When one sets out to narrow down to six perfumes her favorites, what she should do instead is grab a Xanax,  place her head under the pillow, hold it down firmly so nobody hears and scream until the mood passes.

But I didn’t. Instead I have come up with the list of the six perfumes that I cannot live without, under any circumstances, and which best define who I am or want to pretend to be. So they may or may not be the perfumes that I admire most as great creations, though I think all on this list are that, but they are the ones most beautiful to me. The agonies of discarding beloved perfumes from this list has been horrible. Warning, there are a couple of incidences of cheating to narrow this down…

1. Ormonde Woman. Full-bodied green velvet –think Miss Ellen’s Poitiers from Gone with The Wind, after they got made into that beautiful green gown for Scarlett. A little saucy and tart, makes you pucker sometimes, not sure if you like it or not, but inevitably its charm wears you down. Parfum version preferred, it just amps up the annoyance and the charm.

2. Guerlain Après L’ondee. Melancholy, regretful, but completely full of hope. It is sorrow at 1,000 yards, where you can look at it and appreciate the exquisite pain without really feeling it. The numb place before the real pain sets in or after it has gone. EDT or parfum will work.

3. Le Labo Patchouli 24/Vanille 44 – Okay, this is a cheat, I know, I know! But they GO together, kids! A spritz of Patch down the front of your shirt for depth and tarry resonance and a couple of spritzes of Vanille over your outer clothes and in your hair creates a cloud of woody vanilla over that tar - truly the most amazing and comforting scent in the world.

4. Christian Dior Dorling vintage parfum. What a cold, unfeeling thing it starts off as, and you’re thinking it has no soul; it’s finicky, much too churlish and standoffish to love. That’s when Dorling brings the magic. It warms not into the most beautiful girl in the room, but the most interesting, the one you have to stop and pay attention to, sit and talk with. Anthropomorphize much? Well, this perfume seems completely human to me, and she never fails to amaze me.

5. CB Cradle of Light/Strange Invisible Perfumes Lady Day/Serge Lutens Sarrasins. Yes, I’m cheating, but any of these three could fit here, and any day will have me changing my mind. They are gorgeous jasmine treatments, and each stuns me and can keep me mesmerized all day with its beauty - sort of a hypnotic sniffing loop.  Everyone has to have a jasmine on their list, unless you hate jasmine, but you should get over it and put one on your list anyway… or three.

6. Serge Lutens Iris Silver Mist. Give me that overabundance of cold, rooty iris with a dollop of spice in the drydown, and I’ll give you my unadorned and complete, lavish devotion for a lifetime.  Genius, brilliant, and a joy to wear on any day of the year.

While I started off with a list of five, I had to expand it to six because none of these would exit the list. Now, as I read comments, I will find my head exploding as you guys mention perfumes that should be on this list, and there is a subset of about 100 perfumes that go beneath these that I also can’t live without, but these are the list of six’ish that I will have in embarrassing amounts for all of my life.

What’s your six?

Annoying American Idol part of Friday:  Ramiele is GONE, yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mop-up items:  Winner of the Indult C16 and CdG Hinoki samples are:  Tom (tmp00) and Six.  Just click on Contact us over on the left, and send me you address and I’ll ship you the samples! 

In As You Like It (one of my favourites, just for the pure gender play frolics of Rosalind as Ganymede), Jacques famously talks of the seven ages of man, in his standard less-than-chirpy terms, the great big sulky drawers. 400 years ago, people’s lives were a lot shorter, and Jacques has men (and it’s avowedly men, folks - no women to be seen) leaping from adolescent love-mooning, to the passion of young adulthood, to a contented and girth expanding middle-age. In modern terms, I’m not sure where the ages fit, though I guess by now I’ve had between three and four of mine. That is, I’ve definitely been a child, an adolescent and a young man. I’m assuming I’m on the cusp of middle age, even though I’m pretty sure I’m right in it, in reality… A smell the coffee moment? Now, strangely, there are three scents which mark out the first three stages of my life, though my ‘fume promiscuity means that no marker exists from now on. So, I know you’re gagging to know. In fact, I hear some of you cry out, ‘So, what are they already?’ Okay, okay, hold your horses…

At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;

First scent memory of any note is my grandfather’s Old Spice. My grandparents had a vanity unit in their bathroom; we didn’t. There wasn’t much in it - some cotton wool, a few prescription medicines, always a brown glass bottle of hydrogen peroxide, white label, old fashioned even in the seventies. I’d sniff it and get that funny hair salon sensation up my nose. But the prize for me was the Old Spice bottle. I would hold the cold bottle as though it was precious porcelain, reimagine the strains of Carmina Burana and the iconic surfer as I lifted the stopper and inhaled that sweetly spiced powdery goodness. My grandfather was a long way from a surfer dude (just as the model in the old ad was too, I now know) yet for the pre-teen me, there was something immeasurably, ineffably, hopelessly cool about this bottled magic. It’s a scent I still adore as much as any niche fancypants work of ‘art’. Good ole mass market genius. The best of the best. Just like my much loved, and much missed, grandpa.

Then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.

