By Matt

(Hey, folks — we’re kicking back for Memorial Day weekend, in our winter coats most likely, given the current temperature. Please welcome regular commenter Matt for this Friday’s guest post! Enjoy the scrolldown…)

Thank God I’m easy. I’m at that acquisitive stage of perfume obsession where I want to smell, wear, and buy just about everything. Niche, drugstore, designer, pretty much anything goes as long as it’s not Acqua di Gio. Not that I have anything against that scent, honestly; simply everyone in my town wears it. Shopping here is limited and I could just never forgive myself for wearing Unforgivable. I want to stand out a bit and I really don’t mind standing out by smelling like the biggest skank in town. Everybody loves a slut, right?

Yes, I’ve learned so much in the past year, reading the blogs, seeing what people think, comparing this, that, and the other. But the biggest sermon the blogs and boards seem to preach is to never buy unsniffed and it’s the edict I manage to ignore the most. Maybe it’s the willful rebel in me, or just the greedy consumer I am. Someone just this week called me the Poster Boy for Capitalism, but really, aren’t we all just trying to keep the economy going? I am proud to say that I’ve yet to make a single unsniffed purchased based on The Guide; I’m not saying I won’t, it just hasn’t happened yet. Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez aren’t my devilish enablers; it’s March the Maleficent and Patty the Priestess of Purchases and dear, dear Lee (don’t we miss him?) and the rest of you merry band of rogues who lead me into temptation, much to the chagrin of my student loan lender and the delight of my credit card company. I buy unsniffed all the time. But it’s not my fault.

The crazy thing is, I’ve never regretted a single unsniffed purchase and I’ve made some crazy ones. That’s why I thank the good Lord that I’m easy. ‘Cause y´all have led me down some dirty back roads and I’ve loved every minute of it. I can’t imagine being without any of these bottles I’ve bought just because y´all stirred up a hunch in the base of my filthy little brain.

First and foremost, Yatagan–and I think a whole bunch of you are responsible for this one. First spray, I smelled nothing but beef stew. Second go round, “Dude, who’da thunk of using CELERY in a fragrance.” Third time’s a charm and I was ready to destroy the world. I loved it from then on and it’s now what I wear when I plan on taking sh!t from no one. Thanks to you all; I can’t imagine life without it.

It only gets worse. CB Musk Reinvention. Full bottle purchase, unsniffed. I loved it from the very first whiff. Thank you very much, March. You’re a prophet of skank and I owe you my soul if I ever get it back from the devil. I also need to thank tmp00 from PST for his glowing words as well on this one. Like him I wear it alone, I layer it with Yatagan, as well as just about every other scent I own. Just whenever I want to dirty things up. I’ve never received a single compliment on this fragrance and I simply don’t care. The first time my bf smelled this one, he asked me never to wear it again. You know, that’s only gonna make me wear it more.

Success with these two purchases and I felt like I could never go wrong. I couldn’t and I didn’t. Patty sold me on Bvlgari Black and I knew to expect something weird, but I never really knew to expect a weirdness that worked so well on me. I actually do get a lot of compliments on this and it’s usually from people who have no interest whatsoever in fragrance. People might not have perfume, but we’ve all got tires, right?

Andy Tauer. I’m not gonna carry on too much because I always end up gushing like a giddy school girl. But I’ve got full bottles of all his stuff except Orris (damn limited editions, I’m always a day late and a dollar short). Pretty much all of those were ordered unsniffed thanks to some beautifully written reviews by Marina at PST, particularly L’Air du Desert Marocain and Lonestar Memories (Scentzilla’s review also helped sell me on this one). The new incense ones I did win samples of and Maroc I hesitated with my sample because of the “pour elle,” but I swear that’ll never stop me again. I love them all and he’s the only perfumer I’d buy unsniffed just because of the name on the bottle.

