Update on the VI Peel – yikes!!!!!!!!!!!!  I had the peeling I expected on Friday and Saturday, which was like a sunburn peel.  Then Sunday and today is a whole different level of peeling on certain areas – around the mouth and the chin.  Not sure if they are more sensitive or what, but it’s a little freaky  – some bumps and scabbing.  I’m still not going out yet. I went to the movies on Saturday, but after that – no way.  My  main irritation is I can’t work out.  Once I start sweating, it irritates the skin with the salt from the sweat, plus just getting my heart rate up  – it’s like little electrical jolts all over my face.  So I feel like a slug and have been just ordering Sushi for delivery until this is over.  What I really want is Gingersnaps or Snickerdoodles. That would make me feel better. Well, not better, but they sound good.  I’m so hoping I can go out tomorrow or at least do a gentle yoga session at home, at a minimum.

So if someone tells you you will be back to normalish in 4 days or so, don’t believe them. You might, but I think it’s more likely that you’ll have some weird areas on your skin that didn’t like the peel as much or is peeling harder or something, and you may not want to be seen for a week or so.

March already reviewed Natori much more thoroughly, but I’m just doing a random dive into the sample drawer.  Notes are aldehydes, rose, plum, ylang, peony, jasmine, patchouli, amber and musk.  Like March, aldehydes are a no-show on me, which is good.  This just isn’t that kind of scent.  There’s an almost suede’ish smoothness to the musk in this. I don’t get this as an overly floral perfume at all, it’s got a more husky voice, but not slutty at all.  It’s well done and certainly a scent that’s easy to wear.  I’d definitely snag a bottle of it when it hits the discounters.

Can I just whine a little about  The Garden Party solifores?  There’s a Frangipane, Wisteria and Tuberose, though I only saw the tuberose at Harrod’s, not at Luckyscent where the other two are.   $165 for 50 mls.  Now, with today’s new, improved perfume pricing, that’s not wicked high, but it’s enough that you have to really think about it for a soliflore.  The problem is, I really like these soliflores, but I just can’t pull the trigger on $150 for 50 mls.

Frangipane has  notes of Spices, Calabrian bergamot, Ceylonese cinnamon, Indian jasmine absolute, osmanthus absolute, Venezuelan tolu balsam, white musk, oakmoss, East Indian patchouli. This thing is a really gorgeous jasmine/frangipane combo, just a little spicy and musky – jasmine is slightly indolic, but not so much that you recoil, and the other notes just balance it out to be this soft, feminine, womanly musky floral. It’s not the most fabulous thing I’ve ever smelled by a mile, but I really would like to wear it, but not at that price!!!  And the tuberose.  I smelled that briefly in London and was smitten, but, again, not for 150 plus. I think it was 165 pounds there for 50 mls.  I keep hearing these things are way cheaper  in Italy.  Does anyone know if that’s true, and if so, how cheap?   I’d spring 100 bucks for the tuberose, but I’d rather it be closer to the 50.  They’re just not $150 worth of great. Do I sound bitter?  I really hate it when I like something, don’t love it enough to pay through the nose for it, but I still want it anyway.

Am I wrong there? Do you have things like that in your head?  Is this like my yearning for a sports car, but I can’t bring myself to spend that much money?  I really want my kicks cheaper.  Speaking of kicks, anyone want to split a bottle of Kilian Pure Oud – just need on taker?  I don’t need the bottle or the pretty box, etc.

This is a little bit of a meander through the new L’Artisan Havana Vanille as well as perfumedom’s vanilla fields (although not Vanilla Fields), so if vanilla scents don’t interest you, you might as well move on, nothing to see here today.  Can you tell I’m looking forward to fall?

I was an early, frequent opposer of all perfume things gourmand and particularly things vanilla.  I love to bake, and yet wearing anything that smelled like I’d dabbed on vanilla extract seemed bizarre to me.  Who wants to smell like a vanilla cupcake?  (Lots of people, apparently.)  Judging by the ever-changing shelves at Sephora, we seem to have move on past the worst of the Vanilla Heresies, when they had three different lines of vanilla crap, including Laurence Dumont, LaVanilia and something else… in addition to a lot of vanillic CSPs.  And the vanilla was often combined with some other note that made it just that much more terrifying, like citron, or maple.  Or raspberry.  Or mothball, or salmon.  (Okay, joking about those last two.)   Collectively, in concept and execution, they gave me the dry heaves.

Then I discovered Givenchy Organza Indecence, which was one of those scents people were always waxing poetic about.  It’s either been re-released or the distribution is increased, but when I was looking for it, it was darn difficult to find.  (I thought it had been d/c’d but have been told several times that’s incorrect.)  Whatever; I whined on here long enough that someone graciously hooked me up with a sample, at which point I started plotting immediately on how to get my hands on a bottle.   Because it was pretty clear I was going to wear the hell out of that stuff, and I have.

Organza Indecence is technically a more woody/spicy scent than a true vanilla, but its drydown is vanillic enough on me that I began to see the vanilla potential there.  This prompted further adventures in the land of high-end vanillas, where I was hoping to avoid the too-sweet vanillin Curse of Sephora (did you know artificial vanilla is made from wood pulp, a paper industry byproduct?  Yum, dig in.)

Results were varied.  Indult Tihota is lovely but I couldn’t see the point; too extract-y.  Lann-Ael I alternate between loving and loathing, but it’s the apple/cereal bit that grates, not vanilla.  The high mark (?) of vanilla perfume fetish-dom in my opinion is Guerlain’s Spiritueuse Double Vanille, a dark, smoky vanilla which I would own a bottle of except: a) the price is ridiculous, b) it would last me a thousand years and c) having discovered that what I really love about SDV is the smoke/vanilla combo, I can whip up my own by dabbing Bonfire or Burning Leaves on top of another vanilla scent, creating one of my favorite winter standbys.  PdN Vanille Tonka was an epic FAIL for reasons that still elude me, but I think is the tonka.  I still need to try the Micallef, I bet I’d like it.  And finally, the L’Artisan Vanilia I waffle between wanting a decant of and finding it gets on my nerves after a few hours.

Bringing us FINALLY to L’Artisan’s Havana Vanille.  It was done by Bertrand Duchaufour and is grouped in their travel series with Dzongkha, Bois Farine, Timbuktu and Fleur de Liane, of which Duchaufour did all but Farine.  Notes are rum, clove, dried fruits, narcissus, tonka bean, helichrysum, vanilla, smoked woods, moss and balsamic notes according to Robin at Now Smell This, who kindly sent me a sample thinking I’d like it, and I’m going to link right here to her great review.

And now I have to tell two stories on myself, both of which pertain to Havana Vanille.  First off: when I read Duchaufour did it, I was not overly enthused, because with a couple of exceptions most of his work for L’Artisan, including the travel series, are not my favorites, and we will leave it at that.  He has an earth/spicebox style exemplified by, for example, Timbuktu and his Eau d’Italie creations that I find both interesting and personally unwearable.

Second, my mind is a sieve and somehow when the sample arrived I had convinced myself that this was a new Hermessence scent (come on, how funny is that?), and that didn’t really delight me either.  Why?  Because I don’t love most of the Hermessences– the ones I like are too evanescent, and the powerful ones are pretty much scrubbers.   So although I’d changed the perfume house mentally I was still skeered; I sprayed it on meditatively and waited for some horrible melon note to emerge and smother me.

So, March … THAT IS ALL FASCINATING, HOW IS THE HAVANA VANILLE ALREADY?!?!?  Well, I am still thinking.   The first impression is: vanilla, but not a foody one, and yessssssss!!!!!  Then, and I can’t help wondering if this is my Hermessence mindset, we go through a brief five-minute phase where I smell something like bananamelon on top of the vanilla, and the scent comes dangerously close to reminding me of – yes!  my bananamelon nemesis, Hermessence Vanille Galante! – a scent which many perfumistas love and which you may recall made me want to hack my own arm off to get away from.  I didn’t hate it as much as Mousson, which I loathe so virulently I refused to file my sample so as to avoid ever making the mistake of smelling it again, but it was close.   Melon, banana or wet notes and vanilla is just … wrong.

Once we get past that, though, I am very happy.  Havana Vanille is a not-too-sweet vanilla with a decidedly smoky edge to it (my daughter took one sniff and called it “burnt”) and that it is: burnt in two, no, three ways – the sharp smell of singed sugared vanilla, like the top of a crème brulee, the smell of tobacco, and the smell of smoke itself.

Havana Vanille also reminds me a bit of Guerlain SDV, only it’s less dense and less … formal?  (Also, scientists should study my skin; Havana lasts easily 36 hours on me.)  SDV I have to watch not to overdose myself, like eating that last piece of chocolate and then wishing you hadn’t.   The tobacco note is definitely there in Havana, along with the rum, but they’re both so integrated into the scent that I can pick them out looking for them, but I’m not thinking “man, this thing is boozy.”

French speakers: shouldn’t this be Havane Vanille?  Or Havana Vainilla?  Just curious.  I feel like we’re mixing languages.

In the final analysis, if anyone’s read this far:  vanilla fragrances only work for me if there’s something non-edible about them.  I want my vanillas woody, or spicy, or leathery, or smoky.  Like SDV and Organza Indecence, Havana Vanille showcases the soothing seductive smell of vanilla by adding something entirely different and non-foody to frame it.  I haven’t really felt the need to add another vanilla to the fix I generally get from Indecence, Demeter Egg Nog (seriously, a rocking vanilla/spice scent I can’t resist mentioning; try it with Bonfire if you want smoke) and occasional hits of SDV, but this is different enough I’m pretty sure I need at least a generous decant, and maybe a bottle.  People who’ve shied away from vanilla on the ugh-too-sweeeet theory (looking at you, Tom Ford Tobacco Vanille!) might want to check this out.

