Odds and Ends

My friends!  I am so excited!  This weekend is the Chi-Cocoa Scentsation!!!  Yay!!!! Patty and I arrive on Friday (along with 85,000+ other people — I hear this is a big convention weekend in Chi-town!) and we do the big ol’ perfume and chocolate binge on Saturday!  I’ve selected my outfit (shoes with orthotics!  elastic-waist pants!) and bought a brand new Timex for $14.99, tres elegant, for the occasion… you know what chafes me?  I am so bummed our message board imploded.  Who’s going to this thing?  Any of you guys?  Tigs, I know you are.  Bryan, I think.  Who else?  Hello, hello?  (knocks on glass)  Anyway, we are really excited for the event.  I’ll be back Sunday night, and we’ll take things from there.  One more special shout-out to Musette for going to extraordinary lengths to make this happen, and to Shelley for lending a helping hand!

So today I have … no perfume post!  Okay, I sniffed some things… that new Lolita Lempicka Fleur de Corail (in the lil’ mermaid bottle) smells very light to me, just sweet, creamy floral (notes are grapefruit, bergamot, frangipani blossom, orchid, vanilla, amber, musk, driftwood) and the blue bottle pictured there to the left is not as cute in person as the original.  The Black Amethyst at BBW — their sexxx-ay new scent — gah, okay, I am delighted that it’s not some lollipop floral, but that walk-of-shame sour woods (like a downmarket Euphoria) is starting to wear a bit thin.  Can we have something else, please?  How about … leather?  That’s sexy.  (The day BBW comes out with Russian Leather I will eat my tube of BBW Brown Sugar and Fig.)

Also, the new Coach Legacy.  I don’t ever think I ever blogged-in-hindsight about how nicely done the first Coach fragrance was.  I don’t have a bottle of the original and it’s not me, but I thought it was a terrific example of on-target design, from the gorgeous, heavy, monogrammed square bottle (shown at right) to the pretty fragrance inside to the ancillary products (like the cute solid perfume keychain in the Coach tag shape, etc.)  It fits in perfectly with the revived brand’s new image of youthful sophistication, and while I miss their dowdy old original bags, of which I have several because I am that old, I’m happy to see the company doing well.

I’m a little less thrilled with Legacy, at left in the round bottle.  The online description is: “A unique blend of soft florals combined with amber, vanilla and precious woods.”  So, one might guess it would be a slightly heavier, fall fragrance?  And one would be wrong.  This falls squarely into dull flanker territory for me — Coach Eau Legere, so to speak.  It may be my old nemesis, musk anosmia, rearing its pointy head, but I can barely smell this thing — it’s wan and watery compared to the first Coach.  Has anyone else tried this?  Maybe it’s fabulous and I just can’t smell it, like I clearly can’t smell 50% of Estee Lauder Sensuous’ molten river of woods. There’s a whole line of fashion items (scarves, totes, etc.) with that Legacy color scheme, though, and they are pretty darn cute.  Maybe it’ll grow on me.

Finally —  a little perfume discovery that gave me pleasure last week.  I sprayed some Balenciaga Rumba in the air in the guest bedroom (thanks, Angela!), one spritz, and the scent has lived on — and on, and on…. glad I didn’t do two spritzes.  I walk past the guest bedroom all the time, and I get the funniest sensation, like I am smelling a room in someone else’s house, because I haven’t worn Rumba enough to associate it with myself.  Now I go in my guest room to read, while pretending that I’m actually in a lovely, quiet B&B as opposed to my house, and nutty as it may sound, the smell of that “stranger’s perfume” completes the illusion. There’s something perversely pleasurable, as we know, about being in someone else’s bedroom — at a hotel, an inn or another person’s home.  (I’ve never been able to decide whether it’s the vague sense of impropriety or just the thrill of knowing that you don’t have to wash the sheets and vacuum under the bed.)  Discovering how I can be a guest in my own home for a few stolen moments of slothful reading while the family is otherwise occupied has been quite a treat.  Although now the bed’s full of cookie crumbs, so I suppose I’ll have to change the sheets after all.