by The Usual Suspects

It’s that time of year again, when we review our Top Ten list!  Lee has other responsibilities that are going to keep him off the Posse for a little bit (he’ll be back!) so it’s me, Patty, March and Nava, giving you your 10 Scents Worth  (oh, c’mon!  you knew I couldn’t resist!).   All 4 of us are in slightly different climes -  wonder  if where we are influences our choices?  ps.  I’m the one on the right – pretend it’s a Big Black Heavy Horse. — Anita.

Anita’s Choices:  This is one of the most quietly beautiful times of the year, along the rivers in Central IL, even moreso now as we are having our first real autumn in ages.  Autumn here isn’t flashy – yes, we have some lovely maples but nothing to compare to the East.  No, what is most beautiful here is the smoky, subtle profusion of browns, yellows and fading greens and rusting orange – and that smoky purple-silver you get when the ash trees and smoke bushes start turning.  Who knew brown could be so enthralling?  Some farmers still till their fields here and the gorgeous black earth interspersed with the spikes of pale-gold corn stover, the sun glinting off the shards like palladium…..a mundane sight that has caught the breath in my throat more than once.  Because of this, perhaps, my choices are a bit more muted than you might expect:

Cuir de Lancome.  a quiet, creamy, green- honeyed leather, with a touch of vanilla that always startles me – I like it!  It’s perfect in this sunny autumn weather.  I keep wishing for a vintage golden tan melton swing coat to wear with this – but my brown Carhartt jacket will do in a pinch.

Vintage Parure – at least ‘older’ – I don’t know what constitutes vintage in this fragrance and neither of my lovely little decants are dated.  But both of them are dazzling, like the sun on that corn stover.  Rosy-plummy bergamot……and our late, lamented friend, Oakmoss.    There is an incredible yellow diamond line bracelet – I won’t bore you with the details – this fragrance is that bracelet, as are the ash trees along the banks of the Illinois River.    How could I have missed this one, back in the day?  Don’t get between me and a bottle of this.

Vintage Miss Dior edt.  Again, I have no idea how ‘vintage’ this is – but it’s absolutely perfect for this weather (I wore it while busting sod – by hand- for 3 days straight.  Kept me from killing myself).   Another chypre,with warm, bright honeyed notes – but there’s this bergamot-y/melancholy fading-’green’ note that is like those storm clouds gathering in the west, presaging the coming winter.  I could never wear this with a pink sweater.  This is coffee/olive/toffee.  In this I can imagine myself in a New Look suit…and my new, New Look figure to go with it!

March: Nothing says fall quite like … cumin.  For the record – “cumin”-y scents don’t really smell of the actual seasoning to me – sniff for yourself.  I suppose it’s the closest thing we can name, but we could just as well be calling it dried mustard, IMO.  “Cumin” in a fragrance can be a signifier for spice/edible, as it is in the current Rochas Femme, or more like actual sweat (e.g., Eau d’Hermes), and how much cumin is perceived in a scent seems to vary significantly from person to person.  Anyhoodle, now’s the time to break out the new Rochas Femme in all its sweaty glory, or L’Artisan’s wonderful cumin/coffee Navigateur, or even Uncle Serge’s Santal de Mysore if you like your perfume curried.  Over my personal cumin line:  Dinner by Bobo and Theo Fennell –  like the Renaissance Faire threw up on me — but YMMV.  I also love that cumin-y note at the start of Lutens Fleurs d’Oranger, I’ve been wearing the heck out of it the last couple of weeks (yup, finally bought a bottle, having worked through two vials and a decant.)  Then there’s Isabela Capeto, Amouage Jubilation 25, Cartier Declaration, Worth Courtesan and … oh, a million others, see Angela’s recent post on cumin and the comments for what is probably the definitive list.

Nava: To me, nothing says “right now” more than the four goofy horsemen pictured above. More about that in my next post.  The sniffers are all haywire again because life has gone all screwy. But, if they were functioning normally, I’d be wearing Donna Karan Chaos, Serge Fumerie Turque, Hermessence Ambre Narguilé, Tom Ford Tobacco Vanille and Purple Patchouli, plus the occasional spritzes of Chanel Coromandel and Cuir de Russie to keep things interesting. Speaking of interesting, tune in next week…

Patty: Fall is warm woods, incense, vanilla, leaves, velvet and baking bread. So that’s CB  Burning Leaves, Baccarat Sacre Le Larmes de Thebes (or some variation of that), Guerlain Bois d’Armenie and Spiriteuse Double Vanille, Le Labo Patchouli 24 and Vanille somenumberothanother, Hermessence Vetiver Tonka (last weeks’ discussion has me hooked on this again) and L’Artisan Bois Farine.  I do smell great in the fall.  Off in the distance, you hear my Carons warming up for winter.

