By March

The first time we did Swapmania I’d wrung my hands for weeks prior, came up with eleventy-jillion rules, and figured maybe nine people would show up and play.  By the end we had more than 1,200 comments, and when we did it again last summer I think we had something like 900 comments.  So: I think we can call it a success.

Today, I, March the Maleficent, decree the start of our Winter/Spring Swapmania, and this post will stay up and will run through Tuesday.  We moved it to a Friday start date in response to requests.  I’m going to do an abbreviated set of instructions below.  If you are new to this and have no idea what I am talking about, and/or you want to see the “full” list of instructions and how it actually worked in comments, click here for a link to the first Swapmania.

Today you are invited to list, in comments, your swap bottles of perfume, partial bottles, minis, decants and samples.

Please include:

• a brief description of each item you’re offering – such as oz/ml size, concentration (EdT, EdP), and any other info you think might be of interest (vintage/partial/used/boxed…)
• the country you live in (so people can take that into consideration for customs and shipping expense)
• whether you are open to receiving NON-PERFUME ITEMS in exchange, or whether you really would prefer only other perfume items.  FWIW people ended up swapping for all sorts of amazing things, including hand-knit scarves and hats, chocolate, tea, etc.
• You can also say if you are looking for a particular bottle of something(s) to swap for –hope springs eternal!
• Go ahead and list your contact info up front if you want to, that seems to be working.  Don’t just type your normal email address in there, though (see #2 below.)

Clear as mud?  Here’s a sample of what a swap listing might look like:  “Hermes Jardin Sur le Nil, 1.6 oz. EDT, half full, boxed.  I live in the US and am open to swaps abroad.  Willing to swap for perfume or other items. email me — jane doe at gmail dot com”

What can people offer to swap in exchange for your perfumes?  Other bottles/partials/minis/samples etc., or things.  When offering for a swap item, please say what country you’re from so they can take that into consideration.

This will work best if everyone keeps an open mind – let us practice and presume honesty, good intentions, and respect.

Someone posted the helpful detail that you can search comments on a PC by hitting CTRL + F (think “find”.)  This makes it easier if you’re looking through massive comments for a particular fragrance and/or your swap offers.  If you’re on a Mac, try (if you are in a browser like Chrome) hitting Edit, Find to search.

The fine print:

1) Caveat Swapper.  This is not eBay, and I am not your mother.  I will not be mediating disputes. If anything went horribly wrong in the last Swapmania, I never heard about it.  I think most everyone had a blast.  But if something goes wrong with your swap, that’s between you and the other swapper.  Perfume Posse and I are not responsible or liable.

Patty wrote this in a post this week, I’m pasting it here: “The best rule I have, make sure the entire swap is complete and both parties say they are happy before you open and start using. If you swap for a fragrance and for some reason the fragrance you were sending in the swap becomes unavailable because of breakage or something wrong with it, don’t guilt your swappee into taking something they don’t really want so you can keep The Precious. If you want it that bad, and they don’t want something else you have, just offer to pay them the going rate for it or send it back and cry yourself to sleep over the loss.  If you’ve been using it with wild abandon and have to send it back, do offer to compensate them for what you have used if it’s beyond just a couple of sprays.”

2) You and your swapper are responsible for figuring out a way to get in touch with each other to exchange details (mailing address etc.)  Many of you already have gravatar IDs that link to your websites, etc.  You can use MakeupAlley (MUA,) FaceBook, LiveJournal, email, whatever.  PLEASE DO NOT type your email addresses into comments; they are collected by spambots.  If you do so, spell it out:  chris dot smith at hotmail dot com  

3) When you have completed a swap, please go back and mark your item as taken.

4) Please remember to behave yourselves; often, two or more people are making offers for the same bottle of Cuir de Russie, and only one person is going to get it (unless the owner wants to split.)  Last time there was some fairly intense competition on certain bottles, and that’s the way it works.  Let’s treat our fellow swappers with kindness and respect.  Once you’ve agreed to a swap and exchanged mailing info, etc., please don’t back out if you suddenly see something pop up that you’d rather have.  The karma fairies will turn all your Guerlain into vinegar.

5) Send your swap in a timely fashion. Once you’ve agreed to do this, send your side of the swap.  If you’re not going to be able to do so until April, you need to tell your potential co-swapper ahead of time.

