Today will have some highlights and some lowlights.  First the highlights.  Winners of the Vero Profumo samples (and I decided to give away two): HikerChickNH and Minette. Just click on the Contact Us link over on the left and send me your address.

 This is a Super Bowl commercial from Pepsi that I think is hysterical. I’ve worked tangentially with Deaf groups for a couple of decades, and they had a lot of input into this commercial, and it totally gets Deaf humor.  I applaud Pepsi for, first, making a commercial that is funny and also making one that tells us more about others without being patronizing.

Lowlights — anyone seen that Moment of Truth thing on Fox? When it comes to TrashyTV, almost nothing can scare me off my Moral Pedestal.  My thinking is if some idiot signed up to be tortured emotionally for money, then I’m happy to be entertained by that. Moment of Truth asks the contestant questions ahead of time while they are hooked to a lie detector… so ….they already know how bad these questions will get  – along the lines of “Do you think you will still be married to your husband in five years?”  “Do you hesitate having children because you’re not sure your wife is The One?” and “Have you ever made a pass at your girlfriend’s friends?”  and far, far worse.  The contestant answers the question, and if they answer it truthfully, according to the lie detector, they advance on and can win more money, up to a million.  The queasy looks on the faces of the wives, husbands, moms, children of the contestant are what I can’t watch.    Despite the fact everyone agrees to be on this show and knows what will happen, and it should fall into the “morally okay” category I reserve for Voluntary Emotional Torture Victims For My Entertainment… but it just ain’t working this time.  I feel vaguely overtly sleazy when watching.

But what am I gonna do?  The writers are on strike, my staples like Friday Night Lights, Gossip Girl, Brother and Sisters, and October Road are going on hiatus shortly as they run out of episodes.  American Idol is just boring so far this year.  Bruno and Carrie Ann make me sleepy.  I only have three more seasons of  The Wire to run through - and I’m trying to go slow and savor them - Dexter is being cleaned up for regular TV.  I ask you, what in the world would you do?

Oh, perfume?  I’m also feeling vaguely sleazy about all the J. Lo Perfumes that I just bought. Look for us to work all of that into a perfume review in the future.

For those of you that watch teevee, what are you going to watch while we move into re-runs early?  For those of you that don’t watch teevee, we need a list of trashy books to help us over the habit!

Nobody’s gotten the smell of gardenia quite right, in my opinion. Sniffing them yesterday on the bushes in the National Gallery of Art rotunda, I had a chance to ponder. Gardenia is a little … fetid. There’s definitely that bleu cheese note of JAR’s Jardenia, but you’d have to cut it maybe 50% with a generic, smooth cream-cheese smell, and Jardenia also has a full, sweet top note I don’t detect in the actual flower. I’m not clear on the chemical compound involved in the cheese smell. To me it’s somewhere between the stench those giant arums put out and the indoles of jasmine.

A woman visiting from China stopped to sniff with me. I didn’t get very far with my cheese comparison, but she said it was a good smell and a little bad smell, and she closed her eyes and smiled as she inhaled. She looked deeply happy.

The high school girls on a field trip saw us, so they lined up and sniffed it too. They giggled and jerked their heads back; it’s so strong, they said. I asked if they’d wear that in a perfume, and they said no, definitely not. The guard said he thought gardenias smelled okay, but he’d grown up on the Virgin Islands, and if I wanted to smell some beautiful flowers I needed to go there.

A gardenia on its own smells weirdly truncated. I realized yesterday that’s because I’m used to thinking of “gardenia” in perfumery as a player in an ensemble, often paired with something sweet and green like tuberose (Chanel, Jo Malone, Estee Lauder’s Tuberose Gardenia) or muguet (Marc Jacobs). The piercing floral-shop smell of tuberose is the logical complement to gardenia, serving as the top note to gardenia’s opaqueness while it takes the edge off that stink. But with the smell of gardenia fresh in my mind, I’m not sure pairing it with another white floral as a top note represents a great leap forward. It’s like gilding the Sphinx.

Interestingly, looking at online notes, a lot of gardenia fragrances also have jasmine. Googling “gardenia” leads to the discovery that its nickname is “Cape Jasmine” and the latin name is Gardenia jasminoides, although the plants don’t seem to be related. Also, Gardenia is native to southern China, so now I realize the lady in the museum with the blissed-out smile on her face was possibly smelling something pleasantly familiar from home.

The perfume of a single gardenia is a sultry, intoxicating smell. I also think I’d like a gardenia paired with nothing but a note of wet, loamy dirt, and a handful of Spanish moss. Gardenias, like magnolias, mint juleps, and Carson McCullers, are southern. They seem perfect for Lady Day up there (even though I believe she hailed from Baltimore). I wonder if there’s a gardenia fragrance that would let me feel that.  Will SIP’s Lady Day get me there?  What about the Isabey Gardenia?  Too much other stuff going on?

Awhile back I did a post on an orchid scent (I think Shiseido’s Message from Orchids), and one of you readers suckered me into buying a “low maintenance” fragrant orchid I could get to bloom myself! It’s called Purple Cascade “Fragrance Princess.” Of course, I already think of orchids as “low maintenance.” I buy them from Trader Joe’s, they bloom for two months, and then – voila! – I give them to the Korean diner down the street, with the west-facing plate glass window, and I buy another one from Trader Joe’s. Anyway, I stuck my orchid lump (rhizome?) in a sunny window per the instructions, I water it when I remember, and it’s now getting ready to bloom for the second time this year! Three big fat buds! And it is fragrant, and the blooms are huge and purple, but the part that bums me out is: last time the show only lasted about a week (compared to my usual run of 6 – 8 weeks for the phalaenopsis, which, BTW, I’m keeping just for kicks to see if I can get it to rebloom). Orchid fans out there – how do I increase the bloom time? Should I take it out of the sunny window right now before the buds open, and keep it in indirect light? What about watering? And if I keep the second orchid, does this mean I’ll have 23 of them by next January? Should I stop now before I find myself spending hundreds of dollars on orchidjunkie.com? People collect the darndest things, don’t they?

Billie Holiday (with her signature gardenias in her hair): mdcivilrights.org
orchid, Fragrance Princess: sdahldtp.com

29 January 1992. Another dreary winter day struggled to dawn; he did too, for an early tutorial about his research project. By mid-afternoon, he was sitting in the English common room, pretending to read. Interests and concerns at this point in time: 1) Literary theory, particularly fancypants poststructuralist stuff with at least one set of parentheses and a colon in the title; 2) Acid jazz (don’t ask); 3) clubbing; 4) writing; 5) drinking; 6) fashionable indiekid clothes; 7) the self-important self-regard of a working class intellectual; 8 ) lust more than love; 9) a vague nagging nihilism that veered from feeling like a bout of indigestion to an aching despair; 10) random acts of extreme silliness and laughter. In short, an extroverted yet introspective depressive postgraduate with too much self-regard shielding a set of hopeless insecurities. Today, his life would change.

I met Matt on this day, and it marks our anniversary, seeing as we never got engaged or married. He waltzed in on the arm of a mutual friend, he was visiting from London. He was wearing a bizarre purple stripy shirt from which he’d removed the collar, and ill-matching trousers. A wiry rake, clown-like in his colour, decidedly anti-fashion, decidedly interesting. Bright light had emerged from the darkness, and the path I was taking changed, twisted and righted itself exactly as it should have been. Within weeks, I couldn’t imagine the other possible journeys. Those paths were now murky and uninteresting.

Sixteen years on, he makes me laugh like no-one else, knows me as though he is me, and has a look on his face that still melts me when I see it. He ain’t perfect, but that’s why he is. My light in the darkness.

I’m brightening the mood after last week’s gloom - my anniversary falls at the best place in the calendar to shake me out of my winter torpor, and as it does, my other passions awaken too. I’ve ordered plant seeds, onion sets and been making plans for the garden and allotment. I’m alive with writing ideas. And perfume - gimme the perfume already.