Well, I did it; I moved to Toronto. My furniture and the rest of my belongings won’t arrive until Monday, but I’m here and it’s still a bit surreal to think that this is now my home. I realize I was only granted Canadian citizenship in June, but there really is no time like the present.

I think it only fitting to dedicate this post to my mom, without whom I never would have realized my lifelong dream to live amongst the wonderful family I’ve always been closest to. Some people will travel hundreds, even thousands of miles to avoid their families. Not me; I actually want to be with these people. So thanks, Mommy – this one’s for you. I just know you’re smelling wonderful while regaling all your friends with tales of your meshugana daughter.

This essay first appeared on another fragrance blog about 2 years ago, and it was originally titled, The Evolution of Scent.

If Luca Turin can boast he knows The Secret of Scent, I figure what the hell; I may as well take a crack at its evolution. And, I don’t care if the term “evolution” is a dirty word in some parts of the United States. This is global. This is about fragrance: why we gravitate towards certain scents and how the many things we smell over the course of our lives can have a profound effect on us.

Ultimately, our introduction to scent begins with our mothers, fathers and siblings. My dad used an electric razor and never indulged in any sort of after-shave or cologne. My older brother went through the typical men’s fragrance phases of every male who dated during the Studio 54 era: Aramis, Halston Z-14, and finally Lagerfeld, which I found to be the most noxious, offensive concoction.  My sister-in-law gifted him with a bottle of this horrid potion; we’ve never gotten along since the day I met her. Now that he’s a married 50-something, my bro mercifully wafts through life scent-free. I’ll explore my sister-n-law when I can actually write about her without the need for copious numbers of expletives.

That leaves one person: my mother. Mom was a Canadian who lived for twirling through the duty-free shops at New York’s JFK and Toronto’s Pearson International airports; the high point of our many trips to visit her family. She would inevitably emerge clutching a receipt for the purchase of one bottle of scent and one bottle of liquor. In those days you were not allowed to carry your purchases out of the store yourself. You gave the cashier your flight information and your purchases were presented to you after you boarded the plane. The countless bottles of Canadian Club and Seagram’s V.O. never got drunk, but those bottles of scent were as much a part of my mom as her wash-and-wear hairdo and her Act III polyester pantsuits: the Chanels, Nos. 5, 19, and 22, Emeraude, Tabu, Norell and Ombre Rose were her favorites. My mom never bought scent at a drug or department store. If it didn’t come from the duty-free shop, she wanted no part of it. To this day, I’m not sure if she thought she was getting a bargain, or if she took pride in the fact that she was the only one of the women in her circle of friends who got on an airplane with any regularity. For her, buying at the airport was more exotic and sophisticated than strolling up to the fragrance counter in Macy’s.

Six months before her death in 1999, my mom moved from our house in Brooklyn to a condo overlooking the Hudson River in Fort Lee, New Jersey. She was not in great shape physically, and it was always my job to buy her the requisite toiletries she used. One day, while purchasing a jar of Kiehl’s moisturizer at Neiman Marcus, I befriended a saleslady who just happened to live in the same building as my mom. Of course, I told her which apartment my mom lived in, and she showed up one night with a bag full of samples. Some days, I’d walk into my mom’s apartment and there’d be a cloud of No. 5 greeting me. On others, there would be open vials of various Creed scents sitting on the dining room table, and my mom would be in a quandary about which one she wanted. “How come I never saw these in the airport?” she wondered. “So-and-so told me that Grace Kelly wore that one!” she exclaimed, pointing toward the open vial of Fleurissimo. “Go get me a bottle!” And it was the scent of Fleurissimo that was on her skin when she died.

Given my mom’s relationship with these classic scents, you would think that I would wear them to honor her memory. Honestly, none of them have ever appealed to me, and I can’t stomach any heady florals at all. Chanel No. 5? Repellant. Instant headache; I would refuse to wear it even if threatened at gunpoint. Maybe I do need to consider therapy…

My own fragrance choices were influenced by the three sisters who grew up in the house next door to mine, rather than by my own mother. I was closest to the youngest one, L, who used to steal her older sisters’ bottles of Charlie and Shalimar and we’d huddle together under a blanket tent between J’s and M’s twin beds spritzing each other. Talk about a cloud. The first scent I remember seriously wearing was Love’s Baby Soft. I think I was subliminally brainwashed by all the ads for it in Co-ed magazine. Then, it was on to Chantilly. From there, Halston. By the time I hit high school, I was wearing Pavlova. This was quite a contradiction: a soft, romantic, powdery floral scent to go with my rock ‘n roll-patched and buttoned denim jacket, concert t-shirts, jeans and sneakers. In that attire, the only two things I should have smelled of were Parliament cigarettes and Freshen-Up spearmint gum. And it confused the hell out of all the boys in my group. More than once I overheard them wondering, “Where the @$&* is that flower smell coming from?” I guess I was as offensive back then as today’s teens are when they fumigate themselves with Axe body spray. No wonder I didn’t snag my first real boyfriend until I was a freshman in college. Oddly enough, that was a time in my life when I wore no scent at all.

My scent-free phase lasted for quite a long time. Looking back on it, I cannot explain why I went through life sans fragrance for a good three years. Maybe hormonal fluctuations were to blame, or maybe I just got myself so sick of Pavlova, I needed to give my nose a much needed breather. My boyfriend B (whom I now call my husband), used to beg me to put on perfume; not that I smelled bad: he told me he liked the smell of scent on a woman’s skin, since his mom never wore anything other than eau de Schenley mixed with a splash of ginger ale. I found it ironic that there were so many scents on my mother’s vanity table and so many bottles of liquor gathering dust in the closet, while B’s mom always seemed to have a cocktail in her hand and never smelled of anything I could easily discern. I once snuck into his parents’ bedroom to see if she did own any perfume, but all I found on top of her dresser was a dish of hair clips and bobby pins, a jar of cold cream, and one tube of red Cover Girl lipstick. My house was a satellite duty-free shop compared to my future in-laws’. The best part was I could wear anything I felt like, since there was not one particular scent he would associate with his mother. That was tremendously liberating for me. I have such deeply ingrained scent associations courtesy of my own mother that it is a relief to be with someone whose nose is not triggered by some invisible waft in the air like mine often is. B still manages to negotiate life without the fear of a particular scent assaulting his nose. How I envy him; I live in fear of Chanel No. 5 as if it were a tactical nuclear weapon.

I think there is always one real “a-ha” epiphany every fragrance lover has, and for me, it was when I first read about L’Artisan Parfumeur’s Vanilia fragrance in (I believe) the February 1993 issue of Allure magazine. I was 26 years-old, temporarily unemployed, and mesmerized by the description of it. I remember reading something to the effect of “The vanilla L’Artisan brews is so bewitching…”, and about Cher wearing it during an appearance on David Letterman and him swooning. Not that my intention was to make David Letterman swoon (or to smell like Cher), something made me haul my jobless self to Manhattan on a brutally frigid day, trudge to the original L’Artisan Parfumeur shop on Madison Avenue in the 80s, and snap up a bottle of Vanilia. 100 ml was $80 and I didn’t care if I had to starve for weeks to come. It was so beautiful, just inhaling myself was all the sustenance I needed. I had never smelled anything like it, and was totally smitten.

Vanilia is the closest I’ve ever come to having a signature scent, but unfortunately, our relationship turned sour about six months in. One day, quite unexpectedly, Vanilia revolted, and I broke out in the most horrible rash I have ever experienced. I was devastated, not to mention itchy beyond belief. I tried to find ways to continue on with Vanilia – spraying it on different areas of my body that I thought would not react negatively – I spent two weeks using the doorjamb of my office at my new job to scratch my shoulders, much to the amusement of my puzzled co-workers; I desperately started spraying it on my clothing, only to find stains on just about every shirt I owned. It was hopeless. After using up three tubes of prescription cortisone cream, and replacing most of my work wardrobe, I gave up. Vanilia and I were just not meant to be. I’ve tried valiantly over the years to re-establish our relationship, but for whatever cruel reason, every time I spray this beloved scent on my skin, it turns red and itchy within minutes. Are the perfume gods punishing me because I have no respect for the classics? Am I doomed to go through life in a haze of Fleurissimo and No. 5? Are these my fragrances of destiny? Sorry, but I’d rather smell like Exit 13 of the New Jersey Turnpike.

After my disastrous liaison with Vanilia, I developed a most voracious appetite for all things scented. In the early 90s, there was what I like to call, a “fragrance revolution” going on. The late 80s was the Giorgio era with all these monstrous, cloying Godzilla-like fragrances, which gave way to the grunge-fueled CK One “heroin chic” period. I tried so hard to look like a burn-out in high school (while reeking of Pavlova), that I felt completely abandoned by these new trends in fashion and fragrance. I did not want to wear flannel shirts and smell like Kurt Cobain. There was no way my rib cage was ever going to poke out through my skin like Kate Moss’. I was drifting and in need of comfort – which I easily found at the local shopping mall in the Bath and Body Works store. The place was nirvana for me: the gingham checked awning, all the pretty bottles of shower gels, lotions and colognes hooked me instantly. I fell in love with Juniper and Flowering Herbs and just about everything else they sold. I was hurtling towards my thirties in a fog of suburban mall-scent, but I was still longing for something more meaningful and profound that would touch my soul the way Vanilia did. Here I am, at 40, and I still haven’t found it.

