Louise came shopping with us Tuesday — and can I just say how much levity she injected into the new-fall-dress-for-my-12-year-old expedition?  It wasn’t quite the job from hell that it was for the more curvaceous Diva, who at 14 now looks like she’s a high school senior, but still — no stroll in the park.  Bonus points to mom for not having a smackdown with the insane sales clerk, who talked about his desire to be a comedian when he wasn’t macking on the woman ahead of me with his prison stories … no, seriously.   Ask Louise.  (Me to clerk, eventually: “I feel your pain, and yet, I just want to buy these dresses and get out of here.”)  Louise is like the cool auntie — both girls have really taken a shine to her — and is a big riot to shop with.   Today she showed up toting a ginormous bag of nail polish she was getting rid of and being Louise, we are talking about purple, blue, green, black, etc.  The girls are in heaven.  Mom, too, since I get to borrow!

So, happy October!  I am thrilled to be digging some of the heavy-handed favorites out of the closet.  Soon everyone around me will be able to enjoy once again the seasonal miasma glory of such magnificent scents as DK Chaos and Black Cashmere, SL Chergui, CB Burning Leaves, Gathering Apples and Musk (the musk knows no season), CdG original and its tipsy cousin, Kenzo Jungle L’Elephant, Versace Dreamer, Dior Addict, Malle Noir Epices — the list goes on and on.  Doesn’t it?   I know, I know.

I finally got to try the Lacroix Tumulte Pour Homme (thanks, Kevin!), and call me daft, but the first few seconds I thought: Chaos!   Notes are juniper, laurel, bay, violet leaves, incense, plum, atlas cedar, Virginia cedar, Chinese cedar, Virginia cedar.  I know the big joke about Tumulte is it’s being whomped with the cedar-cedar-cedar stick, but on me there’s so much incense — the woody incense makes me imagine this as Chaos Pour Homme — absent any of Chaos’ sweetness.  I would definitely wear this though, it’s unisexy, and I am not even a huge fan of cedar, although now that I think about it, I also loved Rochas Lui and then looked up the notes and it’s mostly cedar, so what do I know?

The new L’Artisan Aedes scent is … very bitter on me.  Not sure why.  It starts off so promising, all peppery incense, and then gets too sharp.  The same thing happened to Louise.  I like the actual room spray on which this is based a lot, so not sure where the misfire is.  For a completely different perspective read Robin’s review, as she generously sent me a sample.  The notes (orange, cardamom, incense, black pepper, rose, iris, cedarwood, resins, patchouli, coffee, opoponax, benzoin, treemoss, immortelle, white musk, vanilla) sound like heaven, don’t they?  Like Robin, I don’t get much in the way of immortelle or coffee either.  Wah.

In this transitional period, I have been wearing the new Chanel Beige — a lot.  It wins this fall’s award for humorous name disconnect — I am deeply NOT beige.  I dislike beige and its wan stepsisters, ivory and cream.  I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be interested in Beige.  But not only does its honey-musky warmth make me smile, it also lasts — it even passes the Louise test, and many of you know how fast she burns off fragrance. It was delightful and luminous on her.  Also in rotation right now — Lubin’s Idole, which is perfect for the fall but not too heavy when it warms up mid-day, and I have a question to ask my fellow sinners — have you accidentally bought a second bottle of fragrance having forgotten you owned the first?  Duh.  I’m thinking that’s the fragrance equivalent of one of those warning signs of addiction quizzes.

Finally, I want to flog another fall fragrance, relatively cheap, that makes me smile – Esteban’s Sensuelle Russie.  It’s such a warm, cheerful thing — notes are bergamot, orange flower, pine, white cedar, cinnamon, cardamom, amber, woods, patchouli.  The spices are fairly pronounced while retaining a certain transparency; I have seen this described as a poor man’s Ambre Narguile, but AN’s cloying richness makes me queasy — this is more like Fendi Theorema in my book.  What I like most about it is that, while it is not “light,” it’s not so heavy that I have ever regretted applying it, which is more than I can say for some of my other fall favorites.  It has historically been impossible to find online (mine was shipped from France via a friend) but researching this post I discovered it here for $45.  Has anyone tried any/all of those yummy-sounding Voluspa body sprays on there?  Burmese Rosewood, Cardamom Fig, Champaca Bloom and Fern, and etc.?  Heh.  Not that I need any more perfume.  But I want it.  Twenty bucks is free, right?

March

This has been a heck of a week – more on that later. First, let’s give away those six Tauer Vetiver Dance samples that Andy sent out.  The winners are:

1. Sylvia
2. DPearson
3. Noyna
4. Pam
5. Gretchen
6. Linda B

Just click on Contact Us over on the left and let me know your address, and I’ll send you the samples!