For more Top Ten of Fall lists, please visit:  Bois de Jasmin, Grain de Musc, Now Smell This and Perfume-Smellin- Things.

image: Four Goofy Horsemen of Apocalypse from March’s old image files.

Well, it’s another out of time day for me, sorry!  The world just ganged up on me this week to make sure I couldn’t get everything done.

I’m in the middle of preparing for my India trip, ordering things, making arrangements for while I’m gone, plus we have a big work meeting next week I’m prepping for. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We are doing hiking in Sikkim, so I have to take all the things you wear at altitude hiking -  backpack, lightweight sleeping bag, long underwear, socks, layers, laundry soap, and on and on.  It became clear a week or so ago that one suitcase isn’t going to work.  I’m taking a big backpack and a big backpack suitcase.  I can leave one in Gangtok while we make the hiking circuit since we land back in Gangtok before we go on to Rishikesh.  I hope that works.  I’m still going to need another suitcase in Delhi for all the stuff I buy there – spices, silks, jewelery.  I may have to throw out the sleeping bag. No, can’t do that, it’s my really great one!!!

So that’s been my last week – getting my visa, ordering all my crap, and most of it is just the weight in my mind that will stay there until I have all of it in my suitcases and checked off my list.

Puzzement, though, is a serious facial cleanser for our days in Delhi. We have about three days in Delhi, and we are taking bandanas to put over our faces because the air is so foul and polluted, and you come back to your hotel with black gunk in your nostrils.  I have a regular facial cleanser, but it occurs to me that I may need something stronger that won’t strip my face. Ideas? I tend to be dry and sensitive, so I can’t go all overboard with this.  Maybe just use my normal and take some facial wipes to keep my pores clear through the day?

My iPad showed up today with its little wireless keyboard and case and, dang, it is so cute, it’s making me squeal like a girl.  If I can do the wireless tethering to either my Verizon or AT&T cell phone, whenever I can find a wireless hotspot or 3g or Edge service, I may be able to post something or e-mail or just google something so I feel closer to home. But this iPad just made a bunch of room in my suitcase. I don’t have to take my mini computer or my Kindle, it will do double duty there.

And I’m a little over two weeks away from going. How did that happen?  It seemed so far away not too long ago.

Well.  You get some idea with those couple of paragraphs about how scattered my already scattered head is.  Calming fragrances, what  ones work?  I’m thinking of that Kenzo UFO thing  or the Tan Guiducci thingie or any of the Cdg Incense series.   What calms you? Incense tends to do it for me, and I need a full dose now!

Patty

There’s a review down there.  But first  – it’s been awhile since we had one of our little Posse reindeer games, isn’t it?

Well, here’s one I’m proposing – we’re going to call it the Signature Scent Challenge.  The challenge is:  I want you to pick one fragrance – yes, that’s one fragrance – and try to wear only that fragrance and no other for a week.  You know … a signature scent.  We’ll all meet back on the blog Monday, November 8 and report in.

Now you are thinking, why, March, why?  Why would you suggest such a terrible thing?  Well, I’m curious.  At one time in my life I only wore one scent (Paris … then Poison … then Coco.)  I either put it on or I didn’t, but it was the only scent I owned.  No hand-wringing, no decisions, no “does this scent make my butt look big?” or “does it go with green?” or “can I wear this to yoga?”

Let’s all time-travel back to those simpler days, shall we?  Because I theorize that after a week, we each might have some interesting observations about a) the perfume we selected, having spent so much one-on-one time with it, and b) our relationship with perfume.

Questions we will answer then include: who among you managed to last a full week?  How did you choose your scent?  Did you find your feelings about the scent changing over the week?  Did you learn anything new about it, its behavior, or yourself?  Play along if you want to (no hard feelings if you don’t) and let’s meet back here for your results week after next. on Monday, November 8 — that should give you some time to prepare yourself mentally…

Okay, today’s post, a quickie based on a revisit – Annick Goutal Songes.

Our Top 10 of Fall post is on Friday, and Songes won’t be on there, but it could be.  I love wearing big white floral scents in the fall.  It seems counter-intuitive, I want them mostly in spring – and they really, truly bloom in humid summer, if you can stand it – but smelling them mixed in with woodsmoke, damp earth and drifts of fallen leaves is also quite lovely.

