Happy 4th of July, everybody!  Scent of the Day?  Grillsmoke!   Margaritas! Watermelon!

Alka-Seltzer

have a great Holiday!

Tom’s posting tomorrow, we’re having a three-day weekend and doing some museum-going on Monday with my captive kid audience.

In other exciting news, I got a new Droid cell phone yesterday, at the end of our long-anticipated divorce from the craptastic AT&T network and back to Verizon.  My husband and girls bullied me into it.  I’m still playing with the Droid; never has fine new technology been so wasted on a human being as this thing on me, I tell you.  I’m the person who’s had an actual Go-Phone for two years — one of those things in the clamshell packaging off the rack for $15 at Best Buy — because whenever a teen’s phone breaks they get my upgrade.  Because heaven forbid they have to go to school with a cheesy, out-of-date phone.

The most amusing thing about playing with the Droid thus far (although watching me do anything, including trying to answer a call, is amusing to my teenagers) is the autocorrect feature in text messaging.  The New York Times magazine had a funny article about autocorrect this morning in their magazine, and they mentioned a website that shows various autocorrect text fails — Damn You Auto Correct!

And hence this quick post on a Sunday night, because frankly I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard.  My ribs ache. Even the dog came in to see what the problem was, followed by Diva, yelling, “you okay in there?”  I should probably mention that what makes so many of these bloopers funny is that they turn out unintentionally raunchy in nature, just in case you end up reading this at work.

March

By March

When I’m not talking to Robin at Now Smell This about perfume, we might be chatting about tea (in which she is the resident expert) or chocolate, a subject dear to our hearts.  We’re doing a joint post on chocolate this weekend – citrus for her, nicely-textured chocolate for me — so be sure to stop by NST on Saturday.

Let’s start off with me stipulating: I know even less about chocolate than perfume.  Everything I know about its manufacture I learned on the fake “factory” ride at Hersheypark.  If you want to know about chocolate liquor and cocoa nibs and what represents quality in chocolate, I’m sure there are plenty of websites devoted to the topic.

Taste is key in chocolate, everyone’s got their favorite flavors, but texture’s important too.  It can be too soft or too waxy.  It can be grainy or chalky.  Goo-filled chocolate bars (like with caramel, or mint crème) are mostly not my thing, nor are super-dark chocolate bars that veer too close to being unsweetened.   I’ve had the best luck sampling chocolate bars in the way I have sampled perfumes – I buy five or ten bars at once and rip them open.  In a household of six, I’m not stuck eating the whole thing, and no chocolate winds up in the trash here unless it’s essentially inedible (those Hungarian puffed-rice bars were pretty bad; so were the mini-bars from Seoul).

Here are random thoughts and a couple of personal favorites in the chocolate-with-an-appealing-texture category.  Please add yours.

1) Chocolove Orange Peel in Dark Chocolate.  (55% cocoa, orange peel).  I am not a huge fan of the chocolate/orange dynamic, no doubt scarred for life by those orange-flavored, waxy segmented chocolate “oranges” from my childhood Christmas stocking. (I ate one recently and they are even worse than I remember.) The Chocolove bar, on the other hand, is brilliant.  It has bits of freeze-dried orange peel, crisp and crunchy between the teeth, a bit like a crisped-rice bar, and the flavor is extraordinarily addictive.  The Fendi Theorema of chocolate.

Runner up: The Dolfin crystallized orange peel one is nice (sticky little bits rather than crunchy), the same with their ginger bar.

2) Dolfin chocolate in Earl Grey (52% cocoa dark chocolate with Earl Grey Tea).  Robin turned me on to Dolfin, they make a passel of seriously strange flavors. If you’re intrigued they also make a handy sample pack (scroll to the bottom for the sample sets).  The Earl Grey bar is a medium dark bar, a little waxy and grainy, with the definite crunch of tea leaves between the teeth.  It’s something of an acquired taste.  Honesty demands that I admit to eating five or six Earl Grey bars without having decided whether I even liked it.  By bar seven, one reaches the inevitable conclusion that there must be some attraction there, yes?  It’s the Dior Dune of chocolate bars.