Now, my excuse for no perfume review. My mom broke her ankle about three years ago, a couple of days after her brother died. She had to go to his funeral before they set it.  From that day to now, a woman who despises painkillers has pretty much been on them nonstop, getting worse in the last year.  She hates them, and I can’t state that strongly enough.  There were times in the last year where she would talk about just sawing her ankle off. It was shot through with arthritis, not set straight, and bone was grinding on bone. 

Last Friday she had a Total Ankle Replacement.  With my mom, surgery is hair-raising. She reacts badly to anesthesia and winds up sick after and can’t eat, can’t take pain meds, it’s just a mess.  I’ve gone through this with her so many times, and it scares me every time.  This time, they gave her some great anti-nausea meds, then dumped her to the curb the day after surgery, and I could tell she was getting sick again. Then I did a bad thing… it was the evening, she needed to not be sick anymore, and I had some leftover cough syrup with phenergan in it (helps with nausea), and I gave it to her.  And it worked until morning and I could call the doctor and get a prescription for her.  Sunday she started eating again and had her appetite back and had the best night of sleep she’s had in three years last night and headed home today to finish recuperating.

I can’t tell you how much better she seemed. Even with the post-surgery pain, she was in less pain than she’s been in for the last three years. She said her post-surgery pain wa sa 5, her pre-surgery pain was a 10 almost constantly.  So she’s feeling pretty snappy and frisky now, and it was great to see.

What perfume did we have on for surgery? I wore Chanel Beige, and Shirley had on Guerlain Double Vanille with a shot of Le Labo Vanille 44. She wafted beautifully.

My apologies for no perfume post today, but it’s been a long few days, and perfume has been the last thing on my mind.  Of the new releases you’ve sniffed so far this fall, which one have you liked the most?  Cartier Roadster and Chanel Beige are pretty much doing it for me so far, but I haven’t sniffed many of them still.

Patty

First off, thanks to everyone who recommended Marc Jacobs’ Daisy as a possible fragrance for my young niece.  I smelled it yesterday and found it entirely (indeed, almost humorously) devoid of sex appeal — if there is an iota of musk in there, I can’t smell it.  And while it is a generic sparkling fruity-floral, it’s neither syrupy nor crass.  I wouldn’t wear it, but it is a light fragrance perfect for a girl, with the bonus points of the adorable bottle and being mercifully free of any unpleasant celebrity-laden associations.  Right now various retailers like Sephora and Macy’s are selling elaborate Daisy gift sets with solid-perfume compacts, teeny cute mini-Daisy purse sprays, fun makeup bags, etc.

Second — UPDATE — I apparently managed AGAIN to paste some code in here rendering half the post invisible in Internet Explorer. I am sorry. I’ll make an effort to recheck the darn thing in IE before I take it live.

Okay, today’s topic. I’ve been putting this off, but here goes:  am I nuts, or does the re-released Donna Karan Chaos smell … different?

There.  I said it.  Flog me with some Yatagan or a plastic decanting pipette, but I can’t help it, it doesn’t smell quite right to me.  Something’s missing.

Granted, we’re talking about my comparisons to samples from old-formula Chaos bottles of various vintages, many of which are different enough they already smell like dupes of each other.  Some are spicier; some are darker; the top notes might have gone off a bit.  I think Chaos’ stunning bottle probably got left out on display more often than other, plainer bottles.

Prior to the re-release of Chaos, when things were looking desperate, I wrote a review of Anarchy, the Irma Shorell dupe, which is  — seriously — to my nose a credible effort.  It does not smell materially different than a couple of my samples of vintage Chaos from different sources.  It’s missing something at the top, and it’s not quite as darkly mysterious as my full bottle, but it’s less prickly as well.

So here’s the new one, and nobody could be happier than I was when they appeared.  And … well, I don’t know.  I wish I had Octavian from 1000 Fragrances here to help; he could sniff it and tell me they’d tinkered with the  dextromethampetamine or whatever.  He’s got a perfume chemist’s nose and knowledge, and I don’t.

The notes from Basenotes list (for the original Chaos): sandalwood, cardamom, cinnamon, padukwood, agarwood, saffron, clove, amber, musk, sage, lavender, chamomile, coriander.

