First, the winners of the Serge Vitriol samples from last week:  Ninara Poll, JAntoinette, Catherine and Flora. Most of you know the drill – click on the Contact Us button on the left, remind me what you’ve won and send me your address, I’ll send you a quick “got it” e-mail so you know you didn’t land in my spam filter, and I’ll get these out to you. Enjoy!!!

The nice profumo.it folks sent me a nice bottle of Sharif and some samples of it as well to give away to you guys. Yeah!!!!!  So I have three generous samples and one 32 ml bottle to give away.  Drop a comment to be entered into the drawing!  It’s a great leather.

I read Tom’s nonreview about seeing The Help, and I went to see it Wednesday evening.  I really liked the book, it was compulsively readable. The movie did a nice job of covering that territory, but I think this is one story that loses something in the translation just because what I liked about the book the most was the story-telling.  It hooked early and drug me to the finish into the wee hours of the morning.  The person that went with me hadn’t read the book, and he really liked the movie on its own. So I think the story holds up in both formats.

And with that, I’m off to put a heating pad on my back and some painkillers.  Not sure how I strained it, but I did, and it is being incredibly loud and complainy since this afternoon!

I’m not that familiar with the profumo.it line, except that I know that the guy that owns/runs/composes for them is incredibly nice and generous, and I hear that from multiple sources. Leather scents aren’t really my thing most of the time, so what should I sample from this line?  Favorites?  Recommendations?

Patty

by the draft-horse lovin’ Musette

Last week, in the Beach Baby post, Joanna and I got into a conversation about appropriate scents to wear when visiting the Amish.  She kindly allowed me to use excerpts of the comments for this post – they went thus:

On my way to Iowa right now to buy some produce and baked goods from the Amish. For some reason I always have to really think about which scent to wear when I’m going to buy stuff from the Amish

and then:

I actually waited until after I had visited with the amish before I spritzed anything on today, (Ysatis which I got from Swapmania! Thanks swap partner!) I’m not sure why I’m always so afraid of offending them with fragrance?

I’m going to start this post by saying a) I only know about 12 Amish and b) the full extent of my knowing them centers around their incredible skill with draft horses.   But I’m also going to ooch my fat butt out on a limb here and say that everything that I have witnessed (no pun intended) in my dealings with those 12 Amish – perfume isn’t on the agenda.  For one thing, I don’t think it’s part of their general culture, though I have never heard the 12 I know say anything negative about smelling it.  For another, horses tend to not like a lot of perfumes – and the Amish tend to like a lot of horses.

But this isn’t about the Amish, exactly. Or horses.  It’s about our notions of what perfumes are appropriate for certain occasions or groups you might perceive as having issues or taking offense.  There’s a lot of resistance to perfume in many places, like offices.  But I’m thinking more about self-policing, out of fear of giving offense.  For me, it’s plummy plushy cumin-laden scents.   like current Femme.  Even lightly applied, I find it totally inappropriate, unnerving and weirdly offputting for any business meeting, as if I’d just shown up to a biofuels conference clad only in a too short, post-coital, soiled satin robe and chipped toenail polish.   For meetings, my go-to is always vintage Mitsouko (if I need to terrify somebody) or Parure (if I want to project ladylike confidence and still kinda scare them) – they just feel appropriate for my Meeting Persona.

But! I wore Mitsouko to hitch up some drafts and got green snot sprayed all over me.  Horses?  Do. Not. Like. Mitsouko. Neither do the people who handle them – it’s just not a barn-appropriate fragrance.   A 2000+lb animal does not need to be offended by perfume – they get spooked enough as it is.

Totally freaked out by the move to this very rural, conservative area I used to be more perverse in my public perfume choices.  I would wear really challenging scents to the most inappropriate places: hubba-hubba Carnal Flower to an Apostolic lady’s 90th birthday card shower, a whole lotta Tribute Attar to the Lions Pancake Breakfast.  Extraordinarily beautiful scents, to be sure – but not ‘pretty’ – and a place like the Lions Pancake Breakfast…well, it was a bit overwhelming (and, I suspect, almost offensive, like I was deliberately bludgeoning them with my Perfumista Coolness.).  I’ve gotten over myself and now save  the glorious Tribute for my city events.  I’ve not been invited to another card shower.  Hmmm… Sometimes a place just needs ‘pretty’.

So what people/places/horses give you pause, when it comes to choosing fragrance?  Are there any where you, like Joanna, are scared to put any on at all?

Okay, I played hooky.  When I should have been retesting the perfume I was in the middle of writing about I decided on the spur of the moment to go see “The Help”.  I’d written about the book at PST a while ago when I wondered how well they’d adapt it to a movie.  They did an excellent job, not shying away from the fact that for some of these women the South in the 60′s was hell.

I do know people who say that they yearn for the good old days when things moved slower and people were nicer to each other and things were so much cheaper, and to an extent I get it.  I wish I was living in a time where a middle-class income would buy you a house in Southern California that was within 100 miles of work, where if you did your job you had it for as long as you want without it being sent off to Texas or South America or New Hebrides so the company wouldn’t have to show a year with no growth or a trip to the ER for a broken arm wasn’t an expense that might mean you go homeless.

On the other hand, as this movie matter-of-factly reminds us, “colored” people had to use separate everything (in one section of the book a black man is beaten almost to death for having used an unmarked “whites only” water fountain) and were sometimes treated as little more than moderately intelligent livestock by their employers.  Even the privileged white people were shackled by societies idea of male and female role models.  I could have been fired or denied housing or run of town simply because of my sexuality at that time.  The cars may look cool and the perfumes had oomph but I have no nostalgia for that era or frankly any of the ones that came after that I actually lived through.  Twenty years from now if I’m still breathing I’ll have little nostalgia for this previous decade.  There were some definite high points, but 9/11, Prop 8 and the great recession will be remembrance of things that I will be glad to have passed.

I have nostalgia for certain things like dial telephones, Coke in 6 oz glass bottles, burning leaf piles.  Luckily I can still get the former two and Chris Brosius does an incredible simulacrum of the latter (whew, got some perfume in there after all!!).  Time periods, not so much.

If you have nostalgia for things from the past, whether yours or not, I’d love to discuss in the comments.  Do see the movie, it’s wonderful.  Take a friend and bring kleenex.

I’m thinking today about better living through chemistry.

(No, not THAT kind of chemistry!) The magic of perfume, of course.

As I mentioned in the Posse’s Top 10 of summer earlier this month, Le Labo’s Tubereuse 40 is, without a doubt, instant liquid happiness for me. It lifts my spirits, puts a smile on my face and

makes me feel 10 pounds lighter. Too bad I can’t afford to wear it every day.

Dior’s Escale a Portofino and Prescriptives’ Calyx have similar (albeit somewhat less powerful) effects on me, and as I have a greater supply of those, they will have to pick up the slack for the remainder of this long, hot summer. (Which, where I live, could easily continue through early October. Grrrrr.)

Anyway, I’d love to know what scents give you an instant boost when you wear them. And do you use them frequently, or save them for special circumstances or events?

I belong to a Facebook perfume chatter group, and today I stumbled across this perfume porn. It made me sad. I spent all day trying to decide whether or not I wanted to share that, and I decided, what the hell. Sometimes, keeping it together is like a house of cards; the whole thing comes tumbling down if you touch the wrong one.

So, to distract myself, I decided on another poll: Share your virtual perfume porn to cheer me up. How many bottles do you have? Remember, honesty is always the best policy.

Have a great weekend.