I’ve been craving three scents in particular, none of which I own, and all three of my decants have dried up. Needless to say, I’ve managed to get more of each… In some cases, much much more than I strictly speaking need.

The first is Annick Goutal’s Sables. I used to like this scent, appreciated its herbal opening and the startlingly strong softness of its development. Now I can’t get enough, as though it’s the elixir of life and nothing else’ll keep me going. So, it’s an immortelle scent and I should’ve had enough of these by now - with the old Eau Noire, the kooky Fougere Bengale and the ultra-pricey Luxe Patchouli. But no. On me, the immortelle in Sables is nonpareil. Its oddness escapes language, and yet, in spite of all those quirks, at the moment it’s fitting me like no other. Less maple syrup than maquis hillside in summer. Man, I love it.

The next - an overlooked gem from Lutens non-export line, Un Bois Sepia. It’s a little like Hermes‘ Rocabar for the first ten minutes or so (and for some makeupalley users, a little like Axe too, apparently), but from this point onwards it charts its own cedar-inflected course. Sweetened by opoponax perhaps, this is a slightly medicinal heavy-materialled Lutens with a familiar ‘is it fruity? Is it spicy?’ scent play that you either love or castigate for being a sugar syrup confection. I’m in the former camp, natch. It’s both fruity and spicy, but quite some distance from the very genetically similar Bois et Fruits, Bois et Musc and Bois Oriental (who all look a lot like their ma, Feminite…). It’s perhaps the most masculine of the bunch and is failing to be summarised prosaically. Tweed, the Lutens site claims. I’ll go with that. I can imagine wearing it whilst strolling around Stornoway, stopping to sup a fine malt in a local pub. And that, for a fantasy, will do me nicely enough.

The final of my cravings is Eau d’Italie’s Sienne l’Hiver. I own a bottle of their Bois d’Ombrie and it’s a potent, masculine tobacco leather incense blend, Bertrand Duchaoufour at his most shadowy and virile. Oooh la la. Sienne l’Hiver, though it dries down to something very similar to its sibling, though a little brighter, is a walk in the etched chill of a sunny winter’s day. Even if the ground is hard, life’s waiting to stir itself in its dank depths, and the drip of meltwater is the metronome counting the ice season’s end. A wet green incense with a very comforting violet and earth accord, this is beautiful.

So, commenters - tell me: 16 years ago - describe yourself. And - what are your current inexplicable scent cravings?

Miller Harris’s Rose en Noir is responsible for today’s visit into Roses of the Night - Rose en Noir, Caron Or et Noir and Serge Lutens Rose de Nuit. 

There are no notes for Miller Harris’ Rose en Noir.  It was created exclusively by Lyn Harris for Liberty in England. It starts off a little jammy, but not overly sweet, this is its flirting stage.  Then she drops her girlie sweetness and starts whispering in your ear about love and loss.  While this appears to be a big blooming rose, and it is, there is something dark and brooding about it.  It is lush, almost overripe.

Rose de Nuit from Serge Lutens has been a rose staple for me since I first smelled it.  It has notes of Turkish rose, yellow jasmine, apricot, amber, musk, sandalwood, beeswax.  This is not a rose that shows up shyly or dressed in her best frock.  It shows up in leather pants, a corset, has a whip in its hand and is holding the rose hostage… in the basement, where you can smell it wafting up very lightly… or is that something else? This one is more about the leather and musk in the base, and the other notes just float around the darkness. The dominatrix of roses and completely gorgeous.

Or et Noir was created in 1949 by Caron and has notes of Bulgarian rose, centifolia rose, geranium, Anatolian rose, lilac, carnation, oakmoss and woody amber.  While Rose de Nuit holds the rose hostage, Or et Noir is like a Tournament of Roses float, except they send it out at night in New Orleans, when the crowds and the voodoo and the dark has woven its spell around it.  Rose is the central theme of this, but this is no rose that you could wear to your Sweet 16 Party.  It is covered in pitch black and the red blooms up through it, its beauty unmolested.

Now, I know y’all rely on me for television recommendations, so here’s this week’s tip.  Rent/buy/borrow The Wire, start at Season 1 and just work your way up through Season 4.  The final season is airing on HBO now.  This is a series about flawed people on all sides, nobody gets a whitewash.  Like the roses of the night, there is beauty and ugliness, contrasts forming the patchwork human quilt we all are.  It’s not just good, it is great. 

Also, if you ever want to buy yourself or have someone who loves you lots buy one luxury fragrance/presentation that’s to die for, do the three 50 ml Annick Goutal Les Orientalistes parfum coffret. it comes in a white leather case, with the three little bottles nestled in the top, then it has a little drawer that pulls out below that would be perfect for some cute little samples and things.  It’s just flat-out freaking gorgeous.

It’s January. It’s cold. You need to get your blood flowing; let’s have an argument.

Louise and I get together at the mall periodically and sniff fragrances, sometimes things we’ve brought with us to swap. If that’s the case we end up sitting at a table at the mall café outside Nordstrom, in the semi-open air. I might bring vials or atomizers to make samples from our bottles. Sometimes we meet up at a Starbucks instead. Sometimes, when we are really reeking, or hoovering each other, or I am making samples, people look at us oddly.

Last week we met at the Starbucks in Wheaton, where the man working near us on his laptop was maybe not digging the early-morning bouquet of our Cinnabar vintage parfum. A few days later I got this email from Louise:

“I just ran into the Wildwood Starbucks (aside from March: a different Starbucks) to pick up some beans after work, and there, huddled over his laptop was the Greek professor dude we gassed out at Wheaton on Wednesday! I looked at him and smiled, and he just looked … frightened. Just when he thought he was safe.”

So. Is it criminally inconsiderate of us to meet at places like Starbucks, where you could argue the citizenry would not welcome our sampling and sillage with their mocha crappacinos? Are we inherently more offensive than the folks who use Starbucks to conduct interviews, have book club meetings, yammer on their cel phones (“hi, I’m at Starbucks!”), escape from the house on dreary afternoons with their badly-behaved toddlers, etc.? If we buy two large drinks and a mocha brownie to tide us over while we try on five (okay, 10) fragrances, are we worse than folks who sit there all day taking up space, nursing a small coffee and using the wi-fi? If we sit far away in a corner and someone sits next to us and we whip out the Musc Ravageur to sample, were they, you know … Asking For It? What say you? Are we being rude?

Okay, on to today’s perfumage. This is another post on New York discoveries.

I was pretty sure, playing in L’Artisan on Madison Avenue with Marina from Perfume-Smellin’ Things, that I had explored all the love L’Artisan had to give me. L’Artisan is like going home, in a good way. Regular readers know I am fond of the line. L’Artisan is an excellent place to start if you’re just getting bitten by the perfume bug, because many of their scents are interesting and a bit strange and generally wearable. For the more experienced fragrance lover, they offer up more unusual scents like Tea for Two, Dzongkha and Dzing! The biggest general complaint about the line might be longevity, but I assume almost anyone reading these blogs can come up with at least one L’Artisan they like.

My favorites in the line move around with the seasons and my changing tastes, but pretty much from the get-go the line has divided itself neatly for me into the majority of likes and the small number I don’t wear at all, mostly because I think they smell terrible on me, not because they are terrible.

One I’ve never liked one bit is Mure et Musc, one of L’Artisan’s oldest, most popular scents (with the pretty, niche-for-the-mass-market-smelling La Chasse being, I believe, their biggest U.S. seller). Mure et Musc has left me absolutely cold for years. I have retried it umpteen times and stand there with my head cocked, trying to discern what part of that slightly bitter, diffuse muskberry combo would appeal to anyone with a sense of, you know, smell.