By the way the Dolfin Sencha (green tea) was a murky disappointment to me, anyway.  The lavender was exceedingly strange, borderline unpleasant, I want to retry it … maybe that’s the Dune of chocolate, since Dune itself has that inedible lavender-chocolate element.  Moving on to…

3) Mo’s Dark Bacon Bar by Vosges. (62% dark chocolate, applewood bacon, smoked salt).  Until I can buy actual chocolate-dipped bacon — and if I looked around online I probably can — I will amuse myself with this.  The milk chocolate version is very rich and the chocolate is creamy veering toward soft; I prefer the dark version, which isn’t terribly dark at all.  If you can eat more than a quarter-bar in one sitting you’re made of sterner stuff than I am.  Also I gave this bar to two people who gave it back to me, pronouncing it disgusting and inedible.  They’re wrong.  The Kolnisch Juchten of chocolate bars.

4) Goji bar by Vosges. (Tibetan goji berries + pink Himalayan salt + 45% deep milk chocolate).  The goji berries add a great texture to the chocolate, a bit like minced dried cranberries, and are pleasantly tart, and then the salt cuts the sweetness further.  I literally cannot stop eating once I’ve opened it.

5) Cadbury Fruit and Nut deserves a mention (raisins, almonds) as my go-to bar for years when I was young and had less money, and a $2.50 bar of chocolate represented a special treat (often smuggled into a theater.)  In a pinch I’d still rather be nibbling my way through one of these than most of the other chocolate bars available at our nearby CVS.

6) Toblerone. Seriously, I can’t even say whether it’s any good, but I’ve been picking those little bits of … white stuff out of my molars for so long I have to include this.  Is that white stuff nuts? Dryer lint?  Just kidding, it’s torrone, an Italian nougat of honey, egg white, sugar and almonds.  A staple of our household at Christmas, when Santa buys the hilariously large bars at Trader Joe’s and puts them in stockings.

Other thoughts:

I’ve ordered from Chocosphere, any other recommendations for chocolate dealers?  By the way, at least locally, my Cost-Plus World Market has a better selection of chocolate bars than anyone else including Whole Foods.  They have a website but you can’t order the bars online, sadly.

I’d love a go-to pepper bar, with peppercorns or hot red peppers.  I like the Vosges hot-pepper ones, as well as the Lindt dark Chili bar, which is an excellent value ($2ish locally.  But they all have heat rather than crunchy texture.  Any out there with freeze-dried minced peppers or peppercorns?  Looking online I see the Dolfin Poivre Rose – the pink peppercorn, which I think I need to re-try.

All right, your turn!!!  If there’s a chocolate bar with a flavor and/or texture you find particularly wonderful, please chime in.   Links are good for shopping purposes, use tinyurl if you’re worried about winding up in our spam filter.  (You paste in some giant multi-line gobbledygook link and it translates it to a much shorter link, just copy and paste that.)  Also if there’s a soft-filled bar you think I should try, because I clearly just haven’t found the right one, throw that out there.  I like Belgian chocolates (filled with ganache etc.), not sure what my problem is with liquid-center bars (raspberry, caramel, etc.), but mostly they put me off.

March

Hey, everyone!  The weather’s fine and fall-ish and you know what that means – it’s time for a Random Sunday makeup post!

The fall makeup collections are out, and it’s been fun looking at all the palettes – lots of dramatic colors and burgundy and brown lippies out there, like the ones in the Lancome ad above, in keeping (it seems to me) with the retro runway looks.  These aren’t necessarily the easiest makeup colors for me to wear, but I still enjoy playing with them in the stores.   I did try on the wack Dior’s Mysterious Mauve, check out that color at left  – yep, a deep, shimmery purple.  Purple.  Look at that thing, how could I resist?  News flash: it was just awful on me, but it would be gorgeous on someone with dark skin.

