Happy Halloween to all of our ghoulishly lovely Posse peeps! It’s that time of year where we conjure our favorite (or most frightening, as the case may be) scents of the season and share them with you. So here goes …

From Ann –

After the long, hot summer  we’ve had, I was really revving my broom in anticipation of cool-weather scents. So here’s what’s rattling my chain this season:

Its incense, juniper, pine and bergamot make Byredo’s Gypsy Water mysterious and intriguing, yet still easy to wear;  Le Labo’s Vanille 44 falls in the same vein, but with less mystery and more cozy comfort. And from my newly acquired fondness for  leather (not to worry, folks, no leather pants here),  I’ve got Bottega Veneta and Cuir de Lancome in as heavy a rotation as my samples will allow. P.S. Just got my sample of Serge Lutens’ Profundis — I’m kinda grooving on its earthy floral vibe with just a hint of  greeny-dark goodness. Maybe I’ll unearth this one for the trick-or-treating to come tonight …

From Anita/Musette –

I’m crawling out of my Grant Application Grave (bwaaahaha -oh, forget it)  just long enough to tell you what scents scare me…and what scents I use to scare others! bwaaahahahaha <ack!>

What Scares Me:

Angel.  Try as I might, I cannot get closer to Angel than 3′.  I was in SFA a few months ago and a woman came in, liberally marinated in the jus.  She wanted to chat and couldn’t understand why I kept backing away!  Finally I asked what she was wearing and she said ‘Angel.  My signature scent’.  All I can say is Voldemort, have I got a gal for youuu!

Opium.  Fear Factor 10.  On my way to the Malle Candle Thingy (yeah, that long ago and it’s STILL seared into my memory).  Got a teeny little dab on my fingertip.  Two trips to the bathroom and a trip to the Clinique counter for some Number 4 Toner Love….and that damn thing STILL clung to me, scattering the hoards right and left as I blazed a trail up Boul Mich to meet M. Frederic. The Opium preceded my entrance by a good 5 feet.   It’s a wonder he didn’t throw a bucket of Carnal Flower on me!

Aromatics Elixir.  In my entire life I have only had two things run me out of my house.  One was a bug bomb I intentionally set off (you know, set it and run like hell, slamming the door behind you)…and the other is Aromatics Elixir, when I spilled it on a leather chair.  It’s not that it’s not gorgeous.  It is.  But so are cobras.  Three days on the porch, that chair.

My Own Skary Ones:

Contemporary (current) Mitsouko.  For sheer, wet-your-pants Terror, nothing says “I will bite your head clean off” like current Mitsouko, with that elegant gasoline punch to the nose.  I wear it when I have to advocate for my dad or remind a Neanderthal site crew that I Am Their Boss.  Something about it really tends to frighten people.  Or maybe it’s just me?

Bandit.  It’s got a mean streak that I just LOVE! but beautiful in its capacity to terrorize.  Like a vampire created by FX artist Rick Baker.  You know it can’t hurt you…..right?  You’re sure about that?

Jolie Madame.  Booooya (with the emphasis on ‘boo’!).  Another one of those to give you pause.  Dark night, dark street.  Gorgeous woman in a fur coat and stilettos slinking down the fog-shrouded sidewalk.  Uh, that is a fur coat…..isn’t it?

From March –

I could aim for the cheap seats with something like Etro Messe de Minuit, which I put on the other day and got an extra dose of crypt from (although it smells like incense-roses on a friend, go figure.)  But instead I think I’ll run with:

Aquolina Pink Sugar.  Parents around here go different routes with the whole Leftover Halloween Candy issue, including doling out two pieces a night for three months, or letting the Great Pumpkin take it all away after a three days.  Our approach has always been: have at it.  I’m pretty sure at least two of my four kids have gorged on their candy until they (literally) puked, and there’s no way I could come up with a better lesson about moderation than that.  Bringing me around to Pink Sugar, a fragrance sweet enough to conjure the evil spirits of five pounds of candy corn, and which nauseates me in pretty much the same way.

When I think about trick or treating as a kid, what is the strongest memory besides the candy?  It’s the smell of the evening, out there in the dark for what seemed like hours of bliss, tromping around with friends in our cheesy home-made costumes up and down sidewalks, and around (and through) endless raked piles of leaves.  The smell of fall is still defined for me by that indescribable leaf pile aroma, which is why I was so thrilled the first time I smelled CB I Hate Perfumes’ Burning Leaves and realized he’d gotten it perfectly.  I’m old enough to remember the excitement when we and all the neighbors used to burn those leaves curbside (something I assume folks outside the city still do).  As great as the fragrance is when you first put it on, my favorite part is the drydown — when the “burning” fades away and I’m left with the smell of fallen leaves and a hint of autumn chill.