Here’s the realization, or maybe rationalization, that I have reached as I am now officially a middle-aged person: When it comes to fragrance, you can have it all if you’d like. There should not be one signature or “holy grail” type scent that you are “supposed” to wear because your mother, sister, best friend, spouse or “X” celebrity in the magazine ad is telling you to. I had a second epiphany sometime in the last decade and that epiphany is that I can have a hundred bottles of scent if I want to, and I can buy them wherever I please, which is exactly what I’ve been doing and have no plans on stopping. Maybe I am a fragrance glutton or a schizophrenic on some level, but I love the variety. My fragrant enigmatic phase is going into its ninth year of existence, so quite possibly, I have achieved a kind of peace in the fact that I like having lots of options. Mind you, I don’t advocate this in every area of life, but when it comes to scent, I am content to always be evolving.

Calice Becker did Back to Black for By Kilian, their newest release.  Made up of Bergamot, raspberry, blue chamomile, cardamom, coriander, saffron, cedarwood, vanilla, almond, vetiver, cistus labdanum, patchouli, and oakmoss.

I’m really most cross with Kilian.  The first few fragrances I thought were fine, but other than the nifty bottles, I just couldn’t justify the price tag and could simply ignore them.  The last two they’ve done, Pure Oud and Back to Black, I’m having to buy bottles of this stuff at $225 and up, and that really sucks.  Really.  Really.  Sucks.

Honeyed, spiced smoky tobacco.  This is the smell of my dad when he smoked a pipe, slightly sweet, rich, earthy, complex, comforting.  Grain de Musc reviewed this already, as did Octavian here. You know what? I don’t normally like the smell of honey in any perfume, it usually just makes me choke up, but blended so perfect with the tobacco, incense, oakmoss and spice notes, it just purrs like I put my nose right into the honey jar – not that cheap store stuff, the comb honey we used to get on the farm – and came out with some on the tip.  There’s definitely a gourmand quality to the scent, but it just sorta floats out there as a component, not as the main feature.  I swear, I’d just eat this stuff if I could.

You know what’s really fun?  Put it on next to Pure Oud.  Yeah, I know I just dripped about $20 worth of perfume on my hand to find out what that was like, but I don’t care.  It was so worth it to find out.  I have no words to express how perfect these two scents lie next to each other and intertwine..

Okay, Kilian, other than price, you’ve completely redeemed yourself in my eyes with these last two releases.   More, please.  Now, I do know the price tag is a killer, $225 for 50 mls, and these have great lasting power (okay, the Oud is more, we won’t talk about that right now), but the refills are $115. So if you buddy up with a couple of people, and only one of you wants the cute bottle and packaging, it does bring it down to a more reasonable price.  No, not cheap, but this Back to Black Aphrodisaic is really amazing.

In my ongoing cosmetic procedures corner – I’m peeling.  I can’t remember if March did one of these, but I settled in for my VIPeel, which is supposed to be fabulous, but you peel like a snake on days 3, 4 and 5. So I’m in hiding on Friday, Saturday and Sunday this week and ordering in Sushi.  They told me to expect some stinging at first. Well, my face is on fricking fire right now  – two hours after – but cooling a little. It’s bright red.  I’m hoping by morning it will be just slightly red so I can do yoga.  I’ll give you guys the results next week when it’s done peeling. They recommended that I follow the peel with a photofacial at two weeks, which I am going to do, along with some routine filler upkeep.  Anyone else done a peel of any type?  Was it worth it, would you do it again?  I mean, if my face stops burning soon and the results are great, I just won’t care.

The nice ladies at Hermes didn’t laugh too hard when I popped into pick up some perfume after the chemical peel, but I hadn’t hit the apex of redness then.  Or they’re just too polite and didn’t want to say.  Can we talk about the Mousseline scarves?  I mean, just, holy,  so wow.  I have other Hermes scarves in the normal silk and in cashmere, but those lightweight gorgeous floaty ones just made me cry.  I NEEDS one, and they’re over $600.  How in the world can I justify that?  I mean, I can justify anything, but it would be a lot easier if it were cashmere or something more substantial, but it’s all floaty and gauzy and sheer and delicate and so beautiful, it made me almost cry.  Ideas on justification?

Chanel Rouge Allure Laque Luminous Satin Lip Laquer.   Rocks.  Srsly.  I got it in Ming (pink) and Dragon (red).  Dragon is the perfect red, and the Ming is a perfect pink for your lips.  It goes on as a gloss, but smooths out to be more of a moisturizing lipstick, not really gloss at all, but sorta like gloss.  It’s a weird effect.  The lasting power is good, it doesn’t have that Chanel taste at all that their lipsticks have that I hate. Beautiful colors, but they need more of them.

I saw Julie and Julia at the movies this week.  I’m completely smitten with Julia Child, dead though she is. So much so that I bought my first real pearl necklace.

We have covered a LOT of territory, y’all, for this Thursday!

Winners of the UFO samples are:  hongongmom, Masha and Francesca.  Click on the contact us button over there on the left, send me your name and address and remind me what you won, and I’ll get you out your sample!!

Winners of the Chanel Cristalle Eau Verte samples:  Theresa, elizablue, Kim, Eva, Michelle H,  ScentRed, Aubrey, Tarleisio, Dleep and Mariekel.  Just follow the same instructions as for the UFO winners, click on the contact us and send me your name, address, remind me the sample you won, and I’ll get it sent to you.

I’m in the middle of a work project and the twins are underfoot this week, so this post is going to be a quickie.  Let’s talk about Guerlain’s Les Secrets de Sophie, a limited edition (natch) white floral with a hit of violet.  The thing apparently retails for roughly $400 in one of those fussy, girly flacons with the bulb atomizers, and … unless things have changed, Guerlain’s atomizers are craptastic.  I hate bulb atomizers.  I’d say more than half the time when I try them in the store, they’re broken, and I’m convinced the bulb atomizer concept is a nefarious plot to allow all the juice inside to evaporate.  Glad I got that off my chest.  Anyhow, the chances of yours truly having a flacon of this in my hands is nil, so maybe it’s just sour grapes.  Thanks to My Special Friend for letting me try her decant.

Les Secrets de Sophie opens with a heady combination of jasmine and violet.  I love jasmine and violet, and I couldn’t have been happier, but I am always surprised by how many women don’t love violet (and/or jasmine.)   The jasmine thing I understand; some people find it too ripe for them, although Sophie wasn’t particularly indolic to my nose.  But violet?  What’s not to love about an innocent little violet?  (Rose, on the other hand, is prickly.)  This violet was just about perfect, halfway between the candied violets that can be too sweet and a very green violet.  For the first hour I had this on, I was debating whether I needed to go looking for a split.

Ultimately, though, Sophie’s secret is that her drydown smells rather like Apres L’Ondee, less hazy and more liquid purple (Caron Aimez Moi?) with an extra dollop of white musk tossed in for good measure.  That’s all good, but I’m not going to pay 400 bills for it.   I’d rather blow that (theoretical) money on some vintage Guerlain on eBay and wear Apres, or one of the gazillion other violet scents I already own.  In fact, just typing this has filled me with a sudden longing for my vintage Jolie Madame.  Hang on, I’m going to put some on right now!  Cheers!

PS For anyone who is interested, a follow up to my Natori post – they have a hand(?) cream in a jar, and I am not an ancillary product fan, mostly preferring my lotions and creams unscented, but they were flogging it at Saks next to the perfume and I have to say it was pretty spectacular.  Forgot to ask the price.  The 1.7 Natori is $80, by the way, and as your favorite Auntie March is fond of saying, anything less than $100 is the new free.

Kenzo has a new fragrance out.  And it’s everything we hate – only 1,000 of them made, special freaky bottle, $188 for 40 mls – well, the price has certainly been worse.  You know how this goes.  Kenzo?  I thought they made all the super-cute, incredibly wearable perfumes that wound up at discounters for $30 a bottle.

Let’s get the particulars.  Ron Arad was commissioned to design the bottles, and they’re pretty cool little twisty silver ribbed thingies with the pumping mechanism buried in the bottle.   Aurelian Guichard composed the perfume, and it was to intended create the scent of skin, while avoiding the traditional scent pyramid scheme.  Notes are orange blossom, Bulgarian rose, frankincense and vanilla; the press release also talks of UFO having “a balance between a powerful heart, the ‘marble accord,’” and the other notes.

Expensive?  check.

Weird bottle?  check.

Limited edition?  check.

Fragrance live up to the rest of the hype?  Believe it or not, in this case it actually does.

Patty says: From the second I smelled it, I was in love.  I sprayed it on (I’ve been doing that a lot since I got it) when my youngest son, Harry, was in the room. He decreed that Harry’s Rules would now include that all women had to wear UFO.  Every time I walked by him this weekend, he would swoon over how UFO smells.  Remember, this is a young man that has been raised around perfume, he’s used to all sorts of smells.  I also burn incense and candles in my home.  It takes something pretty special to get his attention. In fact, I can’t ever remember him ever commenting on any scent I put on before except the ones he hated or if I wore aldehydes in the car when I was driving him to school.

UFO has this warm vanilla floral start that quickly, yes, seems to avoid the normal pyramid and moves right into the incense.  All the notes just dance on the skin together, blending a little, but still distinct’ish.  Lasting power is fabulous on me.  I can still smell it the next morning, though it’s mostly the incense that’s left.  Do I think they hit the scent of skin?  They did okay. There’s a slightly salty feel about it, but I’d never mistake this scent as someone’s skin – it’s just way better than that!  Given the limited number of bottles, I’m hoping they intend to only do 1,000 bottles of those modern colly ones, but release the fragrance in another bottle for, well, ever. Please don’t make me stockpile $188 bottles of perfume.

