You can't deny me my kingdom.

Elizabethtown is one of my favorite movies. Despite being critically panned and a box office flop, I still think it is a beautiful, thoughtful, highly underrated film. Some of my life philosophy has come directly from that movie, to wit:

Claire: “Trust me. Everybody is less mysterious than they think they are.”

Hollie: “It takes time to be funny. It takes time to extract joy from life.”

Claire: “Do you ever just think, 'I'm fooling everybody'?”
Drew: “You have no idea.”

Claire: “So you failed.[...] You wanna be really great? Then have the courage to fail big and stick around. Make them wonder why you're still smiling.”

One of the things that gets discussed in Elizabethtown is the idea of unlucky clothes. Claire has unlucky clothes, a particular little black dress. “Good things have not happened to me in this dress,” she tells Drew.

I don't have unlucky clothes, or unlucky perfume, per se, but I do have a perfume that I associate with endings. For my law school graduation, I saved up and purchased the most expensive bottle of perfume I own as a graduation present for myself. It was a bottle of limited edition L'Artisan Iris Pallida 2007. When I originally reviewed it, I said the scent gave me a visceral response like the feeling of a sob, caught at the back of my throat. It was so sad and beautiful that it literally brought me to tears. It still does.

For most people, I suspect the idea of paying three hundred dollars for a bottle of sadness seems absurd. Why not by a happy, upbeat scent? Why spend so much money for the scent that captures the inexpressible sound that rings out inside when someone breaks your heart?

As I am frequently reminded, however, I am not most people.

One of the ways I am not most people is that I don't have what one would consider a traditional family structure. My family of origin is very small now and consists almost exclusively of my brother and his sons, who live very far away. David and I don't have a family of creation beyond the two of us and our moody pride of cats. For a girl who grew up in and misses having a big southern family, this might have resulted in a very lonely, socially limited, and withdrawn life.

But I got lucky because I had a wonderful therapist in my mid-twenties who taught me that family can be more than just the people whom you share blood with or the partner you marry. Family of origin and family of creation matter, to be sure, but there's also a family of choice. These are the people that we choose to build a life with even when it isn't warranted by genetic material or legal obligation. They are the people we choose to love and to build our lives around. Some people call them best friends; some people will know them as that “aunt” or “uncle” who isn't really related.

To me, they're my family. We spend Thanksgivings and Christmases and Fourth of Julys together. When we vacation, it is often to see one another. We call each other first with news, good and bad. We help each other move. We loan each other money. We hold each other when we cry. We are each other's emergency contacts. We say things like, “I miss you,” and “I love you,” and “I wish you were here.”

By any real standards, we are a family.

I am very lucky to have what I consider a decently large family of choice. Most of us met in college and know each other. Occasionally, we embrace an outsider; occasionally, someone marries in. But this is how it works: those we love are welcomed by the rest of us, usually under my roof or through my arraignment because I tend to play matriarch to our little wayward group. Every single person in this family knows that they can show up here and have a home, no questions asked. If home is the place where they always have to take you, then this house is a home to far more than the four people who currently reside here.

As we get older, and our collective ties get deeper, it gets harder to join, I think. Not intentionally, of course. We will happily bring in the enthusiastic newcomer and embrace them. But I find fewer people, as I go along, who just get it. In my experience, there are always plenty of people who seem flattered by the attention and seem to want to accept a place in this motley crew of mine, but often they don't really understand what it means. Being part of this means making a strange kind of commitment, if not to the group, then at least to either David or to me. This willingness to make you a member of our tribe is something we have always shared, and one of the things that makes us a strong couple. As I said when we got married, “His people will be my people.” I am fortunate that I married someone who shares the reciprocal sentiment.

Though I do not have children, and may never do so, I have a sense that my life will, nonetheless, be filled with children as I grow older. Much as I am everyone's big sister, counselor, confessor, cheerleader, and best friend, I hope to also be a strange, effusive, generous aunt to these babies-to-be. And when I think about how full my life is of people who love, support, believe in, and respect me, I feel, on the whole, deeply fortunate.

So what does this have to do with Iris Pallida, or perfume, or Elizabethtown?