Let’s talk about foundation.  Carter was pimping the new(ish?) Maybelline Dream Smooth Mousse foundation, which has gotten a lot of love already on MakeupAlley, with a high 73% rebuy rating.  It’s a drag you can’t try them on in the drugstores, but our local CVS lets you return opened makeup so I bought a couple so Diva and I could sample them.  SPECIAL NOTE – this is not the Maybelline Dream Matte Mousse foundation, which has much lower MUA approval ratings of 47%, although I did buy some for Diva to try since she’s a teenager.  She found the matte formula hard to work into a smooth finish, although the color was right.  She kept the light neutral shade (Light 1) as a pancake makeup for her dance performances.

I bought what appeared to me to be the two lightest, most neutral tones in the Smooth Mousse – Porcelain Ivory and Classic Ivory.  There are two other light colors that are much more obviously yellow and pink, for those of you who swing that way.  The Classic is too dark for Diva and me, but the Porcelain was excellent.  I wore it for a few days and Diva’s wearing it now.  The formula’s packed in a wide pot with a built-in sponge in the lid storage area. The formula for these things is amaaaazing – they really are incredibly creamy and the coverage is buildable.  They stayed just fine on me, they are dewy but not too shiny on my dry skin, and they didn’t break Diva out.  In the end, I decided the color is just a hair off to be a perfect-perfect match – it’s one I’d wear if I really had to, but I’ve got better matches, and I hate being able to see my foundation.  If you’re looking for a reasonably priced drugstore foundation and you can find a color match (they have 10 shades), this is well worth checking out, and thanks, Carter!

Bringing me to Make Up For Ever’s two obscure lightest colors in their Face & Body Makeup!   Some of you may remember my ecstasy over this iconic product.  It’s at Sephora, and I think the finish is gorgeous (and I’m not the only one, based on MUA ratings.)  The main problem, as always, is finding a color match.  For whatever reason, Sephora stores don’t usually stock the two lightest colors, 36 and 38, in the store – I didn’t know they existed.  (And no, I have no idea what’s behind MUFE’s totally random numbering system.)   I’ve been wearing 20, their palest in-stock neutral, but I’d admitted to myself earlier this spring that it wasn’t the perfect shade for me, it’s a hair too yellow and I have to powder it to tone that down a little.  So I read all the comments on 38 and 36 from fair-skinned folks on MUA and based on that, I ordered 38.  Then two days later I discovered that – ha, ha – those two shades are now stocked by our swank Sephora in the Wall o’ Bling.  So I tried them both, one on each side of my face. The 36 is the paler and pinker of the two – it looks scary, like super-pale calamine lotion in the bottle.  I could actually get away with it, but it was a little pasty on me.  I envision it on those porcelain-doll beauties who are even lighter than I am, and they’re out there.  But #38 was just right.  It looks darker in the bottle and on the application sponge than it does on the skin, it’s closer to 36 than you’d think.  It’s neutral, sheer (more sheer than the 20) and buildable.  I like that I can just do the center of my face, where I’m the most red, and it still looks natural and blends away perfectly at the edges without full coverage down to my jawline, so it’s less “made up” looking.  It doesn’t look like great foundation, it looks like no foundation.  Unlike, say, the MAC girls with their supermatte, very hard-edge makeup, the less-is-more look is better for those of us who are no longer young women, in my opinion.  Too much makeup is oddly aging.

PS: A change in the MUFE bottle – I put the stuff on with a sponge, so the bottle’s open-mouth design, which ooks people out, has never bothered me.  (The weird jello-like consistency doesn’t bother me either.)  But the new bottles, at least the one I got in the mail, have a pump-top on them like the Hi-Def.

