Candles are something I fill my life with. I love the flickering little flame, even though I know it adds some soot to my walls and ceilings. For a while I did the melting thingies, but I just missed having that flame. I don’t burn them as often anymore because I find so few with great throw that are burn-worthy.

Well.  On a weekend shopping expedition, I ran across Tatine Candles (www.tatinecandles.com) I got one in Forest Floor and one in Tabac.  When I opened the Tabac box, I had a hunch these candles were the real deal and might make me very happy as oodles of tobacco leaf unfurled from the box.  Put a match to it, walked away, came back into my living room (which is pretty big) 30 minutes later to the smell of the best of tobacco everywhere. Not cigarette butt tobacco, the tobacco you smell in the cigar shop in that little room.  The throw?  It was all overe the room, in every breathing space, and I’d only burned a teensy bit of the candle.

Cid I mention Forest Floor?  CB would be proud.  This is one straight from I Hate Perfumery, dank forest floor, earth, almost mushroomy, slightly decaying, but not in a bad way, just to add a loamy richness.  Again, the throw. I burned it in the bathroom for maybe 15 minutes, and it was as if I had walked into Mirkwood Forest.

Handmade from soy and beeswax, these are great candles. I’m perusing their website for more purchase.  Hemlock & green Jasmine?  Oh, noes! they don’t actually sell from their website, you do have to find a stockist. If anyone knows a stockist online that sells the entire line, would you let me know? Well, here’s a place in California that has most of them.

Do any of you get Food & Wine Magazine, and did you read the article this month about perfume and wine?  It was interesting, and covered much of what we have talked about here off and on in the past, that the two have a very common thread of notes and smells and identifying them, though it appears those immersed in wine professionally wind up wearing very little perfume, though the writer did wind up with Le Labo Neroli that she felt she could wear occasionally when working professionally in wine.  What a sad thing!  To love both and have to give up so much daily pleasure of perfume while working with wine. I am going to spritz on an extra spray or two of Nuit de Tubereuse tonight while swilling down some wine and immerse myself in the unparallelled pleasure of not having to choose either.

Patty

I’ll be honest – my brand-new decant of Nuit de Tubereuse arrived the same time as the summer heat.  It’s 94 and sunny, and I’ve done pretty much nothing but … how did Tom put it?  Drench my poitrine with NdT until my socks were wet.  I went to a much-anticipated party on Saturday night, with lots of old friends, and they know about my perfume foolishness.  You will be unsurprised to hear that I cheerfully invited them all to lean in and sniff an interesting take on a tuberose, just released in the United States!!  Reports were favorable.  Today I’m wearing it again, and if the heat holds maybe I’ll throw some on tomorrow, that or the Amaranthigh.  I’ll try to wear something new by Wednesday – the new thing sitting right here to the left of my computer, actually.

So today let’s visit another topic.  I had cause recently to root around through my fairly extensive sample/decant collection, making up my side of a swap package.  I have a lot of samples, and while I joke about my ineptitude, the samps are in fact pretty well organized, sorted into sealed plastic tubs alphabetically by house.  This means that if someone is interested in experiencing the joys of Serge Lutens, I can find those samples in one place in fairly short order.  Things are a bit more complicated with the larger atomizers that don’t fit into the tubs, but I can usually find what I’m looking for.

It seems to me that the concept of sample-swappage as we know and love it has been going on most aggressively during the same time that I developed my perfume habit – that is, over the most recent five or six years.  I’m talking about the making, collecting, trading and storing of fragrances in containers other than their original packaging, for swap or for sale, initially aided and abetted by places like MUA, Basenotes, and eBay.  Two or three years ago, I discovered that the contents of some of my older plastic atomizers had gone seriously “off” – there was speculation that the plastic itself was a problem, and I think that most of the decanters switched to glass atomizers around that time, although I have no idea if that’s why.  Glass breaks and is heavier (?) so the plastic ones made a certain amount of sense, even if they weren’t very elegant.  Anyhow, all my good stuff I re-decanted into glass atomizers quite awhile ago, although the spray mechanism itself is plastic.  While I’m babbling, let me stress that a) I store them upright when possible and b) a lot of the new, small spray ones don´t come with caps the way they used to.

So color me sad when I realized that the contents of several of my larger (8ml?) glass atomizers, which are capped and upright, seem to have mostly evaporated, along with the contents of several smaller spray atomizers (the capless ones) and even a few of my teeny vials, which are still capped tight.  I’d been nursing along a few drops of vintage Chanel 22 parfum which is now completely empty. Presumably all of this took place slowly, over a long-enough time that I didn’t discover anything amiss.

And yes, this is very sad.  But once I looked past the sad part, it got me thinking.   I’ll spare you the gag-inducing firefly-in-a-jar analogies, but let’s face it: some of this stuff, it ain’t necessarily gonna last forever, particularly if we’ve only got a few ml of it.

I went to the house of Friend X, and was astonished to discover that her custom-designed Decanting Space smelled of nothing.  I mean, there was no huge perfume off-gassing.  And she laughed and said that if it smelled, there’d be something wrong.  It would mean something was incorrectly stored.

