List

I forgot I was supposed to write this week. Work getting in the way. Sheesh. Here’s a list that you can respond to if you like – some perfume related thoughts partially organised.

Current comfort scent – I’ve had a bottle of le Labo’s Patchouli 24 for oh, I dunno, a couple of years. I bought it as a signed-up Annick Menardo fanboy. Don’t get me wrong; I loved it. But I never seemed to want to wear it. Other Menardo numbers – Bulgari Black, Lolita Lempicka pour Homme, Bois d’Armenie, even Body Kouros – seemed eminently more wearable. And so my bottle languished a little, hardly shrinking in its volume. When I did wear it, it would be one tentative spray. Now, something’s happened. I can’t get enough. Seven sprays seems too little, and every day seems too infrequent. It’s the oddest comfort scent I wear, but it’s long drydown seems like a haunting from the past and I just want to bring the past back, today. Lucan Turin says it smells like a Russian lab; for me, it’s my childhood chemistry set and the warm blanket that was my life as a child.

Current  ‘eh, when will I ever wear you?’ scent – Although Patch 24 languished a little on my perfume shelves, it never gathered dust. I always wanted to sniff it. However, there are other scents I own that I feel estranged from. And sometimes that’s for a short while. Other times, it lasts and lasts. Currently in that category for me is Comme des Garcons Sequoia. Why did I ever love this vinegary rum and wood concoction? It’s interesting, fer sure, but I’ve begun to feel the acidic quality that others pick up in Bertrand Duchaufour’s scents. It ain’t there (yet? ever?) in Timbuktu, which I continue to love, but it invaded Bois d’Ombrie (a scent that I adored for a while beofre it smothered me in libraries, ash trays and pickles) and seems to be hanging round the edges of the otherwise quietly wonderful Dzongkha. Oh hell. All I know is that Sequoia reminds me more of the employees of a pickling factory having their Christmas party than it does of the majesty of redwood forests.

Current ‘must sniff’ – I’m lemmingless and remain so. I love to hear other folks enthusiasm for new scents, but even when they meet with universal acclaim (the Cartiers, Amaranthine), I tend to think ‘oh, I’ll smell that eventually,’ rather than the: MUST. SNIFF. NOW. OR. I’LL. DIE desperation of two years’ back. It’s a relief I tell you. I get my obsessive kicks elsewhere these days (don’t start me again on plants or garden planning or I’ll show you the blister scars from planting over a thousand bulbs), but Al Oudh is at the top of my ‘get round to sniffing sooner rather than later’ list. It helps that it’s a Duchaufour (pickle issues not withstanding) and follows on from a new direction in his work. I’m not a oudh lover – at least not in its western perfume formulations, but this is supposed to trail cumin and civet and castoreum, and I’m nothing if not a man who loves perfumes with that hint of fleshly corruption – a hint of sweat and butt and ooh, you are naughty!, will always stimulate my fancy. If you’ve smelled this ‘un, let’s hear your thoughts. Denyse enjoyed it a lot.

So, let’s hear your similar list, or even different categories should you so wish.