Finally, a MAC lament and a score. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I knew Strada was being discontinued, those bastards, I should have stocked up.  The perfect non-blushy blush for us pale girls who want a little “color” that isn’t orange or dirt.  The d/c’d Strada is now selling on eBay for … $35 a pop.  Anyone find another match?  I’ll probably go to a MAC pro and ask.  In the meantime, Louise forced me to try on lipstick, and I have to say – Viva Glam in Gaga is the pale-pink bomb.  It’s the first one of their Viva Glam lippies I’ve bought.  Their description: “named after celebrity spokesperson Lady Gaga. Features a high lustre finish and cool blue-pink shade.”  It is a pale bubblegum pink unlike any other pink I have.  It’s paler than my actual lips (it’s also paler than the color at left as it appears on my monitor).  It is NOT any of the following: sheer, YLBB, pinky-nude, bright, neon, fuchsia, or (conversely) too pale and mod, speaking of looks that don’t work so great on those of us who wore that the first time around.  It’s wow without being POW.  It’s pale pink as a color rather than a bold statement, and it works great with a modern, pared-down natural look, which is humorous when you think about who it’s named after.

So, it’s your turn.  Anyone out there working a new look, trying some new polish or a great new eye quad?  How do you feel about this fall’s burgundy and brown lips, like at Lancome?  Any other makeup comments or questions to throw out to your fellow commenters, some of whom are much bigger makeup fiends than I am?  (Not naming names.)  Has anyone busted out their red lips yet?  I wore them a few times this summer, actually.  Counter-intuitive and fun, but not when my face is sweaty.

March

Hey, everybody!  Happy fifth of July!   There have been a lot of festivities this weekend, mostly outdoors.  I found myself wearing less perfume than usual on those occasions.  Those big, sweet tuberose and jasmine scents seem to make me bee-licious, although personally I don’t think they attract insects in general.  In fact, I’m never the primary target for mosquitoes if there’s someone around (like the Cheese) who’s more appetizing.

We had a few cooler days, then warmer ones.  I’m giving my majmua a run for it.  I’ve decided that the melted beeswax adds something to the scent I really like, so I got Masha to send me the recipe and I’m going to try making my own solid.  I want to do a separate post on those attars and hear people’s reports — should I do that or Manoumalia on Weds., I wonder?  Probably Manoumalia, I don’t want to rush the attars.

I’ve been on here working on some site cleanup.  You likely wouldn’t notice it unless you went into the archives, we’ve been deleting random characters that got inserted into some posts, along with tidying up the homepage (deleting broken links etc.)

I have no idea who’s around today, which is a big travel holiday for some of us in the U.S. and not for others.   Let’s have a Random Monday open thread — I’ll drop by, anything you want to talk about is fine.  I personally have been experimenting in our extreme heat (upper 90s for days on end, fairly unusual here) with the Really Heady Stuff.   Montale Jasmin Full I love so much in this weather — a truly ripe jasmine that I don’t wear in small enclosed spaces shared by non-perfume-lovers.    Carnal Flower and VC&A Gardenia — big, big hits in this heat.  I also love my sweaty scents like Amaranthigh and Worth Courtesan in the heat.   Bal a Versailles is wonderful on a super-hot day.  The only huge fail I’ve had in the heat was Teo Cabanel Alahine, a big scent on my skin that was an almost instant scrubber.  I’m thinking the ambery aspect of it?  Really, it made me gag.  Weird, because I know one of you commented on how much you loved it on sultry days.  So if you’re reading this and you live in a hot climate and you think we’re out of our minds: give it a whirl, you might be surprised.  After all, when are you supposed to smell jasmine?  On some sultry night in a tropical clime, yes?  Yes.  Has anyone worn … hmm, how about Angel?   Angel would kill me dead under regular circumstances, it seems like even a worse idea now.  OTOH I’m toying with trying out either my vintage Dior Poison tomorrow (it’s supposed to be 99) or Gucci Rush, what do you think?

So: floor’s open.   Any perfume-y stuff on your mind?  Any great new purchases or wants?  Anyone want to place any solid bets on whether I loved or hated Manoumalia?

image: photo I took last summer of the bees on the echinacea.  I found it in my photo archives and it made me smile, so I’m using it again.  Yes, if you are curious: Hecate is still petting bees, and she almost never gets stung now.

March