Perfumed Life

Heya Posse! Today is my birthday, yep, September 25! Exactly nine months after Xmas Day. I’m away in India and Nepal with Jin and we are hanging with my last long term partner Varun. So I thought maybe a little look back might be in order. Ages ago on my Perfume Presents post March inspired me again. You might remember that she had given a bottle of perfume to someone she didn’t know on Posse. Now, however much later down the track we find them living together as perfumed housemates. In no less a romantic daydream destination than Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. This perfumed life is a bit of a roller coaster. We weave in and out of the craving. What’s interesting to me is how sometimes our hobby can shape our world in significant ways. So today I’m going to tell you a couple of anecdotes about how my perfumed life changed the way I live irrevocably.

Perfumed Life

A little backstory

Dad was a jeweller/watchmaker and had a shop that also sold gifts from Lladro and Orrefors to perfumes. It was the only shop of its type for three or four suburbs in any direction. Those suburbs were where the mainly European immigrants would move to when they’d made some real money. Dad was a very handsome, affable man in a wheelchair and Mum looked like a prototype of Lady Gaga. In the early years Mum was the buyer for almost everything and that’s how she discovered perfume. The reps would give her Thank You gifts of fragrance when she ordered.

Some of you know I loved perfume from an early age. Mum gave me a bottle of Aramis for Christmas one year while I was still preteen. Not only did this spark a love of perfume but it also awakened my interest in fashion. In the 70/80s of my reaching adulthood the two things were almost inseparable for me and Mum & I would buy fashion magazines and devour them together. The offshoot was that they invariably also talked and advertised the newest fragrances. We would make designated forays to smell these new scents. Australia was well behind in getting many perfumes and we would be on tenterhooks to get our sniff on. When I was asked to leave school by the Jesuits Mum and Dad said I could do whatever I wanted with my life as long as I had a trade.

Fashion & Perfume

The obvious choice was to study fashion, which I did. Through that course those that wanted were linked up to holiday Squirt Bitch work. It was a duck to water situation. My counter was always Guerlain, Oscar de la Renta, Nina Ricci and Worth. So while Mum had planted the seed, this was the soil, fertiliser, sunlight and water needed to grow the deep sturdy roots of my passion.

Fast forward to 2009/10 and I discover an online scentbloggosphere. O M G! It’s intoxicating. I’d keep up with all the fashion releases over the years but niche had completely passed me by. I have vague memories of seeing Annick Goutal and L’Artisan Perfumeur in the big city flagship department store David Jones. It was what Armani, Mugler or Versace were doing were what mattered in my mind. Suddenly I would come home from nights working and partying and sit at the computer reading every blog I could find. Bois de Jasmin, Perfume Posse, Olfactoria’s Travels, Candy Perfume Boy, The Alembicated Genie and many others. Reading, commenting, searching for deals and the newest thing compulsively. It really was a mania.

Suddenly niche made its mark on my mind. Fortunately (or not, depending how you view it) I was earning ridiculous money and was able to lavishly spend on samples, decants, bottles and books. While having no formal training I was giving myself a master class in scent. Seriously though, I should have done a course or two. It would have given me a much better understanding of everything.

Blogging

Along comes Jin 11.11.2011. He never leaves, and for that I’m profoundly grateful. Anyway, he buys a HUGE television and loads it on the dining room wall. At the time there was no TV in the house. I’d always been more of a reader than a viewer until Jin. We started watching movies together and one night he picked Julie & Julia. He says to me, “You should start a blog on perfume.” I laugh it off. Then one of my childhood girlfriends arrives back in Australia and her marriage falls apart in the most devastating and awful way. Hoping to give her something else to think about, the subject of doing a blog together comes up. Voila! Australian Perfume Junkies is born 29 February 2012. On 31 May 2012 I started writing for Perfume Posse! Through APJ, Perfume Posse and perfume I’ve made friends around the world, many that I’ve met in real life, some who have become my nearest and dearest

Well, that went on about 400 words more than expected.

If you’re still with me, please share a time Perfumed Life changed your life.
Portia xx