The new Chaos is brighter.  It seems more focused on the top (the saffron is quite prominent) and less on the gigantic, raspy bottom — the gap to me between vintage and new Chaos is like the gap between Chaos and Black Cashmere, if that makes any sense.  Black Cashmere is a gorgeous scent and I adore it, and it will take the top of your head off if you look at it wrong — I’ve had to scrub that fierce, growling beast off more than once. Also, the new Chaos seems sweeter — more amber and clean musk, less spices.   Since my time machine’s broken, and acknowledging that I have no way of knowing precisely what the original Chaos smelled like in 1996, the new one, while quite nice, seems more muted and softer.  It’s a narrower bandwidth focused on the soft, creamy comfortable middle of the scent without quite reaching either the heights or the depths of the original.  In my opinion.  While I’m going out on a limb and sawing it off, does anyone else get this… this cola-syrup-deal that pops up in the new Chaos faintly every now and again?  It’s not unpleasant, just kind of odd.  (On the other hand, if I recall correctly, “cola” was a word that turned up occasionally in reader reviews of the original, so maybe the scents are closer than I thought.)

If I’d never smelled the original Chaos — or Anarchy, to be honest — I’d be raving over this new Chaos as the greatest thing since sliced bread.  I only have one sample of the new, which I dumped in an atomizer, and I will try to get some more samples and re-test it. But somehow the reissued Chaos does not fly out of the bottle, reach down my nose and rip my heart out of my chest the way the original did — that jaw-dropping smell that made me shrug and roll over to eBay going, I don’t care what it takes, I’ll pay it.  At the time it was the most expensive bottle I’d ever bought, and (unlike some others) I never regretted it.  I wondered at first whether I’ve just gotten jaded about Chaos, but a revisit of my older samples and my bottle — nail-varnish top notes and all — still grabs me in a way my new sample just doesn’t.  Your thoughts?

Coming soon: reviews of Chaos Pour Homme — okay, not really, but that’s the first thing I thought of when sniffing a new-to-me fragrance last week, and my feelings about DK Fuel, now that I’ve managed to retrieve it from behind my work station where it had slunk off to… occupational hazard.

image, Marc Jacobs in a tutu and Naomi Campbell from a funny photo spread in Bazaar last year

March

I came home today with a headache, having smelled a gazillion tween-y frags in search of something appropriate for my grade-school-aged niece, at the request of her mother (and my close friend) Kate.   I am telling you, sprinting through a field of land mines would have been less fraught for me.  I want Kate to like me after I present the fragrance(s).

It was an interesting conundrum: given all the complaining I do about the fruity-floral-fresh hell of mass market fragrances that seem like the equivalent of cupcakes on the sophistication scale, how hard could it be to choose one for a young girl?  I am here to tell you — way harder than it sounds.

It doesn’t bother me buying perfume for a girl who’s outgrown Disney’s Tinkerbell cologne, at least in her own mind. But girly fragances are tricky.  This is not the time for the entry-level adult stuff you got from your aunt in high school, like Joy, which can be forgiven (or even admired) for a whiff of sexuality.   Even a middle school girl can be forgiven for a little musk — but a girl less than 12, no. There are three legs to the girly-frag stool: sweet/fruity; fresh; and musky.  Kate had already asked me not to go too gaggingly sweet or strong, which eliminated a lot of scents off the bat (hello, Pink Sugar!).  But what I was left with either tended to smell pretty fresh — which I don’t personally like — or surprisingly musky, which can read as too sexy for a girl in minute amounts that would barely register on me, a woman who (stupidly) wore Addict to go shopping.  Also, I wanted the bottle to be cute, if possible, rather than hip or plain or weird.

So here’s a short list of what was left after I eliminated everything else:   Tommy Hilfiger Dreaming; Mariah Carey M or Luscious Pink (bonus points for cute butterfly bottle); the Ferragamo Incantos (okay, a little sweet for me but the girls love the scents and the bottles); Lacoste Inspiration or Touch of Pink; Vera Wang Princess or Flower Princess (bonus points for cuteness) and can I say in hindsight how surprisingly well done Princess smelled compared to most of the competition in the pale pink universe?  I feel compelled to mention the Harajuku Lovers here — in some ways their light scents are perfect, and the wee ones at Macy’s are only $25!   But I think the hip humor of their whimsical doll bottles are better appreciated by slightly older tween/teen girls who are in on the joke and have clearly outgrown dolls themselves, whereas for my niece who is probably unaware of the brand, I thought they looked too much like the Disney-figurine scents she was fleeing from.  I still haven’t made up my mind, and I’m heading for Sephora and Nordstrom next week (MJ Daisy?  the Guerlain AAs?), so any other suggestions you have are welcome.

Brands for slightly older (but still young teenage) girls with more hip factor: the Ed Hardy fragrance, which is apparently all the rage in 9th grade; the Ralphs (Hot, Rocks, Cool, take your pick);  Chanel Chance Eau Fraiche, the J. Los.  Full disclosure: I bought a bottle of J Lo Live and have decided the sweet vanilla-musk drydown, pretty and young as it is, reads as too sensual for my niece; I am giving it to my girls, who liked it a lot and in fact helped me choose it.  Better that than giving them their own bottle of Addict, which they want but would probably kill me in the quantities they put on.

