By the Gang

I hope it’s Spring wherever you are, my dearests. To the north, there are daffodils struggling in the slushy snow.   Where I am, in the lower GI of Illinois, it’s Spring, alrighty, with temps swinging from 38 to 84 then down to the 50s with tornadoes.  Ah, Spring – the Bipolar Season(s)…

But Musette digresses, as usual.  It’s time for the Top 10 of Spring though I’m not feeling it right now, as I sit shivering in my flannels and fleece, praying that Glinda doesn’t have plans for me.  I’ve been craving Big White Flowers, Big Pink Flowers.  Big Flowers. Little white flowers.   Lots of love for Diorissimo. Nothing says spring quite like Roudnitska’s Easter bonnet of Perfection.   Little known fact about Diorissimo:  it is a great weight-loss aid.  It is impossible to eat a Mallomar whilst wearing Diorissimo.  I know!  I’ve tried, many times.  How can something so soft and simple be so sublimely elegant?  If you don’t know the vintage, don’t despair. The contemp’s not quite the same but it’s still beautiful, 55 years later.

This last month has been some really freaky weather – blasting, Santa Ana-type winds and the barometric pressure wielding a sledgehammer to my sinuses…I have been choking the life out of everybody with Fracas.  Vintage.  Contemporary. Shower gel.  Body lotion. Dusting powder (vintage, with the pink feather puff).   All at once.   Go ‘head.  Say sumpin’ I dare you …Fracas has a big sprayer and she’s not afraid to use it!

March says:  it’s the topsy-turvy weather of spring that’s both delightful and annoying, although I’m not complaining, since the midwest has been slammed by terrible weather recently.  Anyhow, from my regular stable of go-to scents, I’ve been drawn to two ends of the spectrum: the bitter-green-citrus Annick Goutals Eau de Ciel and Eau du Sud, both of which are designed for bike-riding and kite-flying on windy spring days, or perhaps a walk along the beach while it’s still too cold to swim.  They smell pretty great in summer, too.  On the other hand, I’m still wearing and loving my Majmua Attar, which I mix up with jojoba oil in small batches.  It’s such a foreign-place smell, it reminds me of our trip to Thailand.  I noticed recently that Tigerflag, where I got these attars, has closed down, but I think White Lotus has them. Any of you attar freaks, feel free to recommend another source.  I’ve heard that some of the cheap-cheap ones aren’t authentic, but don’t know that for sure.

Tom sez: Since spring has sprung I find myself reaching for some of the lighter fragrances in my stash- for day Commes des Garçons Series 1 Lily, a grassy Lily of the Valley that’s almost oversaturated with technicolor summeriness.  For evening I’ve been going back to an old favorite that people don’t mention much anymore L’Antimatiere by LezNez, which dances between clean and carnal and is as comforting as wearing your boyfriend’s cashmere sweater, after.

Patty says: Complete dittoes on Diorissimo and all Lily of the Valley scents, including the Van Cleef  Muguet Blanc that has a more frozen cold approach, which works so well while spring is flirting between winter and warm and I keep doing the OpentheWindow/ClosetheWindow daily shuffle, either too cold or too hot.  And my Daphne out in front of my house that everyone gets so tired of hearing about every year. The good news is, I’m getting  a Linden tree for my front yard, so I’ll add that to my springtime smell yammering.

Nava says: I’m obsessed with finding an air conditioner to fit the casement window of my apartment. That said, I’m forgoing spring this year and preparing for summer; even though as of yesterday, the heat is still pumping in this frickin’ building. In the meantime, I’m quite content with Peace Love and Juicy Couture, which features the lemon note I’m so into lately, along with some honeysuckle, linden and a bit of musk. When I reviewed it, I said it reminded me of Cristalle. That was in cold weather. Now that it’s warmer, the scent is standing on its own a bit more. Plus, I totally dig that bottle.  My other go-to (which I am running out of) is Givenchy’s Ange ou Demon Le Secret. How can you go wrong with cranberry, green tea, citrus and jasmine?

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

Warning for anyone looking for a perfume post, this isn’t it exactly.  It will touch on smell, but only as it relates to my New Health Kick.  So skippity skip skip if you’re wanting something more perfumey today. I’m the resident topic changer.

About a month ago I was introduced to my new favorite cooking goddess through my yoga teacher training (she needs to write a cookbook, everyone would buy it, I’m going to work on her to get this project in gear). She does the cooking for the little Dharma Cafe at Karma Yoga Studio and had a section on Ayurvedic cooking for us during our training.  She’s also a personal chef and brilliant and young and cute and about this big (indicating the size of a cute little bug).  So we had a little consultation, and I went on her food cleanse – reluctantly and only because she was going to make it easy, even if it turned spendy by paying her to do it all for me except eat it. This wasn’t any kind of starving cleanse. You do eliminate gluten, dairy, soy, red meat, all those potential inflammatory foods, and you feast on high alkaline foods, which tend to be, well, green.

I hate vegetables. Not in a loathe them and won’t eat them kind of way, but in a, geezwhatapaininthenecktochopallthiscrapupjusttoeatit kind of way.  In my hurried-up life, it just took too much time.  I do have time, at least a couple of hours a week to chop up veggies, as it turns out, but other than just chopping them, I was never really quite sure what to do with them beyond that.

