minor perfume rampage, part one

My nose is still a little bit stuffed up, but I went on a minor perfume rampage last weekend anyway, on account of I was having the withdrawrals. Went seeking out two different types of perfumes: CB I Hate Perfumes and Bond No. 9. Some of the I Hate Perfumes line is carried by a little boutique in Berkeley, and I had heard that Saks carries Bond No. 9. So off I trotted, with about $7 in my wallet and $2.30 on a BART pass, and a stern self-admonition not to use my credit card (it’s the end of the month).

The owner of the boutique in Berkeley was deep in consultation with another customer when I got there, so I occupied myself at the little shelf holding about nine or ten of Christopher Brosius' creations. A word here about I Hate Perfumes: I frickin' love the way they smell. Another word: I love the way they look - the packaging design is easily the most minimalistic (home-made, even) of any I have encountered in the perfume world. Although I do recognize that it is a gimmick in and of itself, I appreciate the zero-flash approach to marketing that some of my favorite perfumers employ. Frederic Malle (Editions de Parfums) and Jo Malone are two other examples of perfumers with similarly stripped-down styles (although you could argue that Jo Malone's package design ripped off Chanel's classic white-box-with-tasteful-name-in-neat-black-font look, if you wanted to be nasty). At any rate, there’s so much more scope for the imagination in sniffing a perfume that doesn’t have a picture of a naked celebrity on the box, is what I always say.

On the wall behind the I Hate Perfumes shelf was a printed copy of Christopher Brosius' manifesto, which you can also read on the I Hate Perfumes website (a website with a minimalistic design, natch). A few choice bon mots:

"People who smell like everyone else disgust me."

"Perfume is the weather of our inner world bringing life to a personal landscape."

To me, the latter statement is a pretty good summary of the scent aesthetics of this line. I Hate Perfumes presents seemingly simple, un-perfume-like smells - like apple, or dirt, or crayon, or burning leaves - directly. This is perfume as place, with the perfumer letting us use our memory and imagination as the bridge. A Guerlain fragrance, by contrast, might venerate a particular idea of a beautiful woman, or man - Guerlain perfumes are ornate, opaque creations of real art and beauty - but they are about something that is often, to me at least, largely fictional. CB I Hate Perfumes is about the real. It has a certain power which is difficult for me to define any further, but it commands my respect.

And the beauty of these perfumes on the skin can take my breath away. At home, I have In the Library - my gateway I Hate Perfumes scent, which smells great but I haven't really worn it - Tea Rose, which smells, not like a tea rose, but like black tea with cream in it next to a sweet flower; while I like both scents and I really like the combination, this one isn't my favorite, maybe because the milk part starts to smell a little curdled in my nose after a while - Memory of Kindness, a perfume with a strong personality that I had a dream about - and Black March, which smells like potting soil, rain, and fresh green shoots, and is one of my all-time favorite perfumes so far. At the boutique, I sprayed Burning Leaves, Wild Pansy, Mr. (sic) Hulot's Holiday, and In the Kitchen (among others) on several paper strips. They were all great, and Wild Pansy and Mr. Hulot's Holiday were terrific, so I ended up putting one on each wrist. Mr. Hulot's Holiday is supposed to smell like an old-fashioned holiday by the Mediterranean, complete with old suitcases, and it was my favorite of the two. It seems to me to be in the "salt and leather" category, and it is an excellent, though fairly subtle, example of this class – the perfume is mostly woody and actually pretty delicate, with some fresh, breezy notes, and those nice, supporting notes of salt and leather. Wild Pansy smelled like sweet, dirty, green flower shoots – like spring flowers busting through the forest soil. Not unlike the smell you might get if you took some wild pansies and mashed them up, flowers, roots, stems and all, in a sort of joyful, Spring-inspired frenzy. Delicious. Both perfumes have pretty good lasting power. Not so good as the perfume I tried later that day. But I get ahead of myself.

I liked Mr. Hulot’s Holiday enough that I wanted to purchase a bottle, so I looked over towards the boutique owner, but she was still deep in it with her other client, and I figured that was a sign (or at least a chance for the credit card in my wallet to yell DON’T USE ME in a tiny plastic voice only I could hear), so I slipped out and bought myself some fries for lunch.

