I was told I was beautiful but what does that mean to you?

Perfume Challenge Week 17: Monday, 5/9/11, to Friday, 5/13/11

As I driving home yesterday afternoon along a long ribboning road with an obscured view of snow capped mountains way off in the distance, a fire truck rolled out, light and sirens blaring. It was followed soon thereafter by an ambulance. In both cases, all traffic on both sides of this six lane, two-way highway stopped. Those traveling in the opposite direction pulled to the right to allow the vehicles to pass, but even traffic in my direction stopped, just froze right where it was, in case the emergency vehicles needed to cut over to our side and weave between us to get where they needed to be. In that frozen moment I had a few thoughts:

1. I love that I live in a place, and that it still exists on earth, where even a million people crowded together and in the middle of the busy commute home on a Friday afternoon, will all simply stop in unison, even when not all of us needed to, so that someone in need can be reached by those trying to help them. I like to believe it's asign of compassion seeping through cracks in our hard and cyncial shells.

2. If the rapture actually does come, it will look just like this -- the world frozen in place, cars stopped dead in the middle of the road, people just taken bodily from wherever they are. For some reason, it reminds me of the Ray Bradbury story "There Will come Soft Rains", where the family simply isn't there anymore but the technology lives on in fits and starts for a while. It's strange to think we have the capacity to do that, simply vaporize other people en masse, that we ever wanted it. Just because you can do a thing doesn't always mean you should. Humanity isn't always so good at grasping that concept.

Well, that's enough deep thoughts for the day, I'd wager.

Monday: Sage Onyx - Notes: Black Coconut, Tobacco, Oakmoss, Vanilla, Amber, Musk. Very coconut and vanilla up top, for a super sweet scent that reminds me of eating a white chocolate dipped macaroon. It's even a little mildly salty on me, though I don't get any tobacco (a shame -- I like tobacco). Onyx is a snuggly, warm sweet tropical scent thanks to the oakmoss and musk. It is a night time of tropical fun, as though created from the smell floating through a window into a hotel room after quite a bit of noctural fun has been had. A little bit naughty, a lot nice on its own merits, but when I've already got bottles of Coty Sand and Sable, CB I Hate Perfume At the Beach 1966, Creed Virgin Island Water, and Annick Goutal Songes, it's safe to say that my tropical/beachy dance card is quite full. 3 of 5 nods.

Tuesday: By Kilian A Taste of Heaven EdP - Notes: Calabria bergamot oil, geranium bourbon oil, orange flower absolute, Turkish rose absolute, green absinthe oil, lavender barreme oil, lavandin abrialis oil, lavandin green absolute, lavandin green, concrete, Indonesian patchouli oil, oak moss extract, costus oil, ambrarome absolute, vanilla bean absolute, tonka beans. Described as an "absinthe verte," menthol goes honey sweet with a bit of cinnamon and coppery penny scent. Thirty minutes in I get with a wallop of patchoui that takes the sweetness down a step in a way a really enjoy. Nice, and definitely on the drier side of sweet for me, this might make an excellent gourmand light for those who cannot stand the super saccharine affairs that dominate the field. 4 of 5 nods.

Wednesday: Les Nereides Musc de Java - Notes: light musk, berries, blackcurrant, violet leaves, sage, fresh cut hay. Violets and too new green berries become sage become hay with just a hint of blackcurrant. If you like L'Artisan Mure et Musc, or even if you hate it, give this a try. It's greener and less sweet than the aforementioned L'Artisan offering, which I prefer. The berries became stronger on me for the two to six hour period but the green is still there. Nice longevity, it's making the "when I get around to it I'd like to have this" list. 3.5 of 5 nods.

Thursday: L'Atelier Boheme Immortelle EdP - Notes: Brazilian tangerine, Italian bergamot, light florals, pomegranate, amber, immortelle.

Holy mother of baby powder! If you want to be slapped in the face with a fierce amount of amber and immortelle, this is a great scent for you. I'm gonna be straight with you, it's hard for me to get anything else right now other than dry, hay-like, carmeled powdery sweetness. It's really remarkable in the sense that the opening is like someone taking Loves Baby Soft (but way, way better) and powered it up by a factor of a thousand.

