Okay, class.   It’s been in the high 90s this week, although lovely today.  Welcome to summer!  So nice to be back online!  There are still a few glitches, please bear with us.

1) My kids are home for the summer.  Also I’m working on a real estate deal (I have this annoying thing called a ‘job.’)  Both of these are interfering with my blogging.  Comment response may be slow.  Do not adjust your screen.

2) Has anyone else noticed how boooooring our spam has gotten?  It’s all innocuous stuff like (direct quote): “I bookmarked this site a while ago because of the interesting content and I have never been unsatisfied. Continue the outstanding work.”  Click on the link and it gets you a whey-protein drink site.  It almost makes me nostalgic for the spam we used to get – the spam that made me put on my special eyeball-bleaching goggles and hip-waders before I wandered into the filter to retrieve someone’s legit comment.   That spam contained absolutely nothing fit to describe here and made me wonder whether anyone on the planet was still interested in an old-fashioned, garden-variety horizontal bop, if you catch my drift.  Anyhow, that’s gone, and I wonder why?

3) So: perfume.  In my July issue of Allure there’s an interview with Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez called “The Sexiest Fragrances (Ever)” in which they name five: Chinatown, Insolence EDP, Bulgari Black, 31 Rue Cambon, and …. Secretions Magnifiques.

Okay … sort of.  I get it.  Black’s kinky, 31RC has that ice-princess thing going on (but do guys find that hot in a perfume?  I wear 31RC for me, frankly).  But … Insolence EDP?  I really like Insolence, but I bet a lot of guys wouldn’t; too cloying and powdery.  Also, what’s sexy about Chinatown, exactly?  Chinatown does not whisper, come and get it.  Wouldn’t your average Joe (as opposed to our Posse commenter Joe, who’s anything but average) think you smelled, you know … kinda like a dude?  Also, can’t you just see the looks on the faces of the Allure readers when their unsniffed purchases of SM show up in the mail from Bergdorf and they pop them open and spritz?  I wish I was there to watch, although not standing so close as to get hit with any of the atomizer mist.

Here, I’ll take the first 5 things that pop into my head, truth:  Narciso Rodriguez; your favorite white musk (pick one, like Coty Wild Musk); Dior Addict (smells like candy porn; for bad girls only); Organza Indecence (or substitute your favorite vanilla, like L’Artisan Vanilia or Guerlain SDV, because I only want one vanilla category); and Angel.  If that last one makes you scream, pick your favorite kink-animalic.  (Mine: Jicky parfum.)  Animalics reel in the most interesting men, even if you end up throwing them back.  What do you think is sexy?  What do you think of LT/TS’s list?

4) Perfume In Public:  I went to have Hecate allergy-tested, the one where they prick your skin with various allergens.  When I made the appointment I was told specifically: no perfume, scented body care products, etc. in our office. Okay, fine, they’re an allergy office.  Also FYI in general I try to be scent-free on days I’m visiting any sort of medical building.  So early that morning I took a shower, and I was careful to wear just-washed clothes.  My first glitch was: I realized my shirt smelled faintly of Liquid Tide, because I got tired recently of my craptastic uber-green unscented detergent that leaves all my clothes smelling sour.  Also, Liquid Tide is great for removing hideous perfume scrubbers.   They didn’t tell me I had to have unscented laundry detergent, which got me thinking: where could a doctor’s office reasonably expect to draw the line?

In the elevator up to the allergy practice I was standing between two men, one in a suit and the other a construction dude.   Hard-Hat Man was … smelling all freshly sweaty.  And I was thinking about sweat, and how much I like that smell.   Fresh sweat is sexy.  The body odor emanating from someone whose last bath is a distant memory is not pleasant, but a freshly sweaty guy?  Delicious.  One interesting exception is guys at the gym, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s because they don’t wash their clothes after spin class every time?  Do their gym bags make their clothes smell rank?  The lockers?  I don’t know.  I’m married to a man who perspires so copiously that squash matches have been stopped so he can mop up the floor with a towel before somebody slips and breaks a leg.  To the best of my knowledge he has never worn deodorant in his life.  The man simply doesn’t stink.  If it weren’t so great, it would be annoying.

Anyway, the other guy, Mister Suit, was wearing a heavy-handed woody-fresh gigolo scent that made me cringe.  Call me old-fashioned, but I would so much rather smell a discreet man-smell, or some sweat, on a guy.  Or, something ridiculously femme, like a whiff of tuberose.