From Tom –

Well, fall in Los Angeles can’t decide from one hour to the next whether it will be chilly with a marine layer or  having hot Santa Ana winds, so choosing a scent can be an adventure in itself.  That spritz of Fumerie Turque that seemed so appropriate at 8 a.m. when it was 57 degrees  can become a little, well, challenging when it starts to hit the mid-80s at noon.

So I am keeping the Sables, with its immortelle-bomb aspect until it stays cool. I’m enjoying the comfort of ELdO Like This and Le Labo Musk (which you can all sample this November if there’s a Le Labo near you).

For other lists, please visit:  Bois de Jasmin, Grain de Musc, Now Smell This and Perfume-Smellin- Things.

Share your favorites for fall, what scent you’ll be wearing for tonight, or if you’ve got something special planned for Halloween.

pumpkin image: there are a ton of fun carved pumpkins, including plenty of NSFW images.  Since this pumpkin image appears on several sites, I don’t know which one to credit. — March

Walking through the mall a while back, I made my waythrough a crowd of people gathering outside a restaurant.

And as I passed a group of men, a familiar scent waftedto my nose.

It was YSL’s Kouros.

I was immediately reminded of the early ‘80s, when I was incollege and bought it for my then-boyfriend as a birthday gift.

I loved its unusual scent, so different from anything I’d ever smelled before.

And I admired the sleek, coolly marbled white bottle trimmed in silver, almost architectural in its beauty (rather fitting,

actually, since he was an architect).

We traveled abroad for several weeks as I accompanied him onone leg of his fellowship, and he wore Kouros every day of that trip.

Not long after that, we parted.

Ours was an extremely painful breakup, one that left me feeling utterly bereft and even physically sick for a while.

Getting even the slightest whiff of Kouros in the months afterward would upset me.

But time truly is a great healer and eventually I came to realize that these things work out for the best. The hurt has

long since receded and I am now happily married to a wonderful man.

So Kouros, which once would have brought me to tears, now conjures good memories of being madly in love and

experiencing the splendor of Europe.

It has always impressed me as a warm, elegant,almost-European scent.

(It gets some grief from those who find it a bit “dirty,”but I’m very sensitive to civet, cumin and the like and it

never bothered me.)

What fragrance evokes a deep response in you, for better or worse, when you smell it now?

Monday night brought the classic “wintry mix” to the Washington area – a custom blend of sleet, hail, ice and freezing rain that translates into good luck getting out of your house.  I spent much of today shoveling ice and praying that the children will be back in school tomorrow.

It seemed like the perfect time to write up a review of Yves Saint Laurent Cinema, created by Jacques Cavallier in 2004.  Notes are clementine, almond blossom, cyclamen, jasmine, peony, amaryllis, benzoin, amber, musk, vanilla. Here, let me paste in some hilarious copy from Fragrantica:  “Cinema can make every woman feel like a star. It is a fragrance for glamorous women who live under the spotlights, self-confident and elegant, women who know how to draw the attention. A seductive flavor reminds of Hollywood beauties from the romantic love movies, glamourous evening gowns, Hollywood hairstyles, high heels, black seamed stockings…”

Uh … no.  Maybe this is partly why Cinema’s one of those fragrances that seems very under-the-radar to me in perfumista-ville, because once you’re done with all that bodice-ripping copy up there you’re bound to be disappointed in the scent.

Cinema could easily have fit into my oddball vanilla post from last week and, in fact, I thought about including it, but decided it was worth its own review, given how often I wear it.  I worked through five (!) small manufacturer’s sprays, deciding if I even liked it, one of my longer-range scent indecisions, before finally getting my hands on a bottle during the Posse swap.

I can definitely smell the clementine at the top, a juicy burst of orange that cuts the sweetness of the floral notes that follow.  I can’t pick any of that list of flowers out individually, just a hazy, sweet suggestion that keeps Cinema from being a straight-out vanilla, and also keeps it from being gourmand in the way that some vanilla scents drive people nuts by smelling too much like vanilla extract.   It’s a little powdery (maybe the almond blossom?) but not terribly much so, as I don’t especially like powdery notes and Cinema doesn’t get on my nerves.  The drydown is a warm amber-musk with that smoky-balsam benzoin, over a solid base of vanilla.  Again, this might be a vanilla scent to try if you’re looking for an edge of vanilla rather than a deluge.