On Monday, when I rose from my bed, I got dressed. Then I stood in front of my perfume cabinet, trying to decide what to wear, and found myself reaching for Iris Pallida. For me, Iris Pallida is the scent of deep, exquisite pain, the haunting melancholy of loss, and the smell of endings.

You see, I knew it was going to be a bad day. I knew that someone I'd thought was going to be a long term, close friend of the sort that eventually becomes a person I consider family was going to walk away. Through little to no fault of my own, that relationship was necessarily going to end, and there was nothing I could do about it.


Was I angry? Yes. Hurt? Sure, that, too. Self-righteous? Maybe a tiny bit. But mostly, I have just spent this whole week feeling terribly, terribly sad. I grieve because I have this nasty habit of letting people dig deep into me, and even though we may not speak for months or years, I go right on loving them. I go on thinking of them, wishing the best for them and for their lives. I wish that for these people whether or not we ever speak again, because when you care for someone, you want them to be happy.

I've been told on occasion that this willingness to love too much, to expect too much, to give too much, to want too much, is a failing. It makes me difficult. It takes up space; it can suffocate. It's something I need to work to correct, so I can fit more within the socially accepted, distantly polite norms that rule most people's lives.

I choose to ignore this socially 'appropriate' course correction. I know that this makes me a somewhat polarizing person. I'm not easy to get along with. I have high expectations, most of all for myself. I am honest, sometimes to a fault. I am free with myself and the details of my life in ways that can seem overwhelming. People tend to either really like me or be really put off by me. For better or for worst, I don't find a lot of people who express their opinions of me in lukewarm terms.

I'm sure I could do as bidden. I could live a smaller life. I could be shrink back instead of looming. But I worry that the thing that drives me to feel joy is the same thing that breeds my occasional sorrow, and living life in a box so that other people are more comfortable would crush the spark in me that can create whole worlds from the fabric of my own imagination. It is the same part that finds the exquisite beauty in a well-made perfume, or that cries over a well-crafted, heart stirring essay like those in Alyssa Harrad's Coming to My Senses because I see in this would-be stranger a part of myself, and led to a wonderful phone call that I hope is a sign of future friendship to come.

When I tried to name it recently, I came up short.

“Passion,” someone supplied.

“Yes,” I immediately answered.

I could suppress this impulse that drives me, but I don't think I'd like my life much without it. And, to quote another Cameron Crowe movie, Vanilla Sky, “You can do whatever you want with your life, but one day you'll know what love truly is. It's the sour and the sweet. And I know sour, which allows me to appreciate the sweet.” So when I looked upon the vacant waste that was once a fruitful beginning, I did what I do: I leaned into it. I wore my expensive, painful perfume. I cut my hair, watching little pieces of me fall and be swept away. I drank, and I cried, and I laughed.

And then I let go.

But there will never be a day that I won't occasionally be stopped by the joke unshared, the laughter unheard, the love unfelt, that beats on beneath my breast despite its absence.

And this will always be a home to those who once chose to seek it.

"What's this?
Camaraderie of country that turns,
before me, salty
rust on fragile parts.
All this--
All you have inspired,
the crew and ship of empire,
rig and mast and spars,
box of stripes and stars...

I am aching.*
You can't deny me my kingdom.

You.
Sailor on the lonely sea,
will you turn and promise me
you'll always be alive?"

~ "You, Sailor," Erin McKeown

________
* I originally misheard this lyrics as "I am aching." It may actually be, "I am a king."  I like my way better.

Happy Valentine's Day from Feminine Things.

Happy Valentines Day!

From my little corner of the world to yours,

I wish you all a happy Tuesday with those you love,

both near and far.

Brunch and a trip to buy the newest
Buffy Season 9 comics -
our version of a V-Day date!

Jo Malone's Red Roses Chronicle - my gift to myself.

And congrats to our winner, ccdouglass!

Thanks for being my bloggy valentine.

Please email feminine(dot)things @ gmail(dot)com so I can send you your lovely gift! And thanks to all those who entered.  More drawings to come!

Love is not love until love's vulnerable.

Love.

It is the worst good thing that ever happens to a body. You don't have to take my word for it. Literature is riff with examples. Shakespeare said it best: "For never was a story of more woe than this..." Or, to put it in a more modern way: "To love is to destroy, and to be loved is to be destroyed." Thanks Cassandra Clare.