So while Marina and I were laughing and teasing each other about our favorites and not-so-favorites, I sprayed some on again just to confirm what a mediocrity it was.

And I loved it. Why? Why? I have absolutely no idea why. Marina can’t stand it, and she didn’t see the light that day either. What changed? Not the formula. It smells the same on me. It’s not like it was, I don’t know, some ultra-challenging scent that suddenly I got sophisticated enough to enjoy. I have noooo idea.

Mure et Musc is an idealized blackberry – not sweet, not tart, not natural. Nobody’s pretending to be leading you through the brambles. The other note is musk, and that’s it. It’s a simple, perfect combination. And now I’m going to cheat and admit that after my change of heart I googled the fragrance and came upon Bois de Jasmin’s review, where she pretty much nails what I like about it: it’s not remotely foody, with the balance of the slightly animalic musk perfectly tempering any jammy tendencies in the fruit. She prefers Extreme, which has a stronger fruit note. I prefer the regular, which – go ahead, hate me – lasts approximately forever on me, like most fragrances. It also does that aura thing on me, which I’ve decided for the time being is my single favorite characteristic in a scent — its sillage is subtle but omnipresent and long lasting. I can smell it over an entire day without having to sniff at myself, but it’s not strong enough to start grating on my nerves or irritating people around me. That’s a tough balance to find in perfumery.

My take-home lesson? You never know what previously-spurned fragrance might suddenly take up room in your heart, your wallet, your shelf. If a line as familiar and comforting to me as L’Artisan can still provide me with surprises, I know I’m in good shape.

Okay, your turn. Should Louise and I keep our perfume habit out of other people’s lattes? (For various reasons, visiting each other’s homes is problematic). Do you have a favorite L’Artisan? Is there one from the line that seems completely out of place to you, or one you’d ax? (I can think of a couple). Any you’d make them resurrect and release more widely? (Fleur de Carotte!) Do you think if I buy that bottle of Mure et Musc I’ll go back to hating it immediately?

images from L’Artisan’s website

Those of you who have read my thoughts on Vero Profumo’s Onda know I’m a fan of this perfume, perfumer and line.   Onda’s rich strange nod to Guerlain’s Djedi, while not being just a copy of that perfume - a new slant on how you get to Mars from Pluto - is brilliant.  She currently has two other scents out, Rubj and Kiki, and they could not be more different in feel than Onda.  Often I find perfumers tend to use the same notes or types of notes over and over because their feel for those notes or type of perfume is where they are most skilled. When a perfumer works with completely different notes on a type of perfume and does a beautiful job with each sketch, you can just color me impressed.  Vero Kern is definitely that perfumer.

Rubj is described as a rendezvous in Sheikh Nefzaoui’s “Perfumed garden,  Opulent & beguiling.”  Notes include Moroccan sweet orange blossom, Egyptian jasmine, and musk.  This goes on very, very orangey floral, and just about when you are thinking it’s only another sweet, almost fruity floral perfume, the interesting take on it shows up.  I know there are other notes in there, and I hope she chimes in and tells us what they are - I wish I had asked before. As the orange blossom and jasmine start to head off down the path to opulent floralland, it gets snatched to the ground and pummeled with a good dose of earthiness. I know there’s some musk that helps with the earthy feel and grounding, but something(s) else are at play that I can’t name as easily.  So while the notes sound like a simple white floral, there is a lot more going on with this that keeps me snuffling around it in the drydown. This turns out to be my least favorite of the three - I do like it very much, just not as well as the other two.  An unusual slant on the rich white floral.  The drydown on me doesn’t last overmuch   after an overnight, I take back the not lasting, it was just sleeping.  It stays an elegant white floral for hours and is just lovely.  I’m not sure this reacts on my skin like it might on someone else’s midway through. I’ll be interested to hear from others who have tried it.

 Kiki’s description is “an homage to the city of Paris and is meant to please confirmed individualists with French chic.”  Kiki’s notes include Lavender, powdery caramel, musk, and exotic fruits.  Reading those notes almost gave me hives.  Lavender… caramel…?! musk…!?!? fruit???!!!! What fresh hell…  And how can a perfumer who created the freakishly beautiful Onda do something that sounds as if Lavender sprigs will be buried in my candied apple?  Saying this a fruity perfume is just unso.  It is lavender, it is fruit, it is candy, with musk rolling around at the bottom of that odd little sack.  Have I mentioned that I don’t really like lavender notes in perfume?  Or caramel unless it is part of a Banana Caramel pie (ask for the recipe if you must know)?  Or that fruit notes normally don’t excite me?  My best description:  one of those weird desserts that they roll out to your table that your dining companion insisted on.  You are sitting there with your nose turned up at the very idea that you would like this, you like none of these things seprately and together is just revolting - they don’t even belong in the same bowl - but as you dig in, you find yourself realizing that lavender and caramel are a lovely contrast and why didn’t someone tell you how perfect they were together?  There is a facet to Kiki that smells similar to what you always think of as a candied fruit perfume, so it seems familiar, but the lavender is so expertly woven through that it never seems too sweet, and it distracts the nose, then it just trills off into some new area that is just lovely and fresh and completely charming as the musk adds a sensuous, deep sensuousness to it.    In the hands of a skilled perfumer, magic truly happens - the unthinkably perverse turns into cuddly nose porn.

I’m certain as the day is long that Kiki will absolutely not appeal to everyone, but I think those of you that are like me and rolled your eyes at the notes should give it a chance. This one is in regular rotation on me since I sniffed it. It fills me with happiness to wear it, and I would like all those folks out there making a fruity perfume to just sniff this so they can see what a fresh approach on an old standard should smell like.

These are available at the Vero Profumo website, $145 for 7.5 ml and $230 for 15 ml, pure parfums only.  She does have a nice size sample set of all three perfumes $20.

Time for a drawing!  Samples of all three of the Vero Profumo perfumes.  Just drop a note in comments if you would like your name put in the drawing!

To anyone who’s spent more than five minutes reading my blog posts, it must be screamingly obvious that I am, how you say, no trained professional. I do not possess the impartiality or the discernment of the chemist or master perfumer who is capable of dissecting some fragrance with enormous artistic merits that s/he may, personally, hate. You don’t read tons of posts on rose fragrances from me, because I don’t like rose scents, so what can I do? If I stumble across a rose fragrance I actually like, and I do occasionally, you hear about it (off the top of my head: I like a couple of Rosines, SL Rose de Nuit, that nasty Rose Poivree). If Patty’s homeslice and resident Hermes genius Jean-Claude Ellena worked anise and lavender into, miracle of miracles, something I love, you’d have heard about it. Sadly, he did not, and thus no post from me on Brin de Reglisse.

When I picked up the Teo Cabanel bottles at Henri Bendel, the name was familiar, but I had never tried any of the three scents. Picking through the scant information on their website leads me to understand that the original firm was founded in 1893, existed at least until the 1930s in Paris, and was reborn in 2003. There’s a section in there about using “only rich natural ingredients” that I will grit my teeth and resolutely ignore in the interests of focusing on the scents, one of which is “me” and the other two decidedly not.

Oha, the first scent I tried, is a dark, spicy rose. Notes of: roses from Bulgaria and Morocco, jasmine, cardamom, vanilla, iris, tonka bean, woods, white musk. To the extent that any of these get any coverage on the fragrance forums, I think this is the most popular, but sadly I am unable to wax poetically about its rose-infested charms.

I picked up Julia next, because Julia happens to be the name of one of my daughters. The notes are mandarin, rhubarb, blackcurrant, jasmine, hyacinth and violet, sandalwood, incense, citrus, musk. Their website blurb says: “Julia is the perfume for every woman, for all occasions. It brings to mind a bouquet of impressionist flowers. Both voluptuous and subtle, Julia is made for vibrant women with a strong love and passion for life.”

