I got an email from a friend asking me whether I had smelled this one and what I thought of it.  I admit that I had read reviews of it and felt no need to seek it out.  But my friend wrote that there was a newer version that she really liked.  Since she’s a stylish sort of girl with impeccable taste I dropped into the Jimmy Choo boutique to check it out.

Well, it’s no shrinking violet.

It starts with a fruity floral opening.  Those words normally would send me bolting towards the nearest outlet for soap and water, but this I actually liked.  Really liked.  There was something else in there: a touch of burnt caramel, a hint of musk that made the orchids and berry/peach accord work much better than it had a right to.  The burnt caramel note in the middle comes with a fairly delicious vanilla in addition to the orchid and the drydown adds in a very nice patchouli.  I kept smelling something delightful all during the day and realizing that it was me.

Apparently this is a limited one that will only be sold this Christmas.  Perhaps the seasonality portion of the program is no bad thing: a couple too many spritzes of this on a humid August day could kill you.  But smelling this on someone on a crisp fall day?  Heaven..

I hope they bring it back every year.

$150 for 1.3 ounces, exclusively at Saks and at the Jimmy Choo boutique, where I tested.

 I’m seeing more yard sale signs popping up now that the worst of the hot weather is over (fingers crossed), and that got me thinking of ways to find vintage fragrance on the cheap.

 Are yard sales too hit-or-miss to be worthwhile? Are estate sales a better choice because they tend to be from older homes and/or there’s less junk to sift through? (Although I know that junk is in the eye of the beholder.) What about antiques stores? And does the country or the city make for better treasure hunting?

 When DH and I were young, we used to hit nearly every antiques store we passed, and we were regulars at the huge monthly markets in the large city near us, trolling for furniture, china, knickknacks and the like.  We haven’t been in years, however, as we now have way too much stuff and need to get rid of some, although the recent flooding incident is helping with that. Since everything is still pretty much packed up until the flooring gets installed, we’re finding there’s quite a bit we can live without. So we’re hoping to bring a lot less back into the house when we’re no longer pod people. Is it just me or does it seem like we spend our first 30 years or so acquiring things to fill up our lives and homes, and then the latter part trying to get rid of them?

 So let me know if you’ve got any tips or suggestions on finding fragrance in nontraditional ways. What’s been your biggest and best perfume score?

My apologies to the 176 of you that did not win. The 10 of you that did, as a reminder, are getting a 2.5 ml sample of the Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga L’Essence, then smaller samples of Chanel Jersey, Prada Candy and old version Caron Violette Precieuse.  And those ten lucky people are:

Joanie, Lisa D, Claudia, Amy K, TK, Gwenyth, Alnysie, Ines, Tommasina and Joanna.  so click on the Contact Us on the left, remind me what you won and send me your address. I’ll give you a quick reply once I get your e-mail (I don’t do it instantly, it may take a day or so), just so you know I got it and it didn’t land in the spam filter.

Chanel Jersey, I promised a review of this this week. Lavender, vanilla, white musks are the only notes I’ve been able to find officially linked to it.  First spray, you get a lot of lavender, sorta like a drive-by lavender shooting.  This works out spectacularly for me – not a fan of lavender in perfume, love it in the plant – but may not for those of you expecting a lavender-ama.  This is its most interesting time, the first 60 minutes.   The Lavender is sweetened and feels a little peppery, and this is the spot where it feels the most like the Carons. Not exactly, but the interplay of the notes just serves that up.  Now, after the first hour or so, it gets much more generic.  Still pretty, feminine, soft, but the musk gets a more clean’ish smell, the lavender fades, and that’s the place it smells more like fabric, warm and snuggly fabric that’s just been washed, definitely.  Okay, but, well, you know.  My answer?  Just keep re-spritzing.  Hey, it’s a big bottle, and the first hour is worth it.  And after the first hour, I don’t hate it at all, I like it, just not the same kind of love.

So it’s a mixed bag, and I wish the whole scent was as good as it starts out.  Anyone else smell it yet and have an opinion?

Now for my what has Patty learned this month.  I learned how to do my own Shellac polish!  I’ll still go in and have it done, but I wanted to fix my nails that chipped. I’m hard on everything, and I didn’t want to just leave my chipped nail hanging out unprotected, so I got the stuff so I can do my own repairs.  I’m pretty good at it!!!  Not great, and I won’t attempt a pink and white for a good long while, but the two nails I fixed look not horrible.  Do we think shellac hurts our nails?  Does the collective readership have an opinion on this?