Cinema is one of those soothing scents that seems perfect at bedtime, which is mostly when I wear it, or during the day when I want warmth and comfort the way I want hot cocoa, home-baked cookies and a fire in the fireplace.  It reminds me a little of L’Artisan Vanilia, only less weird and with a hint of sophistication, but not too much.

The bottle – a tall, glamorous thing that looks nice on the dresser – is clearly in line with the marketing message, but at odds with the scent itself, which seems perfectly content to put on a cashmere bathrobe and stay in for the evening, reading a good mystery novel, rather than head out for a night on the town.

Endnote: I have a bottle of the eau de parfum, which I find vastly superior to the thin, watery EdT.  They also make a parfum, and I’m trying not to duplicate my scents endlessly in terms of concentration, but I’d be curious if anyone has tried it.  Cinema strikes me as something that might be quite lovely and different in the parfum.

March

New skillz I had no idea I had – map and compass.  Who knew?  Something about plotting points on a map feels like I’ve been doing it forever, and it’s a buttload of fun.  Now, whether I’ll be able to translate that into finding my way in the wilderness?  Well, I and  you will know in a month or so. If you don’t hear from me after my graduation hike, you’ll know.

There are a few guy scents that I’ve co-opted in my perfume meanderings. I don’t do it as much as some of my perfumista friends do (Hi, March!). Dior Homme is at the top of that list, it’s just a great fragrance for men or women.  I’ve added another men’s fragrance to that list, YSL’s new La Nuit de L’Homme.

I can’t really tell you why I like it as much as I do, except it is cuddly as all get-out on me, despite some classic compilation. Notes of bergamot, cardamom, lavender, vetiver, cedar and coumarin make up the scent.  I get very mild lavender, just kind of a soothing background noise.  Mostly, I get coumarin and cardamom. It’s spicy and warm, and the combination almost takes it close to the coffee area.  I just want to curl up with this bottle with the freaky too-big cap and hug it all night.  Don’t veer off into kinky thoughts, y’all.

There’s a traditional masculine feel to it, but the spice notes take it into a more interesting place.  It’s almost a little too masculine for me to wear, and I’d wear it lightly.    While not a groundbreaking scent, I find it just purely comforting and suededly cuddly and soft with enough spice to make it warmer and interesting.

So how many of y’all wear men’s scents, and which are your favorites?

Winners of the Pdn Le Temps d’Une Fete samples are:  Melissa, Elizabeth and Joe. Just click on the contact us button over there on the left and send me your address and make sure to remind me what I’m sending you.

Let’s do a drawing for two of the new YSL samples too.  I’ll do a drawing from comments.

Patty

Happy Valentine´s day, everyone!   I got Feminite du Bois in the parfum concentration.  It is outstanding – the focus more on the plum than on the woods, although I find it layers beautifully with the original FdB eau de parfum.  It´s also exceedingly rich, and a little dab´ll do ya.  For anyone who wants to try it in extrait and can´t quite stomach the price – eBay sometimes has little purse parfum pens (“parfum stylo”) on there, 1.8ml, so you can try it out for less than an arm and a leg.  Maybe just a finger.  The Perfumed Court has it as well.

Please tell me – what delicious things did you get for Valentine´s Day?

Also, before I forget, here´s a link to Chandler Burr´s favorable coverage of several DSH scents – congratulations, Dawn!  And thanks for the heads up, Posse reader Pikake (here’s a link to her new blog on natural perfumery).

So.  On to perfume.

I got to thinking about Yves Saint Laurent´s iconic 80´s scent, Paris, after Olfacta´s thoughtful post on rose fragrances and how she decided they weren´t all horrors after all.  (Certainly a Rosine might change one´s mind about rose.)   Paris seemed like a good fragrance to revisit this time of year.  The notes (from Michael Edwards´ Perfume Legends) are mimosa, geranium, bergamot, mayflower, hawthorn, juniper, Damascus rose, May rose, violet, sandalwood, iris, amber and musk.

In Perfume Legends Sophia Grosjman, the nose behind Paris, talked about her fascination with rose scents and the still relatively new damascones she jammed into her initial draft of Paris for YSL – yet another argument supporting idea that many great perfumes are driven by an overdose of one ingredient.