I tried to think of Guichard doing Bond’s Chinatown and UFO, they are pretty different. The more I thought about it, though, the more it makes sense. Chinatown has a weird duality about it that, love it or hate it, it gets your attention.  Chinatown ultimately wound up much too heavy for me to wear, the scent would get stuck in my nose.  UFO has that same duality of sweet and incensey, but without the heavy patch/floral.  It’s lighter, but keeps the same tensions in the perfume. Where Chinatown is languid and makes me think of Opium dens, UFO is the Angels singing and cavorting in the sun.

March says: I remember reading about this months ago and then I forgot all about it.  I decided to go at it blind and not look the notes up before I tried out my sample atomizer.  Can I just say?  Non-pyramidal structure aside, putting this on my skin and breathing it in for the first time made my heart soar the same way it did the first time I smelled Andy Tauer’s Orris.  In fact, my first sniff of UFO brought Orris to mind (UFO has a hint of the same incense/rose dynamic when it opens), only the Tauer has a bunch of other, heavier spicy stuff.   UFO is cleaner, airy and very much about the incense at the center, along with a musky warmth that I’m assuming must be the “marble accord.”

As the PR stuff suggests, this is a pretty straight ride.  I get a ton of incense, a little vanilla for warmth and roundness.  There is rose in there but (happily) in this case it doesn’t interfere with my enjoyment; it provides a sweet floral dimension rather than a thorny wallop.  The fragrance does seem to fluctuate slightly between a sweeter side (like Orris) and a drier side (reminds me a teensy bit of CdG 88 8 in terms of mineral clarity and weight.)   I definitely feel the “mineral character” in there, the same way 88 8 renders spices as slightly metallic.  After a couple hours the vanilla gets this smoky thing going on which I am very fond of.

For something that doesn’t wear that heavily, and seems to float in and out on me (nose fatigue?)  the sillage is tremendous.  I put two sprays on the back of my hand (which, yes, subsequently got washed a few times.)  Five hours later my daughter commented in passing how much she liked my scent; I am not always a crowd-pleaser in that regard.  I held up my hand to her and sure enough it was UFO she was admiring.

UFO is full of joy to me — that’s the most appropriate word.  There’s something radiant and uplifting about it.   The press release says Guichard “drew on the olfactive memory of his mother who was a sculptor working with marble, and has recreated the scent of marble powder against a woman’s skin.”   This fragrance has tremendous heart.  I like thinking of it as a reflection of his love for his mother.

Of course we’re going to give away some samples.  Just drop a comment to be entered for a chance of winning one of 3 samples.

Today we finish up March’s Mojo Madness with the third fragrance that caught my eye at Saks – the new Narciso Rodriguez For Her Eau de Parfum Intense, which is allegedly a limited edition at Saks and comes in a pink metallic bottle (shown left.)

I have an idea!  Let’s hire Narciso a life coach and get him to give his fragrances real names!  As it stands, you can’t tell them apart without a spreadsheet and photos – they’re all various combinations of the designer’s name with micro-clues like her, musc, and eau de parfum.  It drives me nuts.  Here’s a link to Helg’s exhaustive guide to the NR oeuvre on Perfume Shrine, which I like to think of as “what is the name of that Narciso?  Wait … is that the pink one or the black one?” and for which she deserves some sort of award for patience.

Many of you know I mocked the entire NR line brutally for a couple of years as non-scented dreck until I went to LA with Patty and … whaddya know, fell in love with the plain old original NR EDT, in the black bottle, which I promptly bought and reviewed.  Most of the rest of the line I still pretty much can’t smell, and I put on some Musc for Her (the oil) recently and stuck it under the nose of five perfumista buddies, and guess what?  They couldn’t smell it either.  The Narciso EDP in the pale pink bottle I can smell but it’s much more floral and I don’t like as much as the regular.  There’s always other weird bottles of NR sitting around too (this time they have a purse size bottle that’s labeled hair scent.)

When the nice ladies at Saks, having already wowed me with Issey Miyake’s A Scent and Natori, whipped this one out, I gave it a go.  Along with Natori, this is the other fragrance I may purchase to thank those long-suffering ladies over there for their patience.

The notes for the For Her Intense are musk, ylang-ylang, jasmine and orange blossom.  In terms of character, it’s much more in the style of the original EDT from 2004 than the later, more floral EDP.   By the way, somebody correct me but I think all of these were done by Francis Kurkdjian and Christine Nagel.

For comparison purposes, the original For Her EDT’s notes are (more or less) musk, orange blossom, osmanthus, amber, vanilla, woods, vetiver.

On my skin, the Intense is less focused on the orange blossom than the original EDT.  While the fragrances resemble each other, Intense is more what I imagine Musc for Her would be like if I could actually smell anything.  I put Intense on at Saks and pretty much forgot about it while I was all aquiver over Natori, etc.  Then (you know how these things go…) I found myself hoovering various parts of my body later that day, trying to sort out where that delicious smell was coming from.  It was the Intense.

Intense is about the warm, slightly toasty smell of another person you find attractive.  It is the For Her EDT minus the part that smells recognizably like perfume.  As such, Intense is the consummate wallpaper scent.  It is very much in the background, unobtrusive, and if that holds no interest for you, well – there you go, move on, nothing to see here.  However, if you share my admiration for the subtleties of these sorts of scents, Intense is probably the one I have enjoyed most in terms evoking the warmth of another human being.  I have devised my own two mental categories for these scents – “skin” scents that I can’t smell unless I jam my nose into my wrist, and “aura” or “halo” scents that project a delicate – but detectable – perfumed presence around me.  Intense is an aura scent.  It’s very subtle but noticeably there for me, and as I have discovered with other scents of this type, if it works for you it really works.  I can smell Intense for a full day after I’ve sprayed it, a delightful, comfortable presence around me.

***BTW – both Helg and an online shopping site refer to the fragrance as The Musk Collection and Limited Edition Musk; I can tell you that the outside of the bottle says Narciso Rodriguez for Her (at the top) and eau de parfum intense (at the bottom, which for some reason is not on the bottle pictured here).  What is the precise, legal name of this scent?  I have no idea.   Blame Narciso.

Years ago, when I was a fragrance neophyte, I only wanted to smell like vanilla. That was during the early 90s before the proliferation of food-as-fragrance, and sadly, before I was able to appreciate a scent as groundbreaking as Cher’s Uninhibited. My entrée into vanilla whoredom (way before almond whoredom) was L’Artisan Parfumeur’s Vanilia. From there, I moved on to Comptoir’s Vanille, Vanille Abricot, Vanille Tiare – even though I usually run from gardenia as fast as I can, Vanille Amande, and so on. There was never enough vanilla for me; until it became as common as a Starbucks on two out of every four street corners. When I started smelling that plasticky vanilla flavoring smell – you  know, that stuff that comes in the small brown plastic bottle that’s supposed to resemble vanilla, I knew it was time to move on.

One recent craze that I never really got into is ouds. Any of the ones I’ve smelled have been so overpowering that I could not imagine wearing so much as a microscopic drop. I don’t think I knew what oud was until the Montale line of fragrances hit North America. Having never traveled to Southeast Asia or India, I had no idea that oud is the resin distilled from agarwood, a species of evergreen indigenous to Southeast Asia and India. Well, now I consider myself informed; but my relationship with ouds is still in its infancy. It makes me think of when I went to Rome, and had dinner at a lovely restaurant around the corner from where I stayed. It was my first night there and I just about fell face-first into my dinner plate from jet lag. At the end of the meal, some of the people I was traveling with ordered coffee and grappa. I tasted a few of the grappas and made the grave error of making a couple of not very attractive faces when I tasted ones I didn’t like. We were a party of 12 and one of our waiters spotted my distaste for the grappa. He was so upset that he came back with a tray of about 8 different bottles of grappa and gave me little tastes until I found one I liked. The resulting hangover, combined with my jet lag, was epic; but now, I can do with a little grappa from time to time, as long as no one catches me making any nasty faces.

I’ve negotiated the same sort of détente with ouds, now that I’ve smelled the ones from Comptoir. You can insert the adjective “wearable”, in front of just about every note in the fragrance universe, including ouds. And these are some wearable ouds:

Aoud de Nuit: Bergamot, black currant, black rose, iris, vanilla, cardamom, saffron and cedar wood. This one is my favorite; one guess as to why. The vanilla blends so well with the saffron and cedar wood that it stays clean all the way into the drydown, without becoming overpoweringly sweet.

Aouda: Rose, geranium, chamomile, amyris, niaouli, copahu balm, cedar wood, tolu balsam, patchouli and oud accord. I found this a bit heavy on the rose, with some strong vegetation in the background. I think some of you vintage jezebels out there would love this one; it has a very classic twin-set-and-a-strand-of-pearls feel. Mind you, that would be a twin set and a strand of pearls worn with a pencil skirt and heels. Jeans and flats would be far too contradictory.

Nomaoud: Saffron, ylang ylang, purple rose, rockrose, cedar wood, cashmeran, oud wood, amyris, sandalwood, warm amber, leather and black musk. This is by far the sexiest of the four. The rose notes aren’t nearly as strong as they are in Aouda, and the drydown is warm and musky with just a hint of leather. I wouldn’t call this dirty or animalic, but it definitely exudes a not too subtle sexiness.

