Today will have some highlights and some lowlights.  First the highlights.  Winners of the Vero Profumo samples (and I decided to give away two): HikerChickNH and Minette. Just click on the Contact Us link over on the left and send me your address.

 This is a Super Bowl commercial from Pepsi that I think is hysterical. I’ve worked tangentially with Deaf groups for a couple of decades, and they had a lot of input into this commercial, and it totally gets Deaf humor.  I applaud Pepsi for, first, making a commercial that is funny and also making one that tells us more about others without being patronizing.

Lowlights — anyone seen that Moment of Truth thing on Fox? When it comes to TrashyTV, almost nothing can scare me off my Moral Pedestal.  My thinking is if some idiot signed up to be tortured emotionally for money, then I’m happy to be entertained by that. Moment of Truth asks the contestant questions ahead of time while they are hooked to a lie detector… so ….they already know how bad these questions will get  – along the lines of “Do you think you will still be married to your husband in five years?”  “Do you hesitate having children because you’re not sure your wife is The One?” and “Have you ever made a pass at your girlfriend’s friends?”  and far, far worse.  The contestant answers the question, and if they answer it truthfully, according to the lie detector, they advance on and can win more money, up to a million.  The queasy looks on the faces of the wives, husbands, moms, children of the contestant are what I can’t watch.    Despite the fact everyone agrees to be on this show and knows what will happen, and it should fall into the “morally okay” category I reserve for Voluntary Emotional Torture Victims For My Entertainment… but it just ain’t working this time.  I feel vaguely overtly sleazy when watching.

But what am I gonna do?  The writers are on strike, my staples like Friday Night Lights, Gossip Girl, Brother and Sisters, and October Road are going on hiatus shortly as they run out of episodes.  American Idol is just boring so far this year.  Bruno and Carrie Ann make me sleepy.  I only have three more seasons of  The Wire to run through – and I’m trying to go slow and savor them - Dexter is being cleaned up for regular TV.  I ask you, what in the world would you do?

Oh, perfume?  I’m also feeling vaguely sleazy about all the J. Lo Perfumes that I just bought. Look for us to work all of that into a perfume review in the future.

For those of you that watch teevee, what are you going to watch while we move into re-runs early?  For those of you that don’t watch teevee, we need a list of trashy books to help us over the habit!

Patty

Nobody´s gotten the smell of gardenia quite right, in my opinion. Sniffing them yesterday on the bushes in the National Gallery of Art rotunda, I had a chance to ponder. Gardenia is a little … fetid. There´s definitely that bleu cheese note of JAR´s Jardenia, but you´d have to cut it maybe 50% with a generic, smooth cream-cheese smell, and Jardenia also has a full, sweet top note I don’t detect in the actual flower. I´m not clear on the chemical compound involved in the cheese smell. To me it´s somewhere between the stench those giant arums put out and the indoles of jasmine.

A woman visiting from China stopped to sniff with me. I didn´t get very far with my cheese comparison, but she said it was a good smell and a little bad smell, and she closed her eyes and smiled as she inhaled. She looked deeply happy.

The high school girls on a field trip saw us, so they lined up and sniffed it too. They giggled and jerked their heads back; it´s so strong, they said. I asked if they´d wear that in a perfume, and they said no, definitely not. The guard said he thought gardenias smelled okay, but he´d grown up on the Virgin Islands, and if I wanted to smell some beautiful flowers I needed to go there.

A gardenia on its own smells weirdly truncated. I realized yesterday that´s because I´m used to thinking of “gardenia” in perfumery as a player in an ensemble, often paired with something sweet and green like tuberose (Chanel, Jo Malone, Estee Lauder´s Tuberose Gardenia) or muguet (Marc Jacobs). The piercing floral-shop smell of tuberose is the logical complement to gardenia, serving as the top note to gardenia´s opaqueness while it takes the edge off that stink. But with the smell of gardenia fresh in my mind, I´m not sure pairing it with another white floral as a top note represents a great leap forward. It´s like gilding the Sphinx.

Interestingly, looking at online notes, a lot of gardenia fragrances also have jasmine. Googling “gardenia” leads to the discovery that its nickname is “Cape Jasmine” and the latin name is Gardenia jasminoides, although the plants don´t seem to be related. Also, Gardenia is native to southern China, so now I realize the lady in the museum with the blissed-out smile on her face was possibly smelling something pleasantly familiar from home.

