Hold her down with soggy clothes and breezeblocks...

A Review of Caron Tubéreuse Parfum

Apparently I was on a tuberose kick when I raided my scent stash last week for things to try, because the next thing I grabbed was Caron Tubéreuse parfum. I actually have quite a few of the Caron scents since I grabbed the house sampler last year from Luckyscent, but I haven't really reviewed many of them, have I? Today seems like a good day to rectify that.

Or....not.

Caron describes Tubéreuse as follows:

Caron's latest "fountain" creation, TUBEREUSE was conceived of in 2003 by in-house perfumer Richard FRAYSSE.

A hint of Fressia [sic] and jasmine accentuated by a touch of acidity lend Tubéreuse a rich and opulent fragrance, aimed in particular at CARON's glamour-seeking clientele.

Accords: Tuberose….

A little moldy open grave smell....

Caron Tubéreuse has it fans. Noses in the know have used words such as “bombshell,” “audaciously beautiful rich,” and “a hidden gem” to refer to the scent. Sadly reader, I am not going to be one of them. Nope. For when I put it on my skin, all I could think was: Oh Caron... Why did you do this to a tuberose?

The opening was a mix of vinegar and black tar, that fell straight down into an open grave filled with grape Kool-Aid and the bloated corpses of a hundred earth worms that overdosed from the flavored drink sugar high. Then even the interesting “Death comes a'knocking” aspects drifted off, leaving me with a powdery, dry scratch and sniff version of a white flower.

When it was weird, I was sort of distracted, disoriented, and even intrigued. Could I possibly wear this? Who would wear this? Did the perfumer take their inspiration from a terrible nineteenth century pickle factory fire where women and children were trapped in a terrific blaze that ultimately lead to some sort of Safer Work Conditions for Picklers Labor Reform Act?

But the dry powdery scent it settled into is somehow worse for the comparison. And for something I might describe as quiet and unassuming, good golly Miss Molly, the sillage! I had it on the back of my hands and felt like I had giant boxing gloves of scent around them, like sci-fi created orbs. I would be able to use this combat enhancement to knock people down without actually touching them for days!

While I am loathed to ever give such a bad review, I just have to. You know why, dear reader?

This was a scrubber.

...a little faux grape
 flavoring...

Yeah, I'm not kidding. I couldn't take it! After an hour, which I had to force myself through, I had to get it off my skin, even if steel wool was required. And I felt kind of terrible about it, because lots of people with noses I really respect like Caron Tubéreuse.

I was somewhat comforted to find I am not alone in having Caron Tubéreuse go sideways on me. Abigail at I Smell Therefore I Am described her experience as smelling “like dill pickles.” Chantal-Hélène Wagner of The Scented Salamander more charitably describes it as taking "the dark side of Lady Caron's tuberose and plays Lady Macbeth to the first, minus the signs of madness as it seems on the contrary to have an exceptional measure of self-control.” Of course, she goes on to describe it as being “slightly putrid, like stale water and vase.”

Lady MacBeth, indeed. I really enjoy Lady Caron, so I'll try to get a review on that one in for comparison soon. For me, though, I have to say that if you're out to shop tuberoses, be careful with this one. Maybe you're get an overly devoted wife; maybe you'll get a crazy lady who can't stop seeing blood on her hands.

Luckyscent has Caron Tubéreuse for 7.5ml for $100. Yep, you read that right. One hundred smackers for a mere 7.5 milliliters. Given the above, I can only endorse you trying a sample, which is $5. Perhaps you will love it. If not, better to find that out with the very small dab of a wand.

“Muscle to muscle and toe to toe
The fear has gripped me but here I go
My heart sinks as I jump up
Your hand grips hand as my eyes shut...
Please don't go, I'll eat you whole
I love you so, I love you so, I love you so.”
~ “Breezeblocks,” Alt-J

Want a more positive spin on Caron Tubéreuse than I am able to muster? Try...
~ A review from Pink Manhattan
~ A review from Bois de Jasmin
~ A review from aperfumeblog
~ A review from The Black Narcissus
~ A review from Robin at Now Smell This!
~ A review from Eiderdown Press


Photo of open grave: Some rights reserved by A QUIVERFUL OF FOTOS
Photo of grape soda: Some rights reserved by D Sharon Pruitt of Pink Sherbet Photography

Will you still love me when I'm no longer young and beautiful?

Review of Frédéric Malle Carnal Flower

Wow, have I had a full weekend, my lovely readers! My best friend, Kate, was here for work this week, and we hung out this weekend when she wasn't trying to squeeze in visits to all the other people who love her like I, and it was great. Drinks and more drinks and fabulous company and food, oh my!

I also managed to make it out to the coast very briefly, which was so sunny and beautiful, and something I have been wanting to do for three weeks. It was a little crowded so I didn't stay long, but sometimes just long drives along winding tree-lined highways with lots of good music and room to think out loud can be deeply restorative.

The weather here has gone warm and the flowers are a'blooming. Oh, May flowers, your heady blooms are worthy of the stories told in your name. Speaking of flowers, you know what I recently discovered? Contrary to popular belief, it is not illegal to pick bluebonnets in Texas, though apparently lots of people, including some state troopers, will tell you otherwise. Take that, you unknown state trooper who once made me cry when you yelled at my parents because I had picked some at a rest stop. Take your made up laws and...stuff them in a decorative vase.