Oud Intense: Black currant, lemon, rose, patchouli, amber, pine needles, musk. Here, you have to really love pine, because it is the strongest note by far. This oud is also the most masculine. Don’t get me wrong, women can definitely wear this, but again, you have to love pine. I can envision Philosophy’s Cristina Carlino pitching this one out an office window, since pine is one of the notes she’s always bleating about when it comes to what she thinks we should never smell of. Wasn’t there a pine debate here on the Posse not too long ago? Help me please, because my short term memory is shot right now. I fear I may be working on a dementia.

These are all packaged in Comptoir’s signature aluminum bottle; 100 ml for $110.00. You can find them now at lushoasis.com, and for the MD/DC/VA crowd, I believe Art with Flowers will have them soon. Right now, you can snag 6 CSP samples for free when you order a 100 ml CSP over at Lush Oasis.

Lee asked me to pass along congrats to Alica, who is the lucky winner of his sample drawing from his “You Repulse Me” post last week. Alica, hit the “Contact Us” link at the top left of the page and leave your info. And don’t forget to warn your postal carrier!

EDITED TO ADD: There is one of those uber expensive Guerlain La Fontaine Imperiale with Mon Precieux Nectar inside thingies on Ebay .  Notes are orange blossom, jasmine, bitter almond, wood, vanilla and musk.  If it’s reasonable in the end, I’ll bid if there’s enough takers to split it.  So if any of you were thinking, um, yeah!  But wanted it at a better price, clickety click on the Contact Us and let me know!  Even if you told me before.  If it can be bought for 5-7k, it’s 1,000 ml, so the cost would be $5-7 per ml.  hey, it’s better than $9-10!  And there are only 63 of them that were sold in the world.  I know, it’s annoying, but tell me you don’t want some.

After the great success of Chanel No. 5 Eau Premiere, they decided to go back and see if lightning would strike twice. could they take a classic and update it enough to keep the admirers of it happy, but entice in a new generation?

I have several variations of Cristalle around here, but I deliberately did not smell them because I wanted to evaluate this on its own as far as the success of this updated flanker.  It’s got a nice fresh green open that fairly snaps and pops at you, and I very much like that, veering off into some citrus.  It stays fresh while the magnolia emerges as we enter the heart. Notes are Sicilian lemon, bergamot, neroli, jasmine, magnolia accord, abstract white flowers.  It’s certainly a nice perfume, feels Chanel-like, definitely a more modern approach to Cristalle, if you were wanting it modernized, but it lost the chypre’ness that was part of the original Cristalle EDT (differentiated from the EDP, which I never liked so well).  I think it’s beautifully done, though I think you really have to look it as a completely different perfume from Cristalle EDT or EDP.

Eau Verte is a lovely green magnolia fragrance, easy to wear.  I’m not doing backflips over it because it doesn’t smell very distinctive or special in the way Cristalle or I think any Chanel should smell.  Do I think Chanel succeeded?  Yes, I do, for the same reason I think they did with Eau Premiere.  They have taken a classic, retained a piece of the classic, but rendered out a lot of the “old-fashioned” parts that turn off a lot of young women. Whether we old ladies like it or not, women in their 20s – not all of them – don’t want to smell of aldehydes and oakmoss, that makes them feel old, and they want something fresh and modern. Cristalle Eau Verte  is made for them, but I wouldn’t turn down wearing it from time to time – old biddy that I am.

Now, Chanel did send me a small bottle of this, so you know what that means!!  We’ll give away 10 samples of it.  Just drop a comment in to be entered in the drawing.

As for this updating of classics, what’s the best update of a classic that’s been done, in your opinion.  And secondly, if you were a perfume company with a long and storied name, like Guerlain or Chanel or YSL or Dior (Dior, you disappoint me the most), what kinds of perfumes would you put out that would keep your old customers happy, but draw in new customers?  What’s the business model that would work?  Two different lines, flankers like Chanel does?

Continuing my March Mojo Trifecta, today we have  Natori – which in some ways is less interesting than Miyake’s A Scent.  It’s also something I’d really like to own.   Is it genius?  Nope.  But it sure smells good.

When I was first trying to describe it to Louise I called it a “lingerie scent.”  That seemed a little vague; what kind of lingerie?   But Louise got it immediately.  I’m not thinking of some vampy man-trap stuff.  Instead, Natori is the perfume equivalent of an expensive but very soft, flattering set of underthings that you’d wear as much for your own pleasure as anyone else’s.   Amusingly enough, I figured out while writing this post that (duh) Natori is a lingerie company, and judging by the photos online, the fragrance meshes with the brand perfectly.

Natori’s notes are aldehydes, rose, plum, ylang, peony, jasmine, patchouli, amber and musk.  I have to say, I get very little in the way of aldehydes, even up front where you expect them.  Instead it’s got a broad, sweeping profile with a little of the (dare I say it?  I don’t want to scare anyone off) almost candied sweetness of Poison.  Must be the plum.  The rest of it is as seamless a surface as a lacquered box, with the florals and amber presenting as a rich, creamy, slightly spicy sweetness rather than individual flowers.  The patchouli on my skin is very clean, and there is just enough musk to keep things sensual rather than blatantly sexy.  It wouldn’t be my first choice for office wear, but it wouldn’t be ridiculous either.

Please don’t run away screaming – Natori doesn’t smell anything like Poison, really, and it doesn’t smell like Annick Goutal Passion either, which I blogged on recently, but I’d drop Natori in to the same slot in my perfume wardrobe as Passion.  Natori is unabashedly pretty without being girly.  It goes through a middle phase where it’s a tiny bit gourmand, which makes it feel more “now,” but mostly it seems timeless (neither “current” nor dated) in the same way that Passion seems timeless to me.

I am a person on whom scents last, and Natori was going strong eight hours later on my skin.  I could still smell it on my inner arm, if I looked for it, a full 48 hours later, although at no time did I regret my generous application.  And remember, this is in August heat.  So the worn-out-your-welcome factor on this one seems to be surprisingly low for a scent that wears as richly as Natori does.  Back to my lingerie comparison, it’s so well constructed that no individual parts begin to emerge and chafe over time.

I didn’t whip out my credit card on the spot for this – for one thing, I hate paying retail – but I’m thinking about it.  I’d certainly wear it if a bottle fell into my lap.  And let’s talk about that bottle – I am not a big bottle nut and I can’t think of a bottle recently I’ve coveted more.  My only complaint is that the hole in the middle is – practically enough – translucent, so you can see the liquid inside.  (I think either the juice and/or the window is tinted pale purple.)  In photos it looks to me like it’s a hole in the bottle, like the thing’s donut-shaped, and I personally would have preferred that.  What do you all think?

Natori is, I believe, an EDP.  I sniffed it at Saks and was told it is an exclusive there, at least for the time being.

Lisa Hoffman is the wife of Dustin Hoffman and has apparently been whipping up some skin care on the side, along with some perfumes.  I had no idea.  But I did get some samples recently, and two of the fragrances were up for Fifi Awards last year.   Again, I had no idea.  I mean, I’m sure I saw them, and then just thought, well, nobody is talking about them.

She takes a different approach to the scents. They are oils in roll-on bottles, and they go just at the pulse points, but there is a different variation of the scent for morning, daytime, evening and bedtime.   Well, okay.  The entire set I got to try is Japanese Agarwood, which was one of the nominees for a Fifi Award, along with Madagascar Orchid.  I’m fairly enchanted with the Japanese Agarwood. It’s pretty simple and direct with notes of Italian bergamot, spiced ginger accord and warm amber.  There are very definitely different angles at the scent, depending on which of the four you try.  My preference is the morning or daytime.  They are fresher and very airy. The evening tends to be more woody, but I still like it very much.  I wasn’t as crazy about the bedtime one, not sure why. It just seemed soapier or something. It is intended to be soothing, so maybe that’s it.

Madagascar Orchid has notes of jasmine, lily, ylang dew and pink peony. This one doesn’t work so much for me. I’m not sure which variation I got in the sample, but it was just way too soapy and didn’t work on me, though I suspect it will work for other people.

Tuscan Fig has notes of amber, woods, musk, French jasmine, honeysuckle, osmanthus, madagascar vanilla bean, madagascar gardenia, tahitian tiare and tuscan fig.  This one is most definitely a gourmand, hitting pretty squarely on the vanilla and fig notes, though the florals do find their way through.  As it’s been on a while, it settles in a really soft area still between the vanilla and the fig.  It’s a pretty great gourmand, and I would be interested in smelling all the variations of this one.  The sample doesn’t say which one I have, but it’s a pretty easy to wear gourmand scent.  Rich enough to give you a lushness, but not overpowering, just a soft, lovely gourmand.

They also have French Clary Sage and  Tunisian Neroli available as scents. I did a quick sniff of both, and they are nice scents, but pretty straightforward as what they are, and I don’t really have anything else to say except I did like them, and they’re pretty much what they say they are.  If you like those notes, you would like these perfume oils in those scents.

The price point isn’t ridiculous. You get four perfume oils in a cute little pouch for $95.  I’m not sure exactly the size of the bottles, but I think each is about 5 mls maybe?  Refills for the bottles are $60.  It’s certainly an interesting angle on perfumery, and I’m interested to see what they do with it. In the meantime, I’m really happy with my Japanese Agarwood, that is just a lovely, floating, easy to wear scent.

They’ve been nice enough to extend a 15% discount to readers if you use the code PERFUMEPOSSE at checkout.

Ladies and gents, I have a happy confession to make.   I just got my perfume mojo back.

For the past few weeks, I was worried (I can only admit this now that I am safe.)  Nothing was doing it for me.  I wasn’t that jacked for any new scents, or compelled by the old ones.  I kept reminding myself it’s the summer, we all have our lulls, our dysfunctions, blah blah blah.  But it was … freaking me out a little.

