Whew!  2011 is nearly over and I still don’t have my Escape limo and I have NO idea where Woody Harrelson is right now.   Better hustle!!!  But – we still have a few days so let’s take a look back at the  best/worst/most intriguing of 2011.  Most of this will be perfume, as it is The Perfume Posse, not Anita’s Playpen…but save room for a couple of weird inclusions, just because I Am In That Kinda Mood.  We are also not limiting this list (or your comments) to stuff brought forth in 2011 – rather, we’re interested in what piqued your interest this past year – some may have transported you with delight, some might’ve brought up your lunch!  Ya nebber know.

So, without further ado, here’s what grabbed us in 2011.

Anita’s picks:

Cartier les Heurres Fougueuse.  I fell in love with this the moment I sniffed it.  Then, inexplicably, I fell OUT of love with it – I think I got scared.  Then I just…gave in.  And swooned as over the course of the year it wrapped its honeyed, monied silken tendrils of sun-kissed hay around my soul….sigh.  Oh, Mathilde…..every time I wear this my step lightens just a little.. Liz Zorn Centennial.  This is an offshoot of her Historical Chypre, which I fell in love with (and bought nearly every drop she had) during the Chicocoa Scentsation.  The perfect peachy chypre, it is the essence of everything I love about Liz’s work;  I’m praying she brings it back soon. Chanel Coco (the original).  Blame March.  I wondered what y’all were yarking on about.  Now I know.  Amouage Epic Bath Gel and Body Creme. (not too far behind on this one, right?   I know it’s a 2009 but I wasn’t able to make it to the Dubai launch -previous plans, don’tcha know…)…anyhoo, 2011 made it New To Musette.   I just might make it through the winter (and the coming Apocalypse) with this.  I’m going to have to send my water bills to Christopher Chong, though.  Or His Majesty.  Whichever one is most likely to pay.

Alahine.  Epic FAIL.  Can you believe it?  Neither can I.  I waited 2 years to sniff that and when I did……..nothing.  I mean, it’s nice.  But what in the hell are you people smelling that transports you so?  March can’t even SPELL it, she is so in love.  She’s all ‘Alahiiiiiiiine’.  Wish I could have what she’s having.  sigh.

BestChowDiscoveries: Trader Joe’s Chicken Shu Mai.  For all I know these are made with chicken feet and beaks.  But isn’t that the best part? Sonoma Farm (from Chicago, go figure) Hot Pickled Garlic (that’s not what it’s called but that’s what it is ).   The website is seemingly gone and their stuff is hard to find (and when you do, at Food Fairs, etc, well, let’s just say they are not Good With the Publick.  But!  these (and the Brussels Sprouts) are worth the slog. Perfect in everything and yummy alone.  But I suggest you actually BE alone when you eat this stuff.  You will be comin’ in HOT for awhile…

Movies:  I hate going to the movies so I’m usually months behind everybody else.  And I admit to being Cranky Old Bat about the sheer volume of crap that gets released every month – there must be a whole lotta money needs launderin’, is allz I got to say (don’t believe me?  take a look at this 2011 list  (and I’m not even that fussy – I love blow’emups and Tony Scott!).  I did brave the plex for Contagion.   3 of us in the theatre.  Hey, I could get used to that!  El O hated the movie.  I thought it was quietly horrifying.  I also finally got around to The King’s Speech - hey I said I was behind! Why didn’t the gen pop like this film?  I think Geoffrey Rush could read the phone book and I would be entranced.   The funny, touching scene with him and Colin Firth when Lionel parks himself in St. Edward’s Chair…  Pitch-perfect.

March says: I went back and looked at the release dates of new-ish perfumes I enjoyed, and … they all came out in 2010.  So this year has been kind of a dud for me, in terms of new releases.  The one exception is Bottega Veneta, a less-powdery alternative to the new iteration of Cuir de Lancome, if you like the smell of expensive handbags.  Mostly I’ve been enjoying old favorites gathering dust in my collection, including Alahine, Jubilation 25, Coco, Tauer Orris, and Lutens’ Fleurs de Oranger.  I can think of worse things.  Anita sez:  that’s Alahiiiine! to you, li’l Missy.

Patty chimes in: This has been a weirdly great year for me in finding new loves.  From Prada Candy to the new JAR Bed of Roses, to Flowerbomb Extrait to a never-smelled bottle of the now-discontinued Lorenzo Villoresi Ylang-Ylang I found in my closet (yes, everyone should have closets like mine where you find a box full of perfume you forgot you had) that has sent me to the moon (um, see yesterday’s post for histrionics over this), it’s been a mixed bag of great smells.

I still love Bertrand Duchafour because he’s prolific and great, and I know for a fact there is more great stuff coming in 2012, so he gets my vote for Perfumer of the Year? Decade?  Oh, wait, we are two years in a new decade, it’s too early.