Which brings me to a question: anyone know where I can get a bluebonnet perfume? After reading this piece on the smell of bluebonnets, and seeing it described as “[f]resh air, rain, dirt, and the country[, …] like when you pull towels out of the dryer and stick your face in them,” I now really want to try one. I couldn't find anything but oils online. Anyone have any ideas?

While I wait for your bluebonnet suggestions, let's talk about a floral perfume I did give some wear this week, Frédéric Malle Carnal Flower. One of the most widely reviewed and much lauded of your tuberose options, Carnal Flower is described as follows by the Frédéric Malle's site:

With tuberose, nature offers her own take on dramatic olfactive clashes. These pretty flowers exude a mixture of flower shop freshness and carnal opulence. This natural contradiction has fascinated generations of perfumers including Dominique Ropion. He started to compose his interpretation of the mysterious flower from the latest high-tech analysis of its evaporation. To remain as close to nature as possible, he decided to use a mix of the best natural extractions and high-tech ingredients. Finally, to generate a link between this flower’s scent and the wearer's skin he exaggerated some aspects already existing in the scent of natural tuberose, such as coconut and salycilates, and added a trace of musk. 18 months were necessary to find the perfect balance.

The base encompasses: tuberose absolute, orange blossom absolute, coconut and musk.

There are a lot of reviews of Carnal Flower in part, I think, because it was released at the moment perfume blogging hit its first big wave back around 2005. Another piece of its frequent online inclusion on “must try" lists is attributable to it's unique approach to tuberose. Carnal Flower is a terrific scent, so the quality of the juice combined with the timing makes it a big hit with modern fumies. I suppose I'll add my opinion to the general pro-CF din. Is it good? Yes. But the more interesting question, I think is how does it stand up among the other tuberose scents available, particularly give Carnal Flower's hefty price tag.

The opening of Carnal Flower is greener and more evocative of stem sap than the bright heady florals of Robert Piguet Fracas. There is little of the medicinal note often associated with Serge Lutens Tubéreuse Criminelle, and the vaguely hairspray aspects of musk and dryness you find with By Kilian Beyond Love are entirely absent. Instead, Carnal Flower has a barely there coconut undertone that moves the overall effect slightly, and simultaneously, toward both warm tropical beach and tropical foodie for me. I get next to no musk or orange blossom out of the experience, to the point that I would not have thought to include them in the note list.

I agree with Robin at Now Smell This!, who described Carnal Flower as quiet as tuberose scents go. In a wrist by wrist comparison, it is quieter than both Fracas and Beyond Love. That shouldn't take anything away from Carnal Flower. In fact, making a quiet tuberose is something of a feat in itself. It's nice to wear a tuberose that isn't going to knock someone down fifty feet away from me. Carnal Flower may be the tuberose that many people who don't usually go for big white flowers will truly love.

I think for me one of the stumbling blocks is the name. Flower? Yes. Carnal? Well...not in my mind, but hey—who am I to say what might turn you on? To me it's too quiet and pretty to be sexy. I find Fracas and Beyond Love more overtly sexual. This carnal reads more to me like the shock of a Victorian woman confronted by an uncovered piano leg! The horror!

Then there's the price. A 50ml spray of Carnal Flower is a whooping $240, so make sure to try before you buy. If this is your tuberose holy grail, more power to you. I'll sit here with my pure parfum Fracas, which I bought for considerably less, and watch the world go by.

Want more? Try...
~ a review from The Non-Blonde
~ a review from Perfume Shrine
~ a review from Bois de Jasmin
~ a review from Robin at Now Smell This!
~ a review from Olfactoria's Travels
~ a review from Eiderdown Press
~ a review from Katie Puckrik Smells
~ a review from For the Love of Perfume
~ a review from Muse in Wooden Shoes
~ a review from Sweet Diva
~ a review from The Scented Salamander
~ a review from Scentsate
~ a review from SmellyThoughts
~ a review from PereDePierre
~ a review from Muse in Wooden Shoes

Will you still love me when I got nothing
but my aching soul?
I know you will, I know you will...
I know that you will.
~ “Young and Beautiful,” Lana Del Rey


Photo of bluebonnet - some rights reserved by longhorndave

'Cause she knows that it's demanding to defeat those evil machines...

Thoughts on Rape Culture, Advertising, Feminist Aesthetics, and Warrior Fatigue

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. ~ Virginia Woolf

I haven't blogged about advertising and feminist aesthetics in a long while. It happened for a handful of reasons: lack of time, lack of energy, distracted by shiny objects. But also? Sometimes, I get warrior fatigue. Sometimes I feel lost and alone, orphaned by my own movement, and generally defeated. It is hard to always be fighting.

Oh yes, this completely
nude woman totally makes
me want to buy Shalimar...
no wait: I meant puke.

I also sometimes wonder, dear reader, if you aren't a little tired of hearing it. I feel like I am writing to the choir. If you already know this stuff, what is one more post going to do?