Two years ago, I would have flung the vial as far from me as possible because I didn't like it. Now, I'm not sure if I like it, but I think it's an incredible feat someone managed to make a scent this strongly aspected. I'm trying really hard to imagine a circumstance where I'd want to smell like someone just hit me in the face with a comet-sized powder puff, but all I can think is pink, pink, pink! I think I'd need to be in the mood to do it up Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette style, and I have never once sported a bouffant hair so I can't imagine wearing it. FN1.

And yet, I weirdly want it, just like I want this crazy Marie Antoniette Barbie. Yes, it's absurd and limiting and whatever, but damn -- it's so pretty. And sometimes a body wants pretty. FN2. FN3. Really wanting to try Annick Goutal Sables now, so I can have some other immortelle to compare to. 4 of 5 nods.

Friday: Bond No. 9 Scent of Peace - Notes: Grapefruit, black currant, lily of the valley, musk. Scent of Peace was created by Bond as "our post-9/11 conviction that peace is a beautiful, beautiful thing." The opening of the scent itself is a light, soapy and clean floral with gentle fruity highlights. This part is well-made, but not particularly unique. On me it starts out green, and I get a moderate serving on lily of the valley, but pretty soon it becomes the strangest scent on me. It smells like the taste of really cold, clean water, or maybe the taste of snowflakes on the tongue. I don't know if I find that peaceful; maybe I do. I certainly find it remarkable. One of my favorite things about perfume is that I never stop being surprised. Even when I think I know what will happen next when I put it on, I don't always. I love that. 5 of 5 nods.

Winner of the Week: Wow, really hard to choose this week. I think I'm giving it to Bond No. 9 Scent of Peace, for its unique, quiet, and wow, yeah, actually peaceful qualities. Rarely is it an obliquely named bottle contains what it advertises.  PDXers, I recently found out that Bond No. 9 is coming to the downtown Nordstrom, so keep that in mind when you're planning your summer scent purchases!

"You can buy your hair if it won't grow.
You can fix your nose if he says so.
You can buy all the make up
that M.A.C. can make,
but if you can't look inside you
find out who am I too
be in the position to make me feel so damned unpretty..."
~ "Unpretty," TLC

Photos: 
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FN1. Okay, not on purpose. I am a native Texan after all. Big hair just comes as a genetic gift. Just this morning I was blowing out my hair and found myself pleased because I had managed to make my already thick head of hair look fuller rather than sleeker. I actually had to stop myself, and ask the mirror "Where the hell did that come from?" I'm going to blame the resurgence of 80's styled cuts, which currently has me sporting a longer version of Joan Jett's hair circa 1985, but with swoopy side bangs and red instead of black, of course.

F2. I have a sick fascination with Barbies. I look at them, and I see the distorted body image and the perfect, smooth, plastic skin and realize it's part of what makes me hate my own body, and yet I cannot stop loving her. Sometimes I think that's the most amazingly insidious aspect of mysogany -- I love and admire the thing I will never be, and therefore hate and admire her in equal measure. And we wonder why women stuggle to have relationships with one another...

FN3. Speaking of which -- did everyone see the Glee "If Feel Pretty/Unpretty" mash-up from a couple of weeks ago? Sometimes the show does a number that really hits on something really. It gives me hope Glee! gets back to the original awesomeness it had. If any of the writers are reading this, I have suggestions.

What's a man now? What's a man mean?

2011 Perfume Challenge Week 16: Monday, 4/25/11, to Saturday, 4/30/11

This week’s theme is a strange one, I’ll admit. What you have to understand is that I find the idea of policing gender through scent so fascinating. Why would we do this? What purpose does it serve? Are these scents actually connected to biological maleness in any way? Or is it simply that the areas of the world long dominated exclusively by men to maintain power structures (i.e. the “public” sphere) are typically decorated and occupied by items that carry these scents, such that we come to think of them as “masculine” scents when really we mean “scents associated with the trappings of power and influence in the public sphere”? FN1. And if that is the case, shouldn’t every feminist in the world be eschewing gourmands and florals while running straight for vetivers and tobaccos? FN2.