The perfume of a single gardenia is a sultry, intoxicating smell. I also think I´d like a gardenia paired with nothing but a note of wet, loamy dirt, and a handful of Spanish moss. Gardenias, like magnolias, mint juleps, and Carson McCullers, are southern. They seem perfect for Lady Day up there (even though I believe she hailed from Baltimore). I wonder if there’s a gardenia fragrance that would let me feel that.  Will SIP’s Lady Day get me there?  What about the Isabey Gardenia?  Too much other stuff going on?

Awhile back I did a post on an orchid scent (I think Shiseido´s Message from Orchids), and one of you readers suckered me into buying a “low maintenance” fragrant orchid I could get to bloom myself! It´s called Purple Cascade “Fragrance Princess.” Of course, I already think of orchids as “low maintenance.” I buy them from Trader Joe´s, they bloom for two months, and then – voila! – I give them to the Korean diner down the street, with the west-facing plate glass window, and I buy another one from Trader Joe’s. Anyway, I stuck my orchid lump (rhizome?) in a sunny window per the instructions, I water it when I remember, and it´s now getting ready to bloom for the second time this year! Three big fat buds! And it is fragrant, and the blooms are huge and purple, but the part that bums me out is: last time the show only lasted about a week (compared to my usual run of 6 – 8 weeks for the phalaenopsis, which, BTW, I´m keeping just for kicks to see if I can get it to rebloom). Orchid fans out there – how do I increase the bloom time? Should I take it out of the sunny window right now before the buds open, and keep it in indirect light? What about watering? And if I keep the second orchid, does this mean I´ll have 23 of them by next January? Should I stop now before I find myself spending hundreds of dollars on orchidjunkie.com? People collect the darndest things, don’t they?

Billie Holiday (with her signature gardenias in her hair): mdcivilrights.org
orchid, Fragrance Princess: sdahldtp.com

March

29 January 1992. Another dreary winter day struggled to dawn; he did too, for an early tutorial about his research project. By mid-afternoon, he was sitting in the English common room, pretending to read. Interests and concerns at this point in time: 1) Literary theory, particularly fancypants poststructuralist stuff with at least one set of parentheses and a colon in the title; 2) Acid jazz (don’t ask); 3) clubbing; 4) writing; 5) drinking; 6) fashionable indiekid clothes; 7) the self-important self-regard of a working class intellectual; 8 ) lust more than love; 9) a vague nagging nihilism that veered from feeling like a bout of indigestion to an aching despair; 10) random acts of extreme silliness and laughter. In short, an extroverted yet introspective depressive postgraduate with too much self-regard shielding a set of hopeless insecurities. Today, his life would change.

I met Matt on this day, and it marks our anniversary, seeing as we never got engaged or married. He waltzed in on the arm of a mutual friend, he was visiting from London. He was wearing a bizarre purple stripy shirt from which he’d removed the collar, and ill-matching trousers. A wiry rake, clown-like in his colour, decidedly anti-fashion, decidedly interesting. Bright light had emerged from the darkness, and the path I was taking changed, twisted and righted itself exactly as it should have been. Within weeks, I couldn’t imagine the other possible journeys. Those paths were now murky and uninteresting.

Sixteen years on, he makes me laugh like no-one else, knows me as though he is me, and has a look on his face that still melts me when I see it. He ain’t perfect, but that’s why he is. My light in the darkness.

I’m brightening the mood after last week’s gloom – my anniversary falls at the best place in the calendar to shake me out of my winter torpor, and as it does, my other passions awaken too. I’ve ordered plant seeds, onion sets and been making plans for the garden and allotment. I’m alive with writing ideas. And perfume – gimme the perfume already.

I’ve been craving three scents in particular, none of which I own, and all three of my decants have dried up. Needless to say, I’ve managed to get more of each… In some cases, much much more than I strictly speaking need.

The first is Annick Goutal’s Sables. I used to like this scent, appreciated its herbal opening and the startlingly strong softness of its development. Now I can’t get enough, as though it’s the elixir of life and nothing else’ll keep me going. So, it’s an immortelle scent and I should’ve had enough of these by now – with the old Eau Noire, the kooky Fougere Bengale and the ultra-pricey Luxe Patchouli. But no. On me, the immortelle in Sables is nonpareil. Its oddness escapes language, and yet, in spite of all those quirks, at the moment it’s fitting me like no other. Less maple syrup than maquis hillside in summer. Man, I love it.