6) MUA peeps – you can’t just say “go see my MUA list and see if there’s anything you’d swap for.”  Lots of folks on here aren’t on MUA.  Also I’m not thrilled with people pasting in their entire, lengthy MUA wish/swap lists … because that’s what MUA is for, right?  But I won’t flame you for it.

Okay, kids!  This was a huge blast last time, and people got some amaaaazing things, including extras in their packages.  So go have fun!

By March

Nope, no perfume review today.  But I’m not completely worthless.  A number of you have asked about another round of Swapmania – our free-for-all perfume swapfest that we did a year ago at Thanksgiving, a total experiment on my part, and it was so successful we did it again last summer.  We got more than 1,200 comments the first time, and more than 900 the second time.  That’s a LOT of swaps.

Y’all have evolved some pretty complicated swaps – international, splits, and cool swaps for non-perfume items.  (I think at this point there’s an underground swapfest going on internationally for chocolates and other stuff we can’t get in the U.S.)  You have also swapped for hand-knit scarves, tea, cosmetics, etc.

Or you can just stick to plain old perfume, nothing wrong with that.

Anyhow, I thought we’d do another either later this month or in February, how do you feel about that?  I want to avoid a holiday weekend like Thanksgiving, a bunch of people were disappointed that time because they were out of town and couldn’t play.   Is there some date I shouldn’t do?  Does anyone have a strong preference?

Also, you can drop in comments here any past issues or questions you’d like addressed.  As far as I know, things have gone pretty fabulously, if you can deal with the insanity of the pace of postings.

The only thing off the top of my head I’ll put in here: I know some swappers are/were upset by U.S. residents who wouldn’t swap internationally.  From my own perspective:  I dread shipping internationally because of US customs issues and requirements.  Maybe because I live near D.C., the level of scrutiny and hassle is pretty intense.  So please don’t take it personally – it is not a trust issue.  If you live in a town or country where you just drop your package off with your local delivery wombat, no questions asked, it’s hard to imagine what a pain customs shipping can be.  I do want to note here that I have bought, sold, and swapped with people from all over the world, and never been ripped off or had a package lost.

Finally, your responses to last week’s going-gray post were amazing!  I really enjoyed reading them, although at some point I gave up trying to respond to all of them.  There were some great gray-hair tips and cross-conversations going on in comments.  I am stunned by how many of you are rocking the silver fox yourselves.  By the way, I just had the last stray bits of hair color trimmed from my hair today.  My stylist is working on maximizing the curls, and gave me another “blue shampoo” to try.  Sitting directly across from me was a woman, 60-ish, with long, white and silver hair, ponytail length. She was stunning.

image: Bill the Cat and friends… don’t you love that image?  Bill the Cat is the unofficial mascot of Swapmania until I get an email from Berkeley Breathed’s lawyers telling me to knock it off.

March

By March

This post is, eventually, about perfume.  Also it’s the usual March meander.  Consider yourselves warned.

When you’re a kid, whatever your parents do probably seems normal.  I was raised in the Lutheran church, mostly because my mother didn’t drive and that was the closest church to our house, within walking distance.  Somewhere in my early childhood, my mother decided that the Christmas Eve church services needed some fellowship.  So for days and weeks prior to that night, she planned and bought the necessary supplies, with her own money.  My sister and my dad and mom and I all headed over there at around 4 pm to set the food tables and everything else up.  We stayed the entire evening, refreshing the cookie and sandwich trays and refilling the punch bowls with ginger ale and frozen fruit-punch rings (remember those?)  The good Lutherans of that church got into the spirit quickly and brought all sorts of goodies for the table – bread and cheese and dips and crackers and cookies.  My favorite cookies were the dyed-green, hand-shaped Christmas wreaths made with melted marshmallows and corn flakes, decorated with red-hots representing the holly berries.

Every year my mother wore the same outfit – her one pair of nice gold earrings and a dashiki she’d bought in Senegal – and a modest spritz of My Sin, the only fragrance she owned.  I’d go to the midnight service, which was candle-lit and always seemed magical to me.  Then we’d all stay and clean up and go home in the bitter cold at, oh, 3 am or thereabouts.  My parents had to get up on Christmas day and put up with our present-opening, as much as I’m sure they’d have liked to sleep in.

I look back on this as an adult and realize what an incredible gift it was – to the church, to all of us, and by my father.  Because my dad’s a devout atheist who thinks the whole Christian tradition is a bunch of hooey.  But he loved my mother so much that he spent all that time helping her, because it was important to her, no matter how stupid or loathsome he found it.