So this week, I’m trying out six stereotypical masculines to see which ones I find wearable because I like them as scents, trappings be damned. And the best part of this little experiment – at least 10ml of each one can be had for less than $20, and in some cases even an entire bottle is available for less.

Drugstore blues

In an effort to keep my promise regarding a review of drug store/lower end perfumes in honor of Sookie Stackhouse and the other lovely residents of the fictional Bon Temps, LA, I went to three drug stores and two combo stores in my area this weekend trying to find one that didn’t keep all the bottles locked behind a class case with no sample sprayers.

I failed.

It appears things have changed from when I was a little girl, and a person could walk into a store and actually try on perfume before purchasing it, even if that store was a Walgreens, CVS, or Eckerds (now Rite-Aid). This is no longer that case, and I couldn’t bring myself to drop $50 on 2-4 full bottles of scent I might really never wear again. At least, not at this economically challenging moment. Thus, the drugstore scent reviews will be furloughed (as I have been) until I have the time and money to get to them. I apologize for any disappointment this causes.

I noticed something else, though, while I was on my local tour of drug/ discount department/superstores. I was surprised to see that scents that were strictly “middle to high end department store” nice when I was fifteen are now relegated to partial/full drugstore status. I saw Elizabeth Arden Red Door, CK One, and Elizabeth Taylor White Diamonds all sitting next to Coty and Charlie. When I checked Target, it turns out that there were almost exclusively scents that used to be big name department store scents hanging out behind the glass, waiting for purchase. (Can anyone say Joop! cologne or Ralph Lauren Polo?)

I suppose in the last fifteen years perfume has become more stratified economically. Or maybe I have. I grew up in the sort of family that still ordered clothes from the Sears & Roebuck catalogue if you needed something “fancy.” I don’t think I set foot in a Nordstrom level department store until my mid-late 20s. My prom dress came straight off the rack from the local J.C. Penney, and I felt beautiful in it all the same. But I wonder how much the internet has played a role in the class elements of perfume expanding. When I can give a limited edition perfume made and sold exclusively in France to my niece as a graduation present, it’s clear that her world, and mine, have grown to include things my grandmother and her $15 bottle of perfume, which was considered an “expensive” gift appropriate for birthdays or anniversaries, never dreamed off.

I like the world I live in now. I like its infinite possibilities. I like that the best way to order from one of my very favorite perfumers, Christopher Brosius, is to go straight to his website and order direct from his single independent store in NYC. But I wonder at what we have to give up right outside our doors in exchange. I remember when my grandmother bought me a bottle of Sunflowers for my fifteenth birthday. I felt so special and grown up to have gotten such a nice gift, and everyone around me thought it was really nice, too. I didn’t feel sad or ashamed I wore drugstore perfume. That’s what everyone did, and we were happy that way. I would be sad to think that such an opportunity might be missed today in the shuffle of our increasingly busy world.

To that end, I would like to direct any readers with interests toward Angela's series at Now Smell This! on economically accessible scents (in these trying times) from Victoria Secret, Bath & Body Works, and the like.

A half-angel, half-tart.

You shoot me glances and they're so hard to read.
I misconstrue what you mean.

I spent Saturday night at home with friends, coercing them into watching the excellence that is the 1992 Cameron Crowe film, “Singles,” and, as always, thinking about perfume.

The film came out just as I was starting high school, and I'd say was fairly influential on what I expected my twenties to be like. ("Reality Bites" was probably the other hugely influential film.) I try, now, to remember what I wore back then, in high school. I think I mostly smelled like Bath & Body Works Sun-Ripened Raspberry. Occasionally I think there was some Pearberry, Sweet Pea, and Country Apple thrown in there (I bought nothing but pink and red colored body products, apparently), but by and large it was Sun-Ripened Raspberry, day in, day out.