With all due respect, this is wrong. Julia is the fragrance I want to give to a special girl, with all my love, on her 16^th birthday. It is delicately sweet; the ‘impressionist flowers’ bit is spot-on, a seamless blend of jasmine and hyacinth, the rhubarb and blackcurrant freshly picked rather than jammy. The base notes are a tidy basket to carry the flowers in. Julia glows like dewy skin on high-school girls who are, of course, too young to appreciate their own youthful beauty the way an older woman would. It evokes innocence on the verge of something more. There is nothing winking or jaded about it, but it is not childish. It is gentle, reflective. It would smell absurd on me; I am not that young girl anymore. It is a verging-on-womanhood fragrance, fresh as a new rose at dawn. It is lovely. It knocked me sideways.

Alahine, the last of the three, I can’t stop thinking about. Notes of ylang, bergamot, jasmine, Bulgarian rose, neroli, pepper, iris, cistus, patch, benzoin, vanilla, sandalwood, musk. I went by the store and sprayed this on three times, waffling between the parfum and the EdP. I’ve finally decided I like the EdP better. I am not generally a parfum girl, partly because I almost never struggle with strength and/or longevity in scents. Part of it is clearly my scent personality – in a general sense, I am drawn to the rougher edges of an EdP concentration the way some other people are clearly drawn to the seamlessness of an extrait. Anyway, Alahine can’t be described as rough in any way. It’s a mannered oriental. I’m afraid I don’t have a sample to retest, but I was charmed by Alahine’s transformation. It starts out with a ladylike floral note, a generalized citrus/jasmine/ylang, very classic and expensive smelling. It has the same ladylike component that seems to style the line, but it is Julia’s immaculate mother, thirty years older. From there it only gets better as the pepper, iris and the naughty bits start to bloom, but it’s sexy in a very quiet way, the woman in the corner of the room who catches your eye, and suddenly compared to her quiet chic everyone else looks a bit overdone.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get a little tired.  Tired of the hoopla, the 2007-harvest narcissus LE, the $600 attar plucked by blind nuns at dawn, the newest sex-shop leather bump and grind.  I don’t believe any of the three Teo Cabanel scents is an old formula; I can’t speak to the quality of their ingredients.  But they have the feel of something I long for — a scent that began with a brief that started with the words, make me something beautiful…

image of Alahine parfum: shop.teo-cabanel.com

image of Olivia Hussey, who will always be Juliet to me, dvdtoile.com

I tried to write about perfume, honest, but other things got in the way.

On Saturday, we went out to have a meal with a couple of friends, chew the cud, the usual stuff. I’d been perky all day but found myself getting quieter and quieter as evening progressed. I seemed sad. There wasn’t any clear reason for this - nothing dramatic had happened earlier; I felt well; I like my friends very much. Everyone had noticed however, and I was an absence in the conversation, in spite of physically being there. Matt worked it out before I did.

Earlier, we’d briefly seen the news. I don’t know why the TV was on - we only go down to the tv room for an hour or so a day, and always after 8. Maybe we wanted to check the weather forecast (floods galore in the UK right now), and decided to do it the old-fashioned way; I can’t recall. But anyway, there we were. The news was the usual litany of despair and, though it always affects me, I’ve grown that 21st century carapace that we all wear nowadays to cope with the eerie dissonance between our own lives and what we’re so readily shown from the lives of others. The big story was the arrest of fourteen men in Barcelona for apparent terrorist plots.

It was an incidental that Matt so astutely spotted as the source of my melancholy. As the news anchor intoned over footage about the arrests, the images cut to CCTV of the 2004 Madrid bombings. We watched, without mediation, hordes of people rushing towards a stairwell leading off a train platform and what looked like two detonations occurring behind them. The figures disappeared into the flash and the smoke; it wasn’t clear whether these were amongst the 179 dead, or survivors. It looked fatal enough - whatever I mean by that - to me. The grainy footage, its absence of colour, the half-made forms running in panic, the unswerving unblinking frame except for its judder with the first explosion, vision obliterated by the blast, and then the sudden cut back to the studio…

The shock was on two levels. First, that such footage can be shown, so soon after an event now, only marginally contextualised, as though already historical document and magically impersonal: objective reportage. The second, that real deaths were here shown to the nation as a throwaway set of images on national tv. That’s all it freaking mattered. Not at all. The death of many = something to eat your supper to…

The first shock diminished relatively quickly - I’ve seen dead bodies dragged from buildings on national news broadcasts elsewhere (Spanish TV seems particularly gratuitous to my softer Anglo sensibilities), without forewarning (there’s an endearing tradition in the UK of the broadcaster normally announcing ‘Some viewers may find the following images disturbing’ before harrowing items), I’m not mawkish or squeamish, and I’m fairly savvy to the structure of news bulletins and the tabloid nature of such bulletins on commercial tv here in the UK. But I do tend to get my news on the radio a lot. Sometimes, I remember why.

The second shock lingered, and is still living with me. And it’s this that caused the silent sadness of Saturday night. Once Matt named it, I knew exactly how right he was. Aside from the the sense of wonder that comes from having a partner who knows me better than I know myself, this didn’t lift the gloom, though I could temporarily contain it. I felt freakish - a few million people will have watched that ‘incidental’ footage - how many will have felt it invade their thoughts and feelings, as it damn well should? I’m not claiming some exceptional throne for myself - Prince Embarrassment of Empathy; I’m just sayin’. Terrible, isn’t it? It made me think of this:

War Photograher

by Carol Ann Duffy

In his darkroom he is finally alone
with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.
The only light is red and softly glows,
as though this were a church and he
a priest preparing to intone a Mass.
Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.

He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays
beneath his hands which did not tremble then
though seem to now. Rural England. Home again
to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel,
to fields which don’t explode beneath the feet
of running children in a nightmare heat.

Something is happening. A stranger’s features
faintly start to twist before his eyes,
a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries
of this man’s wife, how he sought approval
without words to do what someone must
and how the blood stained into foreign dust.

A hundred agonies in black-and-white
from which his editor will pick out five or six
for Sunday’s supplement. The reader’s eyeballs prick
with tears between bath and pre-lunch beers.
From aeroplane he stares impassively at where
he earns a living and they do not care.

On the journey home, we listened to Johnny Cash, “American IV: The Man Comes Around”. It seemed fitting, especially the wonder of a song that is his delivery of ‘I Hung My Head’. Sometimes, an old man with a deep voice and so few words can capture the fragility, the pressing beauty of life, more than anything else can. Alongside the terrible pain of its loss. I’ll let Johnny do the talking, laconically at least, for me, from now on.

Why am I posting this here? I’m sorry for the downer folks, but I’m taking advantage of the fact that the warmth I get from this website means so much to me. We’re a community drawn together by the ostensibly frivolous, but what strikes me most about everyone I’ve talked to here is the sense of joy and pleasure you all find in life, and the extent to which you all feel and live and love. And my, there’s something wonderful and profound and lovely in that. That pain I’ve felt since Saturday is a tiny glimpse at a dark world; y’all make me feel like I’m living somewhere bright.

Perfume next week. It’s a promise.

There are days when I don’t really want to be me… it is preferable to be some rich old woman done up with furs, sans the furs and money.  And that’s a day for Hermes 24, Faubourg parfum, First parfum or Patou 1000 parfum.  Other days I do want to blend in with who I am, gently scented, but completely me. That’s a day for Malle’s L’eau d’Hiver or Serge Lutens Encens et Lavande.  If I’m all up in my Marilyn Monroe, I want my Le Labo Aldehyde 44 or Chanel No. 5 parfum.  If I’m down with the sweats, Hermessence Osmanthe Yunnan or Prada Iris Infusion will trail me that day.  There are a thousand facets to who I am, and every day the light hits this diamond a new way, and no one scent can express all of the people I am, was or want to become… so I’ll be needing a lot of scents to keep me happy.