I’ve outed myself as an Annick Goutal fangirl on here before, but I never loved Songes.  I tried it several times and found it terribly off-putting, I still am not sure why.  It’s possible the formula’s changed, of course, but I don’t think that’s it.  I think I’ve changed, more open to heady white florals (Songes is certainly that) and perhaps more comfortable with the sweet/bitter duality of the scent.  Notes for Songes include frangipani, tiare flower, Sambac jasmine, frankincense, vanilla, copahu balm, ylang-ylang, vetiver, sandalwood, amber, and styrax.  My review today is of the EdP, which I find richer and more complex than the EdT.

For many people, Songes is more of a Tahitian-white-flower bouquet up top, with plenty of focus on the frangipani, although the jasmine comes into play pretty quickly.  On me, though, it’s mostly about the jasmine, and what a glorious jasmine it is, managing to be a bit jammy, green and indolic all at once.   Eventually the jasmine is joined by vanilla and sandalwood and the balsamy drydown suggested by those notes – and it has the same sort of dry, resiny jolie-laide bitterness at its heart as the oddball Vanille Exquise.

Songes manages to project an aura of expensive naturalness – it smells both sophisticated and “pure” (although I’m not suggesting it’s in any way more or less synthetic than any other fragrance.)  It’s an interesting, other-end-of-the-spectrum contrast to the smell of Donna Karan’s Pure, which manages to smell mostly and annoyingly of laundry musks.  Songes isn’t as aggressively in-your-face as, say, Montale’s Jasmin Full, although it’s a heady scent, particularly sprayed on, and a light hand might be called for depending on one’s surroundings.  I certainly wouldn’t trespass on other people’s noses by wearing this to a medical building, for instance, or the gym; the sillage on me reaches Fracas levels.

Songes manages to do for jasmine what L’Artisan’s Nuit de Tubereuse does for tuberose – displays it in a setting of other notes that are carefully selected and placed to allow for maximum jewel-like effect.  It literally made my jaw drop; how had I misjudged this so badly?  While Songes is more straightforwardly jasmine than NdT is tuberose, it’s still a complex thing designed to make me reconsider entirely what it is I look for in jasmine.  It also serves as a happy reminder that trying – and retrying – and retrying again a scent that I strongly disliked is often rewarding in the long term.  Another sign you know you’re a perfumista, right?

sample: private source

March

Also known as the not-used-often-enough “Let Patty buy it so you don’t have to” post.

When we were at Barney’s in New York, sticking our noses deep in the Malle candles –

Wait, can I just say that as much as I love the Santal Cardamome candle, it’s almost too rich for me.  Not quite, I can burn it for a while, but I have to shut it down after like 20 minutes. around the  I hate saying that because it’s never happened before.  The sandalwood is just jumping out of the candle, with the cardamom chasing it hard around the room.  I understand from what I’ve read, these are the only two ingredients in the candle since Malle and Ropion were playing around with it and decided they went great together and needed nothing else.  Yes, I guess so.  One amps the other, and it is wicked potent.

Back to Barney’s in NYC with our noses stuck in candles.  I spied this cute little red box with a round circle on the front.  “Whats that?” I asked, figuring it carried a big price tag, and that it was probably some sort if scent blower thing for the times you didn’t want to burn candles. Well, yessirreebobka, that’s exactly what it was.  It’s like $290′ish. I couldn’t bear to look at my receipt, but over $200, less than $300, I think. If it’s more, I don’t want to know, and you do have to have the Malle boutique in Paris or NYC send it to you, Barney’s doesn’t seem to have them on hand.. But you do get the scent of your choice in there, and I picked the Gardenia, the scent that’s taken over my mind lately.  They do have a nonmechanical diffuser for some lesser amount that you just put the scent in and let it diffuse out in the nonjacked-up way.  I picked the active red box instead of the passive thingie.  The scent for the passive and active diffuser comes in the 30% solution or the 50%.  I am  a card-carrying charter member of the Not Screwing Around club, so I got the 50%, it’s not that much more, like $10.

You get the scent in the bottle, unscrew it, put on the wicking thing, shove it up in the red box, plug it in and turn it on.  Out wafts gentle pillows of scent in about the perfect amount.  Not so much that you’re choking on gardenia, but enough that you are smelling it delicately perfuming your room.  You can plug it in and charge it, then unplug it so you can put it anywhere in your house or just keep moving it around.  Well, yes, that is what I do, why do you ask?

I can’t make any comment on whether it’s worth it to you, but it is worth it to me. I’ve been a home scent hoyden for a couple of decades and spent a fortune on candles, incense, diffusers and all sorts of other gizmos to perfume my life.  I want the rooms I spend so much time in to smell the way I want.  I have linen spray for my sheets, the Le Labo Rose 31 laundry soap for my linens.  It is worth it to me because I can use this when I don’t want to leave a candle burning or I want to use the same device to put different scents in different rooms.  I did get another scent for the red box, the Rubrum Lily, which is truly the most gorgeous spiced lily scent in the world.  The red box is plastic, but that nontacky Malle plastic, so you can blend it in, and it doesn’t look any sillier than a lot of the other things I have laying around my house that I like.

