For the Love of Perfume: A Reflection on Favorite Perfumes

Love, Infatuation, and Perfume, Part 1

Dear reader, let me talk to you about love and infatuation and perfume.

It’s a funny thing, love. The crazy rollercoaster emotions that typically come with it are usually sufficient to make even the sanest person loses all sense of proportion, propriety, and reason. It is hard to imagine anything that makes people act quite as crazy.

The problem with love, of course, is that in its incipient stages it look an awful lot like infatuation, a far more fickle and fleeting emotion. It’s got the same overwhelming, synapse exploding, gut wrenching potential in its early moments, but much like Romeo and his discarded Rosalyns, it tends to have a short shelf life.

I cannot tell you how many scents I have loved, or thought I loved, when I first sniffed them. How lovely! How wonderful! How singular and magical! A week later, I sniff again and think "ho-hum" or worse "eek." It is in these moments I feel glad I am forced to be judicious in my scent purchases, or I fear my collection would be overrun with Rosalyns, and the Juliette would be lost among them in the proverbial weeds.

Occasionally I will keep something on my "To be purchased" list a long time, sometimes for over a year or two. When I finally get together the money to buy the long sought after scent, I find I always have a moment’s pause. I cannot help it. After loving something for so long, I canot help but stop and wonder – do I really love it, or was I just kidding myself?

I will sniff and resniff, moving scents up and down the priority shopping list, sometimes removing them completely, as I think about what my collection is missing, what I’m most likely to war over the next three months or so, and I seem not to be able to live without. That’s why it sometimes takes me weeks or months longer to get around to reviewing a new release compared to my blogging cohort. I am stingy with my love, and I only want to promise you something is good if I feel sure it is, and that I wasn’t just moved in the moment to thoughtless oaths like fickle Romeo.

With that in mind, dear reader, I provide you the following list, which wil be posted over several daily posts this week. These are not necessarily the releases I think you should buy for yourself and another, for I am far too much of the mind that scent is singular to be able to cobble together a Gift Guide of Scently Proportions (though I might do one for other things because that seems like it might be a fun project if I have a little time this week). Instead these are the nicest perfumes I have found in a while, some of which I own already because their beauty demanded immediate acquisition and some which seem to constantly haunt my "To Be Purchased" list because they represent not that fleeting glance of infatuation that can turn one’s nose and heart for a few minutes or even a few months, but those scents I have loved for well on a year or more.

In the following days, I will post about scents I love, scents that make this list...

Part 1   ~    Part 2   ~    Part 3   ~   Part 4   ~   Part 5

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$ - $1-$75.

$$ - $76-$130.

$$$ - $131-$200.

$$$$ - $200-$300.

$$$$$ - $300+.