Then there's poetry. T.S. Eliot: "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me." Or Auden: "I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong." Or John Donne: "My rags of heart can like, wish, and adore, but after one such love, can love no more."

Oh! I forgot the movies... Lloyd Dobler said it beautifully: "Maybe I want to get hurt!"

And then there's the music. I could go on and on about the music, but you get the point. Being in love means being vulnerable. It means being to willing to get hurt. And even when it goes well, trust me when I tell you it still sometimes hurts.

What makes me say these things in this holy sanctified Hallmark season of Love? Well for one, I finished reading Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl's third book in the caster chronicles series, Beautiful Chaos, where upon I bawled my eyes out.

Also, David and I usually don't celebrate Valentine's Day. We usually celebrate Not-Valentine's, picking some other less commerically busy and more personally happy day to say, "I love you." But because lots of people do celebrate Valentine's Day, I thought I'd provide some shopping-related thoughts.

Envoyage Perfumes Carmel Bohême is a lovely Valentine's option. Inspired by the French novelist and poet Henri Murger: “Bohemia is a display of exuberance set against dark, silent edges; a glass house of exotic orchids”, this amber floral has notes of "Sweet Orange, Plum, Muguet, Enfleurages of Gardenia and Tuberose, French Jasmine, Honey, Patchouli, Frankincense, Labdanum, Amber, Sandalwood." It is described as "colorful, unpredictable, original, outrageous, edgy, tumultuous."

Personally, I find Carmel Bohême full of wildly delicious white flowers, a warm, lush, lovely scent. It is a wonderful blend of gardenias and tuberoses and jasmine, sweet and soapy and a little tart. Sure, you could buy your loved one a bouquet of real white florals, but trust me when I tell you this is just as beautiful and will last long after the buds are moldering in the bin. It has great longevity, and after four hours, it turns into a honey/amber/sandalwood sweetness that rides close to the skin. Truly lovely, and worth checking out even if you aren't in the market for a Valentine's scent.

Not super excited about white floral bouquets? No problem. Jo Malone is happy to supply you, not only with a bottle of beautiful Red Roses, but with a whole Red Roses Fragrance Chronicle for V-Day. You get a bottle of Red Roses, plus three accords to layer with it: "Sweet Lemon brings tantalising transparency; Scarlet Velvet Rose adds richness; and Honeycomb, a nectar-like warmth." I like the Jo Malone layering system, which in this case allows me to make seven different roses, plus several other scents that don't include the Red Roses center piece. In addition, there are always bonus gifts when it comes to Jo Malone, so when I ordered my set, I got a free 9ml of Grapefruit, which I don't own, to boot. That's a gift that stays beautiful for much longer than thorny reality of the flowers themselves. The collection is a limited edition offering, so if you like Red Roses, you may have to pretend some Valentine-y love to get it.

Not into flowers? Then go with food!  Ayala Moriel Natural Perfumes makes one of the all time best foodie scents in Immortelle l'Amour. Chocolate, vanilla, liquor, maple syrup, waffles all in one, it is a top grade, incredibly lickable scent that can bring happiness even to a wounded heart. She also makes teas and truffles, so it's a one-stop, deliciously aromatic shop to make all your edible love-themed purchases. Prefer jewelry?  You can get solids in compacts and poison rings, so your gift will be both visually and olfactorially beautiful.

Can't stand anything too edibly sweet? Well, here's a scent that you can love even when love itself turns sour. Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab's (The Maglignant Dreams of) Cthulhu in Love is "an amorphous mixture of incense, sea weed, sea salt, sticky dark ocean plants and chocolate." Dry chocolate and sweet dry herbs, it is a surprisingly love and high quality scent for the BPAL price point. It was a random-no-special-occasion-just-because-he-loved-me gift from David, and appears, now that I write this, to be sadly discontinued. Just like slumberhouse Ore which I also have a tiny, precious vial of. Chocolate scents are lovely, but apparently not all that long for this scented world...much like real chocolate is in my house. If you can find Cthulhu in Love, give is a whirl. It's delightful.