Patty

As most of you know, Andy Tauer and Brian Pera collaborated on a film/perfume journey – Brian’s film Woman’s Picture and Andy’s perfumes created to embody the experiences and memories of the women profiled in the film.  I was going to give you a basic review of the perfume but that’s already been done (and very well, I might add) by several of the other blogs involved in the project.  I can’t do it any better than it’s been done so instead, I thought I would share with you some thoughts from me and Andy, over the course of a couple of chatty emails.  This post is a long’un so go grab a cup of tea and settle in..

Me (Musette) to Andy :  ..I am writing my Miriam post and wanted to chat with you a bit.   what I find so intriguing about Miriam is the immediate visceral response I got upon spritzing it.   Given that my response was so …well,’ visceral’ really is the best word to describe it, I wanted to share my response and find out what emotions prompted you to craft this composition 

I did spritz the perfume before watching the DVD.  And , at first spritz, I was immediately transported back to my Tia Cornelia’s drawing room . 

She was my elegant godmother and I always imagined that she lived this life of utter ease, doted upon by my wealthy godfather, Tio Roy.  There was that 40s glamour in her apartment and herself ( Coty face powder and mink stoles and those fox tippets with the scary heads.  Housekeeper.  Great handbags.  Gloves.  Always gloves. But also a bit of quiet melancholy, their chic, closed-in  flat with the Foo dogs and silk drapes,  a slight smell of hairspray clinging to everything .   I empathized with Miriam’s connection to her mother through her perfume .  Your ‘Miriam’ reconnected me to my Tia – it bridges her 40s glamour with a more modern accessibility – it’s very wearable and lovely, in a heartbreaking way. 

I’m very interested in what emotions caused you to craft it thus (I know I already asked that – but it’s the premier question here).  I watched the Miriam segment on the DVD and it almost stopped my heart!  I could barely breathe, watching Miriam’s nearly uncontained rage, fury, despair, frustration, shame….yes, shame…at finding herself at A Certain Age, with a dead marriage, a shackling career and …..a primal relationship that has loosened its fetters and is floating away on the threads of a disintegrating brain.  Was it that ineffable sense of sadness that prompted you to create a scent that whisks one back to a silken, powdered past, while reminding that those days are dust, time is not static…and every moment is a step forward into the unknown.  Miriam had that same affect on me that the madeleine had on Proust. 

I found Miriam to be an intensely moving fragrance and am glad I smelled it before I watched the clip, because I knew I was experiencing it on its own merits, uninfluenced by Brian’s stunningly painful film..    Obviously, you can tell that I have ‘been there, done that’, alas…

Dear Anita

I worked on a page of text for you. I hope it helps you understanding how emotions and perfume composition come together. I tried…. In a sense, I am a little bit lost whenever I need to think about perfume. Sometimes, I feel that you, Brian, any perfume lover wearing it, will understand a creation better than I do.  I send you fragrant hugs and a little picture of me about 43 years ago…..Enjoy, Andy

(isn’t this photo adorable?)

These are Andy’s thoughts:

I watched the portrait of Miriam –one portrait of three in the film WOMAN’S PICTURE- for the first
time more than a year ago. I remember how I felt very compassionate and concerned. In the Miriam
movie we witness how a life starts to fall apart. I followed how, there, at this particular moment in
her life, so many roads seem to end for Miriam: A partner that is so much more talented than she is
and yet he throws his talents away, a TV job full of lies and a mother disintegrating. Miriam is losing
her mother to dementia. All this in 30 minutes is a sad cocktail, yet there is hope as she moves on
and takes her life in her hands again. That was how I felt.

For me, the most touching scene, was the scene where perfume wakens Miriam’s mother up for a
moment, pulls her out of the dark world of oblivion and brings her back for a fleeting moment.
Perfume can do this.

Miriam connects to her mother and to her own past by perfume. Imagine: Liquid in a glass container
can bring back the past. Perfume can do this. Isn’t this amazing?