The brilliant Starla shows me the cleanse, I take one look at it and all the recipes and say, um, no, I know myself, I can’t do that, it will take too much time.  So she every week went out and shopped and brought my groceries over and helped us prep everything so that’s all we (one kid did it with me, other one sorta did) had to eat in the house.  First week was so hard, but I felt good, verging on great by the end of the week, even though I was eating every veggie/boiled egg/avocado/smoked salmon in sight.  Second week, Starla had to prep a little less for us as I took on more, but we happily spent two hours in the kitchen getting everything ready for the week, talking food.  When you talk with people who are passionate about food as therapy, for healing, it’s transformative on your attitude about what food means to you.  Kind of like talking to perfume people about perfume as transformation for mood and attitude.

At the end of week two, my hunger started abating, and I was making these cool plates of salad, boiled eggs, avocado, with a dish of raw gazpacho or a bowl of kale and bean soup and green smoothies and filling up and feeling full for hours.  I didn’t even know greens could do that, I thought it took meat or something “substantial.”  We added to that these amazing chocolate shakes we concocted from Chocolate almond milk and some greens powder and maca stuff and earth powder from this little company called HealthForce (very cool little company that makes a great product), and it was like energy crack.  Already full of energy and feeling great, those shakes just made me float with well-being.

I finally got it. Food is therapy and healing.  I have felt so great the last three weeks, full of energy and bounce, even through my surgery, my healing has been quick.  My body was so hungry the first two weeks of the cleanse because it needed nutrients.  Once it filled up, it’s gone on some completely new hungry schedule that’s about nutrition only and seems to not crave or want food unless it’s empty.  Seriously, you have no idea what a different thing this is for me.  I’m Queen ‘O Snackage.

My whole life I’ve struggled with food, bouncing from one extreme diet to another, gaining weight, losing weight, low carb, low fat, four-hour body, cabbage soup.  I’m the poster child for what happens to you if you treat your body so shabbily, your metabolism tanks in your 40s, and you fight a losing battle with your waistline.  Well, maybe not.

And my sense of smell!  Sweet fancy Moses, it’s like every smell hits my nose and springs into life.  My daphne is blooming, and it is pungent and rich. The grass is green and getting mowed, and the smell of damp spring grass is everywhere.  My nose is lit up like a scent beacon.

And Starla comes over once a week, and we make 2-3 dishes, and she teaches me more about food and putting things together – like radishes, fennel, oranges, mustard and salt (you have no idea how delicious this is) because I show her stuff I have in the fridge from my organic veggie delivery and ask her what I can do with it.

The knowledge she has about food is the knowledge I have about perfume, so we cook and trade stuff we know and agree that Vitamin Cottage Natural Grocers organic grocery store is seriously the best thing we know because we save so much money there over the big WholePaycheck pretty store that costs way too much.  AND everything is organic without having to get out your magnifying glass and check.

Me? Healthy from food?  Yeah, and a lot of raw foods, mostly raw foods and about 90% vegan (except my wild caught smoked salmon that goes so well with my avocados).  Exactly, so weird the chance meeting of a person propels you in such a completely different direction.  Life has the best unexpected surprises.

My surgery went great, I’ve still got some swelling and bruising, but the bruising is on the upside of healing, and it’s been a week.  I can see what’s there, and I’m happy as hell that the sun now shines under my eyes too.

So did you ever meet a person that just propelled your life into a completely different path than you would never have expected?  And if not, tomorrow is the Best of Spring post, so it’s all about perfume!!!

By the way, if you’re looking to lose weight, eating healthy, raw foods is a great way to go! But remember that caloric reduction is the most important step toward weight loss, so consider enlisting the help of olfactory system-based Sensa to control caloric intake while you learn to eat healthfully.

Patty

By March

Over Easter weekend we did that classic mid-Atlantic bump from the rainy mid-50s to the sunny mid-80s in a single day.  I was on the eastern shore of Maryland to stay with the country cousins, during which I ate more food than I have in the last three months – steamed spiced shrimp (with Old Bay seasoning, natch), fried chicken, grilled lamb, a baked ham, Brussels sprouts and asparagus, new potatoes, on and on and on.  And white rolls and sweet potato biscuits, of course.  If there’s a heaven, and I get there, the menu will look something like that.

So it seemed like time to test-drive the five new Jo Malone tea scents, about which I’ve read somewhat mixed reviews.  I went to Bloomingdales to try them – you know, now that it’s warmed up enough in D.C. to put away the wool sweaters – and they are … sold out already, Jo Malone apparently having caught the Limited Edition bug in a bad way.  They’ve still got the Assam/grapefruit, the mint, and the cucumber ones online; the lemon and sweet milk ones are already gone — or, more precisely, being scalped on eBay.  The lemon one sounded dreadful (pineapple and peach? bleargh) but I was looking forward to the others.  Twenty dollars says they’ll be reissued in a year or two, like her wildly popular Kohdo wood collection.  In the meantime, today I raise my porcelain teacup in a toast to the perfume I took to the shore with me, which is Annick Goutal Duel.