Speaking slumberhouse, I'll add Grev  to the mix, though I am probably the only person who will ever put this on a Valentine's list. But then, I'm not like anyone else in most other respects, so here it is. Grev is made of "copaiba, fir balsams, clove, birch, orris, and cedar" and is meant to be a marketed as a masculine, but I think it is a warm, sexy scent for a woman. It's unique, it's unusual, and it is decidedly unexpected. If you're the sort of person who gets married in a dress with blood red corset back and trim at a historic poor farm turned local brewery, then this might be your idea of sexy, too. It reminds me of waking up next with someone you love on one side and on the other, open windows of streaming sunshine and the wet, green smell of fir trees. It's a smell I associate with falling in love.

Which brings me around to my last thematic recommendation: take the ultra-realistic approach. If your love is associated with the smell of new fallen snow, try CB I Hate Perfume Walking in the Air. Working together in a garden? How about CB I Hate Perfume In the Summer Kitchen or Memory of Kindness? Find you love in a library? CB I Hate Perfume In the Library.

Alternately, you could go the Demeter Fragrance Library route, and buy a handful of large minis to create a unique perfume bouquet that hits the high notes of your romance: Vanilla Cake Batter for the birthday cake he made you, White Russian for the drink you shared on your first date, Beeswax for the homemade honey you bought on your first weekend away or the smell of the wax seal on the back of a handwritten love letter, Mistletoe for your first drunken kiss at the company Christmas party. Whatever your memory is, one of these companies probably has a scent that could represent it and give you a way to show that you remember, in a visceral way, the moment you knew you were in love.

And if all else fails, you could always go with the classic, old school approach: say it with love. S-Perfumes 100% Love or Creed Love in Black or Creed Love in White, or any of the By Kilian l'amour-themed scents (Love, Beyond Love, Taste of Heaven, Straight to Heaven, or for those of a more cynical, Amy Winehouse-bent, Back to Black and Love and Tears) are all beautiful scents, and nothing says love like L-O-V-E.

Yes, it's also a CD case!

What about you, dear reader?  Have I told you lately that I love you? Well, if you feel I haven't, then let me make it up to you with this awesome V-Day drawing. Included for one lucky winner will be the fabulously tacky fuzzy pink CD holder with a couple differently themed, love-related mix CDs made and decorated by your truly, PLUS some candy and some lovely samples that will include, but are not limited to S-Perfumes 100% Love, By Kilian Straight to Heaven, Cthulhu in Love, slumberhouse Grev and some other things not listed above.  But yes! At least five samples! Plus music! Candy! A giant pink fuzzy heart CD case! (Don't lie, you know you want its garish wonderfulness.)


POST A COMMENT BELOW talking about perfume!, love, romance, the death thereof, music, movies, perfume!, poetry, books, perfume!, whathaveyou on or before 11:59pm PST on Monday, February 13, 2012.  Will ship internationally. Winner to be announced on V-day.

So come on then: who wants to be my Valentine?

Like a wet log, I sang within a flame.
In that last while, eternity's confine,
I came to love, I came into my own.
~Theodore Roethke, from The Dream

I'll touch ev'ry star in the sky.

Scent Spotlight: By Kilian Love and Tears (Surrender)

Let's talk about love for a moment.

The thing you have to understand about me, is that despite my intensely risk averse nature -- I score off the charts risk averse in all sorts of personality tests -- this miraculously does not extend to the arena of romance. That bungee jump wedding photo to your left? Emotional portrait c'est moi.

My romantic attitude, from the moment I knew romance existed, has always been of the leap-then-look-go-big-or-go-home variety.  Always the first to commit. Always the first to say "I love you." With the rare exception, always the last one to quit. Ever the dumpee, I don't think I ever knew the concept of "surrender" in love; after all, that would have required some sort of initial restraint.

So when I received a generous sample of By Kilian Love and Tears (Surrender) conceptually the scent was lost on me. Jasmine, on the other hand, is not. Love and Tears recently won the 6th Annual Canadian Fragrance Award for Niche Launch Men's or Women's Fragrance. By Kilian describes it thusly:

Only the jasmine flower, with its endless spectrum of facets — citrus, green, floral and animalistic — was able to express the profusion of emotions that I wanted to communicate with this scent: the beginning of love marked with excitement, the fear of the unknown, and, ultimately, the surrender to love!

