If you are a girl, and you are not on top of your game just now – if you have, in fact, misplaced some of the game pieces, and the rules, and maybe even the damn box everything came in – if your game is off, then maybe what you need are some naughty boots.  (If you are a boy — no offense is intended with this post, please forgive me.  Of course, maybe you need some naughty boots too?)

If your game is off and you need some naughty boots, what you need is a friend – not just any standard-issue friend, but a friend like Louise.  (Perhaps we need a tag on the Posse called It’s Louise’s Fault.)  Your friend will suggest meeting you for coffee at the local mall, and, oh, btw, doll – Nordstrom is having their sale! Let’s go look at shoes and purses just for fun.  And you will see those naughty boots there on the sale rack, you will hear their siren call, you will resist being elbowed aside by these sale-crazed women who come up to your shoulder, even though you are not especially tall yourself – and you will ask the salesperson standing there to fetch you the other boot.

Which you are just doing for fun.  Are you going to buy these boots?  Oh, no!  No, you are not.  These boots, they do not fit into your protective suburban camouflage.  These boots are made for walking, but not walking the dog in the woods, or the kids to soccer.  These boots, which are in black patent leather, are fierce.  They have a round toe and a curved heel and come up above the ankle and they are not conventionally sexy (no point, no stiletto heel) and yet, the hotness, it is totally there.  But no.  They are too much money, even on sale.  They are … impractical.  Also, they will undoubtedly be uncomfortable, that is higher than your usual heel.  Let’s just vamp in front of the mirror.

Oh!  Hey, there!   Hello!  Bonjour, you sexy thing!   Those naughty boots, they are surprisingly comfortable!  This man here, he is explaining that this designer makes a comfortable shoe, and that the reason you are able to stand upright and not hobble is that there is an internal platform.  And it’s true – you are not hobbling.  You are maybe even strutting your stuff a little with your jeans rolled up.  And not only do these naughty boots look fine with the rolled-up jeans, but they are crying out for dark tights and a black pencil skirt and some sort of severe, starched white shirt – a sexy-librarian thing.  Also maybe a riding crop.  You realize that the man over there (whom you assume is with that woman, his wife?) is watching you intently as you work those boots while she tries on those dull tweed mid-heels.  He is not half bad looking; that is a very nice suit.  You wonder how he’d feel about the sexy-librarian look.  And possibly the riding crop.  He’d definitely be into it.  You smile to yourself.  Maybe you need to get out more.

And so you buy those boots.  You plunk down that MasterCard and you buy them.  Those boots are too hot.  You have a party coming up, a staid social affair full of conservative women wearing enough holiday sequin-ry to supply Dancing With The Stars for the next decade.  They all look like oversized Christopher Radko Christmas ornaments.  You are thinking, mmmm, sexy librarian, with the naughty boots and the pencil skirt and your late mother-in-law’s pearls, and (maybe) some red lipstick.  Yes?  You will be there with your own husband, and yet one or two of those other men, older and slightly intoxicated, will follow you like dogs.  Well-dressed, polite alpha dogs.  Your own husband is sensible (or maybe kinky) enough to find this enjoyable.

And what fragrance will you wear to the party, my love, what will you wear?  Perhaps it will be the Thirteenth Hour all night long.

I have tried Cartier’s new scent, XIII – La Treizià¨me Heure, and while words like masterpiece sound stupid coming out of my mouth, because I am an amateur perfume-lovin’ nobody, I am sorely tempted.  La Treizià¨me Heure (notes of leather, maté, birch, narcissus, bergamot, patchouli and vanilla) has given me something I don’t have and always want – a new way to look at leather.  This is not the birch-tar smoky, heavy, dark leather.  This is not the soft, sweet glove-leather either.  This is not the inside of a purse, with a dash of face-powder.  The list of notes doesn’t even seem like it would work for me – too cold, too bitter, too austere.  But there is nothing austere about it.  If it had a color, it would be a dark, caressing brown, not black.  It doesn’t play the Jolie-Madame game of a floral in flagrante delicto with the leather.  The flower here is narcissus, leathery and hay-like green and gold.   I keep reapplying, over and over, trying to decide which part is better – the odd, smoky-lapsang top that is not too smoky or butch or strange, not campfire or church (although I love those as well.)  Or is that drydown the part I love, that oily/buttery narcissus that reminds me a bit of the L’Artisan Fleur d’Narcisse that I was too cheap to buy?  The vanilla is a mere whisper; I couldn’t even have identified it as such without the cheat sheet.  Maybe that barnyard drydown is the part I love most.  Even without the naughty boots it would give me a hell of a lift.

Here’s a link to Grain de Musc’s informative post on this scent, with commentary by Mathilde Laurent.

photo: top and left, my new Chie Mihara boots, although the photo doesn’t do them justice.  Here’s an online photo so you can see the height and the shape of the heel, although mine are all black.

March

Some years ago, after a slow recovery from a debilitating double lung whammy of pneumonia and pleurisy, I was shopping in Liberty for perfume. Not for myself; I wanted to find something just so for a friend of mine who loved, and loves, figgy smells.