The next – an overlooked gem from Lutens non-export line, Un Bois Sepia. It’s a little like Hermes‘ Rocabar for the first ten minutes or so (and for some makeupalley users, a little like Axe too, apparently), but from this point onwards it charts its own cedar-inflected course. Sweetened by opoponax perhaps, this is a slightly medicinal heavy-materialled Lutens with a familiar ‘is it fruity? Is it spicy?’ scent play that you either love or castigate for being a sugar syrup confection. I’m in the former camp, natch. It’s both fruity and spicy, but quite some distance from the very genetically similar Bois et Fruits, Bois et Musc and Bois Oriental (who all look a lot like their ma, Feminite…). It’s perhaps the most masculine of the bunch and is failing to be summarised prosaically. Tweed, the Lutens site claims. I’ll go with that. I can imagine wearing it whilst strolling around Stornoway, stopping to sup a fine malt in a local pub. And that, for a fantasy, will do me nicely enough.

The final of my cravings is Eau d’Italie’s Sienne l’Hiver. I own a bottle of their Bois d’Ombrie and it’s a potent, masculine tobacco leather incense blend, Bertrand Duchaoufour at his most shadowy and virile. Oooh la la. Sienne l’Hiver, though it dries down to something very similar to its sibling, though a little brighter, is a walk in the etched chill of a sunny winter’s day. Even if the ground is hard, life’s waiting to stir itself in its dank depths, and the drip of meltwater is the metronome counting the ice season’s end. A wet green incense with a very comforting violet and earth accord, this is beautiful.

So, commenters – tell me: 16 years ago – describe yourself. And – what are your current inexplicable scent cravings?

Lee

Miller Harris’s Rose en Noir is responsible for today’s visit into Roses of the Night – Rose en Noir, Caron Or et Noir and Serge Lutens Rose de Nuit. 

There are no notes for Miller Harris’ Rose en Noir.  It was created exclusively by Lyn Harris for Liberty in England. It starts off a little jammy, but not overly sweet, this is its flirting stage.  Then she drops her girlie sweetness and starts whispering in your ear about love and loss.  While this appears to be a big blooming rose, and it is, there is something dark and brooding about it.  It is lush, almost overripe.

Rose de Nuit from Serge Lutens has been a rose staple for me since I first smelled it.  It has notes of Turkish rose, yellow jasmine, apricot, amber, musk, sandalwood, beeswax.  This is not a rose that shows up shyly or dressed in her best frock.  It shows up in leather pants, a corset, has a whip in its hand and is holding the rose hostage… in the basement, where you can smell it wafting up very lightly… or is that something else? This one is more about the leather and musk in the base, and the other notes just float around the darkness. The dominatrix of roses and completely gorgeous.

Or et Noir was created in 1949 by Caron and has notes of Bulgarian rose, centifolia rose, geranium, Anatolian rose, lilac, carnation, oakmoss and woody amber.  While Rose de Nuit holds the rose hostage, Or et Noir is like a Tournament of Roses float, except they send it out at night in New Orleans, when the crowds and the voodoo and the dark has woven its spell around it.  Rose is the central theme of this, but this is no rose that you could wear to your Sweet 16 Party.  It is covered in pitch black and the red blooms up through it, its beauty unmolested.

Now, I know y’all rely on me for television recommendations, so here’s this week’s tip.  Rent/buy/borrow The Wire, start at Season 1 and just work your way up through Season 4.  The final season is airing on HBO now.  This is a series about flawed people on all sides, nobody gets a whitewash.  Like the roses of the night, there is beauty and ugliness, contrasts forming the patchwork human quilt we all are.  It’s not just good, it is great. 

Also, if you ever want to buy yourself or have someone who loves you lots buy one luxury fragrance/presentation that’s to die for, do the three 50 ml Annick Goutal Les Orientalistes parfum coffret. it comes in a white leather case, with the three little bottles nestled in the top, then it has a little drawer that pulls out below that would be perfect for some cute little samples and things.  It’s just flat-out freaking gorgeous.

Patty

It´s January. It´s cold. You need to get your blood flowing; let´s have an argument.

Louise and I get together at the mall periodically and sniff fragrances, sometimes things we´ve brought with us to swap. If that´s the case we end up sitting at a table at the mall café outside Nordstrom, in the semi-open air. I might bring vials or atomizers to make samples from our bottles. Sometimes we meet up at a Starbucks instead. Sometimes, when we are really reeking, or hoovering each other, or I am making samples, people look at us oddly.

