Pineward Velveteen Perfume Review

I know I’ve gone on in bits about Pineward Velveteen, and it has been difficult to put together my thoughts.

Notes of ambergris, cypress, vanilla, clove, labdanum, fir.   It is warm and cozy, with a layer of darkness underlying it that is intense in a way I find hard to describe – it distracts me from all that cozy.  Making it very hard to find a place to file it under in my perfume mental filing system.

I made a quick comparison to Estee Lauder Cinnabar in a prior post, and I wanted to check that! The opens on both are very close. Cinnabar blows off – at least the current version does – all the best dark parts of it too quickly and lightens.  The other problem child…

Pineward Velveteen deepens, intensifies with that crazy almost-malevolent darkness swirling through it.  One of my favorite books of all time is The Velveteen Rabbit. I don’t know if that formed any part of the idea behind this fragrance by the creator, but it helped me in how I think about it some.

A stuffed toy that is not real, wants to be, love the boy, is next to the boy through a near-death illness, then gets destroyed when the boy is well because it was contaminated.  But the Velveteen Rabbit is eventually granted the wish to become a real rabbit.

There is this closeness to Velveteen that sometimes feels suffocating because it is yearning.  Not loud, just this soft insistence that IT IS THERE.  My arm moves, and I smell it, and it is comforting, always next to me, and there is this little thread of darkness that won’t let me just relax with it.  JAR Golconda was a lot the same. Different smell, lovely, intense, and would never let me rest.  I think of it as the dark parts of us –  the uninvited malevolence that lives in us that is always startling to me when I run into it in a thought, a dream, when I’m really angry.  We live our life fighting that darkness, pushing our Sisyphean goodness boulder up the hill while our selfish, rotten rocks keep making us stumble and slide back down right as we get to the top.  If we ever get there, can we become real humans?

Just when I think I understand the emotional feel of this perfume, it vanishes into another half-formed thought. See Exhibit A and B above.

So there you have it. I love it, but I brace myself when I put it on because my humanity seems too near and so very far away.   Pretty sure I have not described it well, either.

Pineward Velveteen lasts for hours, so this is not a short day! But I did find a trick. I fell madly in love with Stora Skuggan’s flibbertygibbety pefume, Mistpouffer.  The way she crafted the immortelle in there is so charming. Once I spray that near Velveteen, I am sure I will not be tossed in the trash, and I must be real.

So my missing hummingbirds this year finally showed up. I had one that buzzed by every now and then, maybe two.  All of a sudden I had hummers checking the empty feeders, like a couple at a time, so I made the syrup and filled them up.  OMG, I have seven feeders up and a flock of ruby throats fighting around each. I’ve moved some in a different sight line, hoping to get them to share, but one just perches on a little perch next to a feeder and chases off everything that comes by, sometimes two and three at at time. And he is SO little!  I can stand in my kitchen right next to the window and watch him scanning the perimeter for interlopers.  Well, I’m glad they finally showed up on their way back south.

I’ll do a drawing for a sample of the Pineward Velveteen and the Stora Skuggan Mistpouffer. I feel like these two need each other!  How are you winding down your summer?