Brief aside: my rediscovery of the sense of smell actually dates to that incidence of pneumonia. Lying in hospital, nebuliser attached 24 hours a day, I was cut off from the world. When I could breathe the air again, I noticed wonders. Even in the grotesque. I’d loved smell as a young man – encapsulated in my obsession for Christian Dior’s Fahrenheit, but now it seemed launched into new heights of sensory wonderment.I couldn’t get enough. But I think I’ve told this story before.

Back to Liberty. I’d only discovered niche through Basenotes and other online worlds a few months before this shopping trip and, like so many folk, had started in the world of l’Artisan Parfumeur. Premier Figuier was probably right for my friend, but I wanted to try other things first so I’d moved through Diptyque, Marc Jacob for men and something by Carthusia too.

The unassuming sales assistant, after holding off for some time (a very pleasing Liberty trait) asked me what I was looking for. And I told her of the figgy hunt. She suggested, in her lilting Caribbean accent, that perhaps I could try something different, and led me to the Serge Lutens display, my first real contact with those pared down, elegantly unstable export bottles. She picked up Arabie and told me it contained dried fig.

I’d never smelled anything like it. It may well have contained dried fig but like the fabled horn (I speak not of March’s Bois de Matin, people), a cornucopia of other things poured out with the first seductive spray. Sweet and dry, fruity and rich, leathery and sharp, it seemed to hold opulent worlds inside its gamboge liquid.  And these worlds were then, and now, ineffable to me. It was edible and toxic and somehow impossible. Suddenly, perfume had invented its own language inside my head and it would be some time before I would make all the cognitive shifts to fit in this new terrain (and would spend A LOT of money while I did).

And the seduction was so intense that I forgot all about my firend until I snaffled up some l’Artisan for her the following week. It just didn’t compare the opulent beast I’d bought for myself.

I’ve been away with work for the past four days and the only perfume that accompanied me was Arabie. It wasn’t suitable, but nonetheless it’s all I wanted. Like all real first loves, it doesn’t quit me.

Your first real love in perfume? And where now, in your affections, does it sit?

Lee

So when I am fixated on the new to the extent I can’t see anything else, I cast my eyes to the old – the perfumes that are full of memory and the power that only memory can bring.

Memory lives in another place, the room at the top of the stairs that has had all painful sharp edges removed, the rotten parts of the body of the memory have beenscoured away by nature and  time,  the wounds are just thin white scars.  All that is left is the purified essence of a place/time/person/relationship -  the complexity fuzzed up to be a gorgeous faded tapestry on the wall that you can’t see clearly anymore.  The memory is soft, shabbbily beautiful, and you ignore the fraying because it isn’t important now because that memory doesn’t live in the present, it is safely in the past.

Cinnabar in the EDT/EDP was the first perfume I picked solely on my own.  My first grown-up girl perfume was Estee Lauder Private Collection, but I picked it only because my Aunt Nelda wore it, and she was so chic and smart, I trust her taste impicitly.  Never mind that I was probably 10-20 years too young to be wearing it.  I was 19.  But one day I sniffed Cinnabar at the perfume counter, probably around holiday time.  Amber, spice and incense. This was like Christmas Day come to visit, and it settled me in front of the fire with my cocoa and my flannel nightgown.

I wore this for years off and on, mostly in the winter when the heavy orientals are so magical.  Then one day, probably the same day I got rid of all my clothes with the 2-inch thick shoulder pads (well, except that one red dress with the cinched in waist that I can’t bear to part with) I stopped wearing it, moved on to Chloe or KL or something sunnier.  The years of Cinnabar took me through my first brief marriage to a a man that was wild, destructive, lying, cheating, funny, gorgeous, smoking hot and in possession of the most beautiful pair of blue eyes I’ve ever stared into.  That’s a memory I never thought I would be able to look at without doubling over in pain.  Not because I loved him that much, but because he came close to destroying me, and I loved him a little bit less than that much.

It took me years to smell Cinnabar, probably just resniffed it 3 years or so ago.  Cinnabar in the EDT is nice, but it wasn’t until I smelled the perfume that I got the distilled memory of Cinnabar and the bleached, beautiful memory carcass of that time with that man that was so wrong, but made me laugh as none have since.  Cinnabar in parfum smooths out the edges, lets me drink in the richness and comfort of feeling so warm and alive but with none of the pain.  It lives in a beautiful gold room with red carpets at the top of the stairs, and I like to go up there androck from time to time by the fire.

So why in the world doesn’t Estee Lauder bring this back permanently in parfum? Everyone has that perfume that brings back a chaotic or magical time in your life that is filled with intense memories, don’t they?

Patty

The nice thing about being barely able to single-task is that I stop multi-tasking.  I don’t run through Trader Joe’s like my ass is on fire.  I’m not stuffing my overflowing cart of groceries into my canvas bags in the checkout line as if I were a contestant on a game show.  Instead I watch and listen as the male clerks flirt in French with the beautiful girl who works there.  If I were them I’d flirt with her too.  She ends almost every sentence with insha’Allah.  God willing.