At university, I attempted nerd chic. I bought old suits, wore them rolled up on the legs, above thrift store desert boots. Collarless Edwardian dress shirts, though I never quite got the nerve for the little round collars themselves. My glasses were some new graphite carbonised something or the other. And I was reading several books a week, smoking lots, partying, and generally thinking that no-one as witty or as wonderful as me had existed, really, except for maybe a few of my friends. In moments of doubt, I’d wrap my large camel duffle coat around me (second hand was the done thing, of course) and spray on some more Fahrenheit, confidence restorer that it was. Fahrenheit. The ghost of myself, arrogant young man, a performer without the worries of his allotted time on the stage, an aesthete without an understanding of the cost of aesthetics, a ponce, a frightened child, socially clueless, surviving on guile and a modicum of charm. We all know that feeling… The smell brings these things all back, and yet somehow it’s still wonderful. At times, I don’t like the carapace I wore in my undergraduate folly. I like the man hiding within - he’s a good guy, y’know. He was just too shy to show himself back then. But the carapace that is the startling, and over-familiar, green gasoline and honeysuckle jolt of Fahrenheit, well, that I’ll always love.

And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.

My friend Sarah left for Paris as soon as she got her degree, and she’s lived there ever since, now works at the Sorbonne, and is raising two lovely kids with her Basque partner. I still make sporadic visits, but in my twenties, I seemed to be there a lot. She lived on the top floor of an old apartment block in the ‘less fashionable’ end of the Marais, on Rue Vieille du Temple. there were still old-fashioned shops around then - cobblers and keycutters, corner bakers. They’re mainly fancy boutiques now. Whenever Sarah came down her never-ending flights of stairs, the Portuguese housekeeper (oh, Parisian cliches!) would be out in flailings of floral dresses, tabards and dyed black hair, to remonstrate her for some misdemeanour or the other. Sometimes, where she’d stored her bike. Most often, playing music too loudly. We’d listen to rai, Natacha Atlas, and occasionally George Michael. We’d sit on the Ile St. Louis and watch the world and her lover go by. I’d miss Matt, who rarely accompanied me on such jaunts. I guess I’d sigh. Back at the apartment, I’d bathe, and use one of Sarah’s bath oils, scented markers of my times in Paris. My favourite was a Guerlain, but I didn’t really pay attention back then. One day, in my early thirties, I sniffed it once more. It was Eau de Guerlain, and of course I now have the perfume, though not the bath oil (it might have been bubble bath, but that sounds wrong for an epiphany, donchathink?). It’s a citrus begamot herbal eau de cologne, nothing more, nothing less, but the best of its kind. Like youth, it doesn’t last. But unlike youth, you can go back for more whenever you fancy. And that’s some comfort. If I need it. I rarely do.

So tell me. Three scents that are time markers for you in one way or another, fancy as you like or totally dime-to-the-dozen. We’re not proud here.

Georgian illustrations of Jacques’ speech come from http://artoftheprint.com

Released by Christian Dior in 1995, and created by Pierre Bourdon, Dolce Vita has notes of rose, magnolia, muguet, apricot, peach, cinnamon, sandalwood, vanilla, and heliotrope.  There is something about the interplay of the fruity notes on the open that makes this start off feeling a little, well… smutty.  Like there are massive amounts of cumin in there, though it’s not listed as a note.  Attention, K-mart Fragrance Makers, this is what fruity floral should smell like.  Not sweet, but you can pick out the fruit easily.  The cinnamon lends spice, and the floral notes, vanilla and sandalwood smooth it out into a warm, woodsy scent, never taking it into foody at all.  Smooth, interesting and grown-up, Dolce Vita could be worn by  men or women. 

Guerlain Cuir Beluga has notes of mandarine, aldehydes, immortelle, leather, heliotrope, amber, and vanilla.  Don’t look for leather here, you’ll be very disappointed.  You will find a creamy, lovely, cooly interesting scent.  Without the immortelle, I think this scent would tend to bland, but the immortelle gives it enough play so the chocolatey creaminess becomes addictive, but never warmed up.   It is the creamy white flower that blooms in the shade, releasing its perfume only for itself, never caring whether it is beautiful to others.

Strange Invisible Perfumes Vine has notes of  osmanthus, lavender, grapefruit and black currant.  Its inspiration was the Greek Myth of Persephone whose appetite for pomegranate seeds kept her in Hades for half of the year.   It’s an almost sweet green open, which lasts for just a few mintues before the grapefruit and lavender show up to give it a tart almost minty floral feel, all the while Satan is running around beneath it laughing.  Not listed, there’s a deep, dark animalic character that permeates this entire concoction.  If you think Vine is about green… think again. It is the vine that wraps around your leg in the night and pulls you down to the forest floor, caressing you as it overpowers you - but do you want to fight it?  This is one of my favorite SIPs, but it’s not easy to wear or appreciate, and I wouldn’t recommend it for a beginner.  Save it for when you’re feeling more confident and want a walk on the wild side.

On a personal note, my youngest son has picked his college, yeah!!!  Now we start the rest of the long grind doing all those collegy things, and in a few short months I’ll be an empty nester.  That fills me with a melancholy that this part of my life is almost over and a new part is about to begin.  Once we take our family trip to Europe this summer, I’ll need suggestions for what in the world do I do with a big old house empty of kids?