Who would ever have guessed that a single shopping trip could break the spell?  Yes, it’s true – I was cured by a visit to our local Saks, which is such a ghost town in August that the remaining salespeople have been reduced to trying to shill each other.  And there, my friends, I discovered not one, not two, but three new things to be excited about!  Today I’m posting on the first – Issey Miyake’s A Scent.

The way some of you feel about my love for Kenzo (ie, wth?)  is the way I feel about Issey Miyake, which translated into English means “watery grave.”  The thing that scares me most about Issey is when we go to our watery grave, we get there via some hideous fresh/marine/aquatic note (maybe with some melon), and y’all know how I feel about aquatics.  I’d almost rather spray myself with urine (which I hear is sterile… whoops, you aren’t reading this at breakfast, are you?)  Yes, I know — at one point L’Eau D’Issey was groundbreaking and fresh and new.  Well, guess what, folks?  Once upon a time,  Hammer pants were groundbreaking too.  And I love that video, but I never want to see those stupid pants again, and here’s a shout-out to all the designers currently trying to resurrect them, along with jumpsuits:  I will drive a stake through your heart, do you hear me?!??  Stop it NOW.  I am not playing around.

Anyhoo, desperately reeling myself back to the point of this review, my expectations for a scent (that is how it’s written on the bottle, and hey, won’t that name suck in ye olde Google searches?) – uh, my expectations were less than zero, but the poor ladies at Saks had nobody to play with and they were nice, and it was air conditioned, so I sniffed the new Miyake on a card, expecting… well, nothing.  If I was lucky.   (Melony aquatic ozone if I wasn’t lucky.)

Instead, you’re getting this post, because wow, how freaking great is that?!?  Notes for A Scent are hyacinth, verbena, galbanum, jasmine.

Let’s be clear: I wouldn’t wear this if you gave it to me.  It’s a riot, and it is very much not my sort of thing.  It’s a big green green green (did I mention green?) sour floral that in terms of initial aggressiveness on my skin reads somewhere between Shrek and the plant in Little Shop of horrors.  It’s Vent Vert with a shiv, updated somewhat for modern times.  If you took Vent Vert and sent it out clubbing with Cristalle, and they got sloppy drunk and split a pack of Marlboro Reds at the bar and then staggered home, A Scent might be their love child.  It’s got that goes-with-cigarettes smell that Cristalle and a lot of the Estees have, and I don’t mean that as a criticism, either.

I am still trying to wrap my mind around this coming from Issey Miyake.  I can’t imagine walk-of-shame is what they were going for, as I think this is supposed to be all about the crystal airy freshness of a mountain high on liquid clarity or whatever marketing fluff they’re spinning, but there you have it.   If you like galbanum and/or hyacinth and/or Cristalle/Vent Vert makes you feel a little dirty in a good way … check it out.  The jasmine only comes into play well into the drydown on my skin, and while the entire thing becomes more palatable to me at that point, I think it would start to lose its appeal for you galbanum freaks.  Five-hour update:  okay, the fun’s pretty much front-loaded, after five hours it’s just sweet  jasmine and verbena, reminds me a little of Jo Malone White Jasmine Mint.  But the first part!  The first part is great fun.  If you’re into that sort of thing.

I am obliged to link to Grain de Musc’s review of A Scent, because our reviews are so similar in some parts it’s funny and also because she makes some great additional parallels with the new Estee Jasmine White Moss (Denyse adds oakmoss to the list of notes.)  I have to quote this part of her review because it really resonated with me: “ I can’t exactly figure out why the Lauder inspired me to grumble while I’m feeling quite happy about the Miyaké: they clearly have the same lineage. After all, I bear a lot more of a grudge with Issey Miyaké who’s been poisoning my airspace with Calone for over 15 years.”

Also:  I am such a dope, I just noticed two days ago that Basenotes had announced their awards, which is sorta embarrassing because I’m over there all the time reading reviews, etc.   So, congratulations to Robin and the gang at Now Smell This for taking the Gold, and thanks to everyone on here for voting for us — squeeee, we took the Silver!!!! — and also congrats to Octavian at 1000 Fragrances for the Bronze.  I promise never to discuss spraying myself with urine again and I’ll try not to gross anyone out in comments for … what … the next seven hours?  There’s some restraint.  Lee and Louise I can’t take any responsibility for.  Or Carter.  Or Musette.  Or the rest of you smutmuffins.

When we bought this house over five years ago, there were a number of things to, erm, sort – structural, functional and aesthetic. It hadn’t been loved, and its neglect told in the stained and sagging ceilings, the loose floorboards, the squalor of the basement kitchen (now long gone), the patches of weedy grass in the blank canvas of the rear garden interrupted by exposed earth and heaps of Weimaraner turd, the filthy carpets, and so on. The ceilings, whilst still not perfect, are now presentable. The floorboard are tight, man. The kitchen is now a thing of unfussy beauty. The rear garden is turd free and full of plants (new plans for that this autumn), and the carpets – top quality wool no less, are clean. However, I’ve always wanted to replace them and we’ve still yet to get round to it – budget and other priorities. A 200 year old terraced house with four floors always has a list of pressing things to be done… And not all of them get done. But those carpets are still somewhere on the list.

And the reason? Moths. When we moved in, we inherited something (something? Ha!) of an infestation. Every carpeted room had loose patches of pile, and as the first few days passed, we discovered more and more of them. And the small male monsters resting during the day on walls and ceilings. Hundreds of them.

We’re cleared most of the infestation, but it’s been a long battle where pest controllers have failed, and internet bought remedies didn’t do what they said on the tin. What did work – persistence. Moving furniture every time we vacuumed. Lifting carpets and vacuuming under them. Strips of moth killer paper forming random floor patterns in all the relevant rooms. And lavender and cedarwood oil, dissolved in vodka, sprayed liberally on every woollen surface.

We still get one or two appearing on a weekly basis, and might well have to live with that, unless until we finally lift or replace the carpets. They never invaded the wardrobe, and so no holey sweaters, no pockmarked jackets, no coats half digested by tiny caterpillars. And the house always smells goooood.

So, in thinking about what to write this week, and having just killed a moth as it dithered across the bedroom, I was drawn to the fact that what insects find repulsive, we often love. And how, in scent, a touch of the repulsive can be a GOOD THING. Musette commented the other day – hilariously and wonderfully – how she had to change perfumes for a visit to the ER to give off a ‘don’t you go messing with me’ message. Now Musette is never repulsive, of that I can be sure, but here she seemed to be using perfume as repeller more than attracter, and though the message may be conveyed through social association rather than the inherent qualities of the scent itself, that power of perfume to repulse is impressive, no?

I think in their review of Lutens’ Chypre Rouge, Turin/Sanchez stated something along the lines of how it was made of elements that were repulsive in nature, and how these combined – at least in this instance – to make themselves repulsive in perfume too. And they didn’t mean that as a good thing. Now, I’ve always found the aforementioned non-Chypre quite-Rouge, to be a quite harmless, pretty thing, dusted with melancholy like the memories of eating favourite childhood candy. Not repulsive at all.

But I can see the repulsion that some of y’all feel for Borneo 1834. After all, patchouli, like cedar and lavender, is a moth and bug repelllent, and I indeed add a few drops of high grade oil to my moth spray in the colder months. And that perfume also has camphor at the start. And yeah, the cocoa/patchouli combo can smell a little parmesanny/vomitty if you sniff it from the wrong angle.

But you know, in spite of because of these repulsive facets, I love Borneo 1834. Sniffing it, and wearing it, whenever, however. I didn’t at first, and it’s one of those ‘fumes that took me a couple of years to grow to love, but now it burns with an intensity that can’t diminish, even as I know, oh boy, this stuff pretty well stinks.

So tell me, what repulsive perfumes (and smells, if you want to be less specific) do you love, and why? And I’ll rustle up a batch of samples for one lucky commenter – to include both lovely and repulsive, familiar and strange. I’ll send em next week. And there’ll be no moths included. I now have plenty of sample sprays (thanks L!) so I can at last deliver on my promises.

Moth image by Ellie Curtis. She has an Etsy shop.

After the last scent from Parfums Delrae, an orgy of melon, Emotionelle, I was not incredibly excited to try out their newest scent introduced this year, Mythique.   Inspired by Diane de Poitiers, the Duchess of Valentinois and mistress of Henri II of France, Mythique has notes of Florentine iris and flowers found in the gardens of Chemonceau, the Loire Valley castle given to her by Henri II.   Can I just say that if a man wanted to give me a chateau, I’d be on board for that mistress bit. It also features notes of mandarin, bergamot, ivy, peony, jasmine, sandalwood, patchouli and ambrette.

So far I believe just Les Senteurs and First in Fragrance have this scent.  I’m still waiting on my bottle from les Senteurs to be shipped, they were out of stock on it when I was there in July.

Several people have reviewed this already positively, and I just want to add to the admiring chorus. This is a slightly fruity, but not syrupy, iris scent, almost slathered onto your skin like butter, with the same sensuous feel to it. Created by Yann Vasnier (Divine perfumer) and not Michael Roudnitska, it has a whole different, lighter feel than the other Delraes.   Not light like Ellena’s  barely-there creations, but light like bordering on myth.  We spent time in the Loire Valley last year, crawling through chateaus. We didn’t make it through Chemonceau, but the notes in this absolutely feel like those charming places from another world, like history wisps lifting up from your skin, inviting your mind into another time/place.  This is one gorgeous iris scent.  That’s saying a lot for me because iris is one of my favorites, and it takes a lot to put one in my Top Five, but this is one that should be there.