Then in college I swapped over to The Body Shop Vanilla. Vanilla everything. Vanilla, vanilla, vanilla. A friend actually teased me about how boring I smelled, to which I retorted at the time that my now-husband had commented that he liked it.

Between college and law school, it was the now defunct Origins Ginger with a Twist. I picked it out for my wedding because ginger is my husband’s favorite things in the world. (The man can eat a *pound* of crystallized ginger in one sitting!) After I discovered Origins canceled it, I bought two bottles in the hopes that it will last me for years now. I wore it the day I got married, so it’s emotionally significant to me.

In fact, as I trip back through memory lane, I remember distinctly wearing three things as a young girl: Revlon’s Charlie, Revlon owned Natural Wonder’s Electric Youth, a fragrance inspired by the Debbie Gibson hit of the same name, and Coty’s Exclamation. You can actually still buy all three, though Electric Youth goes for a pretty penny on Ebay. All I remember about Electric Youth is that it was cloyingly sweet; my father hated it and reworked the lyrics to the eponymous song to indicate as such.

Charlie I remember as being less sweet, but I haven’t sniffed it since I was about twelve. I should really correct that by hitting up the local Walgreens. And Exclamation! I can’t believe it’s still being made. I’ll have to try to catch a whiff of that, too. It will be so strange to smell it all now that I actually know how to smell things.

And speaking of smelling things: Today I’m wearing Juliette Has a Gun Citizen Queen. The actual ad copy is pretty hilarious.

She is not only this edgy lady, or the most glamorous, or the most intimidating, she’s just all that at the same time, a Beauty on her own, impossible to describe… and that’s exactly why she’s so fascinating. Her perfume, first lead to solve the mystery, is an old fashioned leathery Chypre, at the crossroads of modern an classic perfumery. Romeo...be warned! Juliette is back, more uncatchable than ever…

This copy tells you less than nothing about the scent, of course. Luckyscent more helpfully provides the following:

The third weapon in this hip series of rose fragrances is the most powerful one yet: a striking chypre with aldehydic and animalic undertones, a scent at once belonging to an earlier era of classic perfumery and absolutely contemporary. Blended with amber and patchouli, the dark, leathery rose at the center of the composition takes no prisoners. Violet and iris soften the striking mix, adding a charming retro quality to the perfume. Veiled by this delicately powdery accord, the rose is mysterious, elusive, endlessly intriguing.

Notes: Leather, Bulgarian Rose, Iris, Amber, Immortal flowers, Labdanum

Citizen Queen on immediate application is very powdery and flowery on me, kind of like baby powder. Within a few minutes the overly sweet edge comes off, though, which is a good thing. The iris isn’t very obvious on me in application. This chypre obviously contains sandalwood, which is strong on me, and the amber is also strong, with the rose peaking through at the very bottom, giving it a bit of depth. In the middle, the leather note gets stronger on me, and it smells warm and a little spicy, again vastly improving on the initial application. Again, this lessening of the sweetness and warming up on the animalic notes really improves Citizen Queen. Like nineties riot grrrl fashion, which paired flower dresses with combat boots and thermal shirts under t-shirts scrawled with “This is what a feminist looks like!,” Citizen Queen is both traditionally feminine and boldly rejecting the trappings of traditional femininity. Much like its predecessor, Lady Vengeance, what seems pretty and traditionally feminine at the start turns out to be more assertive, independent, and, let’s be honest, a little dirty. And the little dirty bit, as we all know, is what I like best about it.

I know a lot of people have been swapping Citizen Queen away, but I really like it. Not as much as I love Lady Vengeance, but I like it very much. You can buy it from Beautyhabit and Luckyscent, but I got my 100ml bottle, sprayed once, at about two thirds the price!
Do I read you correctly? Lead me directly.
Help me with this part.
Do I hate you? Do I date you?
Do I got a dyslexic heart?
~ Paul Westerberg, "Dyslexic Heart"
Want more reviews of Citizen Queen?
~ Try the Scented Salamander’s review here.
~ A review from I Smell Therefore I Am here.
~Fragrance Bouquet’s review is here.