To express this complexity of emotions, I did not want a Jasmine that would smell too composed or too adorned, but rather exaggerated within its two most dramatic facets: erotic and sacred.

Notes: Bergamot, petit grain, cypress, jasmine, orange blossom, ylang-ylang and cistus.

I think it can be hard to make a good jasmine, since so often jasmine gets used in soaps and cleansers. I quite enjoy a few scents with strong jasmine notes. I love Annick Goutal Songes, which is a wonderful beachy scent. I heart Etat Libre d'Orange Jasmin et Cigarettes, which is an entirely different kind of jasmine.

And now I dance with a third. One of the most impressive things about Love and Tears is how smooth the opening is. I get some bergamot there at the beginning, but mostly I get this smooth terrific wallop of jasmine. I like the way the orange blossom gives it a bit of a drier texture, and takes down some of the soapiness. Patty mentioned there was a light indolent edge, and it took three tries before I found it, but there it is, in the form of cistus. It actually dirties up the scent, not in a sexy way, but in an actual dirt way, musky in a musty basement way. Jasmine in the garden, as opposed to sexy jasmine on a beach or sexy girl in a smokey bar bathroom, rouging behind her knees with jasmine solid perfume.

If you like jasmine, I think you'll like this. It's really quite pretty. For those of you unsure of jasmines, you may want to give this scent a full hour before you write it off. It does a good job of sidestepping the cheap soapy scent pitfalls, which is quite a jasmine tango.

Does it smell like surrender? How the hell would I know? If I had to ascribe it to a stage of love, though, surrender isn't what I think of. Instead it feels like unexamined infatuation, first date afterglow. If it were a song, I think it would be "So This is Love" from Disney's Cinderella.

Does that sound like surrender to me? No. It sounds like naivety. And while I am usually a willing victim of such blindly blissful thinking, that isn't what love ever felt like to me. But that doesn't make it unromantic. So while lovely, Love and Tears doesn't exactly fit the theme for me. My other only mild objection is $225 is quite a bling-y price tag. That said, I appreciate that By Kilian supports recycling by selling refills for their lovely bottles for half price. And if you're looking for an expensive and beautiful gift, By Kilian does a lovely job. They were even nominated for a FiFi for it.

"I'm all aglow, mmm-hm-hm-hmm,
and now I know
the key to all heaven is mine."
- "So This is Love,"

Want more reviews? Try...
~ a review from Robin at Now Smell This!
~ a review from Grain de Musc
~ a review from The Non-Blonde
~ a review from Patty at Perfume Posse
~ a review from 1000 Fragrances
~ a review from Bois de Jasmin

Perfume sample generously provided by the perfumer.

A Midsummer Night's Dream - JoAnne Bassett Perfumes Night Queen

JoAnne Bassett Perfumes Night Queen (Reine de Nuit EdP)

"Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays.
Roy Orbison singing for the lonely.
Hey, that's me and I want you only."

Stop number three on our Shakespearean adventures is brought to you courtesy of JoAnne Bassett Perfumes. This is also a meditation on the Queen of Fae, Titania. Given the broad themes of the play, the interesting and various characters, even the play within the play, I have to say I’m surprised how many of the perfumers were drawn to a scented meditation of Titania. I think it speaks to how large she looms in the imagination of those who encounter the work.

The notes for Night Queen are “rhododendron, night queen, peru balsam, rosewood, damask rose oil, neroli, tuberose, vintage jasmine sambac, frankincense, yuzu, clove bud, tulsi, frankinsense noir, champa, vetiver, violet leaf and ylang ylang.”

Image by
Howard David Johnson

The initial impression is mossy but not minty, of pines but not firs, which have a strong presence in the woods here. This feels more like the pines of the Blue Ridge, the Appalachians. The open wears close to the skin, and it isn’t what I’d call aggressively green or earthy. There’s a little bit of a briny quality to it, as well, like a warm, wet ocean lies just beyond the edge of the trees and hangs heavy in the moist air.