Later that day I met J in the City for a proper sensory overload. Next post!

sniffle

I have a cold, so what with the stuffed up nose and all the napping, I will be taking a break from posting about perfumes for a few days.

mitsuoko

This morning I dabbed some Guerlain Mitsuoko (eau de parfum) on my wrists before going to work. I had tried it once before and was so turned off I scrubbed myself with soap almost immediately, but I determined to try again. The first whiff of the stuff on my wrists made me feel sorry for any co-workers who might get too close today. I continued to sniff it as I biked to work, as I sat working at my computer, and as I walked around the lake this afternoon. The scent did change somewhat over the course of the day, but it only improved marginally. And I have to say I was disappointed in myself - Mitsuoko is one of the great fragrances, and I was bummed I couldn't see what all the fuss is about. It's like admitting to not being a big fan of Citizen Kane or The White Album. This perfume is supposed to be radiantly, transcendently wonderful - it's even brought some people to tears. And all I could smell was cloves and pee.

But then something happened this evening: the fierce, almost nasty edge to the perfume drifted away, and I was left with this softened, friendly yet complicated thing. It seemed as though there was something that should have been in the top notes - either lemon or apple - mixing with the ghost of the other stuff, in the base. The sharp edge from before was still there - a hint of aldehydes, maybe? - but subdued, and the scent had assumed an entirely new personality - sad, but sweet, kind of like that friend whose company you enjoy more than anyone's but who always seems to be in trouble. I splashed some of Laura Ashley's L'Eau - a simple, clean floral I really like - on the back of my hands this evening for comparison, and I was struck for the first time with the thought that the L'Eau was shallow, almost naive - at least, compared to the thing on my wrist. And now the L'Eau is disappearing, but I'm still enveloped in this cloud of Mitsuoko. I hope some of it got on my coat today. I wouldn't mind at all if this one sticks around for a while.

dream perfume

Sunday morning, right before I woke up, I dreamed of a perfume. In my dream I was in San Francisco or maybe Italy, in a Prada boutique. Once I realized where I was, I started searching for Infusion d'Iris, a perfume I had been reading about but hadn't smelled. The saleslady found it for me and sprayed it on my arm. I sniffed: a very strong, bitter scent, of green shoots and leaves, and white pepper, and jet fuel. It filled my nostrils and made my eyes sting, but it wasn't a totally unpleasant experience. But it didn't smell like a flower. I sniffed some more, then woke up.

Today when I came home, I got some more samplers in the mail (these are the last for a while. I swear.). One of them was Prada's Infusion d'Iris, so I eagerly dabbed some on my wrist, to see if it smelled like I dreamed it. It smells, in a word, heavenly. A delicate, sweet (but not sugary) floral, with a hint of warm woods, and just a little bit of a green edge. It is a beautiful, pale purple perfume. In other words, nothing at all like the one in my dream. But a real beauty. It has won some awards, and I can see why.

Two other perfumes that I got in the mail, both from CB I Hate Perfume, are worth mentioning here. One is called Memory of Kindness, and I couldn't quite place the smell - grass? leaves? - so I looked it up: the main note is tomato leaves. And it smells exactly like tomato leaves - bitter, peppery, earthy. The other one, called Black March, smells exactly like clean, fresh dirt with some green shoots poking through. I really like it. Put them together and they actually smell pretty close to the perfume in my dream, except for the jet fuel.

I love I Hate Perfume.

more tiny bottles

I wore Eau de Soir by Sisley today - it's starting to grow on me. It's a more traditional French perfume, somewhat aldehydic (like Chanel No. 5) and, to my mind, fairly aggressive. My first experience of Eau de Soir actually made me recoil a little bit. But the initial, volatile burst of top notes does evaporate, and the perfume eventually mellows somewhat - by the end of the day, I smelled pretty good (to myself, anyway).

This evening, my sister picked me up and we went and got dinner and did some shopping. I dragged her to the Body Shop, where I layered a few more scents on top of the Eau de Soir. Then I went home, to discover a bonanza of samplers in my mailbox. I was ripping open packages even as I was walking through the door to my apartment, and within minutes I had five more fragrances on my skin. As I type this, I am probably smelling somewhat ridiculous. And I am totally blissed out. My cat doesn't know what to think.

