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! 

On its website Strange Invisible Perfumes describes itself as purveying “botanical fragrances and artisanal products” developed by Alexandra Balahoutis. The site doesn’t go on and on about SIP’s mission, at least that I could see, a fact that pleases me. So far as I’m concerned, their mission is to make something I’d enjoy wearing.

Vine – this is the weird one, right? Notes are black currant, lavender, osmanthus and grapefruit, and it’s a parfum. From their website: “Vine’s whispering decadence is evocative of red wine, black currant and lavender. Provenance: the intricate, sublime yet often cruel duality of nature and the unforeseen appetite of innocence. Character: ambrosia, poised, decadent.”

Um … okay, my balderdashometer just revved (although it didn’t redline – seriously, read that stuff every day and you build up some tolerance.) Anyway, Vine has a fruity, musky scent inside a larger smell that reminds me very much of the Elephant House at the National Zoo. From me, that’s a compliment. It’s an earthy, animal smell, dungy but not really unpleasant. It reminds me a bit of a JAR in its strength, liquor-like smoothness and overall peculiarity – it’s like a warmer, fruitier Ferme tes Yeux (the barnyard one, and apologies if I spelled that wrong). As you go deeper into the drydown I get an outstanding cured tobacco note. I’m giving this two large mammalian opposable thumbs up.

Lady Day – this one I think isn’t on their website, you have to call and ask. It’s the gardenia one. Patty said the notes are lemon verbena, blood orange, jasmine and sandalwood. Here’s her extensive review. I get the citrus-y opening, and the gardenia weaves itself in and out – it pops in, fades, and when it’s not there you’ve got a lovely green jasmine, no cheese note, nothing particularly indolic going on here, a little woods. I’m gonna quote Patty, who put it beautifully: “There is a richness to this perfume, hinting at dark longing, mixed with regret, but never toppling over into the abyss of despair. It is lush, almost too ripely indulgent at times, but manages to pull back before the serious decay sets in. Mostly, it is beautiful and has sillage that wafts gently around you - a soft, rich, velvety sillage. Exquisite, unique and haunting.”

Smelling it in the first ten minutes, I was verklempt – it’s one of those rare perfumes that make me cry. Malle En Passant and Serge Lutens’ Encens et Lavande have the same effect on me, and Teo Cabanel Julia did a little bit, too. En Passant is wistful; EetL is exquisitely mournful, like a rainfall in a cathedral graveyard in the spring. Julia is innocence of youth at the moment before it becomes knowing. Lady Day is sensual and celebratory and heartbreakingly sad. Lord, I do go on, don’t I? Hand me a Kleenex.

Heroine – Duh, I always thought this was “Heroin,” which I thought was a skeevy name for a fragrance, so I’m pleased to discover I was wrong. Notes are ginger, tuberose, frangipani, opoponax and Moroccan cedarwood. It’s murky on me at the start – kind of a mishmash of tropical flowers and wet mud – but give it a few and the ginger and opoponax shove the whole hot mess in the direction of a peppery, resinous floral. I wish the flowers were less present on me and the ginger were stronger; I find it a tad sweet, and it’s less interesting than Vine or Lady Day. Having said that, it’s very pretty, yet just enough off-kilter (there’s a wet, green, earthy note in there) that it’s not dull.

Black Rosette – proving once again that I don’t like rose unless you freak it up a little. Black Rosette is saved for me by the addition of leather and mint. The opening is just … very peculiar. It smells like a cross between artemisia and camphor. It’s medicinal but not unpleasant, I kind of like it. After the camphor fades I get a very leathery rose, but the rose itself is kind of new and green – that florist-fridge-rose smell never leaves, like a rose version of Tuberose Criminelle. I wouldn’t wear it, it’s not me, but I think it’s beautifully done.

Heroine lasted a little less than average on me (4 – 5 hours). Lady Day had a charming way of fading and reappearing suddenly over the course of 8 hours, like being haunted by a particularly lovely ghost. Black Rosette lasted most of the day before riding off into the sunset. Vine lasted, I kid you not, 36 hours on the back of my hand (which means: through many handwashings). I was thrilled, but if you hate it, consider yourself warned. I tried only parfums, and don’t know whether the EDPs wear differently. These had excellent sillage on me, with a little going a long way. I’m impressed with these, and I’m going to explore more of the line on my next trip to New York. They weren’t quite as bizarre as I expected, which was fine. Vine and Lady Day were a trip well worth taking. If any of you have particular recommendations from the line, I’d like to hear them.

Image: rothkochapel.org

My obsession with Strange Invisible Perfumes continues. I swear, I will one day move past it, but I’m having too great of a time exploring them to stop yet, so indulge me for a while longer. After March and Elle kept making reference to Lady Day - which is now just called Untitled on SIP’s website or you can order it directly by calling them - I had to have it.  Notes of lemon verbena, blood orange, jasmine and sandalwood.  According to the crib notes, it was inspired by the “transcendent, velvet aroma of wild gardenia.”  I don’t know that I’ve ever smelled wild gardenia, so I won’t be able to say how close this is.  Further proviso — I don’t generally like gardenia perfumes and detest most of them.  Further further, do we all know that there is no such thing as a gardenia note in perfumery? They have to make it up out of other notes to simulate it, which strikes me a bit like handing a child some fur and pipe cleaner and asking them to make a cat. 

It starts off a little tartish due to the lemon verbena, just enough to give it some tang and then to wallow underneath the perfume all the way into the drydown to simulate that little bit of blue cheese note that gardenia has, but never pushing it over into really rotten blue cheese, which I can’t bear but I know many of you are quite fond of.  It strikes me as being a pretty happy medium.  There is a richness to this perfume, hinting at dark longing, mixed with regret, but never toppling over into the abyss of despair. It is lush, almost too ripely indulgent at times, but manages to pull back before the serious decay sets in.  Mostly, it is beautiful and has sillage that wafts gently around you -  a soft, rich, velvety sillage.  Exquisite, unique and haunting.  Is it really named for Billie Holiday?  That’s probably up to your imagination.  For me, it captures the world-weary, mournful blues sung by like Billie and Etta James and Nina Simone, wanting a little sugar in their bowl, and I think any one of them would have happily worn Lady Day.  My most fervent hope is one day she’ll do Lady Day in an edp, it begs to be spritzed with abandon, though I may kill everyone with the sillage wake I’d trail.

Many of the Strange Invisible Perfumes I don’t recommend to those of you new to nonmainstream perfumerie, they can be an acquired taste, even though I’m absolutely enraptured with most of them at this point. It’s gone beyond bordering on ridiculous into completely obsessive.  Lady Day (Untitled) is one of their scents that is much more approachable for newbies.  March covered a lot of gardenia yesterday, and Lady Day is an essential gardenia scent for gardenia lovers and even those who don’t think they like gardenia.

Let’s have a drawing today.  A sample of Lady Day, Heroine, and Persica or some other SIP substitution if you already have one or more of these.  Just drop a note in comments with the question of the day:  Have you tried any SIPs, and did you fall in the “ew, not for me” camp or in the “love some, hate others” camp or the “Love ‘em all, even if I can’t wear them all” camp?

The New Yorker jumped the gate with an early review of Luca and Tania’s book. Lord, it’s going to be wretched waiting another month or so to get our hands on it.

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?