Les Senteurs was nice enough to send a couple of larger samples to me while waiting on the bottle to show up, so we’ll do a giveaway to two commenters today.  Okay, Top Five Iris Scents, what are yours?

Mine:  Serge Lutens Iris Silver Mist, Fath Iris Gris (I know, not fair, you can’t get it anymore), Parfums Delrae Mythique, Odori Iris, and… yikes!!!  TDC Bois d’Iris or L’artisan Iris Pallida?  But Guerlain’s Apres l’Ondee really should go in here, even though it’s not strictly an iris scent. What to do, what to do.  Well, that’s my list.

I do have to mention that I’m very studiously trying to ignore the pleasantly howling Roja Dove No. 4 on my left arm.

Getting ready for a party recently, I put on an old tried-but-true and realized I’d never given it much attention on the blog.  So here’s my brief, hot-weather kids-underfoot paean to Annick Goutal Passion, and the AG brand in general.

For some perfumistas, Annick Goutal isn’t niche enough.  Pick an argument – they sell it at Nordstrom; it’s too pretty; it’s not sold in $900 casks and available only on alternate Tuesdays at the general store near the airstrip on Rarotonga.  I’d counter-argue that any perfumer with Eau du Fier, Sables and Vetiver in its repertoire is plenty strange enough to qualify.  I also happen to agree with Grain de Musc’s intelligent division of the AG line into various family members, with Passion being very much in the “mama” camp.

Passion has notes of tuberose, jasmine, ylang-ylang, vanilla, patchouli and oakmoss. The fragrance was created in 1983, on the early end of the AG spectrum, and (probably like everything else) seems to have been subtly reformulated over the years – I used to remember less vanilla.

Passion is a heady, Harlequin-romantic white floral that is very much not in my personal style, which is why my continued fondness for it confuses me.  It’s not quite Fracas (what is?), but I wouldn’t want to find myself trapped in the theatre next to a woman wearing too much of it.  There is something faintly lemon-candied about it at the opening that makes me think of PdNs like Maharanih; at the same time it smells very, well, Goutal.  The hazy velvet of oakmoss is apparent from the start, grounding it while keeping it from being overly sweet.

If I were to assign temperatures to my perfume – and hey, it’s my blog, so here I go with my crazy theory – Passion is a warm scent.  Its tuberose does not have the sex-bomb aloofness of Fracas, or the chilly hauteur of Carnal Flower. There is a casual sexiness about it; it’s the sort of scent that should be sprayed on before a date, with the hope (expectation?) that someone else will be helping you out of your pretty sundress later that evening.

In terms of technical merit I’d be forced to choose either Fracas or Carnal Flower as examples of why I am “into” perfume – the creative side, if you will.  If, on the other hand, I wanted the men near me to lean in close, I’d choose Passion.  Granted, people like what they like; maybe you are aroused by the smell of gunpowder, or mint.  We’ve all seen the studies that say men dig the smell of bacon, or cookies.  In spite of the name, Passion is stealth-sexy.  If I wear Organza Indecence to a cocktail party, women look at me with suspicion.  Its vanillic man-candy vibe makes it clear that I’m toying with their drunken husbands.  Passion simply smells good; it’s the sort of scent that other women ask me what I’m wearing, while inducing cheerful flirtations from men.

My bottle is older and (knock wood) hasn’t turned, which AGs sometimes do.  I have read online that the new formulation of Hadrien is wretched – apparently it’s been IFRA’d into something that smells like Lemon Pledge.   I wonder whether the other Goutal eaux with citrus have been damaged.  I can’t bear to think about it.

Do you have a favorite Annick Goutal?  Hey, has anyone seen Mandragore Pourpre in stores yet?  It says August release… I love the original and I think the notes for this one sound great.  (via Fragrantica: bergamot, mint, star anise, amber, rosemary, geranium, pepper, patchouli, myrhh, incense and heliotrope.)

First!  The seven winners of the Divine samples:  Goose, 2scents, bellablue, chasa, Fiordiligi, ScentRed and smy.  Just click on Contact Us over on the left and send me your address and remind me what I’m sending you. Thanks to everyone for playing and also for the great Costa Rica ideas.  BTW, my birthday isn’t until December, but I’m just planning early and also yearning to run way to Mexico for a week of yoga and healthy food, but I think I need to do that like – Right.Now!  Srsly, a week of yoga, eating right, no phones, knocking around old Mayan ruins, sleeping almost on the ocean in a luxury thatched roof hut, reading, did I say sleeping?  Yes, I’m definitely going to run away from home soon.

Penahligon released four new fragrances in July, their anthology series, based on perfumes they used to make.

Night Scented Stock has notes of clove, heliotrope, violet, vanilla, musk and tonka bean, and this is one smooth scent.  All the notes listed are all right up front, clove and heliotrope taking a front seat on a backdrop of musk and tonka bean.  I love this scent, it’s blended beautifully, rich and spicy.

Extract of Limes is just what it says it is – all limes, with some lemon and neroli.  If you are looking for a great, tart citrus, this is the one. I could bathe in this during summer, it’s really refreshing and zesty that actually lasts.

Gardenia has notes of tuberose, jasmine, gardenia, ylang-ylang, spice and vanilla. It’s a nicely done gardenia, but I’m just not doing backflips over it as something really new or different from other gardenia scents, many that I like a lot more. But it’s a good gardenia with some spicy notes, it feels very southern.

Eau de Verveine, the description says “grassy aromatic, with citrus and woods. The scent of an Indian Summer, shimmering heat haze, soft metallics, crumbled herbs, spices, musk and vanilla.”  This is crisp perfection. Every person that I’ve been around when they smelled it really loved it.  It’s a great grassy green scent, but has a nice, rich, rounded drydown.

Another scent that I never see get any attention, and I don’t know what the EDT is like, but Louise and I split a bottle of Miller Harris Citron Citron parfum when we were in London. My reason – it’s the first citrus scent that didn’t fade on me after like 2 minutes. Though I now have to add Extract of Limes from above to that list, that sucker stays put too.

When I popped by Sephora last week to check out their new fall nail colors (see post yesterday), I ran into KenzoAmour Florale, which I am pretty sure was a spring release but has just shown up in our local stores.   I can’t resist pasting in the Sephora online blurbage for this: “In Asia, the light is written in flowers that whisper their solar freshness onto your skin. This scent’s gently dazzling impression begins with a luminous, airy top. The essence reveals its luminous, floral heart and comes to completion with a clear, sensitive base. The hours pass by gracefully, given away by changing light, enticing you to fall in love.”

Perhaps I’m becoming a bitter hag prematurely, but does that mean anything to anyone reading this?   I recognize the words as written in English, and yet.  The whole thing makes me tilt my head to one side in bafflement, like my dog when he’s watching the television.   My six-year-old could write something more edifying.

I am something of a Kenzo fangirl.  KenzoAmour is probably my favorite, with Flower Oriental, Flower (Le Parfum) and Indian Holi not far behind.  There is nothing out there quite like KenzoAmour when I need comfort on a miserable winter day.  If it is ever discontinued, I will mourn its passing.  The KenzoAmour LP was interesting, but what it gained in benzoin-ambery yumminess it lost in luminous transparency, and it never replaced the regular in my affections.  Also, I know that, for those who can work with the weight of Kenzo, scents like Amour and Oriental are surprisingly tenacious.

Notes for Florale are neroli, grapefruit, blackcurrant, cardamom, frangipani, rosebud, gardenia, white musk, cedarwood.  The original KenzoAmour is built around woods, incense, and rice steam.  So, you might take a guess that the Florale flanker doesn’t have much in common with the original beyond the bottle (and more about that bottle in a bit.)  In this case, you’d be correct – Florale is, as its name implies, a floral.  It is sweet without being sweeeeet – certainly by the standards of much of what lurks on the Sephora shelves, it is relatively restrained.  The fruit and citrus is around only briefly, although the cardamom adds a welcome, nuanced spiciness.   The florals read as an indistinct, pale haze rather than as individual accent notes.  As it dries down it gets a bit muskier and woodier, and despite the list of notes I don’t find the fragrance particularly “feminine.”  The musk is a little sour on me.  Florale is a light skin scent after a couple of hours.  I found it a disappointment, although I’m having trouble deciding precisely why.   It’s not like I find Kenzo scents (collectively) provocative or awe-inspiring, and I’m not saying they’re genius.  But for what they are, they are often delicious little things.  This one, not so much.  It’s the sort of scent that is just good enough to remind me that I could be wearing something better, but not comforting or warm or X enough to justify its floral-musky existence.

Online photos like the one at top really don’t do the KenzoAmour Florale bottle justice.  It’s clear glass at the top and bottom, while the center portion appears etched on the interior, with the clearness slowly fading into the etched (frosted?) portion, which looks like milk glass.  Unlike the Amour parfum gold bottle, which looked  kind of cheesy (in my opinion), like it had been spray-painted in a craft shop, the varied glass of Florale works beautifully with the clean, organic lines of the bottle.  Assuming you find that iconic bottle attractive in the first place — and you’re forgiven if you don’t — rendered in a heavy, frosted glass it is eye-candy in a refined, less-is-more way.