My hope is that the perfume industry will read Burr’s book and not take away from it that they all need to make Kelly Caleche, but I hope they realize there is a wide world of customers that like to smell lots of different ways on about every day of the month, and if they make something beautiful and/or unusual from good materials, it will find an audience.  

For consumers, my hope is that you would all stop buying crap!  For the love of all that’s smelly, don’t encourage them making perfumes with no originality and smelling like cheap scented soap. If you keep buying it, they’ll keep throwing it out on our department store counters, and we all suffer for it.  Yes, I said suffer, because it’s wafting out there and invading my nose and my pores, and whenver people complain about perfume in the workplace, I can assure you they are not complaining about my smooth as silk, though cantankerous, darling Diorling. They are complaining about those overamped molecules that are trying to cover up cheap rose/iris/violet/pink pepper/purple passion grapefruit.

Mostly, I need interesting perfumes to write about. If you keep sending another Chloe, Elle, Midnight Poison, or Britney No. 57 out there, all I get to write about is… bleah, another cheap fruity floral. I’d far rather explain why someone might want to smell like Barbie Doll Sex or Lavender backstroking in your Cheerios than to just throw up my hands and try to review Paris Hilton Can’tSayNo with a straight face. 

Perfume is not going to solve world peace or hunger, and it is a luxury item we don’t need, but all things being sorta equal, I’d just as soon my part of the world smelled great, thanks. 

Okay, I’m done. It’s open mic, y’all can insert your favorite perfume rant in comments.

Chandler Burr is the sort of guy I’d want to sit next to at a dinner party – full of funny stories and interesting facts and insider information. I wouldn’t necessarily want to be his roommate; my guess is he travels a lot, and we’d end up arguing about whose turn it was to deal with the landlord and who ran up a huge bill calling Bolivia on the home phone. (I’m maybe not Chandler Burr’s ideal roommate either, what with my husband and kids.) Burr’s also missing a little of the self-edit mode when he talks, so he can be pretty impolitic, which of course makes him even more fun to listen to.

Having met the man and been given a copy of his recent book, The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York, I started reading it on the trip home from New York and worked through it in the last week or so.

If I were reviewing Burr’s book like I write about a perfume, maybe I’d talk about the interesting contrasts in the composition. Burr is the first person to tell you (in fact, he did tell us) that he’s by training and interest an economics and science writer who fell into the perfume thing through a series of events, not that he’s complaining. The point being: he’s not a massive perfume freak, and in my opinion that distance gives him an interesting perspective from which to write.

The Perfect Scent is full of statistics and for-the-layman explanations of things as various as gas chromatography, perfume marketing and sales structures, and the chemistry and formulation of absolutes. It’s the sort of heavy lifting I’d expect from someone with a background writing for respected magazines like The Atlantic, but I never felt Burr was larding his text with numbers just for show. At the same time, he shares intimate, lovely details from inside the world of perfumers – who can resist the story of Jean-Claude Ellena coming home with the scents requested by his children, from sweaty socks to Madeline cookies, the smell of a cloud, of snow? Burr also details the wonderful story behind Ellena’s creation of a scent based on the teas of Mariage Freres, which after several unexpected plot twists became Bulgari’s blockbuster The Vert.

The book follows two perfume stories – the making of Hermes’ Un Jardin Sur le Nil and Coty’s scent, Lovely, for Sarah Jessica Parker. In the broadest sense it’s a portrait of the modern perfume industry, and while many of the personal stories are funny, it’s here that Burr really aims his weapon and fires. (I’d be interested what percentage of the off-the-record folks in the book recognize their thinly disguised, unflattering portraits and call him up to complain). As someone who, in the best amateur tradition, sniffs a lot of perfume, I’m aware of the dismaying attempts by corporations to make new fragrances generically appealing in a hope to sell them by the truckload, and the sheer number of new releases now is ridiculous. But Burr spells out all the machinations behind the scenes that would disgust anyone with a feeling for perfume (and hence what’s being lost in the mass-market-driven approach). We’re in a situation now where the portion of money spent on the juice in the bottle, as opposed to the marketing and packaging of that perfume, is akin to watching the perfumers commissioned with the job digging around under the couch cushions scrounging for change. Whole lists of ingredients are off the table (too expensive) before the scent creation even begins, leaving the perfumers with, as Burr says only half-jokingly in his book, “Iso-E-Super and some cheap Indian rose essence” to work with. The enormous reduction in the per-kilo price of the ingredients in the perfumers’ budgets was one particularly depressing part of the book. Another interesting, depressing aside: given the way so many consumers now hurriedly select fragrance (off the top notes sprayed on a paper blotter), perfumers are pushed to create scents with top notes that perform appealingly on paper, never mind that they won’t be worn that way once the consumer takes the bottle home.

I understand fragrance companies at the end of the day would like to make some money. But the way they’re going about it seems mighty strange to me. Burr also touches the Third Rail of Perfumery (actually, he kicks it over and over and over, and it doesn’t seem to have killed him) by completely exploding the marketing myth that The Brand Magnate (Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren) is the architect of the fragrance. Another section of the book dear to my heart is his discussion of another verboten topic, the use of synthetics in perfumery, a topic most perfume houses would rather not come clean about because they would like you, the consumer, to continue to labor under the illusion that their high-end fragrances are “natural” — which they most decidedly are not. If I had a dollar for every SA who has falsely touted the all-natural ingredients in whatever fragrance they are shilling, I could buy myself a bottle of (beautiful, synthetic) Mitsouko parfum, or possibly some (stunning, synthetic) Chanel No. 5. Burr does a convincing job of articulating how synthetics in perfumery have given us some of our finest fragrances and are in some cases, such as sandalwood, can be the more environmentally “correct” choice.

Should you read this book? Well, how interested are you in the story behind two divergent scents from two wildly different houses with two different agendas? I’m not a scientist, and I have a greater-than-average interest in the various types of levers that get moved to create a perfume. The story is leavened with more than a sprinkling of gossipy anecdotes and charming vignettes. For me, then, the book’s just about perfect. It’s not dull, and if you want to skip back and forth between the two stories of Sur le Nil and SJP (which is how Burr writes it anyway) you can jump forward pretty easily and then go back and catch up. I’d recommend it for people outside the industry who’d like a clearer idea of how a fragrance is developed, warts and all, told in Burr’s sly, observant, not-particularly-diplomatic style.

As we are hitting mid-winter, the Holidays are over, and winter fatigue is setting in, instead of sitting around like Medusa, Stheno and Euryale - fighting over our one Gorgon tooth, eye and nose - we decided to be more, um, constructive. Here’s the Posse’s list of Top Ten Winter Scents, and we actually agreed on all ten — yeah, yeah, hoofbeats, horsemen, pestilence, basilisks, cockatrices, blah, blah, we are able to agree from time to time when we are not lobbing scented hand grenades. Be sure to visit our perfume blogthren to see their lists as well! :: Bois de Jasmin :: Now Smell This :: Perfume Smellin’ Things :: Scentzilla

• L’Artisan Tea for Two
• Guerlain Spiriteuese Double Vanille
• Christian Dior Jules
• Christian Dior Pour Homme (someone should have really told me how freaking gorgeous this is a long time ago)
• Fendi Theorema
• Guerlain Bois d’Armenie
• Le Labo Patchouli 24
• CB Winter 1972
• Parfums de Nicolai New York
• Annick Goutal Ambre Fetiche

What are your top ten scents for Winter?

Today’s the Scent Club, Part 2 – this month we looked at incense scents. Be sure to check out yesterday’s post on incense scents with Lee.

Etro Messe de Minuit – I have a soft spot in my head heart for MdM, because as some of you may know, that’s how I met Patty. I’d ordered a sample from her eBay store, it got lost in the mail, I emailed her, she emailed me back, and the rest, as they say, is history. Losing that stupid sample of MdM turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me.