Did I mention Jicky? In the extrait? Full bottle purchase, again, unsniffed, and that one wasn’t cheap, my friends. I actually trembled a little when I hit the Complete Purchase button with that. March again with this one, but I’d grown to trust her since I felt she’d pegged the inner workings of my head and heart. My only complaint with this one is the bottle and stopper. It’s kinda cumbersome for a guy with clumsy fingers and no coordination or grace. I just decant it into a spray bottle and spritz away. See, I told you I’m a slut. I know I should be ashamed, but it’s just too darn fun.

Sometimes I throw an extra unsniffed bottle in my shopping cart just to get free shipping. I’m an etailer’s dream come true. Dior Homme I got just for that reason. Habit Rouge, it was Guerlain and I’d had two glasses of wine. Cartier Declaration–Lee loves it so it had to be good. There’s a bunch more, but I gotta stop; one should always hold a little something back, it keeps ‘em wanting more. A slut’s credo if there ever was one.

But I keep on doing it. Luckily enough, I ain’t been let down yet. Surely a day of disappointment will come, but I’m not afraid. I know if I end up with something I hate, odds are, one of you scoundrels will be more than willing to give it a happy home, a loving haven for a rescued perfume, ’cause at the end of the day, you’re all just freaks like me. And I thank you for it from the bottom of my wicked little heart.

beefcake photo: Abercrombie.com

My niece loves the Burberries, and she should, she’s 20, and they fit her, and it’s what she should smell like – bright, young, cheerful, beautiful.

The Beat in its edp form seems very much the same as the rest of the Burberry crowd. It has notes of bergamot, mandarin, Ceylon tea, cardamom, pink pepper, bluebell, iris, white musk, vetiver and cedarwood.  I don’t dislike it, I just don’t really think much of it one way or the other, it smells like…. well, the rest of them!  But The Elixir, which is the parfum’ish version of The Beat, is much, much better.  In all the places where a Burberry generally goes a little too brightly forced, The Beat Elixir zigs into something more interesting. There’s definitely more iris and tea, and it reminds me a little of that uber-expensive Dior No. 8 Particuliere thingie that I like so much.  So if you generally like Burberries, but find too many of them the same or not interesting enough, you may like The Beat Elixir. It’s hit my Favorite Burberry list.  Not to mention the bottle, which is super-adorable.

Now a question that is being hotly debated in my family, as my sister is dragging in as many people as possible and still finding no one that agrees with her, so I’m involving y’all.  A woman in her 40s or 50s or 60s is dating, and she makes an above-decent income, do you feel like she should date men closer in income to her, or does it make any difference? My thinking is a woman who makes good money, which she’s gotten through her own efforts, has certain beliefs and characteristics that made financial stability an important factor in her life, enough that she has pursued that financial independence and made it a priority in her life.  Not the most important thing, let’s say, but up there on the list.  If a guy is in his 40s and 50s and makes very little money, obviously that isn’t important to him and probably never will be, which, to me, would suggest right off the bat that they would have a mismatch of “crap that matters to them personally.”  They would eventually run into problems like if he couldn’t do things with her because he couldn’t afford it, or she had to pay for him, which he might accept or might get really mad about her offering to do, it would lead to resentment and conflict and unbalance that relationship.  Now, this in no way says that people who make less money aren’t wonderful, but my belief is people should be realistic and see mismatches well ahead of time and generally avoid them – and a financial mismatch is no different from any other interest.   I’d propose the same argument if it was a man in his 40s, 50s or 60s as well and looking for a woman in a similar age range and not looking for a really young twinkie.     Agree or disagree?

