beautiful.
Serge Lutens Bois de Violette - Pure, beautiful, fierce violets, almost like a deep smokey purple violet lollipop.
Serge Lutens Tubereuse Criminelle — The name!!! And it packs a mean tuberose, but what is there not to love in this. It was my first Serge I fell for, but it has not been my last.
Serge Lutens Fumerie Turque, Rahat Loukhoum and POTL — the best scents I wound up loving that I started out hating.
Caron Coup de Fouet — Easily the best scent ever for me. The peppery clovey spicy smell takes me to my happy place. Smelling it on a jacket days after I’ve worn it just makes my eyes close and a smile to come to my face.
Gobin Daude Seve Exquise — The best scent I cannot buy. Green sappy goodness in a bottle, Robin is right, there is nothing like it, and it is almost impossible to get. I vow in 2006 not to sniff or fall in love with any perfume that is this hard to find. Oh, who am I kidding, part of this is the hunt, the perfume prey. That and pimping it to our friends and family so other people we know and love share our obsession.
Flowerbomb, Bond No. 9 Chinatown and L’Artisan La Chasse Aux Papillon – These are the best “Completely Girly” scents for this year. They go on strong and bold and can be overwhelming, but when you’re wanting to be All Girl, you can’t go wrong here.
My Best Scent for 2005 — Santa Maria Novella Eva. This was close with Coup de Fouet, but there is something charming and lovely and refreshing and innocent about this scent. Not innocent in that affected “clean scent” way, but just in how it feels like fresh meadows and hay and outdoors and young love and a roadster heading south from Firenze. If Coup makes me smile and close my eyes, Eva makes me laugh out loud and believe that I’m really not getting that old.
Celebrities that Annoyed me most: Kirsten Drunkst, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie
Celebrities that Make me Laugh because they are an F’n Train Wreck: Britney Spears, Nicole Ritchie, Lindsey Lohan
Musical Recording I’m most looking forward to: K-Fed’s release of his rap single at midnight New Year’s Eve. It should keep me laughing into the New Year
Best Makeup Line: Giorgio Armani and Trish McEvoy, they are the ones I reach for daily
Best thingie for my hair: Kerastase in the pink bottle. Highlighted-hair ladies, this will keep you super-shiny when you may be a smidge over-colored.
Predictions for 2006:
Many more Caron Urn scents, especially Montaigne, Poivre, Farnesiana, N Aimez que moi, finding out if they will sell me the mondo bottle of Coup, like a vat, so I can just leap in it every morning after my shower.
I will find Seve Exquise in a bottle — no, in a case of bottles, all for meeeeee!
Idole de Lubin will arrive in January, and I will either instantly love it or hate that boozy fruity thing that has me worried every time people talk about rum balls when this perfume is mentioned
I will not stick within my perfume budget next year either
Best part of doing the Best of 2005: Got to visit and blogroll more perfume blogs! Now go visit the rest of the participants in the Best of 2005.
On the 5th Day of Violets… the sleepy violet is getting no sleep.
No, I’ll wake up long enough to do Molinard Violette. This one goes on sweet and dry and a little dark, a smokey violet to my nose. This won’t take long, I love this one, definitely going in the keepr pile and maybe a full bottle down the line, but it needs the spritz test still just to see what it does all over.
Okay, off to work on the Best of 2005 post for tomorrow, woo-hoo! Sleep is highly overrated.
The 30-year-old tells the New York Post’s Page Six column he is looking for someone under 45 who is intelligent with a kind heart.
He says, “Any girl who is interested must simply be born female and between the ages of 18 and 45.
“They must have an IQ above 130 and they must be honest. They must not have any clinical, psychological disorders… and a kind heart.
So how rich is he? And is Yoko his mother? I mean, would she be the mom-in-law?
Rosie Perez dances on moving treadmill, gets hurt
Maybe it’s just me, but I have a hard time walking and running on a treadmill, not to mention chewing gum. It has never occurred to me to dance, no matter how good the music, no matter how high my fever might have been, what kind of drugs I was on, what psychotic episode was taking place.
This article calls it a freak accident. Yeah, like stupid is freaky.
UPDATE: Rerun tonight. I’m bummed. New episode next week.
Tonight is Project Runway! Will Santino take an axe to the inferior designers?
Will Andrae cry on the runway again?
I really don’t know what I’m going to do when “Lost” starts again. When is it going to have a new epidsode?!?!?!?!?!? When all the bimbos get out of jail on their DUIs? Grrrrr! ahem, sorry. I’m going to have to choose between them somehow. Only night of television I watch right no, and the only two shows I like are on at the same time.