I’m sure some of you would agree with that statement based solely on the way Messe de Minuit smells. Of the huge number of love-it-or-hate-it scents I can randomly think of, MdeM has got to be one of the original freak classics at this point. It’s essentially an incense scent (the name translated is Midnight Mass), with additional notes of cinnamon, myrrh, vanilla, and (depending where you’re reading) things like orange, amber and patchouli.

Messe de Minuit smells to me like the inside of a church at Christmas mass – there is incense, some woody notes, resin and myrrh. I can smell the crypt-keeper part everyone objects to – the part like mildew that in my opinion is a trick of the patchouli/myrrh combination – but somehow I just don’t find it objectionable. This scent has an online perfume rep as being this goth scent, and here I’d like to interject one of my favorite stories about preconceived notions and perfume. Because if you take someone – in this case my sister-in-law Kate, who has no interest in or knowledge of fragrance, beyond what she sniffs occasionally in my perfume closet – and you spray some of this randomly on her, she’ll surprise you by announcing it smells like spicy roses, and demand that you hook her up with some more. She’s now on her second (third?) bottle, which she has shipped to her from Bergdorf, having declared all that goth stuff a bunch of b.s. And you know what’s weird? On her it does smell like roses – spicy roses and incense. Go figure.

Next up, Bond No. 9 Andy Warhol Silver Factory. I reviewed this recently, and I maintain my enthusiasm. Easily my favorite of the Bond line, a variation on the theme of incense, this one being fun and lighthearted and blingy and glam. I hear there is going to be a whole series of Warhol scents, and I can’t imagine what the others will smell like (tomato soup?) This one smells like frankincense, violets and some funny metallic/synthetic note (notes are: bergamot, grapefruit, lavender, violet, incense, jasmine, iris, amber, woods.)

The Bond is IMHO probably the most commercial of all the scents we did – it’s fun, pretty (but not too pretty), unisex, wearable assuming you like incense even a little bit. I was wondering whether I’d been brainwashed by the good reviews, but I dug it up again for this session and I’m still impressed. Good work, Bond.

Finally, the biehl.parfumkunstwerke mb03. Notes are chamomile, red pepper, elemi, cistus, cashmere wood, styrax, amber, incense, sandalwood, patchouli. Hey, anybody remember these? Anybody? I mean, this is the volume issue we perfume nuts complain about. How many of these were there – 13? 14? – released at the same time. In some ways I like the concept – I like knowing who the perfumer is, in this case Mark Buxton, the alchemist behind several CdG gems. But the biehls all had those non-fragrance-names, and try typing biehl.parfumkunstwerke a few times without rolling your eyes (or accidentally typing A Very Dirty Word)… uh, where were we? To me this scent is a nice idea, a short story rather than a deep novel. My favorite bits are the first fifteen minutes, when I get the spices, and the sweet woods, and the whole deal reminds me vaguely of a summer version of the Warhol. It’s a very playful scent, and I can’t help but feel that this disappeared into the abyss because of the way it was released. Having said that, this is remarkably short-lived on me, and that’s not a frequent problem.

So – let’s have some conversation. Does Messe de Minuit really smell that bad? Or did it grow on you (and not like mildew?) Do you think the Biehl is underrated, and/or do you have another favorite from that line? Did the Silver Factory live up to your expectations? Does Andy Warhol cult irritate you even a teeny bit? Oh, wait, that’s off topic… and any of you newbies, how did you feel about all these incense fragrances? Thumbs up? Down?

Next month’s scent club: I Heart Perfume! Just in time for Valentine’s Day. This is a bit of an odd lot, scents we chose because they go together in terms of their feel and also happen to be either current or enduring favorites. They are: Isabela Capeto, Serge Lutens Rousse, Dior Homme and Chanel No. 22. There’s a spicy theme running in there, but in a hopeful, spring-is-around-the-corner way, not the winter-solstice way. We hope you join us next month to discuss these.

I don’t frequent perfume forums (fora?) as much as I used to, but I know that, alongside the ‘What (never Which…) colognes do chicks really dig?’ style questions, another frequent one, sometimes in poll form, is ‘Who do you wear scents for?’

The question puzzles me, for its starting point seems slightly wonky. Perhaps it’s age, self-absorption, or some other fault of mine, but I can’t imagine wearing scent for anyone. I wear them purely for personal pleasure. I think it was commenter Elle who recently wrote about scents transporting her from the real to the unreal, or out of the quotidian and into the quixotic. And that’s what they are for me. A profoundly personal and often private ritual, a personal journey into a fantastic elsewhere. In fact, I’m easily embarrassed by people - acquaintances rather than friends - asking me what I’m wearing, as daft as that seems. I’d rather be thought of as nude, scentwise, than be asked by one of the uninitiated what my scent is, which makes me feel nude clotheswise (as nice as it also is to be complimented of course). As though my private place, my solace, has been invaded.

Oh, ain’t I being precious today? But this private pleasure, that I’m happy to share somewhat anonymously over the internet, is both trivial consumption and profound experience. Scents are the closest I often get to awe and wonder. Baby, they’re my religious experience - a world outside of words, a world of marvels.

In case you didn’t spot it, that’s my segueway into incense scents. Burnt material used to cover the stench of the huddled masses at worship, now transformed in the modern age to personal perfumes. Wondrous really, isn’t it? I have mixed feelings about them and until recently, thought I had gone off most of them completely. I was wrong.

Incense scents often appear have a narrow colour palette, and they’re easily seen as monotone and ascetic in nature. Two benchmarks at this end are Armani’s Bois d’Encens and Comme des Garcons’ Avignon.

Of the four incenses I’m reviewing, the Armani is probably the simplest. Cedar - tick. Frankincense - tick. Pepper - tick. Vetiver - tick. It’s fairly diffuse too and surrounds the wearer like an aura. However, it’s more an aura of chilly minimalism than high mass, though that peppery kick sometimes reminds me of similar masculine accords in scents like Gucci pour Homme and CDG 2 Man. If this is a church, it’s way too styled for the huddled masses. I think that have a strict door policy - only black outfits, perhaps a touch of grey here and there. Next!

I used to own Avignon but I shipped it to a dear friend who loves it more than me. It’s a remarkable fragrance - the closest it’s possible to get to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela without visiting. It’s not pure frankincense, but close enough to seem like it might be, and I’m sure I detect some cinnamon in there. But it is being in that cathedral, queuing up with the devout and the curious to touch the foot of the Trinity, the lingering aroma of the botafumeiro - a huge, swinging censer - and the damp of the stones from the humid Atlantic weather of north western Spain. I’ve been to the cathedral at Avignon, though I have no real memories associated with it. Santiago will have to suffice.

For the next two, ostensibly incense scents, my words’ll be limited. Because, though they dilute the purity of of smoke and faith, their beauty is essentially ineffable. The first, because it’s glamorous, sparkling, colourful incense and the best thing I bought in 2007. I’ve hinted here how much I love Amouage’s Jubilation XXV - and oh, I do, I do, I do. It has depth, richness, vibrancy and symphonic range in its harmonising of ingredients. It opens with a fruity, tart-sour accord, a signature motif in many of Bertrand Duchaufour’s compositions
(though not in Avignon or Kyoto, it has to be said). However, it doesn’t stay there for long, instead using a whole orchestra of colour around frankincense to brighten the familiar note. And yet it’s restrained, never brash, and makes you smell goooood, rather than feel like the perfume’s wearing you. In fact, it transforms me into the epitome of chic and debonair, and that’s some feat I tell you.