Remember Duel?   No, not the maple-syrup one, that’s Sables.  Duel’s the maté-tea one.  Lasts for 92 seconds?  That’s the big complaint – Duel is great, but unless you’re going to wear some constant-delivery system, maybe a bottle built into your sunhat, what’s the point?  Even the Goutal website refers to it as a “skin scent.”  Well, I don’t know if what’s changed is the formula or my nose, but recently my spritzes of Duel seem to last the entire day.  Notes are petitgrain, absinthe, maté tea, heather, iris, leather, musk, tobacco.

Wait, I have to paste this hilarious blather from Nordstrom in: “Duel is a fragrance designed for men who wish they could go back in time to fight in a duel to defend one’s honor and love. Duel is a fresh woody fragrance with a hint of leather musk and tobacco.” Who gets drunk and writes this stuff?  I’m going to fight to defend Duel’s honor myself by pointing out that it’s unisex (rather than “masculine”) and there’s nothing retro about it.

Like a lot of Goutals, Duel is a little sharp at the top – the rootiness of iris, some sour green citrus notes, and then there’s the maté tea, in this case a red-brown smell that registers between oolong and roiboos, a little grassy, with a hint of carrots.  The drydown is very smooth: a wisp of tobacco, and no perceptible leather.  In other words, despite that list of notes, this is really more of a summer-tea scent than anything else, closer to the Bulgari teas (but more complex) or maybe de Nicolai’s Fig-Tea (only much less sweet.)  It’s as refreshing as the big glass of unsweetened herbal-mint and black tea I had before my bike ride in the heat, before my nap and some more fried chicken.

Duel, like Sables, seems to vary pretty widely in its distribution in the U.S. – sometimes it’s there at places like Saks, sometimes not.  If you like tea scents, it’s well worth seeking out.  I’d love to hear from anyone who’s tried it recently whether I’m nuts about the lasting power being so much better now.

Sample source:  private samples from two different sources, both alleged to be of recent vintage, plus a travel bottle of uncertain age.

Finally, here’s some feedback on Tauer Zeta from Francesca, i.e., someone who’s smelled actual linden (and who won a sample on our draw):  “It’s very very true to the fragrance of real linden blossoms. And perhaps even to the smell of linden blossom honey. Now, I have to say, I’m not usually a big fan of linden or honey notes in fragrances, but this one is just so true. There’s quite a blast of citrus right at the beginning, but that goes away in moments. And I’m getting a bit of that Tauer, what is it, creosote? which really enhances the linden. It’s dried down into great subtlety…. As delicately as it dried down, it was still noticeable after three handwashings.  I used to collect lindenflowers from the park and dry them out, and then make tea with lindenflower honey, which is just—lindorama. Zeta is really the best linden scent I’ve sniffed.” Thanks, Francesca!

March

by TOM

by Musette

I hope everyone has recovered from the sweat and skank and sex of last week’s posts!  I had to take to mah faintin’ couch, I was so overcome.  When I came to, it was Spring in the Illinois Valley, serious weather moodswings and all the weird hail, snow, wind, rain…and then, suddenly, the trees are beginning to bud and bloom and I got the Easter gift of tulipa tarda blossoming under my dining room windows.

I will now commence with the blathering.

The thing I love most about Spring is the element of surprise.  If you are a careless gardener (me), it’s always a crapshoot, these early days – watch what you hoe, Cochise – what looks like a dead piece of stick one day will suddenly push forth chartreuse shoots the next –what is it?  Who knows?  I always mean to do a chart of what I planted in the fall .  Of course, I always mean to learn Mandarin, too.  Uh huh… Nothing scented is up – it’s a chilly spring so the buds and beds are taking their sweet time – it’s actually nice to watch Spring sloooowly unfurl itself, rather than racing up through the dry ground and dying in 36 hrs, as it does when it warms up too fast.  The one scent I am getting a LOT of is…frog.  Yes.  Lots of frog.   I should bottle that and send it to March.

The weather is still too mercurial for complicated scents; I’m loving those quiet, relaxed irises and lilies of the valley – heck, I almost forgot!  It’s time to break out En Passant.  Perfect for a blustery day, with a glass of white wine and a baguette toasting in the oven and a bowl of lilacs on the kitchen counter…yum!  Whenever I try to wear this in winter it brings up my lunch a little – maybe the forced-air heat?  On a rainy, 50F day, it’s just perfect.

Speaking of food Victoria started a lemming for one of my favorite Spring dishes – lemon scented risotto with asparagus – absolutely divine.   And garlic scapes!  I wait all year for Lyn’s crop – like asparagus, they are a harbinger of Spring – and they make a great soup, with toasted croutons and a little shaved Gruyere.  Oh, I’m droooooling.   Could we make a perfume from that?  I would wear it, I swear!

So what says Spring to you?  Perfumewise, foodwise, flower, whatever.   I know we’ve done this before but it’s always fun to see what it means to others. Where I live right now, it’s frogs and the Annual PuppySpitOutTheToad Day (he’s still young – the toads just laugh as they hop away)