Ann’s Picks:

MDCI’s La Belle Helene: Up until this baby, no way,  no how was I ever going into pear territory again. Annick Goutal’s Petite Cherie went sour on me in record time and too many cheap pear body products left me shuddering. Until a sweet Posse swapper sent me a sample of La Belle, and one day, feeling brave, I said, “Oh, what the heck!” and put it on. Wowza! Now this is a pear I can wear. On me, it starts out a little bright, but true to the fruit,  and later, deepens, getting burnished down to a slightly gourmand (is that chocolate I smell?) soft oriental. It has a touchable, almost suedelike vibe to it, not unlike SL’s Daim Blond. It’s almost as if her gloves got left behind in the pear orchard, instead of atop a bushel basket of apricots.

Maison Martin Margiela Untitled: The fashion minimalist in me (I’ve always loved designers such as Zoran and Ronaldus Shamask) coveted this cool, paint-dipped bottle long before I had a chance to sniff the juice. And what lovely green juice it is: A hit of bitter green galbanum a la Cristalle segues beautifully into some musky, almost smoky incense, and thankfully, not an ashtray in sight.

Parfumerie Generale’s Indochine: This has turned out to be one of my favorite comfort “blankies” this winter. It reminds me a bit of Kenzo’s Amour (perhaps the thanaka wood that both share) but to my nose, the PG is richer, more creamy, dreamy and woody. This in a body cream would be nothing short of heaven in a jar. Its stablemate, Cadjmere, is another fave, although it gets a little cheeky with me if I do more than dab it.

Bottega Veneta: This lovely is helping to make a leather lover  out of me, despite my earlier misgivings about the note. BV’s easy elegance just coos quiet sophistication and makes me feel like a million bucks. And it doesn’t hurt that the bottle’s a thing of beauty. Now, if we can just get our hands on some MPG’s Cuir Fetiche to try …

And here’s a wonderful scentiment   from Tom, which we all share!!!

I’m doing my “best of” scent-wise on PST, so I’ll content myself with with celebrating a different best here: YOU GUYS!  That’s right!  I want to toast all of you out there, fellow bloggers, commenters and readers.  In the last several years of blogging, reading, learning and meeting people I can honestly state that I have never met a more warm, funny, intelligent and giving group of people.  YOU are the best of 2011 or any other year and I wish you all the best in the future.

For more looks back at 2011 please visit  Perfume-Smellin’ Things, Bois de Jasmin, Now Smell This and Grain de Musc.

While I was doing last-minute research for the Cuir Fetiche post, I learned of the passing of Jean-Francois Laporte, the visionary behind Sisley, L’Artisan and Maitre Parfumeur et Gantier (MP&G) among others.   His contribution to the perfume world is extensive and he will be sorely missed.

I cannot do him justice here because it’s already been done, way more beautifully than I ever could.  Please take a minute to go over to Denyse’s tribute at Grain de Musc for a look at a truly remarkable man’s life.

by Musette-with-a-Whip

I adore leather.   leather gloves.  I have a glove collection to rival Imelda’s shoes, in all colors and types. Leather dresses.   I wore a Harley-Davidson  black leather evening gown with red leather opera gloves to a conservative charity event.  It was weird – the leather part (the gown design is a plain black v-neck column) – but fabulous.  Biker jackets.  Before ballistic nylon and its ilk, it was the hide that would save your hide in event of an unexpected get-off.   Soft, tough, sexy leather.   The smell of a leather coat worn by a beloved someone.  A tissue-thin evening glove with a hint of skin-scent and hand cream, maybe a touch of perfume.

Maitre Parfumeur et Gantier has captured all of that in their new scent Cuir Fetiche.     This is one of the sexiest scents I’ve smelled in a very long time, mostly because it doesn’t seem to be trying all that hard, corseted bottle notwithstanding.  The leather doesn’t come on strong at all, which you would think would be a negative, given my love of leather.  But the first, developing notes conjured an almost visceral image :  slowly sliding a soft, glove-leather jacket off someone you adore beyond reason, someone you want so bad it makes your gums hurt and your skin feel just a tad too tight, whenever you are anywhere near them.  That faint buzzing in the ears, where you can’t be sure you aren’t behaving oddly because …..well, just because.  And then.  And then, you finally arrive at a time and place where you can make the buzzing stop – and perhaps the first step is sliding that leather jacket off….

that’s what I got out of it, anyway (“I’ll have what she’s having”).  On first spritz I get a touch of soapy powder over leather but in the time it took me to write that the soapy powder settles down and becomes a very intimate, human-musk skin scent, with soft floral overtones.  I usually hate musk so I was surprised to find it so ‘intimate’ and pleasurable.  Weird as this sounds (and remember, I wore ball gowns to my last office job) I could see how this could work as an office scent, as long as you don’t mind your officemates following you around like snuffling dogs all day long.  Notes are courtesy fragrantica:

Top: red mandarin, bergamot, lemon, geranium
Heart: leather, ylang ylang, jasmine, rose, iris, vanilla
Base: Musk, ambergris, patchouli, cedar, sandalwood.

check out this gorgeous bottle!

