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.