My personal favorite discovery of the day for me rather than my niece: the new Calvin Klein Secret Obsession.  One whiff of the cigarette-tinged beard that is the 1985 original Obsession (and how could I have forgotten that?) reminded me how much popular conceptions of “sexy” have changed in the last two decades, and I cannot imagine that bitter and strange and twisted original topping the charts in this Age of Angel and Pink Sugar.  Secret Obsession is a somewhat different proposition.  Notes are plum, mace, rose, jasmine, orange flower, tuberose, cashmere woods, burnt amber, vanilla and sandalwood.  So, while being considerably less pushy than Obsession, as you can see, it’s not a light fragrance, and I predict it will be irritating the fragrance-averse in a mall near you very soon.  It’s got something akin to that cracked-out hairspray note of Rush, and a perfect balance of ambery sweetness and a slightly naughty cigarette-in-the-next-room spiciness.  The longer I wore it the more I admired it; like Rush it is simultaneously comforting and profoundly strange and synthetic-smelling, all big hair and dance music.  In the far drydown it reminds me a bit of Eau de Merveilles’ salted amber.  I find Secret Obsession less engulfing than Rush — which on the wrong day is like squirting Aqua-Net up your nose — while retaining Rush’s sense of playfulness.  Bottle’s fun too.

PS A Question for Club Kids, Current and Former: In Denyse’s review of Rush, a commenter said Rush has the smell of amyl nitrites or “poppers,” of which Rush is a known brand.  This was news to us, and of interest given the fragrance’s peculiar synthetic vibe (and the hunch that Tom Ford would know what poppers smell like).  Chandler Burr made a similar comment about the smell of poppers in the new Dianne Brill fragrance, which would make sense as Brill was an 80s club queen.  The wiki article was somewhat informative (apparently the larger drug class is alkyl nitrites) but nowhere is the smell discussed.  Do they all smell the same?  Are poppers “scented,” like room spray?  What do they smell like?  Anyone care to share any light on the topic, please do so in the comments and no, not gonna call your mommy and tell on you.  BTW clarifying — I am not suggesting that these fragrances contain poppers, and won’t be shooting them up my nose to test that theory, as I am sure they don’t; I am merely curious as to whether there is a recognizable “popper” smell in either, and wondering how you’d go about recreating that for a fragrance.  Same way they fake everything else, I suppose.

March

The kitty’s attempt to “hide” my Guerlain Femme Fatale Chypre Fatale sample have been thwarted, and I finally found it on the floor hidden behind the leg of the desk.  Notes of White Peach, Rose, Patchouli & Vanilla.  The peach is very pronounced on me, with some really nice underpinnings of patchouli and vanilla. I don’t get a lot of rose at all from this.  It’s not my favorite of the three at all, it reminds me a little of a, um — cough drop?  I know others liked this more, so maybe it’s me, but I just don’t care for it.  Slightly overhyped with the ad copy? Yes. 

Moving on to one of the most beautiful rose/incense/vanilla (take your pick) entries in forever, dahlinks, Amouage Lyric for Women, consisting of bergamot, cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, rose, angelica, jasmine, ylang ylang, geranium, orris, oakmoss, musk, wood, patchouli, vetiver, sandalwood, vanilla, tonka bean and frankincense.  This makes me want to weep. Marina gave a great review already, and I don’t have a ton to add to it except my breathless panting about how freaking gorgeous this thing is.  It strikes me that people who are NOT a fan of the rose may wind up happy with this. It’s really not about the rose as much as it is everything else surrounding it.  Roses wafting happily over a bed of smoking incense and vanilla, infused with a myriad of spices.  Just when you think that’s all (!) there is, you get a little geranium nosing around or musk or a note you’re not quite sure of. I swear, I sometimes almost get a horsey smell from it, that wonderful burrow your nose in the neck of a horse smell that is like nothing else.  Complex and just shimmering with shadow and light, this is a stunner and not like anything else I have, which is… well, that’s a fairly large statement.

 Amouage Lyric Men has notes of bergamot, lime, rose, angelica, orange blossom, galbanum, ginger, nutmeg, saffron, pine, sandalwood, vanilla, musk and frankincense.  The male counterpart to the women’s, I wish I knew what Amouage does to their men’s scents of what note they’re using that goes to alcohol on me. I get a heady blast of angelica and  incense, little citrus on the open, and then that note  infects the rest with the smell of alcohol (this is just my nose giving me fits, not the scent itself), and I can’t give you much more about this except I know I would very much like it. it’s less intense than the women’s, almost no trace of vanilla to my nose, where the Women’s is pretty head with their vanilla-incense-musk blend.

Patty