Love it or loathe it, there´s no mistaking Paris for something else.  You might not be able to name it in a blind test, but if someone stuck it under your nose and said Paris, you´d say, of course!!  It doesn´t smell particularly like any other rose fragrance. There´s an enormous Phil Spector-esque wall of smell: tart, sharp, green and woody notes that draw attention from the rose without totally obscuring it.  It wasn´t until recently in my perfume obsession that I realized Paris was a rose fragrance.  (Interesting aside from Edwards´ book: in France the fragrance was marketed around the imagery of Paris itself, whereas the US rolled it out as a rose fragrance with less than optimal results, because I´m not the only person afraid of rose.)

Browsing The Guide recently, I came across a review by Tania Sanchez of Annick Goutal Rose Absolue that summed up brilliantly my problem — and apparently Tania´s problem — with many rose scents:  “I´m always disappointed by rose soliflores; the material seems impressively complex but too sour to enjoy, like those wines that taste like they´d rather be vinegar.”  Elsewhere (Caron Rose) she says, “all expensive rose soliflores boast of sourcing only the best natural rose essences to capture the beauty of the flower, but somehow they all tend to smell a bit like this: part lemon soap, part wine vinegar, part green (as in boiled vegetables).”  Well, amen, sister.   The roses I can tolerate get busy doing something else – they get weirder (Serge Lutens´ Rose de Nuit), manlier (Rosine´s Rose d’Homme) or at the other end of the spectrum they become delicate and ethereal rather than liquor-like (MDCI Rose de Siwa.)  Paris worked for me not due to less rose, but the sheer volume of the other notes.  It´s like standing right in front of the orchestra.

So off I went to try it – first at Nordstrom where they told me it was discontinued and tried to sell me their last shower gel (discontinued being SA-speak for “I´m terribly sorry, we no longer stock Paris, perhaps you might try Macy´s down the corridor.”)   They carry Paris at Sephora and Macy´s, which has the EDT and the EDP as well as some ancillary products like lotion.  I picked up the bottle and sprayed a little on, waiting for the scent I loved and remembered.

Which brings me to the wistful, sad part of my post, because … maybe we won’t always have Paris after all.  Has anyone tried Paris recently?  Maybe it´s my nose.  Or my skin.  Or old bottles of juice killed off under the lights.  But my first thought upon smelling the EDT at Sephora was, where´s the rest of it?  A test of the second and third bottles at Macy´s produced the same results.  I´m sure I wore the EDT, which is all I could have afforded, and in any case the EDP is a different animal – rosier and more vanillic. (The current EDP´s got an interesting, slightly animalic incense-y drydown, and I´m trying to decide if I could stagger through the first half hour for the payoff.)

Paris today feels thin and muted, like someone took out a restraining order on all the towering, tart florals and woods that made it unique.  Eventually I gave up and went on a grocery run to Trader Joe´s.  At that point I was wearing five test sprays from four bottles of Paris and realized (apologies to my fellow patrons) that´s several sprays too many.  The weird thing was, while it smelled horrible on my skin, I kept getting the occasional waft of the old familiar around me.  The next day I woke up, walked into my closet, and — boom, Paris! on the jacket I’d been wearing, although it was gone entirely from my skin — my skin, which soaks up scent like a sponge.  I asked Robin at Now Smell This and she said the current version smelled mighty thin to her too (here’s her review of Paris.)

I cannot, no matter how I try, separate Paris the fragrance from the time I wore it.  Paris owned the mid-1980s.  It went so well with Christian Lacroix bubble dresses and the champagne excesses that seem oh-so-sadly-familiar two decades later, particularly now that we´ve run off the cliff like Wile E. Coyote and it´s just a matter of seeing how far it is to the bottom.

In Perfume Legends, Grojsman cites Apres l´Ondee as an influence on her design – “the skeleton of a very creamy violet note.  Then I worked on the rose to put with it.”   I have always found Paris a wistful fragrance, and not just because of my nostalgia regarding it.  Roughly 25 years after its introduction, I can smell it again and appreciate both its strange, transcendent beauty and the feeling it leaves me with – a slight melancholy sense of unfulfilled dreams.

image: 6-year-old Hecate in the outfit she picked to wear for her Valentine’s Day parties.  She is a lovely, funny, quirky kid and she is definitely my valentine. (btw for recent alarmed readers: Hecate is her nom de blog.  I did not actually saddle my daughter with the name Hecate.  She shares her real name with a gorgeous fragrance, though.)

March