And We’re Back!

Okay, class.   It’s been in the high 90s this week, although lovely today.  Welcome to summer!  So nice to be back online!  There are still a few glitches, please bear with us.

1) My kids are home for the summer.  Also I’m working on a real estate deal (I have this annoying thing called a ‘job.’)  Both of these are interfering with my blogging.  Comment response may be slow.  Do not adjust your screen.

2) Has anyone else noticed how boooooring our spam has gotten?  It’s all innocuous stuff like (direct quote): “I bookmarked this site a while ago because of the interesting content and I have never been unsatisfied. Continue the outstanding work.”  Click on the link and it gets you a whey-protein drink site.  It almost makes me nostalgic for the spam we used to get – the spam that made me put on my special eyeball-bleaching goggles and hip-waders before I wandered into the filter to retrieve someone’s legit comment.   That spam contained absolutely nothing fit to describe here and made me wonder whether anyone on the planet was still interested in an old-fashioned, garden-variety horizontal bop, if you catch my drift.  Anyhow, that’s gone, and I wonder why?

3) So: perfume.  In my July issue of Allure there’s an interview with Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez called “The Sexiest Fragrances (Ever)” in which they name five: Chinatown, Insolence EDP, Bulgari Black, 31 Rue Cambon, and …. Secretions Magnifiques.

Okay … sort of.  I get it.  Black’s kinky, 31RC has that ice-princess thing going on (but do guys find that hot in a perfume?  I wear 31RC for me, frankly).  But … Insolence EDP?  I really like Insolence, but I bet a lot of guys wouldn’t; too cloying and powdery.  Also, what’s sexy about Chinatown, exactly?  Chinatown does not whisper, come and get it.  Wouldn’t your average Joe (as opposed to our Posse commenter Joe, who’s anything but average) think you smelled, you know … kinda like a dude?  Also, can’t you just see the looks on the faces of the Allure readers when their unsniffed purchases of SM show up in the mail from Bergdorf and they pop them open and spritz?  I wish I was there to watch, although not standing so close as to get hit with any of the atomizer mist.

Here, I’ll take the first 5 things that pop into my head, truth:  Narciso Rodriguez; your favorite white musk (pick one, like Coty Wild Musk); Dior Addict (smells like candy porn; for bad girls only); Organza Indecence (or substitute your favorite vanilla, like L’Artisan Vanilia or Guerlain SDV, because I only want one vanilla category); and Angel.  If that last one makes you scream, pick your favorite kink-animalic.  (Mine: Jicky parfum.)  Animalics reel in the most interesting men, even if you end up throwing them back.  What do you think is sexy?  What do you think of LT/TS’s list?

4) Perfume In Public:  I went to have Hecate allergy-tested, the one where they prick your skin with various allergens.  When I made the appointment I was told specifically: no perfume, scented body care products, etc. in our office. Okay, fine, they’re an allergy office.  Also FYI in general I try to be scent-free on days I’m visiting any sort of medical building.  So early that morning I took a shower, and I was careful to wear just-washed clothes.  My first glitch was: I realized my shirt smelled faintly of Liquid Tide, because I got tired recently of my craptastic uber-green unscented detergent that leaves all my clothes smelling sour.  Also, Liquid Tide is great for removing hideous perfume scrubbers.   They didn’t tell me I had to have unscented laundry detergent, which got me thinking: where could a doctor’s office reasonably expect to draw the line?

In the elevator up to the allergy practice I was standing between two men, one in a suit and the other a construction dude.   Hard-Hat Man was … smelling all freshly sweaty.  And I was thinking about sweat, and how much I like that smell.   Fresh sweat is sexy.  The body odor emanating from someone whose last bath is a distant memory is not pleasant, but a freshly sweaty guy?  Delicious.  One interesting exception is guys at the gym, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s because they don’t wash their clothes after spin class every time?  Do their gym bags make their clothes smell rank?  The lockers?  I don’t know.  I’m married to a man who perspires so copiously that squash matches have been stopped so he can mop up the floor with a towel before somebody slips and breaks a leg.  To the best of my knowledge he has never worn deodorant in his life.  The man simply doesn’t stink.  If it weren’t so great, it would be annoying.

Anyway, the other guy, Mister Suit, was wearing a heavy-handed woody-fresh gigolo scent that made me cringe.  Call me old-fashioned, but I would so much rather smell a discreet man-smell, or some sweat, on a guy.  Or, something ridiculously femme, like a whiff of tuberose.

The allergists’ office is a big group practice, and the man I sat down next to was clearly a smoker.  I could smell it.  Or, he’d been in an enclosed space (maybe a car?) with someone who smokes.  And that smell to me is every bit as noxious as any body spray.  But what are the office workers going to do?  Again, where can you draw that line?  Excuse me, sir, you smell like the Marlboro Man. We’ll have to reschedule your appointment.

So Hecate had her skin test, they draw on your arm with marker and then jab it with a bunch of different things.  I’ve never done this before.  We sat there for maybe five minutes watching her arm puff up, and the PA came back in, looked at her arm, and said wow.  And went to get the doctor.  It was upsetting, sitting there watching Hecate’s spindly little arm blow up and realizing, no wonder she’s climbing out of her skin all the time.  No wonder she’s so sensitive and twitchy and scratchy and sniffly and the rest of it.  That kid probably feels like hell 10 months out of the year, and she says nothing.  The last time we went to the ENT again, and he told me she has a sinus infection and both her ears are full of fluid, he kept looking at me like, What. Is. Wrong. With. You?   But I swear, that kid never says a word.  Because to her, that’s normal.

When I got home and got Hecate anti-histamined and settled and fed and playing with the visiting cousins (yay!), I opened my box from Tigerflag.  Did anyone else get their box?  I think I ordered samples of all the attars and a larger bottle of the majmua.  When I opened the box, that smell …. that smell of everything together rose up and embraced me.  Just the smell of everything in the package, all of it tightly sealed.  Because you can’t really seal in smells like those, can you?  I put on a teeny tiny dab of the majmua, undiluted.  It comes in this bottle that gives you a single drop.  And a drop of the mitti attar, the one that is essence of dirt.  And then I curled up on the bedspread with my nose to my wrist and listened to the dog-day cicadas, which have come out in the last few days, and breathed.

image: Edna Mode.  She just felt right.