The politics of perfume in Canada.

You know, I’m a sensitive person to other’s comfort, I really am. I don’t care what those people say about me that know me. If someone found a particular perfume I wore to be nauseating, and we had to be in close proximity for any bit of time during the day, I would stop wearing it. I know I should be a little less cynical about this “perfume allergy” thing, but even the expert in the article says it’s a myth.

It is almost becoming like everything that has to do with humans and living is becoming an annoyance to others, so we ban the things that make us human and unique and create headaches. I’m all for the cacophony of smells and sounds that makes up the human orchestra, and that includes elevators full of Giorgio and even clouds of Angel in the bathroom and *gasp* the hospital and Church!

Okay, I’ll hush now and crawl back under my sensitive rock.

Patty

Rolling out of bed, so tired, bleary eyed, exhausted, another day of work and running and errands ahead. Hop into the shower, thinking about what perfume to wear. Too many take too much effort and will just wear out my nose before the day is done because they are too heavy, too sweet, too nothing, too unknown, I don´t want to think about this! Hermes, take me away!!!!

Hermes always has a perfume that requires very little effort to wear or understand, but are not so simple that they are boring, so I have several from them that I can spritz on with abandon, that feel like old friends, whether I´ve had them for years or just a month.

The best part about doing a post about my Best Fragrance Friends Forever is that I get the revisit them all and remember why I love them and depend on them. These aren´t necessarily my favorite perfumes as far as how I find them interesting or unusual or how they create a mood – most of them aren´t – but they are the ones that are the Deep Bench, the Pinch Hitters, the scents that don´t require any work for me to love or wear. There is no interpretation, they are comfortable old coats I can shrug on and not think about, but just enjoy being in their company.

Hermes Eau de Merveilles or Water of Wonders – ambergris, bitter orange, Italian lemon, Indonesian pepper, pink pepper, oak, cedar, balsam, vetiver and woods. This has everything I love in a fragrance. The citrus notes are bright and sparkly, but not overly sweet. The pepper adds a little oomph to it, and then all of that woods. This perfume is charming and comfortable. It´s effortless to wear. I don´t have to pretend to be anyone other than who I am with this friend, it reflects me instead of me wearing it.

Un Jardin Sur le Nil - from the Hermes garden series, this one celebrates the River Nile. Notes of green mango, lotus flowers, aromatic rushes, incense, sycamore wood. This one is more citrusy than the Merveilles, without feeling fruity. It is made for spritzing wildly all about and feeling like I can just float above my cares for the day, not worry about tomorrow. This is the friend that takes me out for a wild ride when I’ve been working too hard and makes sure I remember what it is just to laugh and be carefree.

Un Jardin en Mediterranee - another of the garden series and one that many people do not care for, though I can´t figure out why. Notes of fig tree, mastic tree, red cedar, bergamot, orange blossom and white oleander. It´s not my favorite of the Hermes scents, but it is the one that nets me the most compliments, followed by Merveilles, then Sur le Nil. I cannot wait for the next one in the Un Jardin series to come out. It is a friend because I feel so pretty when I wear it, adored.

Last in the Hermes line of friends, but not least, but newest to me are the Hermessence series. I do not know them as well as the others, but have fallen in love with two, alone or together. I won´t discuss the Nazgul. Even when I am not bearing the ring, it loves me not.

Rose Ikebana - The silk in the series, with notes of rose tea, infusion of petals, peony, magnolia, pink peppercorn, zest of grapefruit, rhubarb and vanilla honey. I cannot imagine a perfume that is easier to wear than this one. It is smooth and creamy, and I am a total sucker for peony and rhubarb. Throw those in a perfume and you own me forever. There´s nothing about this perfume that seems remarkable or outstanding, but in the total, from start to finish, it feels as easy as breathing to wear it, and in its ease is the thing of significance. It is the friend you meet who you instantly feel you have known forever. There is nothing horrible that is revealed as you get to know them, they fit into your life easily, and you feel blessed for having known them. Rose Ikebana is graceful and easy, as I find most of the Hermes scents to be, it never tries too hard or laughs too loud or stays too long, she always leaving you wanting more time with her. This has quickly become the one fragrance that I reach for when I´m in a hurry and just want to smell good.

Vetiver Tonka - The wool in the series, with notes of vetiver, neroli, bergamot, grilled hazelnut, dry fruit, cereals and tonka bean. Smells like chocolate to me. Not really chocolate, but all the best that is chocolate without being gourmandy. This one is the friend to go out drinking with, gossiping and laughing all night, content in sharing what´s been going on in your life, indulging in a wonderfully sinful dessert, wishing you could spend more time together, but so content with having the time that you have had.