Patty

So, we announced the Chi-Cocoa Scentsation coming in September, and put it out there with some details, and then … a bunch of you surprised us by announcing you´re planning on coming! Musette is working her butt off on this, on a totally volunteer basis, trying to get this puppy organized, since it looks like the group will be a decent size. She´s stressing a little. Here´s a newsflash – Chicago in the spring and fall is a big convention destination. So, among other things, the hotel rooms in that area aren´t as cheap as we were hoping. Musette´s got her travel agent working on some options; we´re figuring out how we´re going to work Neil Morris and Liz Zorn into the event; we´re enthusiastic amateurs trying to keep it casual while at the same time accepting that there has to be a certain amount of structure if this is going to work. We´ll make future announcements here and on the Message Board to the left, hopefully with some hotel info. Right now, remember to hold onto those unwanted bottles of Jungle Elephant, Aromatics Elixir and other things you bought unsniffed, because we´re going to have a Mystery Bottle Swap! For those of you flying with no checked bags (that will be me, I hope): we´ll provide a mailing address so you can send them ahead if you want.

Okay, on to today´s post.

My love affair with fragrances of the Japanese skincare company Annayake continues pretty much unabated. The most popular one in the blogosphere is probably Miyako, with notes of cardamom, cinnamon, frankincense, hinoki, rose, jasmine, ylang-ylang, patchouli, cedar, sandalwood, musk, rockrose, benzoin, myrrh, and amber. I find the first half hour a rough ride – it´s spicy and dry and raspy and the rockrose (aka cistus) and myrrh are all up in your face with their camphor-y herbaceous dance of the seven resins or whatever. Then it dies and we all go to benzoin-woods heaven and live happily ever after.

My personal favorite thus far, in the same woody-comfort-scent vein, is Tsukimi, their “fall” scent – they have one for each season – with notes of pepper, grapefruit, lemon, jasmine, violet, cinnamon, patchouli, sandalwood, vanilla. I find that list misleading – focus on the second half of those notes, because it is all warm cinnamon, woods and vanilla. It is smooth and creamy, neither too sweet nor too dry. It is a woody comfort scent somewhere between Organza Indecence and Feminite du Bois.

Pour Elle is an oddball thing, kind of an herbal tea (notes of bergamot, fig, elemi, water lily, tea, cypress, and white musk) and I need to retry it in the summer, when I think I will like it very much. I held off on this post, figuring by now it´d have been warm enough to report back more fully, but it´s been cool and wet all May and at this point I feel like I will never be warm (or dry) again.

Finally, dusting off and reorganizing my fragrances recently, I ran across a sample of Yukimi, the “winter” scent, which to be honest I didn´t even realize I had. Notes are mint, mandarin, freesia, rose, jasmine, woods, and amber.

It is an unusual scent but it is not difficult. (I would describe all of them I´ve tried so far as unisex, including Pour Elle.) The first bit of Yukimi is as refreshing as sucking on a mint candy. The mandarin adds a nice albeit brief zing at the opening, the jasmine is very clean and the rose is undiscernable to my nose. It is a floral woody scent, with a note that makes me think of anise, but not in a way that bothers me. My favorite part is when the mint is more or less equal with the woods – it´s like sniffing two different but oddly complementary scents at the same time. As I get further into the drydown the amber and woods become more dominant, and the anise note remains politely in the background. If Yukimi had a color, it would be a deep, wintery purple.

Although Yukimi is their “winter” scent its cool minty aspect strikes me as something that would be absolutely appealing in warmer weather, and the couple of days we made it to the 70´s seemed perfect, although I am not sure I would love it in the teeth of a Washington, D.C. summer. But really, folks reading this who are fans of soft, woody scents with floral and/or incense accents, and who have not sampled the line, might find something to love among the Annayakes. All the Annayake fragrances I have sniffed have a refreshing lack of sugar, and an interesting meet-up of quirky elegance and wearability.

Many of these are available at Cosmolane and eSkincarestore for I think $75 – $95, and the men´s are at Beauty Encounter. At less than $100 they are a (relative) bargain for a niche fragrance these days, although not quite the bargain they were when the Canadian dollar was worth 30% less than the USD. Sigh. The bottles are tall and slender and I think they are lovely. By the way, if the notes to Tsukimi appeal to you – Cosmolane threw in a small Tsukimi hand lotion which is great, so maybe they sell it although I did not see it on their site.