The problem, of course, is that I am wearing too much perfume. I can't quite tell one smell from another at this point. I think I may need to take a two-day sabbatical in order to be able to use my nose properly again. My sister made a good point tonight - that the more one uses perfume, the more likely it is that one's sniffer becomes de-sensitized. (I think she made this point partly because she noticed how, um, fragrant I am today.) At any rate, I need to take a break.

One last thing - one of the samples in the mail was a Laura Ashley perfume, and I will have to re-visit this when my nose is less handicapped, but my first impression is a really nice one. It's L'Eau, made by Jean-Claude Ellena, and it smells like...water. Imagine it's a hot, thirsty spring day and you are drinking a cold glass of clean, sweet water, and you will have an idea of what this one smells like. The fragrance is really delicate - it's definitely a "fresh" perfume, with some light floral and citrus notes, but there's also a faint tinge of anise, or licorice, and something else - a saltiness, maybe? so, so nice.

Oops, I was supposed to write about men's perfumes or cat butt (not necessarily linking the two). Okay, that will be the next post.

probably too much information

I think my sense of smell, and my sense of what smells good, changes depending on what time of the month it is. Hmm.

super longs

Last weekend, I went with my sister to the Super Longs on 51st in Oakland. We went there for plants (her) and kitty litter (me), as well as some aimless browsing. Since there was nobody at the cosmetics counter when we walked by, I felt free to try some of the perfumes that weren’t enclosed in glass. I sprayed Y Tu Tambien on one wrist, Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen's Beach Honeysuckle on the other wrist, and Love's Baby Soft on the back of my hand. Then someone came over the loudspeaker and said something like "customer needs assistance at the cosmetics counter," so I booked it over to the earring racks to avoid someone asking me why I was opening boxes and spraying myself with stuff. Serves them right for not having testers.

The beach honeysuckle was actually pretty nice - smelled a lot like, well, beaches and honeysuckle - and not too sweet, but it wasn't memorable, either. I liked Y Tu Tambien - mango and vanilla, with a little bit of green, kind of like J. Lo's Live but less complex - but my sister turned up her nose at it. I thought about getting one of the (very cheap) bottles of Y Tu Tambien gathering dust on the counter, but it turned out to be lacking any base whatsoever - it evaporated and nearly disappeared, leaving only the faintest trace of vanilla, before I even left the store. I guess I've been spoiled by some of the fancy scents I've been experimenting with at home - the ones that stay around long after you've forgotten you were wearing them. Light Blue, Live, and (especially) Bigarade Concentree are all able to sustain memorable and varied conversations long after the first spray. Is the name for that quality sillage, or persistance? At any rate, my sister and I both liked the Love's Baby Soft. It is a pretty classic scent.

We also got some lip gloss (her) and a People magazine (me).

The next post will be about either men's colognes or cats' butts.

dream interpreter

Lo and behold, a perfume website has a dream interpreter feature. Click here, the website for Tommy Hilfiger's Dreaming perfume, click on The Dream Expert, then click on the dream interpreter link. Interesting. Incidentally, I've smelled this new perfume and it's pretty nice - as fruity (peachy) florals go, it may be one of the better ones.

I just tried to use the interpreter to de-code a dream I had a few nights ago, but "poison cupcake" isn't one of the recognized terms. Drat.

old spice commercial

Possibly the best commercial ever. Featuring Bruce Campbell.

tiny bottles

I’m almost, but not quite, embarrassed to admit that my perfume collection has grown recently to over two dozen fragrances, with the help of the internet. But wait, I hear you ask: don’t all those bottles take up a ton of space? And are you going to start selling drugs to little kids to finance your habit? The answers to your questions are No; and Thank you for your concern but no. Because all of the perfumes I’m talking about are sample sizes of 1.5 mL or less. And most of them cost about two dollars each. Yeah, homes. That’s what I’m talking about.

Turns out, with the help of the tiny, frantic monkeys inside my computer, I can order samples of nearly any perfume I hear or read about. My favorite website is The Perfumed Court, where they sell hand-decanted samples of hundreds – maybe thousands – of perfumes. But even Amazon.com sells perfume samplers – Lovely, J’Adore, and Angel, among others. And if you have vials of those three little babies, you’ve really got something good there.

See? Didn’t I tell you don’t need a ton of dough to be able to appreciate perfumes? Truthfully, I do need to stop getting samples for a while, because even at two or three bucks a pop, it starts to add up.