Combining Vetiver Tonka and Rose Ikebana is bliss. I need a new language just to express how comforting these two together are. Any season, whatever my favorite clothes are, watching the Poseidon Adventure for the 300th time. How did I live my life without knowing them?

Marc Jacobs and Marc Jacobs Essence - Simple white floral, like a lovely child with no guile, this is spending the afternoon with my beautiful tiny nieces curled up on the couch or a day at the park with them smelling flowers.

(picture from De Rosado)
Caron Coup de Fouet - I tend to go on and on about this one, as anyone who has been reading here for any length of time knows. That clovey spicy goodness that is The Coup is my Very Best Friend Forever. It is comfort in a bottle, I can slip into that and do nothing but breath deep. It feels like Old Spice does emotionally, all the good things in this world. It isn´t just about the way it smells, this one is entirely about how it makes me feel. I feel loved and accepted and comforted and happy. There is no bad mood for me when the Coup is about. The Coup is my sister in a good mood. My sister’s a Scorpio and never reads this so I can say what I want. Lovely, loyal, wonderful person, but Good Lord can she get mad fast. Coup never gets mad, just stays with you faintly for days and weeks. Months can go by, and I can pick up a coat that Coup has been with, and peace and contentment just surround me. I have no idea why it has this effect on me, but it is powerful indeed.

It is odd that Poivre is not quite the same for me. Poivre is stunning, a more powerful Coup, deeper, richer, but it takes a little work for me to wear. I think Coup´s comfort is that it is rich without being heavy, deep without being terribly complex. I love them both, but Coup is the one that has such a deep emotional comforting effect.

What fragrances are you Best Friends Forever? Not your favorite or the most popular, but the one you depend on when all the others let you down?

Patty

Mood, emotion and scent are closely related for me and are how I evaluate a new perfume. While I can sometimes find some of the notes in a composition and generally describe what it smells like, the details of a perfume elude me. I greatly admire those who can give those details — I love reading them, and they add so much to what I already know or feel about a scent and often produce ginormous lemmings nibbling at my nose.

My day normally starts with me getting out of bed, throwing on some coffee to brew, sitting down to get two hours of work in before the youngest teenager has to get up to go to school. He gets up, I get a shower, dress, grab something to eat, and we are out the door. Most days, I have my shower time to think about what perfume to wear that day. This is why I so love my days when I work at home and the weekends. Smelling like I just spilled three bottles of perfume on myself is not unusual, nor are three or four showers on a weekend day, just so I can play in my perfumes again and again. (photo from Anne Scarlett)

March wrote about scent and memory last week, and it set me to thinking about my own scent memories. My mother has never worn many perfumes, and only when she goes out, so when I think of her smell, I think of clean Irish Spring soap and Jergens hand lotion. My Aunt Esther used to visit us every summer. She was such a classy, smart woman, and just a tiny ball of fire, but her scent for me will always be noxcema cream. At night she would put her hair up in a little pink hairnet and slather that crap on. We loved her because she would let us have homemade ice cream any time of day she was eating it, which was most of the day. Aunt Ruby would also come every summer. Yes, there are a lot of aunts, there were 13 kids in my dad’s family. Aunt Ruby brought her dog, a French poodle named Jacques. Having a fluffy, overbred, nervous, man-hating French poodle on a farm was pretty much a bad idea, but she would leave him there with us while she went on a vacation. For our entertainment, we would go get her shoes, slip them on and walk in the door, and Jacque would just go mad, barking and dancing and prancing, smelling whatever Aunt Ruby smelled like, until he finally looked up to find two very silly girls doubled over in laughter. We did this a lot, and it never failed to amuse us. Simple children, I know.

Some of my smell memories from my childhood are awfully disgusting smells. We were raised on a dairy farm. See that idyllic picture on the left? That was a true picture — much of our life was full of the outdoors and bucolic views like that, but the part of a dairy most people don’t see is very different in view and scent. I actually had a picture of this, but you don’t want to see that, do you? Maybe later.

The reality was a 5 a.m. wake-up call every morning of my life that I can remember, a huge breakfast that had to be consumed in about 7 minutes, one part of which was always a big-ass fried egg in the middle of my plate. I hate fried eggs. Hated them then, hate them now, but my father’s rural Kansas religious belief seemed to revolve around that egg being ingested every morning by every person in the family. To this day, I cannot smell a fried egg without bringing back memories of hiding it under my plate, in my orange juice glass, slipping some to my sister to eat, all under the baleful eye of my daddy, who often did look the other way. Scent memory is a powerful thing.

After breakfast, it was a dash to the pasture to get the cows rounded up and into the corral outside the barn and ready to milk. That part of the morning was just stunning. Crisp Kansas air, before the sun was up, dew in the grass, everything still sleepy. Good thing, because that feeling sure wasn’t gonna hold.

See the picture on the right, that’s what my morning started out like — the backside of cows, many who had been in snow or laying in mud or crapping down their back legs. I won’t go into when we had them on fresh alfalfa bales — let’s just say, when they coughed, we took cover. We had to run in a bunch at a time into the barn, put them in stanchions, then chain their back legs together, hopefully without getting the snot kicked out of us or have our toes stepped on (toenails went missing regularly in our house). They would poop there as we milked them, milk would leak out of the milking machines as you pulled them off or put them on, grain got wet, they would wait until you were standing between two of them and then just start leaning on you, crushing you between them. This was at 5:30 a.m. every morning, no mornings off. The smell of sour milk and cow crap was the scent that started my day for at least a decade. After we milked, we had to run to the house, wash up (five kids in one bathroom, that was superfantastic fun) and make the school bus. But every morning, once I discovered perfume, I would spritz on a little scent. Being poor, I normally only had one or two cheap drugstore scents. No memory of what they were at all, except I do remember Stephen B my senior year in high school.

Now, why would I tell you that story? For two reasons. One — that isn’t the smell I remember from my childhood. Easy to describe that smell, but I really don’t remember it now, it was just background noise. This and the fried egg smell are my most powerful scent memories. My Daddy wore Old Spice when he went out for the evening with my mom or to school functions. He would have worn it to Church, but he was holding a grudge and would only step foot in church for funerals and weddings. To this day, when I smell Old Spice, I can almost see him in front of me, laughing that big, booming laugh he had; can hear him tell a story or a joke, see his infectious smile, his massive arms that could bend crowbars. Smelling Old Spice can make me purr in contentment because it is comfort and love and everything good in this world and the next.

The second reason I told you that disgusting cow story — My mornings still start at 5 a.m. or earlier, but I don’t have to smell sour milk and cow crap, but I still have to pick out a scent to wear. There is something wonderful and delicious pondering which of my twenty-eleven scents I have that I will wear that day. What am I in the mood for? Is it rainy out or sunny? Winter or spring? Do I feel happy or sad? Do I need comfort, or do I want to be a baaaaaad girl? There are those mornings where I can’t decide, and I go to a handful of scents that are the standards that get me through life when I can’t decide.

This next week, I want to go through what scents I use for different moods. That is how I use perfume, to express my inner life in an outward way.

First up on Monday — Scents that are My Best Firiends

Patty

Marlen just opened shop on his new Blog for those of you that haven’t seen that announcement.

Can I have a moment to complain? Work really takes away from blogging and reading blogs and commenting, and I’m not very happy about that this week. I have missed all you guys.

But I’m back, just in time to talk about my favorite trashy shows at the end of the week, wahoo! You have something to look forward to tomorrow.

Patty

I have a shoebox full of fragrance vials. I call it the Halloween Candy. Some of the Candy came from eBay; I buy decants. But most of the Candy came from the same incredibly generous, anonymous donor in Colorado who owns this blog. She said, hey, let me send you a few things. I knew the Colorado package was here because one of the vials had opened in transit (Frangipani? Rosine?) and my front porch smelled like a fancy brothel. I mean, the sillage from the mailbox was breathtaking.

I play a game with the Candy. It´s a good game because it helps me fulfill one of my 2006 resolutions: to buck my control-freak tendencies. I just plunge my hand in there, no peeking, and come up with something, and that’s what I’m putting on.

So here are some brief, recent impressions from the Candy box (and a few from test-drives at the perfume counter). I´m not going to cheat on any of these entries by looking up the correct spelling, actual fragrance notes, or anything else that might add to what little credibility I have left. Go ahead, laugh at my mistakes.

Santa Maria Novella Heliotropo – strong almond, heliotrope, a hint of something bready or PlayDoh-ish, and then – poof! – it´s gone. Completely. In less than 5 minutes. I repeated this test; same result. Three hours later: I am aware of a bitter, herb-y drydown that reappears, but very close to the skin. It reminds me of what´s left after some of the iPdF fragrances, which is actually quite pleasant.

Frederic Malle En Passant – bread (why bread again?) lilacs, rain, a hint of cucumber from an adjacent garden, and smelling the lilacs with my face pushed up against a cold, wet fence (chain link? Possibly iron). I find it ineffably sad, which is confusing – is this an association I have with lilacs? Beautiful but I could only wear it to cry. I´m so curious about the emotional aspect I ask my 11-year-old what she thinks. She says: “It smells like flowers and rain. It makes me feel happy and sad at the same time.” Decent sillage three hours later. Still makes me want to cry.

Shiseido Feminite du Bois – I know this is a Major Love for Patty. I think the French translates roughly to The Femininity of Wood. (If this is a howler of a mistake, have fun – I´m not going to fix it.) What I get first is lovely and strange – cedar, something sharp and turpentine-ish, lavender or rosemary, iris? And then roughly 2 minutes later, the inevitable Serge Cedar Trainwreck – whatever compound Chris Sheldrake is using (and I know, this is pre-Serge, but I´m betting it´s the same) turns into unadulterated B.O. on me, as if I´d applied it directly to my armpits post-workout. I have the identical problem with SL Bois de Violette and Iris Silver Mist. Oh, well – plenty of other things to love. Postscript: 5 hours later, right on the skin, is that unbelievable honey drydown you get if you suffer through the initial hell of Miel de Bois.

Frederic Malle Iris Poudre – a perfect-for-spring fragrance that pretty much captures its name – Powdery Iris. On me it is a light, close to the skin scent that reminds me strongly of Apres l´Ondee in terms of its initial impression (powder and a hint of violet) and in its transparence. However, in the drydown it has a bit more edge, more cedar-y and musk. Reminiscent of the great 1950s powder scents, with a twist.

Annick Goutal Eau de Camille – what kind of skin do I have? I have the kind that can transmogrify a lovely, ethereal scent into something so manifestly evil that the chic SA at my local Neiman Marcus makes a moue of distaste upon sniffing my wrist and says, hurriedly, “er, it´s not supposed to smell like that, the bottle must be spoiled.” No, madame, don´t blame Annick. It´s me. I have not the slightest idea how this is supposed to smell, but if you were here right now with me, you would smell burning rubber and trampled grass resting on a base of the merest whiff of vomit. No, I am not funning you. Four hours later: gone, mercifully.

Annick Goutal Muguet – I take back every snarky, hurtful thing I ever said about muguet (a.k.a. lily of the valley), which generally makes me think of sugared plastic. One of the AG soliflores (using the term loosely), Muguet is the precise smell of a handful of lily of the valley stems and leaves plucked from the shady spot of your yard, way back over there by the roses where the grass doesn´t grow so well, misted lightly with water, and tied with a white organdy ribbon for you to carry in a bouquet toward the altar on what is possibly the happiest day of your life. (Have I mentioned that I hate muguet perfumes?) Considering how deliciously swoony I find this, I wonder what a true muguet fan would think. If muguet is your thing, do yourself a favor and try this one. Lasts until the next morning, if I sniff for it.

Annick Goutal Folavril – Ack!! Nooooooooo, get it off me!!! White pepper, dandelion greens and the grape lollipop I found under the back seat of the van. Some masochistic impulse compels me to re-smell it. See note for Camille, above. I brought this on myself by commenting on Cait´s blog that AG scents never seem to sour on me.

S-Perfume 100% Love – I wanted to hate this. How I wanted to hate this. Rose, chocolate and incense… I find even the idea nauseating. And if you had to come up with a concept for a perfume house designed to irritate me, you´d be hard-pressed to do better (worse?) than S-Perfumes´ cutesy minimalist sperm thing. So. I opened the vial with a flourish of barely concealed contempt, affixed a sneer to my face, and waited for the punch line… which is, of course, that it was love (lust?) at first smell. 100% Love is a harlot of a fragrance, a wanton woman in a brown velvet dress flashing her red silk garters at you, so dig out that roll of $100 bills, baby, because she´s going to do things you´re too shy to ask for, and you´re going to like it. In terms of Sex in A Bottle, it´s right up there with Bal a Versailles. They have a “S-ex” perfume (they paid people to come up with that name?!) but as far as I´m concerned they must have mixed up the labels. This one goes all night on me… if you know what I mean.

Images:
jordan almonds — americanbridalshop.com
rainy street – East Germany (uncredited)
hat from suzannemillinery.com
lily of the valley bouquet courtesy of derouinfloral.com
Bettie Page, pinup queen – grrl.com

March