The last incense from me is one of my holy grail scents, Serge Lutens’s Encens et Lavande. I first smelled this early on in my journey into niche. Who’d've thunk that incense, lavender and a smidgeon of sage (or a whole heap of aromachemicals and naturals masquerading as a trinity) could smell so good? Though I would guess there’s a touch of immortelle there too - at least this perfume started my love affair with that accord. And maybe some amber? It’s the ultimate transporter for me. I can be stressed out of my nut, doolally, off my rocker, flying with the birds; a sniff of this will bring me both back into who I am and away from all the small stuff that we all, too often, sweat over unnecessarily. It’s calm captured, or the last thing to fly out of Pandora’s box bottled by that necromancer of molecules, Sheldrake. If you’ve never sniffed it, please remedy this serious fault (sin?) now. I said NOW.

Of these four (or three or two…), which is your favourite and why? And don’t forget to tune in tomorrow where March reviews two incenses I’ve failed to sniff, and one I hope to avoid sniffing for the rest of my mortal existence. I’ll sniff it enough afterwards…

Image of the Botafumeiro courtesy of wikimedia.

The newest in a line of city exclusives from Le Labo, Vanille 44, created by perfumer Alberto Morillas,  has taken up residence at Colette in Paris.  My very favorite of the city exclusives up to this point, Aldehyde 44, is at Barney’s in Dallas. And the NYC Tuberose 44 is at Le Labo and Barney’s in NYC, I believe.

 Notes of bergamot, incense, gaiac wood, mandarin, vanilla, muscenone, pipol and hedione compose this scent.  I’ve lived with this one for a couple of days, and my nose is finally at work again, or enough so I can trust what it is smelling. This goes on woody with underlying amber and incense.  Not deep, dark churchy incense, but a softer, more woody incense, and it is shot through with vanilla.  Absolutely not sweet, just soft and snuggly, slightly buttery?  The underlying musk, amber and incense stay with the scent as it develops, never overpowering any other notes, perfectly blended.   The description from le Labo seems to suggest that it’s not a vanilla fragrance, but my nose thinks it most definitely is, but not in a “beat me over the head with a Watkins bottle until I bleed vanilla” kind of way, no.

On me, it has good lasting power, though it softens through the day into a beautiful whisper.  The vanilla is perfect, like the wispy smell of vanilla you get from a fresh-baked cookie. Comparing it to the recent Guerlain Spiriteuse Double Vanille, it doesn’t have the boozy notes, nor is it as smoky or dark, leaning more to the woodsy side.  SDV jumps up in your face with a fairly butch vanilla, while Vanille 44 meanders in and out of your consciousness throughout the day, but I find them both warm and enchanting. 

I’m not a big vanilla fan - standard disclaimer on this blog -  but both this and the Guerlain SDV have suited me perfectly, and I find them with different vanilla approaches, but both staying out of the put on 15 pounds just sniffing zone.  Vanille 44 is a great fit in the existing Le Labo line and stays true to the type of scents they have done so far, though it or nothing will replace Patchoul 24 as my all-time favorite Le Labo scent. ever… bar none, no exceptions.

I’m not even going to comment on the price tag of about $500 U.S. for 100 ml, nor about the exclusivity of it.  It is what it is, kids.

Advance notice for Posse Scent Club: tune in Wednesday for January Scent Club Part I (Incense Edition) and Part II on Thursday. On to today’s post:

Unpacking my luggage from last week’s trip, I found myself (surprise, surprise) trying to find the source of some unidentifiable, wonderful scent. I’d bought tea and goodies at Takashimaya, and chocolates, and I tend to have random paper blotters tucked into pockets of things I’ve worn, so the source of the loveliness wasn’t immediately clear. Eventually I found it: the candle Patty had brought me from her visit to Paris — Annick Goutal’s Le Sac de Ma Mere (My mother’s bag).

I’d mentioned this scent to Patty. I was wondering, while she was in Paris, if she might smell it at the boutique. I wasn’t sure what format it came in — I thought it was a room spray — but mostly I thought it might be an interesting addition to The Perfumed Court, and she’s always looking for new things.

Patty being Patty, she bought me a candle, which as it turns out is how the scent is packaged. I tried to pay her for it, and she told me I could (insert mild obscenity here.) Patty gets a kick out of giving, and I still can’t believe she humped that candle all the way back from Paris and then to New York to surprise me with it. When I am with Patty, I feel like she brings out my best self. How many people can you say that about? Okay, I’ll shut up now before she tells me to (insert mild obscenity here) and get back to the candle.

From the AG website:

Childhood scents stay engraved in our memories. Camille Goutal has created the magic of memory by recalling the fragrance of her mother’s handbag. It is a scented candle in which the dizzying smell of tanned leather is mixed with powder blush and lipstick. Ingredients: Russian leather, iris, violet, oakmoss.

Coming upon it in my luggage, before I’d applied any other perfume, in my warm, sunlit bedroom, was the best possible way to take it in. It is as simple (and as complex) as it sounds. It’s as if she found my mother’s purse from my childhood and captured the essence of it. There is a rich, warm leather, comforting rather than “exclusive.” It’s a respectable handbag smell. And then there’s the sweetness – makeup, perhaps a small solid perfume or a purse atomizer, a handkerchief, some hard candies or mints. There is tobacco, and a slightly dusty smell, the smell of the mystery a mother’s pocketbook always seems to hold, even if you can’t put your finger literally on its source. It is a scent memory. It is a simple, quiet smell. If you share the memory, it is heartbreakingly perfect, a scent that makes tears spring to your eyes before you realize what’s happened. Like many interesting stories, it is partly about a kind of loss.

Adding to the aura surrounding my mother’s purse was that for years, underneath her car keys and cigarettes and other everyday items, it held a loaded revolver. She was from rural Virginia and guns were as much a part of her life as they were of my father’s, a farm boy from Oklahoma. Nothing was more useless than an unloaded gun. I knew it was in there. I never touched it. She carried it for protection, why (or from whom) I never knew. I don’t think the other neighborhood moms were packing, but what do I know? All their pocketbooks weighed a ton.

As a teenager I asked her once whether she thought she could, you know, really shoot someone with that gun? If someone was, like, breaking into our house or something? She stared at me, puzzled, trying to understand where the trick part of the question was. The subtleties of my vegetarian, life-embracing, organic-cotton-wearing, Rumi-reading mindset were lost on her. My father told me years later she was a crack shot, something he admired.

Le Sac de Ma Mere. Is your mother’s purse a universal smell, with or without the metallic revolver note? Would it smell different in Japan? India? I am curious – is that a female thing? Do any of our male readers have memories of their mother’s purses as being some sort of repository of mystery?

My father thought I hung the moon. He still does. When I was young he was my advocate, my conversational companion, my occasional partner in crime. But my mother was the planet around which I revolved, every aspect of my life influenced by her cosmic pull. I smelled the candle, with its sense (its scents?) of secrecy, sadness, and comfort. I held Le Sac de Ma Mere in my hand and wished I could be, for five minutes, that young girl again, surrounded by my mother’s fierce protection — something I took for granted, like the rising of the sun, until it was gone.

handbag: soyouwearablevintage.com

photo of woman in red from a recent show in South Carolina about the history of handbags (the Anita Davis collection, 2000 objects!) that I would have loved to have seen, www.sc.gov

It’s a girl… with a wicked bad cold, feverish, sniffling hacking, drooling. Yup, that’s me.  Shortly after our return from New York, I sneezed twice, and then my head blew up and went off the cliff with one of the worst colds I’ve had in years decades.

Suffering a loss of smell and fever delusions, y’all will just have to put up with my 103-degree mental meanderings, but I promise they will be brief and *giggling* probably incomprehensible.  This is as close to posting under the influence as I’m likely to get. 