On my left wrist is Angel (sweet, chocolatey, great-smelling but not really me); on my left shoulder is Apres L’Ondee (pretty disappointing; smells like violets and toilet cleaner); on my right wrist is Bigarade Concentree (stunning; smells like mandarin orange rind and warm cedar, in a really, really good way); and on my right shoulder is Rose Barbare (Ah. Divinity.). I smell…interesting. My cat doesn’t know what to think.

lovely/covet

I am sitting here - reclining, actually - on the couch, and I smell like Sarah Jessica Parker. On my left wrist is Lovely, which was created about two years ago (I am always, always behind the curve); on the other is Covet, which was released recently. Both are perfumes created by Ms. Parker. And I must say, I smell really fricking good. Especially on the left.

A lot has been written about Lovely, especially by Mr. Chandler Burr (otherwise known as my boyfriend [if he weren't gay]). His still new-ish book, The Perfect Scent, includes an in-depth description of how this perfume was created. I personally thought Lovely was a dorky name for a perfume and I thought the commercial for the perfume was dorky, too, when it came out. At that time, I think if I had to choose between browsing celebrity perfumes and chewing on a lightbulb while it was still plugged in and glowing, I probably would have picked the latter. What a difference a couple of years makes. My goodness.

Covet, the more recently-created perfume, smells pretty darned good. It starts out with a nice, sharp blend of fresh greeny-ness and lemon, along with a few other fairly assertive smells. The whole thing would, in fact, be maybe too aggressive except mixed in there is also a small handful of smoother qualities - I couldn't really define any of them for myself until I looked the perfume up on the internet and was able to identify: Chocolate! Nice choice.

Lovely is the twin sister of Covet, but, like, the paternal twin sister. Definitely the blonde one. Covet, in fact, would probably smell pretty irresistible on a guy, but Lovely could work well on either or any of the genders. It is pretty wonderful, in fact. In fact, I can't seem to stop sniffing my arm. The perfume has settled down to a quiet powderiness, but the first smell out of the bottle was a real zinger, albeit not a noisy one. I inhaled: a sweet, subdued floral mixed with a nice dose of woodsiness and a very nice ambery smell...plus something else that I couldn't name, except that it smelled exactly like drama class. Exactly like Lisser Theater on the Mills campus. I'm still not sure if it is the mixture of cedar and amber, plus the delicate touches of narcissus and patchouli, but whatever it is, it's great. It smells like white flowers and salty skin. Chandler Burr calls it "a sheath of light built around a core of dark." Yes.

Okay, I've been sniffing myself for a couple of hours now, and it seems as though Lovely has settled down with a pillow and a book in her corner of the windowseat, but Covet is still goin' strong and wants me to know about it. Even after a few hours, the greeny-ness is still mixing really nicely with the chocolate, plus all the other stuff that's going on in there.

DAMN, I smell good.

name that smell

So, you knew there were perfumes called White Linen and Egoiste, but did you know there was one called In the Library? Perfume names, like perfume bottles and (some) perfume commercials, are one of the fun parts of the whole perfume obsession. (Obsession, that's another one.) Some names are simple and direct - Chanel No.s 5, 19 and 22 come to mind - others are more lyrical, like Hermes' Un Jardin Sur Le Nil (it smells like green mangoes, which I guess are common in gardens on the Nile). And others are metaphorical, whimsical or just plain weird, like Dzing! by L'Artisan Parfumeur.

Here are some of my favorites among the more weirder perfume names (some descriptions taken from the Perfumed Court website):

In the Library, by CB I Hate Perfume - First of all, love the name of this perfume house. Perhaps predictably, this is supposed to smell like "a combination of Russian & Moroccan leather bindings, worn cloth and a hint of wood polish." Other perfumes by CB I Hate Perfume include Burning Leaves and I Am a Dandelion (which is supposed to smell "rich, earthy, with a slightly milky feel").

Dzing! by L'Artisan Parfumeur - Chandler Burr says this smells "like a plank of newly sawed pine still warm from the blade."

Garage, by Comme des Garcons - I love the description of this one: "Don't think just grease, oil and rubber...Think of your father working on a car, an old leather chair, or your grandparent's toolshed." The scent of this one is supposed to include notes of kerosene and "plastic flowers."

Guerrilla, by Comme des Garcons - This one has notes that include saffron, black pepper, and vetiver.