But, hey, the good news is!  I can send out teeny samples of both the gardenia and the lily to two lucky comments who love home fragrance as  much as I do and would like to sniff these two scents. The Diffusers don’t have all the scents available, just four, I believe.  So leave a comment, give me some ideas of your favorite fall perfume (I need ideas!), and you’ll be entered in the draw.

Patty

This post is dedicated to all of you, particularly those of you who own fragrances you find less than stellar due to an unsniffed purchase triggered by rave reviews.

You know you’re a perfumista if:

You’ve bought something unsniffed that you regret. It may seem counterintuitive, but the real mark of perfume obsession isn’t that you love everything you own.  It’s that you hate some of it.  That bottle of Dune/Rush/Kenzo Jungle you bought unsniffed after an ecstatic review?  The one that makes you throw up a little in your mouth?  Yeah, sorry about that.  People still occasionally offer me their bottles of Worth Courtesan, saying, b!tch, you have it since you like it so much.  Bonus points if you: were chemically impaired while purchasing; bought it on eBay worldwide and screwed yourself on the currency conversion; bought an empty bottle, factice, or (as I did) an image of the scent rather than the actual thing.  The only proper response is to laugh and add the story to your repertoire.  In return, someday you’ll run across a bottle of Venezia in a thrift store and the lady will shrug and say, oh, five dollars, I guess.

You’ve bought multiple concentrations/vintages/versions of the same scent.  You need old Femme (skanky/leathery) and new Femme (sweaty/sweet.)  You know that the cologne, EdT, EdP and parfum versions of Chanel No. 5 are somewhat different animals, and you want them all in your zoo.   You enjoy the variations in peach, moss, patch and musk among your nine vintage bottles of Mitsouko.  You like trying them on at the same time so you can compare.  You are a freak.  Come sit by me, you smell good.

You love a “difficult” fragrance that you used to hate. Maybe you’ve always loved oysters, sashimi and arugula.  Or maybe, like me, you had to expand your horizons a little over time.   I have learned never to say never when it comes to some of the most pugnaciously assertive scents.  Scents as varied as Muscs Kublai Khan, new Femme, Rasputin’s Armpit Ambre Russe and Satan’s Beehive Miel de Bois have wormed their way into my heart.  Perhaps one day I’ll add Angel, Tubereuse Criminelle and Borneo to this list.

You know exactly/have no idea whatsoever what you’ve spent on perfume in the last quarter. I’m always fascinated by the quarterly spending polls on NST.  Who are these people who track their purchases and their inventory in spreadsheets, along with notes about vintage, source, etc.?  Some of them … are you.  I take the opposite approach.  I have more or less instantaneous perfume-buying amnesia (PBA**).  That new box of vintage Fidji on my dresser?  Owned that thing forever.   Femme?  The sweat-fairies brought it.  Half-bottle of Cartier Must II?  I … decline to answer on the grounds that it may be held against me by someone in this house who thinks I own too much damn perfume already.  As if.  **Warning: PBA may result in multiple backup bottles you forgot you already had.

You have a deceitful relationship with the US Postal Service. Your mailman looks at you funny.  Did that vial of Secretions Magnifique leak into the mailer?  Damn.  Also you’ve learned to look deep into the eyes of the clerk behind the counter and lie.  Nope, nothing liquid, fragile, hazardous or perishable.

You’ve got more vials lying around your place than a crack dealer. On your kitchen counter.  In your briefcase.  On top of the dryer. Sometimes they’re unlabeled (is this Bandit?)  Sometimes the labels got wet or smudged and you spend the next 45 minutes trying to decide what Eau d———— is.

You spend as much time choosing your scent as the rest of your attire. Maybe it’s just for work.  Or a job interview.  Or maybe it’s a weekend in New York, or three weeks in Bali … or Austria … decants?  Samples?  A single bottle? Should I buy something there to be a scent souvenir of the trip?!?  Panic ensues.

You hang out on perfume blogs. Okay, your turn!

Endnote: This Friday is our Fall Top 10, with the usual suspects.  Lee has temporarily given up the Friday slot due to other demands on his time, and Nava is likely doing the same.  I didn’t want you thinking something ominous had happened to them.  Anita had already offered to help out while Patty’s in India next month, so she’s picking up some slack.  Thanks, Anita.  Great, fun post last Friday.

March