Do I still enjoy perfume as much now? I think so, but then I smell some disappointments or stuff that is the same as the last three releases at 3x the price and get pessimistic.  After much reflection recently, I find deep at my core, I still adore perfume and the whole olfactory marketing mess — the good, the bad, the ugly. Even when they churn out crap that’s only worth poking fun at, or we are bombarded by 7,46,023 new releases a month, or the price goes north of $200 a bottle, or they produce something that you can only buy if you secure passage to Mars, or the marketing material reads like Lady Chatterly’s Lover rewritten by a lovesick 13-year-old.  Love it. Love the process, adore the perfumers who make that magic happen, even when given impossible budgets and sketches to work from. They make memories, old and new, appear out of molecules and imagination.

For those of you new to the perfume journey, don’t let us that have (*sung to Bon Jovi’s “Dead or Alive“) sniffed them all throw you off.   For those of you new to perfume, what is your favorite/least favorite thing so far you have discovered about perfume.  For you old hands, same thing - what do you hate the most about perfume and love the most.  On the line as a prize…  hmmm, what have I got around here?  How about a sample from my cute little red girl of - wheee!!! - Isabela Capeto and a sample of the new Le Labo Vanille 44 thingie from Paris when I get some next week.  Just drop a comment, and you’ll be treated to my whacked out on aspirin reply.  You lucky, lkcy, lukcyw people. 

Some random details from New York City:

Regarding the two new Armani Prives, Rose Alexandrie and Vetiver Babylone – they’re in clear glass bottles with black stone tops (picture the original Prive bottles recast in Jo Malone glass and with JM-type labels, to give you a vague idea.) They smelled like (wait for it) … rose and vetiver. That’s about the cleanest vetiver I’ve ever smelled, and the rose is pretty tentative – a rose-fruity sparkle with some white musk. We couldn’t find anyone who could tell us anything at Barneys, but we think the price point on these may be lower? I like all the other Prives to varying degrees (perhaps more than many of you do), but neither of these new two was anything to write home about. They were lightweight in all senses, had the feel of a sketch rather than a finished piece, and don’t seem properly connected with the other Prives in terms of design or density. Maybe he’s doing a Prive Lite line? Based on their smell and appearance I would expect/hope they would be significantly cheaper.

On the Molinard Une Histoire de Chypre created exclusively for Aedes – I took the subway down there on Tuesday morning and Aedes is closed on Tuesdays, so I guess I’m off the hook! No? Fine. Here’s the link to Aedes’ blurb about Chypre, which gives a lot of detail. Doesn’t it sound beautiful? I have not reviewed any of these (with the exception of Habanita, but I think my review was for the vintage.) I have a soft spot in general for the Molinard line, even the cheap stuff, and a particular admiration for their back-catalog reissues. In my alternate universe, the shelves at Sephora would be lined with fragrances with classical lines and proportions like the Molinards, as opposed to 70 percent of what’s there now. Having said that, I have been insufficiently moved by any of the 1849 Collection to want to buy one of those stunning Lalique bottles, and that’s just my personal taste. The Chypre I had difficulty smelling because the atomizer worked so poorly (I was going to go back in there with a virgin nose and figure out another way to pour some on.) It surprised me in the same way my first sniff of Coty’s legendary Chypre surprised me; I was expecting something considerably darker and dirtier, based on my reading of descriptions of the scent and its sillage. From what I could smell, the Molinard Chypre reminded me a fair amount of the Coty, and that’s obviously praise, yes? I personally wanted something … more abundant? And I might well have gotten it on Tuesday morning, had I retried it.

Finally, I need your help: here’s a link to the charming Isabela Capeto website, stop by if you have time. But what I really want to know is: what is that piano piece playing on the website? Can anyone tell me? Is it some old chestnut by Liszt that everyone knows but me? A famous Brazilian song? I’ve emailed them and asked and get back a very polite reply that they’ll look into it, but nothing so far. If one of you classical music/piano buffs knows, please tell.

I think the bottle is cute, sure, but seriously, I bought it for the contents. I find Isabela Capeto an interesting series of accords that manage to swing between insouciance (the osmanthus and lily) and  fire (the sandalwood, opoponax and spices), with some pretty earthy cedar/vetiver at the opening. I agree with the commenter on Patty’s post that the four holes in her face on the bottle are supposed to be like the holes on a button – the red doll is actually Capeto’s logo, she is a clothing designer and her stuff has lots of whimsical (albeit high-end) crafty-type details like cutouts, appliqué, sequins, ribbons, and buttons. Any of our Brazilian readers (I know some of you lurk!), please chime in with your opinion of the line.  The perfumer is Carmita Magalhaes from Mane.

NYC image: poshnosh.com

I’m not feeling brilliant but I need to write a review - I’ve been dithering with other stuff here for way too long. But, given my febrile state, there’ll be no preamble (other than this, erm, meta-preamble), no discussion of CDG’s quirks and funny spots, no anecdotal asides. Well, that’s what I’m saying now. We’ll see.

These two scents are are very different points on my perfume continuum. One I think I love, the other I almost hate. Let’s start with hate first.

Patty and March have already written about 888. They both quite liked it, though neither flipped their lids when they sniffed it. My lid closed down with a clank when I did and I pulled my ugly wrinkle nose face. There’s a category of scents that I. JUST. CAN’T. DO. and this, for some reason, falls in there, with those two Soir Sisleys that I conflate in my brain.

Here’s what marvellous March said: ‘Here’s what I got: 888 opens with a huge blast of pepper and coriander, but there’s also a strong, old-fashioned classic cologne note. The effect together is effervescent and really, really appealing. Right away the tone is set: okay, we’re going to have fun here. If anything, I’d have named this one Play. I don’t get much metal, for those of you avoiding 888 because of the m-word. “Curcuma” suggests either ginger or turmeric, and I’m going with the latter – along with the amber and saffron that begins to dominate as the cologne fades, there’s a mustard-like note.’

And here’s what perfectly perspicacious Patty said: ‘I’m not sure I’ve ever smelled gold. but this is why I think it should smell like in an ideal world — slightly fresh, a little metallic, with the geranium giving it that weird, funky, almost rubbery {!?!} vibe. I’ll be anxious for you Daddy Warbucks readers who have smelled gold to sniff it and tell me how close it is. As a scent, it works for me beautifully — it is fresh and appealing on the surface, but has some strange things going on underneath that surface. I think of it like one of those beautiful lakes from Lord of the Rings. All pretty and mirror-like on the top, and some funky fanged fish swimming around underneath that beauty.’

Well, that filled up some space, and I do feel rough.

The end.

Just kidding! Here’s what lunatic Lee said: ‘Yeuch , I need to remove it! Horrible horrible top notes. Yes, it is effervescent, but in that nasty old Baghari way and I’m a total lame-ass (still) with most aldehydes. It probably doesn’t even have aldehydes but I don’t care (aside - I can’t check my one and only wearing of this scent - sniffed thanks to Patty’s unstinting generosity - cos I’ve shipped it on to its next victim); it’s a super-perfumey perfume number that’s doing a ‘Oh I’m here, take notice’ dance up my nostrils. Blech. So it’s almost bad chypre to begin with (good chypre - Mitsy parfum; bad chypre - aforementioned Sisley stink) rather than cologne. And it’s big - a demon of diffusion. It’s wearing shoulder pads, it’s gold lamé and shoulder pads. Did I say shoulder pads? It’s synthetics gone serious. I see why they had that one called Play now - cos all the fun is done. Goodbye Tar and Garage and all you daft little scents. Hello brash new world of glitz and high-pitched noise.’

That’s hyperbole really. I know I’ve offended lots of lovely folks there, but I guess I like my perfume to smell odd rather than perfumey. And this is, well, perfumey. With a sprinkling of agent orange.

Luxe Patchouli seduced me in autumn when I first sniffed it in London’s Liberty. I didn’t pay much heed to it that day, other than declaring it ‘mmm… tasty!’, but thanks to Louise sorting out a spli