Then it’s off to the post office.  I don’t like my perfume to be … too easy.  Why buy my bottle here when I can order it up on eBay and realize after the fact that it’s shipping from Latvia?  Although hey, shout-out to our Latvian readers – I got it in less than two weeks.  I’ve waited longer for packages from the UK.  And Texas.  I missed the mailman that day, so I had to go to the main post office and pick it up, which I love as much as getting my teeth filled.  Only on this day there is no line, and I stand and wait while they argue, laughing, with a customer about whether someone did something (ran a race?) in less than nine seconds.  I think the consensus was 9.6.6.   And then they emerge from the back with my package and it’s Serge Lutens Cà¨dre, and if you are a perfume fan you can get into any box in your car, because you have your keys, yes?  I do not have Louise’s skill – she can gnaw through a box with her teeth, while driving with her knees – although I think she keeps an exacto knife in her car now…I have decided that Cà¨dre was created just for me, although yes, I will share with you.  There is plenty to go around.   I sit in the car, nose pressed to my inner arm, and moan so loudly that the man in the car parked next to me looks over, startled.  I think he’d like to have some of what I’m having, if you catch my drift.  That first part, it’s so hot and cold, somewhere between Carnal Flower and Poison, that death-by-florist-chilled-tuberose of CF melded with the honeyed richness of Poison (although completely without the cherry-cough-syrup note in Poison that in my opinion is the part people are most likely to object to).  The drydown, oh my.  Smooooooooth.

I read every single message on my FAIL post on Monday.  And thank all of you.  I’m forcing myself not to sit here too long these days, just long enough for my grow light to cheer me up.  Otherwise I end up doing things like read the archived Savage Love columns at The Stranger and when I look up it’s five hours later.  Not good.  So I set the timer and get things done in ten-minute increments, because I’ve discovered I can do almost anything if I only have to keep it up for ten minutes.   My increments wore on joyfully with the application of Cartier’s XII, which I chose mostly because it’s the one I remember reading the raves about.  It’s L´Heure Mystérieuse, notes of jasmine, patchouli, elemi gum, coriander, incense, frankincense and juniper.  How do you think that worked out on me, eh?  Correct.  It was the sort of smell that caused me to swivel my head around so my nose could follow the rest of the atomized scent in the air.  I find the development interesting; there’s a ton of patchouli up front, almost pushing me to my patch line, before it dries down into a more intellectual, less smutty variation on Bal a Versailles – I can’t pick the jasmine out, and the base, she slays, she glides along, so smooth, this seamless confection of strange – sesame candies, the woodpile, and smoky incense from the sweater you put away last year?  Damn.  Where are the rest of those things…

March

There should be a warning at the top of this. New Guerlainperfume  post, insert old New Guerlain perfume post.

Let’s do something happy before we move on to the mundane. The winners of the Carter L’Heure sample sets are: Klara and Bursztyn. Just click the Contact Us over on the left, send me your mailing address and remind me what I’m sending you, and I’ll get them off to you!

Also, for those that asked about that way cool clock in last week’s post – I don’t think it exists anywhere, it looks like a photoshop, but if someone would get to work building one, I know I”d buy one too.

Okay, Boise Torride is the latest in Guerlain’s Elixirs Charnels collection and has notes of bergamot, tangerine, pink pepper, marshmallow harmony, orange blossom, jasmine, patchouli, white musk and cedar.  Some of those notes sounded a little fussy to me, so I was happy enough to find it fairly woody on the open, and it was pretty much like most of the new Guerlains.  Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m a huge fan of the La Matiere series, I find myself wearing them a lot, but I have noticed that they tend to be closing on interchangeable.  They are beautiful, easy to wear, but the more that come ou -, and I put the Elixirs Charnels in the same category, but far closer to interchangeable because they seemed to pick up after the La Matieres, but without their character – the more forgettable the individual ones are getting.

The names, and I’m not going back and revisiting March’s wish for Bois du Matin, are certainly interesting. Hot wood?  Is my barbaric French translation close?  I’ll give it the wood, but I don’t get the hot part of it.  In the long drydown, it gets a little muddy to my nose. That doesn’t make it icky, I just can’t get a good feel for what it’s supposed to be. Woody marshmallow?  Can we see how something soft like marshmallow shouldn’t be in a perfume called Boise Torride?  Of course we can.  At the bottom, there’s a note that reads slightly bitter to me that will keep this one from being something I would wear.

So I like it, it’s soft floral wood, very much like other completely likable Elixirs Charnels and La Matieres, but it’s not very much different.  So for $250 for 75 mls, you probably only need to pick out one of these to take home.

Maybe I’m just on a post-VCA/Cartier/MFK bummer?  Those did much to restore my joy in new perfumes, thinking, yeah, we have done it all, but it doesn’t mean we can’t do it better.  Boise Torride is good, but it’s just not better, and I want that perfume bar to keep getting set higher. I want surprise and joy.

Hey, I know, you can’t always get what you want.

Patty