Well, hmmm.  Most of my vintage perfumes, and much of my perfume in general, is in the empty bedroom on the north side of our house.  The room is cool and dark.  It also smells quite strongly of vintage perfume, right now with an overlay of Chamade, most likely.  But if it weren’t Chamade, it would be something else.   I suppose I could run around weeping and tearing my hair out and then go in there and – I don’t know what.  Seal all my stoppered flacons inside Saran Wrap and duct tape?  Where’s the fun in that?  If I can’t walk by my dresser and pop the teensy stoppers off my vintage, better-than-Shalimar Emeraude, or my skanktastic fingernail-sized bottle of Youth Dew Bath Oil, or my recent eBay win, a room-clearing mini of Dune in parfum, well … I don’t see the point of owning them.  I can only assume that molecule by molecule, drop by precious drop, some (most?) of those stoppered flacons and minis and carefully, lovingly prepared homemade vials and decants are evaporating, no matter how careful I am about making sure the stoppers are in and the kids aren’t playing with them.

Someone on the blog last week made a comment about hoarding the last precious few drops of a much-loved sample.  I think it was Chanel No. 5 parfum, vintage.  And several of us chimed in and said, wear it.  Go on and wear it.  Enjoy it now, just because you can.  Unless you live with another perfumista, nobody else in your house is going to appreciate those last couple of drops of Micallef Gaiac, or vintage Norell, as much as you will, right?

I have little stashes of vintage. In their own special boxes.  Small vials.  Long lost Guerlains, Lelong, Givenchy, some Weil, other things.  I think it’s time to start wearing them.

PS Thanks everyone for your feedback on contact lenses — it’s nice to read various perspectives on the daily/weekly/monthly contacts as well as other options.  I’m sure the eyedoctor will have a recommendation, but I’m always interested in the opinions of others with experience and no particular agenda regarding sales, etc.

March

1) We had a small fail yesterday, a mixup about whose turn it was to post.  No worries, everyone’s fine.  We’ll be back Monday.

2) A question for contact lens wearers. I wore contacts during the Jurassic era, when pterodactyls flew overhead and — if your lens popped out at the Skynyrd concert — you got down on the beer-soaked stadium floor and crawled around looking for it.   Times have changed, I hear.  I’m getting Diva her long-desired contacts this summer.   She’s fairly nearsighted with mild astigmatism.  I’m sure there are dozens of great choices, but does anyone have a particular brand/regimen (daily?  weekly?) or other insights regarding disposables that they’d like to share?

3) My ongoing clothing re-assessment/thoughts.  As I’ve said before, and as perfumista visitors to my Sacred Walk-In Closet may have noticed, I’m a pattern whore.  I have a magpie’s eye for color as well.  Part of it, I’m sure, is my inherent, lifelong tendency to look at clothes as “costume,” with plenty of vintage pieces.  Part of it is my skin — jewel tones look good on me.  And part of it might be that because I’m small, I feel comfortable with (or even strengthened by) eye-catching fabric patterns, assuming they’re scaled correctly, neither girlishly dainty nor too large.

For some reason, though, I’ve really been drawn to simple, more muted colors recently.  Lots of solid browns, grays, blues and the occasional tan that doesn’t make me look washed out.   Those are all harder colors for me to hit right, but there’s something about, say, a gunmetal-gray cotton shirt these days that I love, paired with jeans, a single piece of jewelry, and a cognac-colored purse or wedges.    It doesn’t make sense at all.  This is usually when I’m breaking out my tropical-print linen trousers and my tangerine sweaters.  But I’m enjoying the ride.  Are any of you in the middle of reassessments or unexpected shifts in your usual style?

March

A couple of months ago. Royal Apothic sent me two of their scents to sniff, Iris and Hydrangea.  I promptly set them to one side and figured I’d get around to them later.  Yeah, my later is a while.

But talking about cheap thrills.  Finally I opened the Iris and used the little roller ball to put it on.  You know, It’s not Iris Silver Mist at all, but it is a slightly sweet iris scent that’s light, easy to wear, and fits in perfectly with the hot days ahead. Very feminine and likable.  Hey, let’s test that hydrangea too!  Same. Slightly sweet, light, refreshing, perfect for spring and summer.

Best news – these are available in the looks like about 10-15 ml roller ball for $16 at Anthropologie. I mean, that’s not just free, but almost like they are paying you to tak it off their hands.  In the cheap thrill category, this works great.

Speaking of cheap thrills, after my dismal failure in the one-week challenge, I’ve decided to give it a longer time of financial austerity.  I’d like to move more away from the shopping satisfaction mentality into thinking much longer about purchases.  So what I’m going to do, every time I feel the urge to buy something that is not really essential, I’ll just write it down. After three months of this, I’ll go through that list and see if I want anything on it.  I have no idea if this will work better than the one week thingie, but I am feeling a little like I just spend a lot of goofy money and want to break that habit and be more mindful about expenditures – perhaps spending more on one large, thoughtful purchase than 50 small, goofy purchases.  Well, we’ll see how it all works out.  It was the ice cream maker that sorta did me in.  I love ice cream, and I’m lactose intolerant, so I barely ever eat it, but it was Meryl Streep character in that  movie “It’s Complicated” talking about her ice cream maker that had me thinking I needed one. I don’t need one, but now I have one.