I don’t know how I feel about God right now, particularly after this year.  But I know that if there’s a heaven, my mom and dad and every dog I’ve loved will be there.

If I were doing the Lutheran Christmas shindig this year, I’d wear Guerlain Jicky.  Jicky was one of my gateway drugs to perfumery.  Jicky is angular and strange, even more so than Mitsouko; it would fit easily into the lineup at Comme des Garcons. My old-ish bottle of the parfum is lavender and pure, animalic skank.  The EDT is lemon and lavender and a generous dollop of WTF.  Luca Turin suggests that the PDT is the closest to the original.  Earlier this year one of you (Musette?) sent me a small bottle of the PDT, which I wanted desperately, with a note that said, paraphrasing, I hear you like this evil thing, so, mazeltov! The PDT is hot candle wax and frigid winter, lemony furniture polish in the sanctuary, damp wool, and icicles glowing in the light.

For any of you who’ve read this far: here’s March’s Christmas Giveaway.  To one commenter I will send three (bootlegged!) CDs of our family’s favorite Christmas music from years past, including a 1940s Christmas, traditional Christmas, and the groovy guitar and singing of the Monks of Weston Priory, a seasonal LP which my mother and I loved and which has garnered more than one raised eyebrow from friends (no accounting for taste, right?)  Also included will be a small decant of Jicky PDT and two bricks of my favorite Santa Fe piñon incense.  If Christmas isn’t your tradition, you can always give those CDs away.  And feel free to name your traditions/favorite music in comments!

Finally, here’s a YouTube link to one of my favorite traditional Christmas carols, The Holly and the Ivy, adapted slightly and sung, in haunting and melodic fashion, by an obscure pop band (Los Campesinos) which Diva played for me this weekend in the car on her iPod. The visuals are boring but I got all verklempt listening to it.

Grace and peace to all of you, and blessings for the new year.

Image: Holly and ivy in Wales, Eric Jones, wikimedia commons.

March

First, winners of the de Profundis samples – MaureenC and Homura-chan.  Just click on the Contact Us over on the left, send me your address, remind me of what you’ve won. Make sure I give you a quick response so you know you didn’t drop into my spam filter thingie.

I loved the discussion on the perfume. Well, not the perfume, but the “de Profundis: part – Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Dante, the Psalms?  I think the answer is mostly Wilde and Baudelaire as far as Serge’s inspiration. But the theme crossed all of them, and I agree that it is one of hope.  If you spend too long thinking about your daily drudgery, endlessly toiling, worrying, sacrificing, over and over, it’s overwhelming, yet most of us hang onto that refracted joy that we glimpse sometimes in a child’s laughter, a thoughtful gesture, seeing love where you least expected it.  Yes, I do mean refracted. Refraction is the bending of light as it passes from one substance to another.  Most of the joy we get is bent from one person to another, one moment to the next, from a happy memory recalled in the present or a hopeful expectation from the present to the future.

And it is that refracted joy that gives us hope that what we do matters, that we are all  worthy of redemption – either in a religious or humanitarian sense – and capable of more than who we often are.  I think the crying from the depths is ourselves wanting more, hoping for more – for ourselves, other people, the world, or maybe it is crying for love or companionship, understanding, to not be completely and utterly as alone as we all are.

Which led me to my favorite question – what would you do if you weren’t afraid?   I keep facing that question in my life over and over in the last 3-4 years. My answer is simply there’s nothing I won’t do, fear isn’t a factor I consider.  What’s your answer?  My answer used to be “sniff that Humanity thing again Mugler did” and then I decided it wasn’t fear that stopped me but revulsion. I think fear and revulsion aren’t the same?

So I think I need to buy that big-ass kiln to fuse glass in at home, especially since that stupidly expensive cardigan I thought was shipping this month got canceled.  Right?  I know I need a 40 watt breaker, but if I just plug it in in the basement where the dryer goes in, never run them at the same time (obviously!), it should work, and I won’t blow up my house.  And if I do, I’ll probably have some really cool blown-up fused glass all over the block for my  neighbors to appreciate.

Patty

Last fall we did Swapmania – our first perfume swap free-for-all on the Posse.  I’d wrung my hands for weeks prior, came up with eleventy-jillion rules, and figured maybe nine people would show up and play.  By the end of that weekend we had more than 1,200 comments, and for awhile people were having trouble getting on the site due to traffic.  So: I think we can call it a success.