Has anyone tried the spring and summer scents, which sound more conventional, or the masculines — Undo, Tomo or Lui? Those each sound good in some ways, but each has a note that scares me – I wonder if Lui is too fresh, and is Undo interesting or is it too masculine for me? And Tomo has coriander and tonka – hmmmm. But the rest of each of those scents sounds delish – lots of tea, spices, tobacco, and similar good stuff.

March

One of the stranger realities of certain perfume obsessives is: we are intimately familiar with the scent of long-lost treasures like Iris Gris, or Djedi, or Chaos – but ask us what Tommy Girl smells like and we have no idea. So periodically we venture forth into the surreal world of popular fragrances that we somehow never quite got around to smelling. Euphoria got the sniff not too long ago. We did the J Lo´s. Today – Dior Addict. It seems to be everywhere, the name is totally familiar, but … what does it smell like? We had no idea.

From Women´s Wear Daily: “Addict is a floral oriental sensual from 2002, created by Firmenich’s Thierry Wasser. Its notes include mandarin leaf, silk tree flower; Queen of the Night flower (night-blooming cereus), rose, jasmine, orange blossom, bourbon vanilla absolute, Mysore sandalwood and tonka bean.”

Luca Turin gave Addict two crummy stars in The Guide and is described it as “cheap chocolate and dissonant heavy floral” that “smells nasty from all angles.” If you picked it up on a trip to Sephora and sniffed it to satisfy your curiosity, you might reasonably expect it to be a fruity floral, like so much of the popular scents today, enlivened solely by a (misleading) racy name. But it´s interesting enough to review, and here are our thoughts.

Patty says: I have to jump over to Luca’s side of the fence on this one. While I adore Hypnotic Poison’s perfect balance, even though you do have to go with a delicate hand on it, Addict is just… chewed up s’mores and leftover Prom corsage. And I don’t mean that in a good way. The interesting gourmandy notes just smell cheap and plasticky and are quickly covered up by florals that do nothing to relieve the pain. Now, time does make it better, but only because it goes away. Do I hate it? No, not really. I just don’t want it on my skin. And now for a completely different take on it…

March says: LT and I will have to disagree on this one. First off, how the man can rave for an entire page in The Guide over the choco-fruital Missoni, to which he gave five (!) stars, and which someone on the blog recently described as “barfalicious,” which I totally agree with, and then call Addict cheap chocolate … well, you tell me. Maybe Missoni uses the most costly barfalicious ingredients, but the only thing I liked about Missoni was the bottle.

Anyway, Dior Addict is an in-your-face old-school sweet oriental, along the lines of Dior Hypnotic Poison (on the classy end) or Versace Dark Crystal (on the Donatella end.) As such, Addict is best as a fall and winter scent in the warmer climes, and I think my comparison to Hypnotic isn’t that far off, with one major distinction. Hypnotic is a scent I love in theory but — like Fracas — I don’t wear much because I simply cannot put it on lightly enough. Even spraying it in the air and walking through it is too much; I need a dabber. In contrast, I find Addict totally wearable, from the start, although one spray is enough and two is probably too much. Addict is like a stripped-down, amped-down Hypnotic on me, without the marzipan; instead it is all about the creamy jasmine, vanilla and woods. It’s less sophisticated than Hypnotic (which, love it or hate it, is a fascinating scent) but none the worse for it — it sits somewhere between the richness of a Turkish coffee and the chewy nougat inside a Three Musketeers bar, and I mean that in the best possible way. I didn’t rush out to buy a bottle, but I’d wear it if you gave it to me, and I’ll probably snag one from a discounter in the fall.

There have been several flankers, and one or two of those have some fans on the perfume forums. Please feel free to share any raves or gripes you have about any of the Addicts.