About forty-five minutes in, the mossy greens and briny blues fall away and the scent becomes a sweet floral scent. I do get the clove, frankincense, and ylang-ylang strongly, but the interesting center of this seems to be the night queen. I love the idea of the scent for this play being centered on a night blooming flower, something that comes out to bring a sense of romance as day turns to darkness, much like the fae in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The loveliness is even more wonderful because it is so unexpected; I can hardly detect the scent that it will become at the beginning of Night Queen. Having never encountered the flower before, I'd describe it here as a sweet gently edible floral, and reminds me of a rich tea blend with a chamomile center. There’s more sillage here, which is great! I really liked this one came in strong, because it is so, so pretty. The only other scent can think of that this drydown reminds me of even a little bit is INeKE Evening Edged in Gold, but when I put them next to each other, I have to think the resemblance is mostly in my mental landscape.

When one holds the scent under the nose, it smells like one thing, the application is a second, but the majority of the wearable scent comes in as a completely surprising third act. The overall scent reminds me of the bloom of love. It grows from an earthy attraction to the polite engagement of first dates and early courtship until it becomes love affirmed and deeply requited, a lush and sensual emotional experience.

“Show a little faith.
There's magic in the night
You ain't a beauty, but, hey, you're alright,
Oh and that's alright with me…”

I don’t know that I’d identify this with scent with the Queen of Fae as I envision her. (Incidentally, I don’t know what I’m looking for in a scent for Titania; I can't think of any scent I know of that would fit, but my nose is loving all of these scents made in her image as different potential ways she could be played.) To me, Night Queen instead reminds me of the young, fresh faced lovers who play out their lost, confused love quadrangle throughout the majority of Shakespeare's comedy.

As for Midsummer, if this scent were made into a production of the play, I’d expect it to be set in the 1950s in the Appalachians and focus on the interplay of the teen love and angst the play could contain. Hermia, a pretty young blonde, refuses to have a romance arranged by her parents with Demetrius, who in my version is a star high school athlete and a bit of a player. Demetrius has won approval to date Hermia by working part-time in Hermia's father's garage after school and charming Hermia's mother with his nice family and nice manners.

Hermia, a straight-A student and very popular and pretty girl, prefers instead the love of Lysander, who is a hardworking student bound to inherit his dad's hardware store one day. Lysander has won Hermia's heart over the course of many months of Sundays spent helping out Hermia with the Sunday school class she teaches, where they spent time together in light of Hermia's father's strict rules that did not allow Hermia to date.

Hermia's preference for Lysander is also important to Helena, a pretty but slightly dingy cheerleader. Helena was hot and heavy with Demetrius before he decided Hermia made for a prettier picture come prom time. Helena still pines for Demetrius, and laments her lost love to Hermia over their brown paper lunch bags regularly. As Hermia and Lysander plan to make their escape to Lysander's aunt on the eve of Hermia's eighteenth birthday so they can get married before Hermia's parents can stop them, Helena hopes that by telling Demetrius of their plans, she can finally convince him to give up on his pursuit of Hermia and choose her instead.

Then they all head into the wooded mountains in classic American cars along dark old highways, getting lost and eventually finding themselves bewitched by the fae and the old magicks that have always lived among country folk in the American south, and still do even today.

While Hollywood is all obsessed with remaking everything old new again, someone should get on this. And the screenplay writers should be required to wear "Night Queen" and listen to Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road" while they create the retelling. Because when I close my eyes and inhale this rich and wonderful perfume, I hear big engines and poodle skirt swishes and Bruce Springsteen playing as the scent glides through the open windows, playing at the hair of our young lovers, as they roar off into the night.

Well, now, I'm no hero, that's understood.
All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood.
With a chance to make it good somehow,
Hey what else can we do now?
Except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair.
Well the night's bustin' open, these two lanes will take us anywhere.
We got one last chance to make it real
to trade in these wings on some wheels
Climb in back.
Heaven's waiting down on the tracks…”

To see more visit A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Perfume Event, running June 14-24, 2011.

A Midsummer Night's Dream - EnVoyage Perfumes Titania

En Voyage Perfumes Titania

Edward Robert Hughes's
Midsummer Eve

The second Midsummer scent I received was from Shelley Waddington of EnVoyage Perfumes. She also provided a meditation on the Titania, Queen of Fae, but this took its inspiration from a very different part of Shakespeare’s play.