“There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.” ~ Adrienne Rich

I was always a feminist. I don't know why. I think probably because being an abuse little kid raised by crazy people who kept insisting they were normal forced me to make a choice. Either they were right, and I was awful and deserved awfulness, or they were wrong, and the world was a weirdly biased and inherently unjust place.

I did what any child desperate to survive would do under those conditions.

I chose myself.

I chose not to accept that I was awful, not to let their poison change my mind. I made that decision one terrible day in a hospital, though I didn't know it at the time. But I do remember thinking, very clearly, that it wouldn't always be this way, and it wasn't worth my life. I stopped taking out the awfulness on myself that day, on my own body, and I started living, just out of spite. If I was going to die, it wouldn't be by my own hand. I would no longer be complicit in my own defeat.

Nearly twenty years later, I've seen enough of the ugliness in the world to wonder: how many women have had to make such a choice...

Dear Tom Ford, thanks for making it easy
to despise your entire product line.

All oppression creates a state of war. ~ Simone de Beauvoir

That my father had a position of public power that made normal channels of relief unavailable to us underscored the power of status and privilege. That I am naturally highly empathetic meant that when I got older, my sense of personal injustice seemed easy to extend to others when I came to see the world in all its horrible inequity.

These things made me, like fire tempers a blade.

Call it coincidence or the juxtaposition of fate and genetics, a little nature/nurture combo, but whatever it is, I am who I am: a feminist from first breath to last. But when I am tired and weary of a world where people genuinely seem to hate women, and especially hate those who attempt to fight against that hatred, even I have to take a break.

Sometimes I just can't do it anymore. When I see students protesting rape culture at a top tier college being told they deserve to be raped and at another university, a Take Back the Night week is protested by a crazy man who says the students marching for safety are sluts who should be raped, sometimes I just feel like nothing I do matters.

“Patriarchy has no gender.” ~ bell hooks

If we could see patriarchy,
I feel like it would look
a lot like this...

Patriarchy is so big; it is so everywhere and every time and every culture. It is like The Silence in Doctor Who. It's influence is always there, just outside your field of vision, pervasive and persistently changing the world for the better. And as soon as you look away, even for a moment—you forget. You can't remember where that sick feeling in your stomach came from because you're too busy just trying to live your life. You forget that the silence, and here I mean the silencing influence of patriarchy, is standing behind you, influencing your thoughts, your decisions, even your actions.

The most stunning, terrible, mind-melting eleven words I have ever read was a short line in Catharine A. MacKinnon's “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory.” They were these:

Feminism does not begin with the premise that it is unpremised.

The piece—a thick diatribe against our broken understanding of rape and our failed ability to properly prosecute it, as well as a whole lot more—drops this nugget of wisdom in two paragraphs out of maybe a hundred containing just as many ideas. And yet, it scrambled my brain all around. She goes on.

That is, the equality of women to men will not be scientifically provable until it is no longer necessary to do so. Women's situation offers no outside to stand on or gaze at, no inside to escape to, too much urgency to wait, no place else to go, and nothing to use but the twisted tools that have been shoved down our throats. If feminism is revolutionary, this is why.

Who needs a woman
then they can have an
object and woman in one!

Even if we are revolutionary, even if what I do is a fight worth fighting, it is only because I continue to exist in the face of this vast awful thing that premises me. This is both a literal and philosophical truth in my case. The abuse of a developing child premises the adult they become; the oppression of women underlies my understanding of the world, the entire world's understanding of itself.

It affects men and women. It premises our understandings of ourselves and each other. Patriarchy is terrible for everyone, and we all cannot escape it. We literally cannot imagine a world without patriarchy. The driving animus of my life, feminism, exists because of patriarchy. Patriarchy and an inborn sense of wrongness, of injustice.

That realization, that moment when I see the horrible thing I always feel standing behind me, raising the hair along the back of my neck and I know it's real and true and awful, the moment just before I forget again, it is terrible and sad and it takes all the fight out of me.

“How else to make a dent in an object as immovable as patriarchy itself...?” ~ Dalma Heyn

Yes, my dear, sweet, lovely, and perhaps saddened reader, I get tired. I believe we all do, from time to time.

But then I see something like the video below, and I remember. I remember what it is like to feel the rage of first knowing, or of realizing the truly awful depth of the problem, and to think, “I can change it. Maybe only a little. Maybe only for one person. Maybe that person will just be me.” And with humor and angry and sadness and creativity, they begin to struggle against the wrongness without and the rage within.


And I think, that is why I write these. Because if one of you is new, or has just found this piece, or is reading any of these words and considering these ideas for the first time, let me say:

Yes, it is a terrible thing. Yes, it is okay to feel sad and frustrated and angry. But know this: you are not alone. And every single one of us, to the best we can, are fighting with you.

Until that unpremised day, viva la revolution.

Or, to put it another, particularly Whovian way:

Sooner or later, Silence will fall.


"...'Cause she knows that it'd be tragic
if those evil robots win.
I know she can beat them.

Oh Yoshimi, they don't believe me,
but you won't let those robots defeat me."
~ Flaming Lips, "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots"