Exotic Shemale

Our spam filter caught 1068 spams in a 20-day period recently, mostly pornographic, including the one that inspired the title of today´s post (I guess that´s in contrast to your prosaic, workaday shemale). Anyway, for those of you (pitbullfriend, etc.) who´ve been mistakenly caught by the filter – if it makes you feel any better, I am now routinely identified as a spammer on my own blog. The same thing just happened to me on Made By Blog. Is there a message here? Can the spam filter see into my soul? If your comment goes *poof* – you´ve just been filtered. Contact Us and we can undelete it. Next time it happens to me, I´m going to experiment with changing comment identities and see if that helps.

I´d like to start off today´s Candy with a review of Le Labo Aldehyde 44 – a fragrance so exclusive that it´s sold only at Barneys in Dallas, so you can´t have any unless you live in Dallas. Because it´s exclusive – it excludes you. Okay, maybe you can have some if you live near Dallas and can drive there. Or if you fly through Dallas on business – or, if you have friend in or near Dallas, or know someone who flies there on business. Or, if you sign on for a bottle split (thanks Amy!), which is how I got my sample. Or, if you live anywhere in the United States, you can buy a sample on eBay, because it´s just that exclusive.

I had my makeup done at a Clinique counter in Dallas years ago, going for something typically Clinique (youthful and subtle), and emerged into the daylight looking like one of those exotic shemales in a Robert Palmer video from the 80s. In my hometown of Washington, D.C., it would be just the opposite: you could go to the fly girls at M.A.C., or sidle up to the goth SAs selling a new Dior makeup line called Midnight Strumpet, and ask for Full Face, and you´d still emerge looking fresh and ready for a game of tennis at the club …. where was I? The truth is, I love Aldehyde 44, which breaks new ground by being all about the aldehydes and not much else. It doesn´t go anywhere, it doesn´t do anything, it just sits there and shimmers like a bottomless glass of champagne, and what is not to love about that? It´s …. aldehydes. Okay, trying again with something less stupid-sounding: it´s not perfume-y. It´s not an aldehydic opening grafted onto anything, like the wonderful opening of Piguet Baghari, which then goes on to become a different fragrance – a fragrance with strong references to a vintage classic. 44 has a more contemporary feel, but it manages not to veer in the other, too-powdery direction either. It´s a study on a single smell, although it is not in any way simple – in fact, I think the “44” refers to the ingredients list, and it feels quite complex. There are some sort of white florals in there (jasmine?), and maybe that´s part of what makes the aldehydes feel so beautifully balanced.

KISS Her: from the ULTA website, “features top notes of apple-tini, wet fig leaves, racy bull accord and red peppercorns followed by middle notes of red poppy, black orchid, sueded frangipani petals and calla lily. Base notes of amber crystals, musky bare skin accord, patent leather and mahogany give the scent a sensual finish.” Yeah, whatever. I am old enough to remember this goofball band (pictured at the top in their KISS stage makeup), and I really wanted to love this – come on, wet fig leaves and racy bull accord? They could get away with something pretty weird, right? My first draft looked something like this: “a sour-fruit, fresh accord that dries down into an extremely familiar musky skin scent that´s not very interesting.” Then I spent several days sniffing things to identify which skin scent this is a blatant ripoff of. Guess what? I can´t find it; in fact, the more I sniffed, the better I liked KISS Her. It´s not “me:” put another way, it´s not a bitter, jaded 40-something with a not-so-secret soft side. It´s fresh, fairly subtle, and does, indeed, smell of warm skin. It´s like a white cotton camisole on a lovely 22-year-old girl. Maybe it´s the hormones talking, but KISS Her’s almost anti-glam charm won me over completely.

KISS Him: again from Ulta: “top notes of bergamot, white pepper, anise and black cumin over mid notes of lavender, cypress, dark rum and fir balsam. The scent closes on masculine base notes of sandalwood, tonka, moss and honeyed amber crystals.” Now this was totally weird, and I wish some more guys would try it and report back on Basenotes, but maybe it´s just too déclassé for your averages Basenotes guy? I mean, would you men die of shame if someone saw this on your sink? Oh, look! Three guys have tried it on Basenotes, and as one of them said, “I saw this in Dillards and laughed… until I smelled it.” A peppery stankfest of cumin, cypress and sandalwood, this smells like sweat, but clean sweat. Like a hot young guy in a tee shirt. Like Harry Potter in Equus. Okay, thinking about something else now. Guys: maybe you could hide the bottle in your underwear drawer? Women: if you liked Kingdom, or Femme (reorchestrated), but want something a little more butch, this is for you.

Annick Goutal Chene Imperiale – I can´t find out anything at all about this. I assume it´s a home fragrance. It´s smoke and earth, with a faint breath of florals. On the campfire scale it´s somewhere between the new Kolnisch Juchten and Diptyque John Galliano. Stunning.

Heeley Cardinal — notes via Luckyscent are: incense, cistus, grey amber, patchouli, vetiver. Every time I put this on I think, maybe you can have too many incense scents. This one makes me think: so what? I need another incense frag like I need a third eye (or another kid; a third arm would be helpful, because then I’d have somewhere else to try scents.) Then I make my little squinchy-face and get back to my regularly scheduled life. Maybe four or six hours later I get a whiff of myself and think, wow, what is that great fragrance? And I realize it’s Cardinal, which almost fits into the CdG incense series, standing closer to Kyoto’s slightly sweet dryness than Avignon’s heavy cathedral. Hmmmm. Maybe you can’t have too many incense scents after all.

images: KISS band photo, gamasutra.com; Kiss Him and Her from Ulta.com; Robert Palmer “Addicted to Love” still, sterago.com; Daniel Radcliffe: fantasymundo.com heh heh. For a side of Hairy Potter you’ve never seen, click here or here. If you’re reading this at work … WTH, aren’t you supposed to be working?!?! Anyway, don’t visit those images unless your cube-farm spot is private.