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk roses and eglantine.
~Oberon, describing Titania’s bower, where she sleeps.

Top Notes: Fir Needles, Spice and Citrus.
Heart Notes: Basil, Mint, Geranium, Lavender Hidcote, Ylang-Ylang, Wild Rose and Heliotrope.
Base Notes: Juniper, Ho-Wood, Aromatic Woods and Nuts, Moss, Fern, Savory Leaves, Iris, Honey.

This is Titania as her vexed but nonetheless doting lover sees her. It is so different from Bellatrix Perfumes Titania, it is almost astonishing. Ankica Milic’s Titania is strong and bold, and the passage Ankica choose includes lines that can be played as vaguely threatening. Shelley Waddington focuses instead on Titania’s softness, and beauty. It gives us a scent that is more a reflection of the Queen, as seen through the eyes of a lover, than that of a mirror. And yet, despite the wildly different trajectory here, I think it is equally beautiful!

Galadriel, the Lady of the Wood

The top is fresh and minty and reminds me of falling asleep on a bed of fresh pine needles in a cool forest. The sweetness is very gentle and natural. It is so elegant, as though a beautiful cape were made from the greenest spring leaves and mosses and a crown made from the tender twisted stems and branches and wrapped around you. It has a kind of majesty to it that remind me of what it might be like to see Cate Blanchett play Titania as though she were much softer version of Galadriel. In my mind, I go immediately to the image of the playful, dreamy Titania after she has been bewitched by Oberon, which apparently was the exact inspiration. But it not only reminds me of Titania as she is lying sleepily in her bower, it also reminds me of the slowly waking lovers near the end of the play, when they arise and cannot recall if they have lived, or merely dreamed, the night’s events.

I really wish I could place the sweet part of this. I keep looking to the notes for guidance, but I just can’t work it out. I think I’m mostly getting geranium, with a decent hit of lavender and honey. Yes, I’m definitely getting lavender, now that I think back to my friend Tiff’s wedding, which was an outdoor June pagan wedding in a wood along a lake, and lavender was the theme flower/scent. She carried lavender; some of the cupcakes were lemon lavender; we threw cups of dried lavender over the couple as they left. It was dark and warmly wet and the smell of lavender was everywhere that afternoon and night; I suspect if you were going to make her a scent in commemoration of the event, which was very midsummer themed (fairy themed touches around the wedding as well), this might be, not the scent she wore, but the actual smell of her union day itself. FN1.

Bridal Veil Lakes,
where my friend was married

Every fairy take his gait;
And each several chamber bless,
Through this palace, with sweet peace;
And the owner of it blest
Ever shall in safety rest.
~ Oberon, giving instructions to the fairies

Which brings me to another tangential, but thematically appropriate, thought. This would make an excellent scent for a summer wedding, in the merry, marry month of June. Shakespeare’s work itself transpires around what becomes a triple wedding, and this seems like an excellent scent for a warm outdoor ceremony, because I can imagine it warming on the skin beautifully without becoming overpowering. How perfectly it all plays together, and how wonderfully Shelley Waddington did with this one. If you close your eyes, you can imagine this smell wafting through the whole of Theseus and Hippolyta’s house at the play’s end as an olfactory experience of having each couple’s love, and all those among them, and all those their love has yet to create, being blessed by nature and by magic.

Wonderful. Magical. A hit for summer, for love, and definitely worth owning if made available for purchase.

To see more visit A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Perfume Event, running June 14-24, 2011.
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1. I’ll tell you, because I know you’d want to know, she wore Coco Mademoiselle.

A Midsummer Night's Dream - Bellatrix Perfumes Titania

Bellatrix Perfumes Titania

The first Midsummer scent I bring you comes from the lovely Ankica Milic of Bellatrix Perfumes.

She provided me the following to reflect on as I sampled her scent, Titania:

Out of this wood do not desire to go:
Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no.
I am a spirit of no common rate;
The summer still doth tend upon my state;
And I do love thee: therefore, go with me;
I’ll gve thee fairies to attend on thee,
And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep,
And sing while thou on pressed flowers dost sleep;
And I will purge thy mortal grossness so
That thou shalt like an airy spirit go.

