BTW:

DO NOT PANIC, POSSE! March and Patty have not left us (leaving me to torture you in perpetuity).  I’m just filling in here and there until they get their own stuff back on track.  School, work, LIFE.  You know.  That stuff can really cut into blog-time!

They’ll be back shortly.  In the meantime, I could really use the fabled Posse Input here:

This is just naasty.

I am embarrassed to be writing this but:

I am going to spend this glorious late-summer morning CLEANING OUT MY MAKEUP DRAWERS!

Note that I said ‘drawers’.  Not one.  Not three.  Prolly more like 5 of those extruded-plastic drawer thingies you get at Home Depot, plus the 3 drawers on my side of the vanity PLUS the extra 5 drawer thingy in the linen closet….this is just ridiculous.

It’s not my fault, btw.  I Blame the Lady R.  She is my favorite SA in the Universe because, besides being a lovely person, she is also supremely generous with samples.  For decades I bought Everything Beauty  from her and came away with enough goodies to choke a Percheron, not that I would do that, as I love Percherons as you all know.  When I was flush it was  a fun little greedy-perk: crappy day?  buy a lipstick, come away with a 3-lb bag of stuff.  Gift With Purchase?  Don’t get me started.

Then, when I moved to the country, got broke all of a sudden and could barely buy dog food, she kept me sane by just giving me stuff – I would stagger in, she would look at my pathetic, haggard face, ragged nails and ratty hair and before I knew it, she’s pressing a nicely tissued-up little bag o’ goodness into my hand and telling me to get the hell back  to Cowtown and start making money.  Never mind that I already had enough cosmetics to start my own little boutique – there’s just something about  walking out with a little bag o’ stuff that made me think I just might survive.  Then I got  a little bit moneyfied again and the buy/get started anew.

At this point though, I’m way past diminishing returns.  I could live to be 90 and never get through all this stuff.  So I’m donating a lot of unused   stuff and pitching as much used stuff as I can bear to part with.

But here’s the question:  at what point does ‘unopened/unused’ become potentially icky and  ‘used’ become ‘unusable’?  I don’t want to donate old unused stuff and have some poor soul’s eyelids fall off.  And I need some serious intervention if I’m going to pitch the used – I don’t think I’m much of a  hoarder, except when it comes to cosmetics/treatment, which is kinda stupid – and probably unsafe.  The SA’s answer is always suspect – after all, it’s their job to sell you new stuff – and if my dermatologist  had his way I would throw it all out and use Dial soap and Vaseline or something.  So I throw the questions to you, my dearests:   Take loose powder, for instance.  I have jars of Prescriptives Loose powder that are in shaker apps – since they don’t touch the skin (I shake it onto a brush), shouldn’t they be okay?  I am assuming that there is a ‘use-by’ date for pressed powder, and I am sure those are now petri dishes of ookaliciousness.  But when does the petri dish overflow?  What if you only use something (not mascara – even I am not that crazy) once or twice, then throw it in a drawer and forget about it for a year?  I’m a little more careful with liquid foundation – it’s always sponge apped and I tend to not let foundation languish ….. you know I’m lying…..okay!!!!  I’m lying through my regularly changed toothbrush-using teeth! I have some Really Old Foundation.  But it still smells okay – I figure there’s enough preservatives in this stuff to outlast the next Ice Age.  But why on earth would I keep the L’Oreal I bought in Dallas on a sales trip NINE YEARS AGO ?  I was late for a client dinner, had no foundation, drugstore on the way, you know the drill and…well..this stuff makes me look like one of the Recently Exhumed.  Thank Floyd the restaurant was dimly lit.  I lugged that crap through DFW  and ORD and have packed and hauled  it through 3 moves!!!  A $7 bottle of ugly foundation.

What is wrong with me?