The allergists’ office is a big group practice, and the man I sat down next to was clearly a smoker.  I could smell it.  Or, he’d been in an enclosed space (maybe a car?) with someone who smokes.  And that smell to me is every bit as noxious as any body spray.  But what are the office workers going to do?  Again, where can you draw that line?  Excuse me, sir, you smell like the Marlboro Man. We’ll have to reschedule your appointment.

So Hecate had her skin test, they draw on your arm with marker and then jab it with a bunch of different things.  I’ve never done this before.  We sat there for maybe five minutes watching her arm puff up, and the PA came back in, looked at her arm, and said wow.  And went to get the doctor.  It was upsetting, sitting there watching Hecate’s spindly little arm blow up and realizing, no wonder she’s climbing out of her skin all the time.  No wonder she’s so sensitive and twitchy and scratchy and sniffly and the rest of it.  That kid probably feels like hell 10 months out of the year, and she says nothing.  The last time we went to the ENT again, and he told me she has a sinus infection and both her ears are full of fluid, he kept looking at me like, What. Is. Wrong. With. You?   But I swear, that kid never says a word.  Because to her, that’s normal.

When I got home and got Hecate anti-histamined and settled and fed and playing with the visiting cousins (yay!), I opened my box from Tigerflag.  Did anyone else get their box?  I think I ordered samples of all the attars and a larger bottle of the majmua.  When I opened the box, that smell …. that smell of everything together rose up and embraced me.  Just the smell of everything in the package, all of it tightly sealed.  Because you can’t really seal in smells like those, can you?  I put on a teeny tiny dab of the majmua, undiluted.  It comes in this bottle that gives you a single drop.  And a drop of the mitti attar, the one that is essence of dirt.  And then I curled up on the bedspread with my nose to my wrist and listened to the dog-day cicadas, which have come out in the last few days, and breathed.

image: Edna Mode.  She just felt right.

March

Quite some time ago, Angie did a wonderful post on Now Smell This on becoming a perfumista – from Stage One (strong interest) to Stage Four – connoisseurship.  I think NST’s Robin later added a quasi-joking stage five along the lines of ennui.  Maybe defeat is the final stage for me.  Many of us have talked in various forums about burnout, both from the sheer number of new releases and, often, their lack of anything interesting to add to the perfume dialogue.

I’ll be honest.  I’m tired of sniffing new product.  All too often it’s a fruitchouli or insipid musk or another gourmand or – in the case of that Chanel Chance Eau Tendre I just gave away unopened – it’s reduced to the sophistication level of a body-care product.  I bet Coco’s spinning in her grave.  Even Guerlain has worn out its welcome with the new releases.  And when niche lines I’ve never heard of beforehand are releasing five or ten scents at once for their debut, I want to grab them by the lapels, gaze deep into their eyes, and say, How about just one?  Or maybe two or three? Faced with all that, I’d rather go dig up my vintage Mitsouko.

There are releases I seek out  – from Serge Lutens, say, or L’Artisan – because the chances are relatively good I won’t be bored.   But more and more, I want to play with what I own.  After years of steady, intense pursuit of perfume the way an obsessed person pursues an evasive lover, I have amassed quite a collection.  Not a huge collection by the standards of some, but more perfume than I will wear in this lifetime.  And in that collection are fragrances that are, for me, the most beautiful scents on earth.  Increasingly, I’d rather spend the day wafting an old favorite than trying the new Tom Ford or Estee or what have you.

Some new fragrances I love, of course; I am craving a bottle of Amaranthine.  And I’m always “discovering” scents from the past, scents I’d dismissed (Dune), or wore and then forgot about (Niki de Saint Phalle), or somehow missed the first time around (Theorema, Chaos and many others).  One of these scents is Guerlain Chamade.

It’s not hard to understand how I might have overlooked it.  First off, it’s not as widely available as some of the other classic Guerlains.  Second, the current iteration of Chamade in the EDT is (like most Guerlains now, in my opinion) much sharper and less lovely than the current EDP version, not to mention the extrait.  Finally, the top of Chamade is such a sullen, green oddity that if I ever sniffed it before, I probably thought, eh.  I doubt it would have made it past the blotter onto my skin.   However, having fallen in love with Chamade in Paris, I pursued a bottle of parfum de toilette (PDT, the slightly “vintage” version) online, although the newer EDP is great too, and the parfum is no doubt gorgeous.