If you want to join me for a week or a month or all three months, feel free!  I’ll be posting probably once a month on how it’s going.  I’m still contemplating all the rules – do I need to cancel all my eyelash extension appointments? It saves me tons in makeup since I can just put on powder eyeliner and do nothing else with my face.  Do I get to keep acupuncture and rolfing 1x a month?  The devil is making the details.

One recent purchase, though, has made me incredibly happy. With the tuberose infusion in perfumes this year, I was thinking I needed some live tuberose, so I ordered a bunch of Tuberose tubers/bulbs (???).  It took me 2-3 weeks after they go there to get them planted, but when I put them in the pots this week, I was in the front yard, and I kept thinking all those lovely, rich floral smells were my roses (I have monstrous rose bushes all over the front yard, and they are all just crazy with blooms).  And then I realized it couldn’t be just that, there was a much smuttier smell around.  The thing is, the tuberose bulb/tuber, when sniffed up close, didn’t seem to have a strong smell, but it was just permeating my front yard. Tuberose everywhere, just wafting lightly.  So it’s this strong while it’s still under the dirt in little pots, I am breathless with anticipation for when they come up and bloom. Cost for that – less than $20, a seriously cheap thrill.

What’s your favorite cheap thrill in the scent category. Doesn’t neeed to be a perfume, just something scent or that puts off scent that makes you very h appy

Patty

Separate from my sudden, shocking (to me) ardent love affair with big white florals and “beautiful” perfumes in general, we’re in a White Flower Moment in perfumery.  Tuberose, jasmine and gardenia must be the new pink pepper.   I’m loving L’Artisan’s Nuit de Tubereuse, as well as the heady florals of Amaranthine, Chloe (old school!), VC&A Gardenia Petale, Penhaligon’s Gardenia, and no doubt others I’ve forgotten.  I can’t wait for the weather to warm up so I can bust some of them out on a 93-degree day, when they’re really amazing.

So I was thrilled to finally get my hands on Histoires de Parfums Tubereuse 3 L’Animale, the one of the Histoires trio that I thought I’d like the most, based on the notes and early reviews.  From Beautycafe: “A floral and tobacco leather scent that opens with a bath of fresh kumquat and neroli and leads into a strong combination of plum, herbs and dry grasses. Blond tobacco and immortelle flower leave intense base notes that linger.”  I’d already read enough opinions elsewhere to be expecting more of a cuddly, honey-tobacco-hay comfort scent than a tuberose soliflore, and I love immortelle.   Granted, it’s not cashmere-sweater season, but I’m always ready to discover a scent I imagine would fall somewhere in the neighborhood of Amaranthine, Lolita Lempicka L and VC&A Lys Carmin in terms of comfort.

Tubereuse 3 L’Animale opens on a powerful note of … whoa, seriously?  Y’all are funnin’ me, right?  It’s an indistinct, powdery, musky, sunbaked-vintage aroma that any of us who’ve smelled a lot of vintage perfumes are familiar with.  Imagine a bottle of Habanita that sat on your Aunt Edna’s dresser next to the radiator for the last forty years.  It smells old.  It smells powdery and musty and sour; back in the day it might have been Replique or Mitsouko or Chypre or God’s Gift to All Mankind, only now it smells like you talcum-powdered the back end of an elderly, incontinent housecat.  And not in a good way, either.

Patty was actually the generous source of this sample (and isn’t she pleased right this second that she sent it to me?)  I was getting ready to email her the first time I tried it to ask if maybe she’d mislabeled some precious, nasty, ancient Guerlain that I’m now ignorantly disrespecting – Ma Entrecuisse, perhaps? – only then the immortelle showed up, so I’m sure she sent me the right thing.  It’s not really Mr. Yuck territory.  Instead I dug up (so to speak) my old friend Bill the Cat.  If you sprayed him with Annick Goutal Sables and then left him in the sun to ripen for the afternoon, he’d probably smell like this thing.  Perfume-wise the closest thing I can compare it to is that retch-inducing skank machine from Miller Harris that smells like Jane Birkin dropped her bag in the hog pen.  Only, you know, in this case with plenty of immortelle.

So.  EPIC FAIL.  But really, in its own way, completely enjoyable.  It made me laugh.  I have no idea why it’s such a trainwreck on my skin compared to everyone else’s, but hey – good news!  At least you’re not sitting here with a new lemming!  Unless you use me as a reverse indicator.  And now I can go back to enjoying my vintage Chamade.

Bill the Cat images:  Bloom County. That first one has nothing to do with this post but, having seen it, how could I resist?

March