Lady Vengrance and Miss Charming, by Juliette Has a Gun - I don't know what these two smell like, but I just like the juxtaposition of the names, and the name of the house.

Let me Play the Lion and Unicorn Spell, by LesNez - Another good pair of names.

Magazine Street, by Strange Invisible Perfumes - I mostly just like the name of this perfume house. Magazine Street is in New Orleans and I think this perfume is supposed to be somewhat spicy.

Dzing!

I like me some perfume. I think this confuses people who know me and know that I am neither a rich old lady nor a young, ultra-feminine one. I blame the internet, and the many good perfume sites out there, for feeding my interest in all things smelly. I have known about some of these sites for a while, but it hasn't been until recently that I started really scouring them for information, following links, going from one site where the writer raves about the candy-and-concrete flair of Thierry Mugler's Angel, to another site that describes Angel as "chocolate-covered vomit."

The godfather of all perfume critics is, of course, Chandler Burr, who writes a regular column for the New York Times Style section. I have yet to be convinced that Mr. Burr has better taste in perfume than, say, the women who write reviews for the Perfume Posse (theirs was the "chocolate-covered vomit" quote), but he is an enthusiastic critic and his writing style really pops off the page (er, monitor).

For example, reviewing Guerlain's Insolence, Mr. Burr writes that it "smells like fruit compote sprinkled with Splenda: aesthetically nondescript...spiritually flat...Inside the industry they speak of Insolence grimly, as of a suicide." His review of CK One: "It's the freshness of laundry washed in the artificial gravity of a space colony." His review of Calyx: "It's a green freshness that is viscerally alive...vivid as a young tree ripped in half by a storm...This is an HDTV perfume." And Yves Saint Laurents' Kouros is like the "hot, ripe smell of a French trucker's Jockey shorts after a muggy day on the A51...This perfume is fecal." Hard to top that.

Other than perfume websites, there was also this recent visit I had with the Guerlain counter at Neiman Marcus in San Francisco. I was browsing - couldn't really afford to buy - and looking at some of the perfumes near the front of the display. The small French woman at the counter started spraying perfume on strips for me - I think she was picking scents that she thought I would like. They were nice - floral, pretty - but none of them really sparked. I spotted a bottle of Sous le Vent and asked for a strip. Her eyes narrowed. "'Ow you know Sous le Vent?" she asked, almost suspiciously. "Um, think I read something about it," I muttered. She sprayed a strip, I sniffed: It smelled like damp woods and the city. Flowers, too, but also other stuff. Spices, but it wasn't spicy. There were lots of things in there. "That one's interesting," I told my petite friend. She steered me towards some other perfumes, on the shelf behind the counter. "This one is Double Vanille, and this one is Rose Barbare," she told me, spraying two more strips. I sniffed the first one: a deep, rich vanilla - strong, but not overpowering. I was an instant fan. And then I sniffed the second strip. And my brain exploded, a little bit. I had liked Sous le Vent, but this one smelled almost unbelievably good. Like the most beautiful, dark rose, but also like earth, wood, deep water. I sniffed and sniffed. My nose was glued to the small piece of paper. My French friend smiled at me through her little German glasses. "Wow," I said.

And that's where I am starting from. I would like to find other perfumes that make the same impression on me as those ones from that visit with the Guerlain counter. And I would like to be able to use words other than "wow" to describe them. I want to develop an ability to smell the parts of a perfume - jasmine, iris, bergamot, chypre, civet - and I want to be able to write it all down on the page - er, monitor.

And I'm here to tell you that my working hypothesis is that sniffing perfume is neither a particularly girly, nor a particularly high-class pursuit. We all have noses, don't we? and we all know that what we like to smell is as particular as what we like to eat. We just talk about it less than we talk about food. But there are perfumes for all noses. Some people love the smell of microwave popcorn, others love the smell of a really green banana, others love tuberose. And others love the smell of leather mixed with a cat's dirty butt. (No, I did not make that one up; and yes, there really is a perfume that smells like that.) All of us, or most of us, love the smell of vanilla.

So this is my new web page about perfume, but what it is really about is how I am trying to learn how to use my nose, and then write about it. It's not a joke. It's for real. And it's harder than you might think. Also, it's really, really fun. I have named this new page after the classic Spinal Tap album.