Patty

First off – thanks to everyone who voted for Perfume Posse on the 8th Annual Basenotes Awards - we took the silver medal (and congrats to Now Smell This for gold and Bois de Jasmin for bronze.) We work really hard on this blog, as you can tell, sort of, if you squint. Or read it when you´re drunk, or bored with GFY. No, seriously, we were thrilled!! You readers are the best! Hugs all around.

Now put your hats and sidearms back on, it’s time to ride with us for the sniffage roundup. Today´s topic as announced last week – a report from the field (that´s you) on what you might have sniffed/bought/bought unsniffed based on a review in The Guide. Or, you can report on something else you bought/tried based on a blog review, advice from your granny, etc. What I love hearing about: what you were expecting/hoping for, and what you got.

Here´s my contribution:

Montana Just Me – I already mentioned this, but I bought it unsniffed because LT compares my much-loved Worth Courtesan to “the sadly discontinued” Montana. I hate it. It smells nothing like Courtesan. It smells like peppered nail varnish. YMMV. Louise wore it back in the day and I´m giving her the bottle.

Gucci Envy for Men – another Guide-prompted sniff, Lord knows I´d never bother otherwise. I don´t even know what the women´s Envy smells like. Notes are: oppoponax, incense, patchouli, amber, musk, cedarwood, cardamom, anise, ginger, nutmeg, pimento. LT admired the ginger (a smell I love) and called it a “lovely woody oriental.” I smelled it on a strip, thought meh, sprayed it on my arm, thought meh, and moved on. Also, I get the “envy” green thing, but the stuff looks like Scope mouthwash in the bottle, and ugh. In the car on the way home, it registered. And … wow. Nice.

I am uninterested in smelling like standard-issue man, even nice-smelling man. I think Ralph Lauren Double Black is a great mainstream men´s scent, with its coffee and mango, and Armani Attitude isn´t half bad, either – and while I might buy one of them for the Cheese, I wouldn´t wear either. I´ll smell like civet or popcorn or the inside of a moldy crypt, but I don´t want to smell like a guy. So. If Envy for Men were one iota more conventional, I wouldn´t wear it. As it is, its gingery-woody-oriental goodness is the love child of L´Instant Pour Homme and Givenchy Organza Indecence – the quirky, patch-y classicism of the former and the warm, spicy vanillic sweetness of the latter. I want to layer it with something to amp up its femme quirkiness – maybe more vanilla, or maybe Serge Five O´Clock Snooze, or maybe that Origins Ginger thing you all keep mentioning. Yummy. ADDENDUM: It is wonderful with more ginger, I tried the Origins.

Mariah Carey M – marshmallow, “sea breeze” accord, Tahitian tiare, gardenia, amber, patch, incense, done by Carlos Benaim. I´ve confessed on here my love for tacky bottles, and M would certainly fit into that profile for me. The only reason I hadn´t sniffed it was … well, it´s by Mariah Carey, and nothing against Mariah herself, understand, but I´d assumed M was likely to be a gag-inducing fruity floral. Anyhoo, in The Guide TS called it a “pleasant nutty-lactonic sweet floral” with a browned butter smell, which sounded like it might have some legs as one of my snuggly comfort scents. And it just won the Basenotes award for best women´s celeb scent, so I gave it a go, why not? And… oh, I don´t know. It´s not terrible. I wonder if I´m anosmic to some part of the base? It´s fairly diffuse on my skin, have any of you tried it? Is this one of those five-spray deals? It´s less appealing to me than Hilary Duff With Love, or Betsey Johnson — both of which I like, and either of which I´d prefer (TS hated La Duff with its masculine woody drydown, while I admired its gutsy break from what you´d expect from a teen queen.) With M you´ve got your (slightly bitter) fresh thing at the opening, then you´ve got your gourmand. Sniff your skin at the drydown and the incense smells like Pixy Stix. Too bad, I was kind of lemming that bottle once I picked it up. 

Okay – your turn. Did you get what you were expecting in your sniffage, or something different?

March