Am I really as gross as I think I sound here?  In my defense I do wash my brushes regularly, I sharpen my eye and lip liners religiously and I do not use mascara beyond a month or two. I got into gel eyeliners and have taken the precaution of using disposable applicators (and never double-dipping - she says, crossing her fingers and hoping like heck she’s right).   But a lipstick?  C’mon.  I remember using one of my mom’s old lipsticks waaaay after the fact and my lips are still on my face.   I don’t share lippies without a slice and some alcohol – I love y’all but it’s a crazy world out there.  So I think I’m as petri-free as I can get without straying into Howard Hughes territory… But I don’t need 24 of them.  okay, 28.   O-kay!  31! Sheesh.  Ridiculous, I know, but most of them were GWP.   The one thing I know I’ll have little trouble with is eyeshadow.  I’m getting way too old for a lot of the colors I’ve hoarded, plus wearing glasses and bright eyeshadow just looks weird to me.  And I need an eye infection like I need…an eye infection.   So that’s an easy one.  10 pots of ‘vintage’ MUF, down the chute!  Aiiiiyyy!

Do you guys have a standard ‘dump date’ for your cosmetics?  Is your ‘use by’ date different for treatment?   What about used v. unused?  Do you still love me, even though I am possibly the ickiest person on the Posse?

photo:  Fungus petri dish.  Some rights reserved  (this is NOT my makeup – I swear!!!  really.)

stuff:  alllll mine.  ick.

Chantecaille, maker of the seemingly discontinued, but maybe back (at a higher price point and for less fragrance?) Frangipane, has three new scents up for Fall 2010 – Kalimantan, Petales and Vetyver.

They are showing as a pre-order at Neiman-Marcus, but no ship date yet. I know that Sylvie Chantecaille is due at some event at Bergdorf in late September, and I’m going to assume that will be the launch of the three new fragrances.

Chantecaille isn’t know for its ground-breaking fragrances, but the ones they have created have been nice, pretty, even lovely in some cases. So my expectations are set for that  fragrance genre (!pretty!) smelling these three samples, which I got as a free gift by ordering something or another Chantecaille.  I think I picked out a pretty bronze eyeliner.

Vetyver has notes of citron, pepper, nutmeg, bergamot, vetiver, musk and sandalwood.  It does have vetiver in it, and you can tell, which I really was worried about, afraid they would dust so much !pretty! around it that you couldn’t smell the vetiver. It’s a soft vetiver, just lightly spiced with pepper, but the pepper persists through the entire drydown, for a very nice effect. It’s really very nice and no hint of frilly florals or tropicals anywhere around it.  If you like vetiver to have some punch, it’s probably not going to be for you – there’s no roughness in it, it doesn’t growl when you put it on.  Men or women could wear this, it’s not feminine.  If you’ve ever had trouble wearing vetiver, thinking it’s too earthy or swarthy, Chantecaille’s version may work for you.

Petales has notes of gardenia, balsam, jasmine, tuberose, cedar, ambergris and sandalwood. I’m definitely expecting feminine, and they’re not going to disappoint me here either.  It’s much more floral than woodsy, but it’s not as lush as the other fragrances they had before, the tiare, wisteria and frangipane, which were way lush to the point of, well, I needed them to not last as long as they did.  Petales skews to the white floral tropical area, but does not face plant in the gardenia like some of these things do. I’m surprised at Chantecaille’s restraint on this.  It’s well done and pretty much what you would expect from a restrained, feminine cosmetics line, but with more interest and nuance than the first round of pretty feminine fragrances they did.  It’s lighter, more delicate, which is sometimes a very hard thing to do with this list of notes. I’d wear this a lot for when I want a white floral, but I don’t want to put on my full Blanche DuBois.

Kalimantan is the one whose notes had me the most interested, but also the one that I knew had the biggest shot of making me sigh and be sad that it didn’t live up to its billing.  Still, I’ve tried to keep  my expectations low – well, for the reason above, it’s a feminine cosmetics line making a fragrance based on Borneo.  Okay, the notes, and I’ll skip over the marketing materials – Incense , Cistus Labdanum, Indonesian patchouli,  Thyme, Rosemary, Bergamot, Vanilla, Styrax, Agarwood, Cedar, Sandalwood.