Today, I, March the Maleficent, decree the start of our Summer Swapmania, and this post will stay up and will run through the weekend.  I’m guessing fewer people will play this time (vacation etc.) but who knows?  I’m going to do an abbreviated set of instructions below.  If you are new to this and have no idea what I am talking about, and/or you want to see the “full” list of instructions from last time and how it actually worked in comments, click here for a link to the last Swapmania.

For further edification, I did a follow up post asking how it went, and if you’d like to read THOSE 215 comments (what people got, etc.) that link is here.

Today you are invited to list, in comments, your swap bottles of perfume, partial bottles, minis, decants and samples.  I think it’s easier to list items in separate comments if you’re offering more than one item (sample sets are one item), otherwise the threads can get confusing, Edited Weds. morning:  go ahead and list all your swaps in one comment unless you’re doing more than, say, five.  Ish.

Please include:

• a brief description of each item you’re offering – such as oz/ml size, concentration (EdT, EdP), and any other info you think might be of interest (vintage/partial/used/boxed…)
• the country you live in (so people can take that into consideration for customs and shipping expense)
• whether you are open to receiving NON-PERFUME ITEMS in exchange, or whether you really would prefer only other perfume items.  FWIW – last time people ended up swapping for all sorts of amazing things, including hand-knit scarves and hats, chocolate, tea, etc.
• You can also say if you are looking for a particular bottle of something(s) to swap for –hope springs eternal!
• WEDS. AM UPDATE – hey, go ahead and list your contact info up front if you want to, that seems to be working.  Don’t just type your normal email address in there, though (see #2 below.)

Clear as mud?  Here’s a sample of what a swap listing might look like:  “Hermes Jardin Sur le Nil, 1.6 oz. EDT, half full, boxed.  I live in the US and am open to swaps abroad.  Willing to swap for perfume or other items. email me — jane doe at gmail dot com”

What can people offer to swap in exchange for your perfumes?  Other bottles/partials/minis/samples etc., or things.  When offering for a swap item, please say what country you’re from so they can take that into consideration.

This will work best if everyone keeps an open mind – let us practice and presume honesty, good intentions, and respect.

Someone posted the helpful detail that you can search comments on a PC by hitting CTRL + F (think “find”.)  This makes it easier if you’re looking through massive comments for a particular fragrance and/or your swap offers.  If you’re on a Mac, try (if you are in a browser like Chrome) hitting Edit, Find to search.

The fine print:

1) Caveat Swapper.  This is not eBay, and I am not your higher power or your mother.  I will not be mediating disputes. If anything went horribly wrong in the last Swapmania, I never heard about it.  I think most everyone had a blast.  But if something goes wrong with your swap, that’s between you and the other swapper.  Perfume Posse and I are not responsible or liable.

2) You and your swapper are responsible for figuring out a way to get in touch with each other to exchange details (mailing address etc.)  Many of you already have gravatar IDs that link to your websites, etc.  You can use MakeupAlley (MUA,) FaceBook, LiveJournal, email, whatever.  PLEASE DO NOT type your email addresses into comments; they are collected by spambots.  If you must do so, spell it out:  chris dot smith at hotmail dot com   When you have completed a swap, please go back and mark your item as taken.

3) Please remember to behave yourselves; often, two or more people are making offers for the same bottle of Cuir de Russie, and only one person is going to get it (unless the owner wants to split.)  Last time there was some fairly intense competition on certain bottles, and that’s the way it works.  Let’s treat our fellow swappers with kindness and respect.  Once you’ve agreed to a swap and exchanged mailing info, etc., please don’t back out if you suddenly see something pop up that you’d rather have.  The karma fairies will turn all your Guerlain into vinegar.

4) Send your swap in a timely fashion. It seems self-evident, but this was a minor issue last time.  Once you’ve agreed to do this, send your side of the swap.  If you’re not going to be able to do so until August, you need to tell your co-swapper ahead of time.

5) MUA peeps – you can’t just say “go see my MUA list and see if there’s anything you’d swap for.”  Lots of folks on here aren’t on MUA.  Also I’m not thrilled with people pasting in their entire, lengthy MUA wish/swap lists … because that’s what MUA is for, right?  But I won’t flame you for it.

Okay, kids!  This was a huge blast last time, and people got some amaaaazing things, including extras in their packages.  So go have fun!