Notes: Rosewood, Pink Pepper, Mentha peperita, Tuberose, Rose damascene abs., Neroli, Iris, Labdanum, Violet leaf, Orris butter, Sandal album, Angelica root, Ambrette, Oak moss, Patchouli.

What a lovely choice of words for an artistic meditation. I believe, on this passage alone, I could plan an entire lovely summer wedding. Titania’s woods are in many ways like love itself – once ensnared, it is a place one not only cannot leave, but does not wish to flee, for how sweet are its tender entrapments!

The scent, then, to me is less a mediation on the Queen of Fae herself, than on that blessed and magickal place that lives in our hearts, the haze of love that feels like the moment between sleeping and wakefulness. A drowsing dreamy state, where one might feel the gentle press of hands and gentler kiss of brow and cheek, and even in that unconsciousness, sigh for the happiness of it.

In that respect, Ankica has done her material a turn considerably more than fair. The scent is one that eyes closed and listening to Shakespeare’s words, might conjure in one’s mind images of the characters venturing into the woods that fateful night.

I cannot say that it is much like anything else I have tried, though I see some similarity to both strongly woody scents and some nerolis. The opening is full of pepper and menthe, which quickly retreats and folds strongly toward rosewood, oak moss, and patchouli. Violet leaf lurks, and rose as well. I give Ankica true credit for managing such a gentle patchouli. Usually it is a note so overwhelming I have to struggle to catch anything else. I do not get any iris, sadly, but I do not find it a loss here.

To give a sense of the scent beyond my own expression, let me give some other comparisons. It has some in common with Dana English Leather, but it less sharp featured and masculine than this cousin. Compared to Jo Malone Orange Blossom, Ankica's scent is less flowery and sweet and more of smooth wood, more inclined toward Fair Titania's hidden home than she herself. It is not so green as to share any relation to Roxana Illuminated Perfumes GreenWitch, though the Queen of Fae be both green and bewitching. It is very lovely, and makes a truly sweet scent for this project.

I hope Ankica will make it available when she chooses to launch her line. I’d like to own it. It fills a hole in my collection I did not know existed until I smelled the scent. And in this respect, it is quite like finding love when for love one seeks least.

That may be Titania and Oberon’s greatest trick here, and it is a good one.

To see more visit A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Perfume Event, running June 14-24, 2011.

We are alive, so we've gotta live life to the fullest...

You were on my mind
at least nine tenths of yesterday;
it seemed as if perhaps I'd gone insane.
What is it about you
that has commandeered my brain?
Maybe it's your awesome songs
or maybe it's the way
when I look at your face
I can tell that you're not going to be stopping soon
or even slowing down...

I have a weakness for inconvenient love stories.

You know, the kind where two people meet and fall in love, but one of them is leaving for war or dying or has just lost their job and is going to bury a parent. I don’t know why.

For me it just seems like love, if it is meant to last, with all its difficulties and strains and stresses, should be hard. It’s not supposed to be easy. Yes, you look across a room or a bar or a plane or, hell, a mall food court, and you see someone and your heart literally hiccups in your chest. But there should be something difficult about making it work in the beginning, something out of the control of the two people involved that isn’t just about personal insecurity or drama, but about real life choices, that makes it all more real. Because if it is real, if it is meant to move you and change you and turn not just your head (which a lot of people can do) but also turn your heart (which very few will), it should require turning your life around. Making choices is something that will be required for loving someone over a lifetime because there will be moments when one or both of you are struggling or scheming or dreaming and the other has to learn to be the proverbial wind in the sails.

So, yes. I like stories where people get pregnant and then fall in love. Where you fail at work and your dad dies and all you want to do is commit suicide by exercise bike, but instead choose a girl in a red hat. Where you think you’re going crazy because a voice is talking to you telling you that you are fated to die while the girl you love screams at you for auditing her, but somehow your life is saved by wheat flour and a wristwatch.

There were times apart;
there were times together.
I was pledged to her
for worse or better.
When it mattered most I let her down.
That's the way it goes. It'll all work out.