Last week we met at the Starbucks in Wheaton, where the man working near us on his laptop was maybe not digging the early-morning bouquet of our Cinnabar vintage parfum. A few days later I got this email from Louise:

“I just ran into the Wildwood Starbucks (aside from March: a different Starbucks) to pick up some beans after work, and there, huddled over his laptop was the Greek professor dude we gassed out at Wheaton on Wednesday! I looked at him and smiled, and he just looked … frightened. Just when he thought he was safe.”

So. Is it criminally inconsiderate of us to meet at places like Starbucks, where you could argue the citizenry would not welcome our sampling and sillage with their mocha crappacinos? Are we inherently more offensive than the folks who use Starbucks to conduct interviews, have book club meetings, yammer on their cel phones (“hi, I´m at Starbucks!”), escape from the house on dreary afternoons with their badly-behaved toddlers, etc.? If we buy two large drinks and a mocha brownie to tide us over while we try on five (okay, 10) fragrances, are we worse than folks who sit there all day taking up space, nursing a small coffee and using the wi-fi? If we sit far away in a corner and someone sits next to us and we whip out the Musc Ravageur to sample, were they, you know … Asking For It? What say you? Are we being rude?

Okay, on to today´s perfumage. This is another post on New York discoveries.

I was pretty sure, playing in L´Artisan on Madison Avenue with Marina from Perfume-Smellin’ Things, that I had explored all the love L´Artisan had to give me. L’Artisan is like going home, in a good way. Regular readers know I am fond of the line. L´Artisan is an excellent place to start if you´re just getting bitten by the perfume bug, because many of their scents are interesting and a bit strange and generally wearable. For the more experienced fragrance lover, they offer up more unusual scents like Tea for Two, Dzongkha and Dzing! The biggest general complaint about the line might be longevity, but I assume almost anyone reading these blogs can come up with at least one L´Artisan they like.

My favorites in the line move around with the seasons and my changing tastes, but pretty much from the get-go the line has divided itself neatly for me into the majority of likes and the small number I don´t wear at all, mostly because I think they smell terrible on me, not because they are terrible.

One I´ve never liked one bit is Mure et Musc, one of L´Artisan´s oldest, most popular scents (with the pretty, niche-for-the-mass-market-smelling La Chasse being, I believe, their biggest U.S. seller). Mure et Musc has left me absolutely cold for years. I have retried it umpteen times and stand there with my head cocked, trying to discern what part of that slightly bitter, diffuse muskberry combo would appeal to anyone with a sense of, you know, smell.

So while Marina and I were laughing and teasing each other about our favorites and not-so-favorites, I sprayed some on again just to confirm what a mediocrity it was.

And I loved it. Why? Why? I have absolutely no idea why. Marina can´t stand it, and she didn´t see the light that day either. What changed? Not the formula. It smells the same on me. It´s not like it was, I don´t know, some ultra-challenging scent that suddenly I got sophisticated enough to enjoy. I have noooo idea.

Mure et Musc is an idealized blackberry – not sweet, not tart, not natural. Nobody´s pretending to be leading you through the brambles. The other note is musk, and that´s it. It´s a simple, perfect combination. And now I´m going to cheat and admit that after my change of heart I googled the fragrance and came upon Bois de Jasmin´s review, where she pretty much nails what I like about it: it´s not remotely foody, with the balance of the slightly animalic musk perfectly tempering any jammy tendencies in the fruit. She prefers Extreme, which has a stronger fruit note. I prefer the regular, which – go ahead, hate me – lasts approximately forever on me, like most fragrances. It also does that aura thing on me, which I’ve decided for the time being is my single favorite characteristic in a scent — its sillage is subtle but omnipresent and long lasting. I can smell it over an entire day without having to sniff at myself, but it’s not strong enough to start grating on my nerves or irritating people around me. That’s a tough balance to find in perfumery.

My take-home lesson? You never know what previously-spurned fragrance might suddenly take up room in your heart, your wallet, your shelf. If a line as familiar and comforting to me as L´Artisan can still provide me with surprises, I know I´m in good shape.

Okay, your turn. Should Louise and I keep our perfume habit out of other people´s lattes? (For various reasons, visiting each other’s homes is problematic). Do you have a favorite L´Artisan? Is there one from the line that seems completely out of place to you, or one you´d ax? (I can think of a couple). Any you´d make them resurrect and release more widely? (Fleur de Carotte!) Do you think if I buy that bottle of Mure et Musc I´ll go back to hating it immediately?

images from L’Artisan’s website

March