I am close to 50 years old now and the older I get the easier I have tears in my eyes. I am convinced
that getting older comes with softness. When watching Miriam the first time, it touched me very
much, because it reminded me in a lot of lines in my own life. There was a time when I was sitting in
a meeting room just like Miriam had to and I too had no way but quitting my job and a good part of
my life. I remembered sitting next to my mother in the hospital and waiting for the monitor showing
me the last heart beat of my mother. I guess we all have these moments in life, where we face
complete failure, where we need to let go.

Thus, Miriam for me is a very emotional and melancholic movie. Is there something like a
melancholic fragrance? Maybe there is: A bitter sweet scent of memories. I wanted to create a
perfume that I could present as a gift to Miriam that evening, when she is home, out of her job, back
from the nursing home, alone. I imaged how this perfume must be. It is a perfume with bitter sweet
memories built in. It is a perfume promising that there is hope. I wanted it to be a perfume that links
her to her mother, that brings back memories of times gone by, but I wanted it to be a perfume that
allows her to move on, with her life.

I tried, together with Brian, to rationalize my construction, my perfume formula. Why violet leaf
absolute? Why roses? Why Sandalwood and why this and not that? I tried to explain Brian Pera and I
tried for myself to find parameters that I used to compose the perfume: Diffusiveness. Uniqueness.
Provocation. Vintage. Feminine. These parameters help to understand the formula. I shared the
composition, most of the ingredients with Brian, but the mystery of a fragrance is hidden behind its
ingredients. It is the magic that a perfume can be more than the sum of its ingredients. Perfumes are
created with intuition and composed with emotions. Perfumes surprise the intellect.

Notes for Miriam from the evelyn avenue website: bergamot, sweet orange, geranium, violet blossom, rose, jasmine, ylang, violet leaf, lavender, vanilla, orris root, sandalwood.)  (the notes from Musette:  a ton of Aldehydes and roses – very vintage l’Aimant, which always evokes a bit of melancholy in me).  You can get purchase info on www.evelynavenue.com and www.luckyscent.com

None of this would’ve happened had Brian Pera not first embarked on his tableaux.  I’m not ashamed to say there are so many aspects of Miriam that resonate with me – it may be that the Miriam character is of a similar age, in some similar straits…perhaps I was just looking for something to rip the lungs out of my body that afternoon…who knows?  But between the film and the scent, it was a truly visceral experience, with both of them seamlessly supporting the other.  Brian shot an interview for each blog – here is the one he did for us: click on this to be directed to the  Interview

I hope this hasn’t bored the toenails off you all.  I really enjoyed chatting with Andy and wanted to share this with you.

Now to the giveaway – we have 8-beautiful-8 gifts to giveaway, courtesy of Andy and Brian.  Each winner will receive a sample of the beautiful, evocative Miriam and a DVD of selected interviews and shorts from the wonderful film “Woman’s Picture”.  To enter….hmmm…let’s talk Emotion, shall we?  What scent triggers the deepest emotions (good or bad) in you?

Real life intruded again.  I was going to write a lyrical review of the City Exclusive Le Labo Gaiac 10.  Le Labo is having all the city exclusives come out in November for one month available for purchase by those of us who don’t live in the host city.  They starting today are sampling them through their website and at their stores at $10 per sample.  Not the best bargain I can think of, but at least you can live with them for a few days to see whether you love it enough to pop for the full bottle.  I stopped by and picked up Gaiac 10 and spritzed before running off to a city event touring the police station and just walked in the door.

So, Gaiac 10 is nice, more about it later.

We toured the SWAT team, the shooting range, the emergency preparedness center and the forensics lab.  Bottom line: you do not want to be a criminal in Beverly Hills.  Turns out that we’re a test-bed for all the new technology used by homeland security.  If you drive in your plates are scanned and for wants and warrants.  There are cameras all over taking high-quality video on the business streets.  The lab boys use all that stuff you see on CSI, including super-glue.

Big Brother?  Could be.  But here’s a story that was told to by a former mayor on how this can be used.  A resident of one of the local elder-care apartment houses called 911 to report that her husband, who has Alzheimer’s wandered off in the night while she was asleep.  She was frantic, as you can imagine.  Since the house was on the edge of the business triangle they were able to scan the past hours and see when he left and which direction we went in.  He stayed wandering around the center of town and they were able to find him, pick her up and get to him to return him safely home.

I’ll take the idea that they might be sitting in BHPD headquarters asking if all I ever do is drink Diet Coke on the patio at the Beverly Hills Market if they can do the above.

Next time: Perfume.  I promise.