Since we don’t have the delicious In N Out Burgers yet or ever, my need for an amazing burger sends me off to Red Robin. The Clucks and Fries (appetizer) are just a basket Heart attack, deep-fried chicken breasts and potatoes and ranch dressing for dipping.
Can you tell where I’m going in a few minutes to pick up dinner?
Healthy eating starts next week, and not a second before.
On the 4th day of Violets…
I know, I know, two today, but I missed on the 25th, so I need to catch up.
Penhaligon’s Violette is the tester on the other arm (this makes today very interesting because I’ve spread Fumerie Turque all over everywhere else but these two arms).
This one goes on greener smelling, not particularly sweet, but not dry either. Not very complex in the drydown, but it stays very nice, a green, creamy violet. It doesn’t appear to be staying with me very long. Poor shy violets want to poke their heads back under their arms.
That’s why Bois des Violette is the Mother Ship of violets, it goes on big and stays big. More on that later.
On the Third day of Violets, we tried out…
Berdoues Violettes de Toulouse. This goes on with that dry smell, like the Caron. So far, not my favorite violet. If it doesn’t shape up soon, it’s getting a thumbs down, which would be a shame because I think this is pretty inexpensive.
Better now in the drydown, but retains that dry smell. Not my favorite.
Is there really such a thing as a perfume allergy?
I’m not saying there isn’t, and I understand smoke allergies, etc., but does anyone know what ingredients in perfume wafting through the air would set off an allergy? Aldehydes? Smoke allergy makes sense, and I’ve seen people’s allergic, physical reaction to that, but that’s a burning thing that stays in the air for X period of time.
Or is it possible that some people don’t like perfume and just call it an allergy? What are the symtoms of a perfume allergy?
On the Second day of Violets, it is Caron Violette Precieuse.
Not sure what that means exactly, a Precise Violet? Okay. Smelling this in the sample vial, I have been beyond apprehensive. It smells like violet gym socks. But with Caron, I know to never judge them in the bottle. True to Caron, this is what happened as well. Violet gym socks turned to…
Velvet Violet. Sweet, but not overly so, woody, a little green. Is this the perfect Violet? If not, it’s darn close to it. Amazing perfection, this is how I think of violets, little perfect blossoms that are shy, but seductive and heart-breaking in their beauty.
So what’s with this one being discontinued? How can that be? Now I have to go hunt down a few bottles!
The Superficial | Kirsten Dunst is more important than cripples
All of you Kirsten Dunst fans want to click the above link. I’m still laughing. This girl is the definition of “self-entitled.”
elizabeth W Violet Eau de Parfum
I know, I know, I’m a day late starting. Too much lasagna for Christmas, I fell asleep early.
Elizabeth W does a really lovely violet. Accented with mandarin, lily of the valley, cyclamen and ylang ylang, it takes nothing away from the violet, but keeps the violet very soft, very floral. Never having heard of this line, the sample came in a swap, and I think I need to explore some more. Lasting power is a little short, but at $29 for 2 oz, you can afford to reapply.
I just put this on the skin to sample, but I think a nice spritzing would be really lovely.
Merry Christmas!
Legerdenez is Cait’s new perfume blog. She does those beautiful, elegant reviews you’ve come to realize you don’t get here.
Welcome to perfume blogging, Cait!
Fresh in on a swap package from Greece is The Mother of Bell Jars. Yes, that’s right, I now have my own bottle of Feminite du Bois.
Wow. From that graceful bottle to that yummy juice, I now see all the other Serge children before they popped out of the side of the FdB bottle (she looks just a skosh preggers).
I’m loving this, it’s like meeting the parents of the person you love.
I think I promised a Musky Tomato story.
It all started out because I was making presents for the women in my husband’s office. Some of them were getting a little bouquet of perfume samples, and others were getting lotion because either they or their spouse was sensitive to perfumes.
One couldn’t do any florals. So I have this amazing creamy whipped lotion base that is so fun to throw scent into, so I was making up a couple of tubs of lotion, then making small samples of scent so they can choose one for their lotion or leave it unscented.
I love the smell of tomato leaf, but I understand probably not everyone feels quite the same way. Hmm, tomato leaf and violet? Could work. Anyway, I wanted to make something with the tomato leaf scent just for fun, but I had to add something to it to try and mellow it out, so I put in a little musk and patchouli (mild patch), and, voila, musky, earthy tomato!
My dear, sweet, long-suffering husband came home, and I again forced another smell under his nose to get his opinion on, and he swooned. He loves the Musky Tomato. It’s actually very appealing, but it needs another name, but we can’t come up with anything. Ideas?
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