Trying to figure out how I felt about Florale, I retried Kenzo Flower (technically, I think: FlowerByKenzo) for the umpteenth time.  I appreciate the irony of my long-standing dislike for Flower, which must surely be Kenzo’s best known and best selling scent.  Its popularity remains inexplicable to me.  I can’t say that I liked it this time, either, but repeat exposure means that I dislike it less, and I definitely prefer it to Florale.  Part of it is smell dissonance; the first 20 minutes of Flower on my skin is almost pure baby powder, and baby powder to me doesn’t mean pampering – it means babies, and babies are pretty much nothing but crying and work, no matter how much you love them.  It’s like the people who smell eugenol (cloves) in fragrance and can’t think of anything but toothache and miserable trips to the dentist.  Our smell memories are so individuated – on vacation in Maine, we were giving all the kids baby aspirin for their sunburn one day, and my sister-in-law mentioned how much she hates the smell of baby aspirin.  To her, the smell is unhappy because it is associated with being sick as a child and needing medicine.  I have the same association but in my mind it’s a happy one – baby aspirin is the smell of my mother taking care of me when I was sick.  In other words, the smell of baby aspirin is the smell of being lovingly tended to.

The drydown of Flower has really grown on me, though –once the violet and rose blow off I’m left with the funky, resin-y kick of opoponax, musk and hawthorne, along with the luminous glow of hedione, and what’s not to love about that?  I wonder if I keep trying it whether I’ll find myself wanting a bottle in a year or two.

I went by Sephora to check out their new SOPI nail polish colors, particularly the forest-green Dark Room I was lusting after, and … meh.  Don’t bother.  It’s streaky in application, oddly dull on the nail  and, unfortunately, pretty much a fade to black with the necessary two coats.  Total fail.  I know there are a bunch of new greens either out or coming out, I’ll have to get that list from my pal Louise who knows about my dark-green fetish…

In the Shadows is also much darker in person than this online swatch – your standard dried-blood vampy, nice finish, looks good but nothing you need if you already own five shades just like it.  If you’re a vampy fan, you’re probably already covered.  An aside: I can’t own too many blues, greens, reds, grays or random fugly colors, but give me three or five vampies and I seem to lose interest in any more.

To me the standout was Under My Trench Coat, which they describe as “light grey khaki with gold shimmer” and again their photo’s off – it’s a much more subdued micro-shimmer on the nail, I’d say a semi-matte — on the nail you have to stare to see the shimmer.  This falls squarely in the jolie laide camp (subcategory: mushroom) for those of you who share my passion for quirky colors.  Darker than Run With It!, less purple than Metro Chic, and lighter (and warmer) than Jacques, this is a dove-grey khaki neutral with a gorgeous two-coat finish.  A winner.

Finally, I’ve just started playing in their dirty pinks, gray-salmons and mauves, all jolie laide shades that are a decidedly acquired taste and IMO some of the trickiest colors to wear.   Here’s a link to their color swatches, scroll down and check out the section of swatches starting with Nonfat Soy Half Caff on down to It’s Somewhere In My Purse if you’re not clear what I’m talking about.   The key with these colors is they have to be just funky enough not to be mistaken for the lame-o Revlon Dusty Desert Rose I wore with my nylon taffeta bridesmaid dress and crimped hair in 1986.   I ended up falling for the bruise-like pink-purple On Stage (shown above), which I put on because it looked ugly in the bottle (huh, and you wonder how I end up picking my fragrances out).   I thought it would be a total bust, but somehow the deep slightly pink-y gray purple looked interesting instead of heedious.  Call Your Mother is an attractive, slightly pinker alternative to Metro Chic.  All these colors made me look forward to fall.

Anything new on the horizon you’re looking forward to?  Oh, also — np fanatics, which I assume you are if you read this far — did you see All Lacquered Up’s polish collaboration with Barielle?  Yummmm!!   Here are links to Part 1 and Part 2.  If you scroll down you can see them on the nail.  I’ve been very pleased with my Barielles in the past, and I can’t wait to try at least half of these.  I thought it was fascinating to see which colors a polish junkie would come up with in a collaboration like this.

Two weeks ago, I posted a picture of a post-spaghetti western, pre-Dirty Harry Clint Eastwood for an essay in which I compared the allure of foody/gourmand fragrances to a “fatal attraction”. The reason I chose Clint instead of Glenn Close, the notorious bunny-boiler from the 80s classic Fatal Attraction, was because I think Clint’s ill-fated encounters with Jessica Walter in Play Misty For Me are far more terrifying than Michael Douglas’ trysts with Ms. Close. However, Jessica Walter doesn’t harm any small defenseless animals with her butcher knife; just an unsuspecting housekeeper and a well-meaning police detective.

This week, I’ve fallen even deeper down the retro rabbit hole by digging up another “moldy oldie”: the song, “Lola”, by The Kinks. I’m not going to compare a ditty written about an encounter with a transvestite to a new fragrance, but ever since I heard about Marc Jacobs’ newest addition to his eponymous fragrance collection, there’s been an earworm of “Lola” wrapped around my brain, and images of Lady Gaga burned onto my retinas.  Why I’ve chosen to associate the two is beyond my comprehension; especially since I am completely unfamiliar with any Lady Gaga material, save for her outrageous, drag-queenly attire.

There seems to be a number of retro redux trends gripping the world right now; I’ve been inundated with vintage images of Michael Jackson and The Jackson 5 for reasons I’m sure I don’t need to explain, as well as cheesy late night commercials for the “BumpIts” hair accessory, which promises to deliver a beehive hairdo that would rival Priscilla Presley’s, circa 1967. Along comes Jacobs’ newest scent, packaged in a bottle that can best be described as an homage to an Edible Arrangements bouquet, or Formica and vinyl furniture from the 1960s.

I’ve made no secret of my love for Jacobs’ Daisy fragrance; despite it being an innocuous, ubiquitous fruity floral. My love for it is augmented by the adorable bottle it comes in. I don’t often fall for scent packaging, but Daisy sits atop my list of best bottles, keeping company with Fifi Chachnil, the sweeping couture gown silhouette of Givenchy Organza Indecence (the 100 ml size), and many of the glorious Bond No. 9 bottles. I’ve compared the vinyl Daisy daisies to a kitchen table and chairs my parents had: a round white Formica topped table and vinyl chairs in a shade of green that could only be vinyl. In other words, don’t bother looking for it in nature because it doesn’t exist. Now we have Lola, circa now, and she certainly doesn’t smell like “cherry cola”.

I’m bringing up the rear in terms of a technical review of Lola. If you’re interested in the nuts and bolts, surf on over to Now Smell This or Bois de Jasmin. Robin and Victoria have done their usual bang-up jobs reporting on the who, what, where and why.

To me, Lola is a cheeky, playful little scent that pushes all the right olfactory buttons. It starts out all cute and fruity, becomes girlishly floral, and winds down with a nice bit of vanilla and musk. That description can be used for any number of scents currently on the market, and it makes me think of how I recoiled in disgust from Jessica Simpson’s Fancy the first time smelled it. Lola encompasses all the elements that make you want to avoid department store fragrance counters at all costs; but the one thing it isn’t is a doppelgänger of all those fruit/flower/vanilla/musk mash-ups. It is exceedingly well done. And the bottle is spectacular. My Visa card floated out of my wallet as if on angels wings…right into the hands of the Bloomingdales SA; $85.00 for the 100 ml bottle. How could I not?

Thanks for hanging with me through my retro rewind mode. I recently read an essay written by one of my former professors about the concert Paul McCartney gave last month at the New York Mets’ new stadium, CitiField. It inspired me, and got me thinking about the British Invasion bands and how at the age of 42, I’ve managed to see quite a few of these musicians in concert. I never did see the Beatles together, but I did see McCartney at Giants Stadium back in the early 90s, and George Harrison as part of an ensemble in a benefit concert at Madison Square Garden in the mid 80s. I’ve seen Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton, Rod Stewart, The Kinks, The Who and the Rolling Stones in concert. I’ve also seen Elton John on every single American tour he’s done since 1982. And I still have all the ticket stubs.

Once again, it’s your turn: Tell me what your favorite cheesy late night commercials are. And, which musicians/bands have you seen multiple times? Finally, to keep this on topic: Your favorite fragrance bottles.

Divine’s newest fragrance is Eau Divine.  I’m a big fan of all the Divine fragrances, and they’ve always struck me as being underrated. I wish they sold the bigger, cheaper bottles in the U.S.  that they have on their website, I think they would get a lot more of a following.

Notes are green mandarin, star anise, rose hip, ginger, nutmeg, orange flower, violet, cardamom, white amber, hot musk and labdanum.

I’m never sure why sometimes notes have descriptives added, like “hot musk.”  Is that as opposed to cold musk?  Or Tepid Musk?  Just wondering.

This opens crisp and green with all sorts of interesting notes floating around with some tartness and spiciness layered in as it dries. there’s a little bitter note almost which blends pretty seeamlessly with the anise.  The florals don’t play a huge role in this perfume except as the  quieted string section, except the violet which seems to trill around all the other notes without feeling out of place. violet and spice and incense?  Well, yeah, that works, who knew?  The longer drydown reveals more emphasis on the incense with little blips of bitter and spice, but I wouldn’t call it an incense perfume at all, it just supplies a depth for the other notes to melt into. All notes seem to blend more the longer it’s on so I can’t detect them individually as easily, it’s just this lovely, sometimes off- kilter symphony that so works.  This is just another beautifully done Divine perfume.

Divine was kind enough to send several samples for us to do a giveaway on.  So to be entered in the drawing for one of the 7 generous samples, just drop a comment in!

Have we talked about my 50th birthday?  It’s coming up, but later in the year. I’ve pretty much decided to go to Costa Rica for 2-3 weeks as my present to myself in January, after my birthday.  Any of you that have been there, if you have places I should stay, etc., let me know!  I plan to do Arenal and probably a week by Jaco or Tamarindo (sp?).  Definitely want to do the cloud forest as well.  Other things that are can’t-miss, hotels that are perfection without killing my budget?