Sweetness Follows: 100% Love.

It would be a lie to say that I never had good experiences with family. While our relationships were, at best, complicated and difficult, and, at worst, violent and cruel, there were things and times and people that I loved and love still. It’s the kind of love forged from common experiences and common roots and the formation of some fundamental building blocks of identity, not from common goals or values. It’s the family/personhood of origin, not the family/personhood of creation or choice, held in common with those people who, for whatever reason, you share blood and history with.

In that same vein, I’ve realized how great 100% Love is. Like the idea of going home, it took a while for 100% Love by S-Perfumes to grow on me. The Guide saddles it with the handle of “chocolate rose.” Created by Sophia Grojsman, 100% Love is described as

The pulpy erotic part of a secret red fruit, the rich, deep and velvety skin of a dark natural rose by L.M.R., a ray of green sap from the rose's thorn, a mystical "concoction" of incense and black cacao.

My love (no pun intended) for 100% Love is, in part, a reflection on the improvement of my nose. When I first sniffed it, about six months ago, I did not love it. Too light, too airy, too thin, too simple. Nope. Not for me. But, like a good little level one perfumista in training, I took the advice of those with vastly more developed sniffers than mine. I set it aside to try again later. About a month ago, I bought a small spray sample to try it again (the first came in a 1.5ml tube sampler, and the sprayer with this one really did make all the difference), and all of the sudden, I saw its genius. 100% Love was a light, sweet and liquored cloud hanging around me, like single barrel whiskey or really good rum mixed with sweet cola and grenadine. One of the more pleasurable memories I have from my childhood is that when my father would drag my brother and I around to the extra jobs he worked at a group of 610-Loop Houston hotels, he would lead us into the bar and ply us with all the Roy Rogers we could drink, complete with red plastic swords stacked with cherries. When I smell 100% Love, it smells like those drinks.

100% Love also reminds me of the boxes of cherry cordials my father bought every year at holidays. While there was always the inevitable Whitman Sampler for Christmas, and my mother received a giant heart-shaped box of chocolates every Valentines, the cheap cherry cordials picked up at the local drugstore meant a good mood, a happy time to be shared. And when I spray on 100% Love, I feel a lost sort of love, the love that comes from having had certain shared wins and loses, shared joys and sorrows, shared anger and resentment and regret…and the naivete of youth and its inability of processing the complex emotions that come with family at the time. Nostalgic and sweet, with a tiny sour note or dark mark inevitable on the horizon. Like a little girl in a bar with her drunken father, blissfully unaware of the alcoholism that will eventually kill him, slurping down Roy Rogers with lots of cherries. Like the soft and fluttery feeling of rose petals from the bush my grandmother’s backyard brushed across skin, rose bushes that would one day later, unforeseeably and inexplicably, cease to bloom again. A little drunk…a little sad…on chocolate and roses and an unshakable love that lies so deep inside you that you can run from it, but never escape.

Readying to bury your father and your mother,
what did you think when you lost another?
I used to wonder why did you bother,
distanced from one, blind to the other.

Live your life filled with joy and wonder.
I always knew this altogether thunder
was lost in our little lives.

Oh..., oh..., but sweetness follows.

Another perspective can be found in Robin’s review over at Now Smell This! Also, special shout out to Angela, who gifted me with a totally undeserved bottle of 100% Love. It made my week.

Drink image courtesy of instructables.com.
Cordials from Sanders Candy.