Okay, before I uncork the sample, I’m projecting this to be a feminine oriental vaguely incensed laced with too much vanilla.  Actual sampling says:  hey, they put some incense and patchouli in this!  and not too much vanilla.  Nicely spiced with the thyme and rosemary, which brings the heavier labdanum and styrax back from the edge of oily indulgence, reigns in some of the more virulent aspects of patchouli, and it has some nice wood floating around in it.  Can’t find the vanilla – at least not in any way that smells gourmand, which is what I expected, if at all – it’s just all dry, there’s no soppy wetness from an of the notes. There’s a really lovely balance between the incense and patchouli.   It never veers over too far into a patchouli pit, but it keeps a distinctive patchouli feel.  It also doesn’t go careening over the cliff into chanting and om’ing on the incense side either, but has enough incense that it feels very meditative.  I have to hand it to Chantecaille, and maybe it was because my expectations were so low, this one far exceeded what I expected.  It’s beautifully done and not what I thought they’d deliver – and I mean that in a good way.  Take away any preconceived notions you have about the Chantecaille name on it, it’s a great fragrance.

$175 for 2.5 ounces. Hey, didn’t they use to sell their scents for $90 for 100 mls?  Charge more, less fragrance, but all three of these are better fragrances than the first round, so we’ve made some kind of tradeoff here.  I won’t even comment on whether the price uptick is worth it or not.  Anyone else smelled these, and did you smell the first round of Chantecaille fragrances?  Surprised?  Disappointed? I think I have enough in my sample vials to do one or two sample sets of the three to a commenter.

Patty

By March

Monday is the first day of the rest of my life – school is back in session, woo-hoo!  This afternoon (Sunday) we had the twins’ eighth birthday party.  It was 12 – 14 kids from the neighborhood, forced to stay outdoors in their bathing suits and armed with large squirtguns on a hot, sunny day.  I think it was a resounding success, from the perspective that there were no broken bones or internal injuries that I know of, and nobody was sobbing hysterically when his/her parent arrived.  I admit things were a little more Lord of the Flies than was strictly necessary, but it was still fun.  We did it old school – there were two homemade cakes, one decorated with gummi worms (Hecate) and one with gummi sharks (Buckethead) sinking themselves into the icing, and plenty of lemonade and ice cream.  Oh, and nobody threw up.  That’s good, right?

In the last week we’ve been to the Agricultural Fair, where all the 4-H kids who are left in this area come to show their livestock, and to HersheyPark.  The ag fair is so amazing, some of you can laugh away but it’s a world I know nothing about.  They have all their prize-winning pies and hens and etc.  It’s the only way my kids get to see anything like farm animals.  The smells are interesting and diverse.   The goat shed is really … goat-y, way more ripe than sheep or pigs.  The chicken shack – sorry, poultry barn – doesn’t smell so great either.  I petted an angora rabbit, and a Brahmin cow-thing the size of a minivan, and there were pig races and barbeque and fried chicken and kegs of Bud and homemade slaw, courtesy of the Baptist church ladies.

HersheyPark was Diva and Enigma, just for the day.  I’ve been going to HersheyPark since I was a little kid, and taking my own kids there is special to me, riding those rides and eating nasty things like giant slushees and fries and cotton candy and funnel cakes and – this year – a deep-fried Reese’s peanut butter cup, because it was on the menu at the funnel cake place (they dip it in funnel cake batter) and I sort of had to order it, didn’t I?  Taking the cheesy fake “factory” tour at the beginning, just outside the entrance, which we love.  And we rode and swung and screamed like crazy and laughed and mocked each other and somewhere in there for a few hours I got to feel that free feeling – the way I remember.  What it felt like to be a kid, that kind of joyful place where it’s all about the next five minutes.  Somebody did barf on one of the rides, but it wasn’t us.  HersheyPark smells like hot pavement and chlorine and fried food and pond water and sunscreen and cocoa hulls.