Chamade was released in 1969, done by Jean-Paul Guerlain, and the notes (I’ve seen several slight variations to this list) are hyacinth, aldehydes, jasmine, ylang, rose, blackcurrant bud, galbanum, vanilla, amber, benzoin, and sandalwood.  Chamade-lovers worldwide can now de-lurk and tell me I’m an idiot, but I don’t care for that green opening that seems so utterly disconnected from the rest of the scent.  It’s like a Cristalle dupe without the same pitch-perfect, Marlboro-Light follow through.   Luca Turin says in The Guide that he lived near the Paris flagship store at the time Chamade was released, and it took him months to realize the two perfumes (top and heart) he kept smelling were in fact one and the same.  (He gives it five stars and calls it “a masterpiece.”)

The not-quite-Cristalle top fades, and then all is quiet; is the action over?  No.  Next comes the powdery floral of my dreams – i.e., less powder (not one of my favorite effects in a scent) and more floral.  It’s not remotely baby-powderish, more sweetly diffuse, with a liquor-like richness that’s exceedingly difficult to describe.  LT says it’s a “beautiful, strange, moist, powdery yellow narcissus accord that had the oily feel of pollen rubbed between finger and thumb.”  And I’m quoting that because I’m hard-pressed to do better – there is something oily about it, and it is both beautiful and a little strange – it has a luminosity that makes me think of fireflies in the night, in one of their rare displays of synchronous flashing.  It sends up its small golden flares in measured bursts as I wear it, the heavy vanillic white florals interspersed with the green-tartness of blackcurrant.   It is leagues and fathoms away from the current Guerlains of the quasi-edible variety, but it’s less old-school and “difficult” than Jicky, Mitsouko or Parure (to name three Guerlains I happen to love, but I certainly understand why others don’t.)   For a well-mannered floral with both powder and aldehydes, Chamade doesn’t make me feel like Aunt Nellie pinning on a brooch – it’s too wet and beautiful to smell old-fashioned.    The drydown after two or three hours is well worth the wait – the powder fades, and it’s a quiet, ambery benzoin with a touch of honey.

Chamade fits very nicely in the smell-pretty box, a box that at least for me holds rather more interest than it used to.  It doesn’t require careful consideration before I put it on, and I’ve garnered enough compliments on it to have concluded that others must like it too.  Just don’t say I didn’t warn you about that funny, mossy-green opening act.

image of fireflies: nature.com

March

Just don’t work out like you want.  Yesterday was a long day, and somehow, when I found myself curled up in my bed last night, it didn’t occur to me it was Wednesday and y’all might like a new post today.  Sorry about that!

Winners of the Byredo La Tulipe samples are — Mary, Style Spy and Karen G.

Winners of the Hermes Voyage d’Hermes samples are — Hemlock Sillage, Tiara, Suzy Q, and Francesca.

If you’re a winner, click on the Contact Us Button on the left, remind me what you won (this is really important when we have two drawings!) and send me your address, and I’ll get this out to you!

From Evil Auntie Musette:

Since Patty’s biiiizy, if y’all want to play Scent of the Day, I’m game!

Mine is Jicky.  Dunno why.  I’m feeling kinda scary today – Jicky is one of my ‘arrrgh’ scents.  However, I might change to Diorissimo a bit later  – it’s 70F here!

Patty

As you know, I hauled a bunch of my less-common stuff downstairs recently for my perfume party, which allowed me to revisit some of the things I never smell, including my bottle of Guerlinade.  Back before the Earth’s crust cooled, and pterodactyls soared overhead, and Guerlain still made interesting perfumes… I used to call myself a Guerlain fangirl.  I was all over Jicky and Mitsouko, in particular, but had opened my arms wide, embracing the house in general.  Okay, with a couple of exceptions.  But still.

And so I came to realize that if I was going to be true to my Guerlain-ness I obviously needed to own a bottle of the so-called Guerlinade, right?  The heart, the soul, the essence of Guerlain?  The only problem was, the bottles were fancy and pretty and it was a discontinued LE, and I kept getting shut out of the bottles on eBay.  I think for awhile they sold for $200 – $300, which used to seem like real money.  Here, here’s a pic of a bottle that just sold on eBay for $124 and it’s empty.  (Hint: there’s a bottle on there right now, UK eBay – 2 days left, no packaging.  $16.00?  No bids?  Have at it.)

Anyhow, having failed to get a bottle, one day I whined to Patty about my streak of bad luck, and she offered to sell me a partial bottle, which almost got confiscated at the airport when she had to do carry-on (she didn’t bring it at the last minute), and how much would that have hurt?  A lot.  So I got my bottle, and I said:  Oh!  Hey!  So!  That’s the Guerlinade! And that was the end of it, because I thought it smelled boring.  I put the bottle away.

Anyone who is looking for something with the intensity of Mitsouko, or the animalic exoticism of Mouchoir de Monsieur or Jicky, is going to be disappointed.  Conversely, it doesn’t replicate the powdery genteel sweetness of L’Heure Bleue or Apres L’Ondee either.  To me Guerlinade is less about some universal Guerlain base than a higher plane, a lofty realm to which, frankly, I wish Guerlain still aspired.  Notes are bergamot, rose, jasmine, tonka bean, iris, and vanilla.

Guerlinade starts off with a strong hit of bergamot over the florals – I can really pick out the rooty/powdery qualities of the iris – and as the bergamot falls off the rich vanillic aspects of the base rise up, although it never becomes remotely like something you’d call edible.  Although there’s nothing listed in the notes to suggest it, in the middle stretch I get what smells like musk, nothing like the animalic reverb of the Guerlain classics but definitely there on my skin.  There’s something — like hay, or suede – in there that creeps out later as well.  The drydown on my skin is stronger, drier and less sweet than what I’d expect given the list of notes, and the way it smells when I first put it on.

If you haven’t smelled Guerlinade, I personally wouldn’t kill myself getting ahold of a bottle.  And on eBay, anyway, if the outer packaging is there, you’re probably going to be bidding against bottle collectors.  But having worn Guerlinade on and off for several days, I moved the bottle out of its display box and onto the shelf of fragrances I actually reach for and wear.  It smells elegant and expensive without, in fact, boring me.  I have no idea whether Coco Chanel really said elegance is refusal, but something about the luxe yet spare Guerlinade works for me like a single strand of pearls.

March

First, I am in need of someone in Greece to help me with a small project.   Click on contact us over on the left if you are a someone who could/would help or know someone that can help!  I just need someone that could get a package that they’ll only ship within Greece, and would reship it to me, of course with my paying for the shipping costs and any little favors I can do in return.

Second – winners of the Tom Ford Musk sample set are: : Lora and Sue and Billy D.  Just click the contact Us on the left, send me your address, remind me what you won, and I’ll get these mailed out to you!

This will be annoying perfume house creation day.  Nothing gets people a more irritated than Tom Ford and Guerlain’s prices on their more exclusive scents, and I’m right in the front of that line.

After grousing last week that I only got some of the new Tom Ford musk samples from BG, this week the Grey Vetiver and PB Arabian Wood showed up from the lovely people at BG, Jhanie and Raquel S., along with three more of the musks I already had.  Hey, are you guys reading? *blowing kisses* Love your work, ya’ll rock, seriously and everyone should call you at the Tom ford Beauty Counter and buy product from you – 212-872-2813 – even if it’s for other stuff in the store.  Seriously, this kind of great service, and I know they do it for a bunch of customers, not just because I write for a blog, is spectacular and should be rewarded.

Tom Ford Grey Vetiver is going to at least be in their more mainline scents, with White Patchouli and Black Orchid, and will be $85 for 50 mls, and I’m guessing probably about $120(?). Notes of grapefruit, orange flower, sage, nutmeg, orris, pimiento, amber woods and oak moss make up grey vetiver, along with, I assume, vetiver.  It’s not a heavily earthy vetiver, leaning more to the “banker” vetiver – an elegant, restrained take on vetiver, but it’s still pretty darn wonderful as it is.  There’s some really nice spiciness with this and a touch of rootiness coming in with the iris  after a more traditional fougere’ish open. On my skin, I’d really say it tends to be more masculine because of the more traditional men’s fougere notes.  I think that’s just more my expectation or sense of masculine scents than it actually is.  A woman could very easily wear this, and I’m sure I will!  It’s got a great length to it, lasting for several hours and smelling even better, less fougere’ish, more vetiver and spice, which is the cool aspect of this scent.