This is my first MP&G so I had to read up on them – Jean Laporte, the former owner of L’Artisan, inspired by Parisian gantiers (glovemakers) who supplied scented gloves to 17thCentury aristocracy began this company in 1988 and apprenticed  Jean-Paul Millet Lage, a former banker-turned-perfumer (at first I read ‘baker’ which made more sense than ‘banker’ but as a machine-shop-owner/artist I am in no position to judge.  Talent and occupation are not always in sync).  Just stop for a second and read that word ‘apprentice’ again.  When was the last time you heard of anybody other than a union tradesman ‘apprenticing’?  In this day and age of instant expertise, the idea of a banker being willing to apprentice himself to a perfumer to learn his craft is ….well, it’s heartening.   I don’t know about his other MP&G scents (but reading comments indicates this is a bit of a polarizing brand, with the soapy and the musk)  but this one is really nice – though it reminds me of something else…the skin-scent drydown, with the touch of leather, is remarkably close to another scent….and for the life of me I can’t remember what it is!  I am going off my notes from a few days ago and am now at the onset of a flu I thought I’d dodged, dammit!  My nose is in shreds.  I’m not even going to bother trying to do scent-detective work.   Instead…I’m going to do us all a favor and do a giveaway of my little sample.  To enter, tell me how YOU feel about leather.  Or this line.  Or both!.  I’ll have Pickle pull a winner via random.org on Friday.  He will NOT be wearing this:

(though Mario is ROCKIN’ this!  Hard!…and c’mon.  I had to include it.  When else would I ever get a chance to use it?)

sample: gifted by a dear Perfumista friend                                                                                                                                       (Mario Lopez in Nip/Tuck)

Cuir Fetiche, an Autumn 2011 release,  is not on the MP&G website just yet.  It’s supposedly going to be offered through aedes and luckyscent, though it wasn’t on either site as of last night.

Update:  Per a post on Perfume Shrine, M. Laporte died recently.  A sad loss to the Perfume World.  Condolences to his family and friends.

Okay, I’m dashing in today. Training teachers, writing curriculum material, implementing improvement plans – I have no room left for work folks! I’m all about the smells and the plants, people. Wish my bank would understand. So work it is, and hence the brief(ish) post today.

I’m a positive person. Us Brits don’t always do positive in quite the same way as our more upbeat American cousins do, but I’m pretty much at the ‘Rah! Rah! Yay!’ end of the spectrum really. And I normally have only good things to say about scents. So, for a little bit of variety, and seeing as I have next to nothing to say about new scents right now (secret – I haven’t been wearing much, as so busy with the gardening stuff – such a Brit stereotype), I thought I might slam into a few I truly hate.

I don’t hate many things in life really – I’m you’re live and let live sort. Whilst not exactly laissez-faire, I always try to see where something’s coming from and give it some room for manoeuvre. Hating’s a little too strong for me, most days. Hey, I might not like it, but someone surely does. And that’s good enough. And hate – it’s such bad karma, dude. I’d rather the positive than the negative hyperbole, any day.

However, there are a few things that even for placid ole me bring out the nasty side. And I’m not talking designer scents either – I can’t really think of any that I feel strongly enough about to hate… I’m talking my niche nasties, my leprous disasters of limited distribution, my … you get the picture. I’m not even talking those things you love to sniff because their repulsiveness fascinates you. I’m talking those things that make you shudder, scents that are abject horror, perfumes to make you puke, fragrances that are flagrant abuses of olfaction.

And here they are. Apologies if you love these; I don’t (secret – I don’t know how anyone can. Please explain). You can tell me your hates straight after. We can still be friends.

Lorenzo Villoresi Incensi. Quite simply vile. Bitter, cold, messy, an abhorrent cacophony of notes. I never knew an incense could be worse than Messe de Minuit, but here it is. I love cinnamon, I enjoy incense, but here this foul brew conjures up a Satanic anti-sacrament in which I’d rather be eviscerated than have to sniff it again. Knocks his Piper Nigrum – top notes might be great but wait for the murky sludge of the drydown – into the shade in terms of awfulness.

Montale Musk to Musk. Delightful commenter grizzlesnort sent me a decant of this, and I pray I won’t offend you too much, J, by saying ‘thank you for the reminder’. I mean thank you by the way – it’s good to have a baseline for what a terrible musk fragrance can smell like. I had a small sample of this a while back that I seemed to lose. This decant reminded me of how exceptionally powerful a scent-related shudder can be. Oh my. It’s aldehydic and white musky, with a dank fleshrottiness underneath all that ‘pwitty pwitty’. It’s putrescence purtied up. Like a well-rotted corpse in lipstick and rouge.

Maitre Parfumeur et Gantier Jardin du Nil. Basenotes is down right now so I can’t access the reviews. But they’re worth reading. The MPetG site says of this bejewelled bilgebroth, “Returning from a voyage to Egypt, after having discovered mint and geranium rosa crops in the Nile Delta, Maà®tre Parfumeur et Gantier created Jardin du Nil. The refinement of geranium, rose and jasmine is added to a fresh top note of hesperides, on amber, patchouli and vetiver warm notes.’ Guys, you should’ve just stuck some flowers in old water for a few days and sniffed the results. Unwearable. Unless you’re decaying brown silt sitting on a pond liner.

Over to you!

Finger image from ezthemes.com.

Lee