Unsurprisingly, there has been very little perfume this week, although I did enjoy reading everyone’s arguments and counter-arguments on my “perfume as art” post last Wednesday, particularly the back-and-forth about whether perfume has a “function” and whether/how that’s different than food.   I do agree that perfume types tend to be sensualists in other areas of their lives, maybe food or music.   And I appreciated the thoughtful comments about the kinds of information you’re interested in regarding perfume, and what’s less interesting or useful.  In the words of Quinncreative, “And if I find a good story behind the perfume, I’ll certainly try it, but not just because the advertisement assures me it’s made from gnome tears stirred by a broomstraw once owned by Serge Lutens.”  LOL, Quinn.  I dunno, I might order up a sample pronto if Serge promised gnome tears (a scenario that is no more improbable or obscure than a few actual SL press releases.)

And now … well, I’m kind of beat.  I’m washing clothes from a camping trip, this room smells powerfully of bonfire in the best way.  I don’t know if it’s that smell, or the fact that the heat broke a little, or maybe that the kids are heading to school, but I’ve had this cheerful feeling in my heart that fall is just around the corner.

image: that’s our fried Reese’s peanut-butter cup.  It looked sort of a like a soft-shell crab on the plate, which made it extra scary to bite into.

March

So, I was in London on Monday and stopped by my favourite department store. I was daft enough to forget to smell the new l’Artisan vetiver, but I managed to get my schnozz to hover over much of the new stuff I’d been missing out on.

And… you know… I’ve nothing to report. My occasional Fridays are so low on actual perfume commentary I’m surprised Patty and March haven’t given me the heave-ho. Most of the new left me unengaged or non-plussed. The Costume National Homme was… nice. I’ll try a bit harder. It’s a Ropion creation that charts a journey through the spice route to a sweet amber drydown. It’s truly very pleasant. Though the drydown lacks interest and it’s a little too insistently sweet ‘n’ spicy for me.

So, I got home and looked at my shelves of perfumes and divided them into those that are worn with frequency, those that are in the ‘have to keep’ camp, and those that are surplus to requirements. And the news is, I’m heading to around 30. I feel like I’ve experienced some kind of trascendentally scented colonic treatment.

Meanwhile, the spectacle obsession continues to grow, but that’s altogether another story.

As I’m rambling, I might as well tell you about the scents of my holiday – umbrella pines, iodine, chlorine, mint and lime, dog crap, dried male urine, wafts of restaurant garbage, various eaux de cologne and lemon refreshers, sun tan cream, stale drains, hot concrete, rosemary, lavender, oleander (I didn’t know this had perfume), datura, sweat, cool nights, bright light, hot skin, tuna, olive oil (grass-like), coffee, coconut pastries.

And here’s Portugal’s recessionary evidence. Even in the country’s equivalent of Orange County, $10 million homes half-built and abandoned to graffiti, largely of the misshapen penis variety. The graffiti, not the homes. Though there was a heartfelt message to a missing lover. Perhaps those misshapen penises were saying something profound that I didn’t quite follow.

Lee

There is definitely a Romance.Gone.Bad vibe to the By Kilians. After their foray into ouds this last year and an aphrodisiac (if you like your aphrodisiacs of the spice variety and not oyster’ish), they’ve returned to the “love” theme with Love and Tears.

Calice Becker is the creator of this one, and it is beautifully done. Notes of Bergamot, petitgrain, cypress, jasmine, orange blossom, ylang-ylang and cistus make up the perfume. It’s not over in the very indolic range of jasmine, but more in the greenish tropical jasmine range. Makes sense if you want your love with pristine tears instead of dirty, rutting goat sex. I’m more in favor of the latter, but I wouldn’t turn down a bottle of Love and Tears or even a more pure love full of happy tears. Not that I’d want to live with it regularly, but it would be worth a visit.  Brief.  The perfume I could live with a lot longer, it really is lovely.

So if you want jasmine to be a little more green with a light indolic touch (no fecal for you, thanks!) and more tropical, you should definitely look into Love and Tears.

Denyse has reviewed this too.  It’s due out late September at Luckyscent, but they included a sample with an order, so I think you can sample earlier than the release date.

Which for you, nice, happy love or something more smutty?

Patty