It’s a great vetiver scent.  I don’t find it incredibly ground-breaking, but it is a great take on vetiver, especially the spicy aspects that get played up more after it’s been on a while.  Tom Ford will sell a billion of these -  I’ll absolutely guarantee that – and it will become a men’s classic.  Again, not because it’s ground-breaking, but because it is well-made, easy to wear, easy to like right out of the bottle, and holds your interest as you wear it without driving you to distraction trying to figure it out. And it smells great.  AND it’s not $180 for 50 mls, it’s just $85.  I’m never wrong on this stuff, so you heard it here first.

Arabian Wood, also from Tom Ford, has notes of lavender, Bulgarian rose, freesia, orange blossom, galbanum, bergamot, rose de mai, ylang ylang, rose absolute, jasmine, gardenia, honey, orris, patchouli, cedar, oak moss, sandalwood, tonka bean and amber.  It was exclusive in Kuwait before it released generally to the rest of the world. I don’t know why I was thinking this would be highly oud’ish and middle eastern. It’s just not.  It’s a fairly well rounded fougere with some great floral notes that don’t take up too much space and a sharp’ish base that’s interesting – green sharpish, definitely the galbanum.  The woody parts of it are more green wood and continue to lean that way all through the drydown, though much of the sharpishness blends in nicely.  They have an interesting taken on dealing with the wood, and it seems almost Dior’like on me.  I still don’t think the name really suits it very well.

Then I made the mistake of throwing some Kilian Pure Oud up next to it, which prompted a phone call to Luckyscent to order another bottle, but I asked them instead if they thought this was going to go in wider release, and the answer was — MAYBE!! Not sure on the refill situation yet, but they’re going to check and get back to me.

Now for the most annoying scent created this year, Guerlain’s Mon Precieux Nectar.  62 bottles were made and sold at 6k Euro, I believe, apiece.  You do get 1000 mls of pure parfum and a great Baccarat fountain.  Well, one showed up on eBay – Ha, take that on exclusivity, Guerlain! we lowly perfume minions always find a way – and it sold for about half the price, which a bunch of us reckless fools went together on and split it about 30-40 ways to get the darn thing bought.   I know many of you were opposed to this ridiculous, opulent Guerlain display, but there is something about breaking that exclusive system or bringing a perfume into the hands of some ordinary perfumistas without having to fork over that kind of dough individually that just makes my little cracker heart glad.

For those of you that hate the Sylvaine Delacourte trajectory Guerlain’s been on and who hated Quend Vient la Pluie, you will be happy to know that you don’t need this one.  Notes of petitgrain, bitter almond, jasmine, orange blossom, sensual woods, incense, vanilla and white musk are the notes.  Word for this – gourmand, indulgent. plump and plush. Grain de Musc reviewed it and she’s pretty spot on.  I’ve really liked what Sylvaine has done. I like the old school Guerlain too, but I find the La Matieres and Double Vanille much more to my everyday wearing and liking than L’heuere Bleue and Jicky.  Fine, you can boo and jeer if you will. I admire those fragrances very much, but they just aren’t things I can or will wear every day. I could happily wear the La Matieres or Quand Vient or Nectar or Double Vanille every day, if necessary, and be quite content. They are full-on comfort scents, all round edges, warm, inviting. They call you in to get closer, not make you back up and wonder what in the world is that smell.  Mon Precieux Nectar is very much like that.  It opens a little sweet, vanilla and almond enveloping you.  If it stayed that sweet, it would be a problem, but it doesn’t.  It gives way to a more lush woody floral quality overlaying the gourmands that just feels like velvet to the  nose.  The incense is a bit player in this scent, but I certainly pick up on it as it dries down,  as well as the petitgrain, and the gourmand qualities continue to diminish, leaving a more ephemeral, beautiful scent that’s much more interesting than the big gourmand open.  The white musk gives it a nice, soft base to land on.  Not a skanky musk in the least, just a plush one.  I think it’s beautiful, but I like this kind of scent a lot, so there you have it.

The price point is ridiculous, even considering you’re getting 1000 ml of pure parfum.  It’s for collectors and the idol rich, but as much as I want to protest this silliness and make Guerlain sell to us in smaller quantities without all the hoopla, I’ll still give in and try to find a way to get ahold of them.

Now, for my happy fools that love to bust Guerlain exclusivity vats, how do we get our hands on the Habit Rouge extrait?  Thoughts? BG has it, as does the Guerlain boutique. I don’t even know how much it is or how much you get in a bottle, but it seems like enough of us should be stupid enough to try and get some, right?

For those of you that still would like a taste of the Nectar, I will give out four small samples of it to four lucky commenters.

Patty