I noticed that I have a tendency to collect things in series: books, movies, TV shows, costume jewelry, etc. It’s hard for me to stop at, for example, just one show season or a necklace if there are more. I will keep buying books from a favorite author even if the last couple weren’t that great. I will wait till the show is canceled or closed to buy a complete set. And I will keep browsing new offerings from a designer I like to see if there is a piece of jewelry in a new color/form/material that will fill some imaginary hole in my collection. Because of that I have some problems with testing perfumes: my impulse is to go through the complete line or at least a very representative subset of it; and you can imagine how hard it might be in case of niche or indie perfume houses. It usually results in a wide variety of samples for a single line (which I consider an upside of my OCD behavior).
Author: Undina
Tea Break
I enjoy drinking brewed tea. In my day-to-day life I consume mostly not caffeinated (not de-caffeinated!) teas from tea bags but on weekends or when having friends over I like making real tea. I’m not a tea snob, I do not read about teas even as much as I read about perfumes so I have no idea if teas that I like are amouages or britney spearses of the field. And I do not really care as long as I like how they smell, how they taste and how they look.
I knew nothing about the brand when one of my friends brought a couple of Golden Moon Tea’s tins as a gift – one with White tea (with an unexpectedly for a white tea well-defined taste) and one with black tea and vanilla (they do not carry it any longer but this one is the closest to the one I tried before). If you were to apply L’Artisan’s Tea for Two lightly, wait for couple of hours and then add Diptyque’s Eau Duelle you would get something close to how Madagascar (black tea) smells.
New Year Resolutions: March
March was much more intense in terms of both perfumes testing and wearing. I was good towards my favorites though I didn’t always spend quality time with them; sometimes I wore them as a part of a comparison test or only for a couple of hours (or as long as they lasted without re-applying). But still I hope they wouldn’t complain if anybody would ask (but, just in case, please don’t).
Quick March stats:
* Different perfumes worn: 61 (11 more than in the previous month)
* Favorite perfumes worn/tested: 21 (+8)
* Perfumes I tried for the first time: 27 (+13)
* Perfume houses I wore most often: Ormonde Jayne and Amouage (I wore/tested them on 12 and 10 occasions correspondingly)
* Most popular notes: top – (not counting bergamot) still cardamom but popular last month lemon shared popularity with mandarin, pink pepper and rose; middle – jasmine and rose (I’m curious if this ever going to change or should I stop counting them in the heart position the same way I stopped counting bergamot among the head notes?); base – sandalwood (as it was in February)but patchouli note was moved into the fifth place and replaced by musk.
Now I’m curious how other people do that. Are two perfumes per day (on average) two much?
Image: my own
My First Scrubber
While reading What Is Your Perfume Nemesis discussion at Olfactoria’s Travels I was reminded of one of my perfume “hates”. My very first scrubber.
It was a scent strip in one of the fashion magazines that attracted my attention to the new perfume Gucci Rush. I liked the scent and even rubbed it on my wrist. It smelled good. So the next time I happened to be in a store with a perfume counter I went straight to that tester and lavishly sprayed the fragrance all over my wrist: I wasn’t sure in its tenacity and wanted it to last long enough for me to enjoy and decide if I want to buy a bottle. It did last. Much longer than I wanted it too. I could hardly wait to get home, take off any clothes that came in contact with it and shower. It was that bad on my skin.
Dive in to keep reading…
A Friend in Need…
I like all kinds of holidays and celebrations. New Year and my birthday are two my favorite occasions and I always try to get the most of them.
For the New Year 2011 my friends and I had a party at our place. It wasn’t too big or loud but it was warm and joyful, with good food, great drinks and a pleasant (at least for me – can’t vouch for everybody else) gifts exchange. It was a wonderful night; I wore one of my favorite perfumes, was very happy and felt great.
Next morni afternoon I woke up really sick with flu. It was the worst sickness I had in many years. I felt awful and had no strength to get out of the bed for a couple of days. In my feverish mind there were two recurring thoughts to which I tried to hold on as if it was really important to keep thinking them. First – I was very glad and thankful to all the forces of the Universe that I hadn’t got sick 24 hours earlier: it would have been a complete disaster for our party and everybody involved. And second – I was happy that by the time I woke up my new perfumed love (Ormonde Jayne’s Ta’if) was already gone: I was dreading to associate the scent I cherished with the misery of that day. So while feeling horrible I felt lucky.
When I finally forced myself to get up and start moving, I noticed a wonderful smell coming from my bathrobe’s collar. It wasn’t too strong or persistent, I would catch a whiff of it now and then, but it was so unexpectedly comforting and supporting that I almost cried. With all the testing I had been conducting at the time it took me a while to figure out what perfume it was. Tiare by Ormonde Jayne.
Perfume Purrfect?
There comes a time in every blogger’s life when you should write about your pet. So here I am.
I share my habitat with a very good-natured, affectionate and companionable medium hair orange tabby cat (though whoever classified him as such should start coming to my place daily in a month 
so we could discuss that definition over their vacuuming my floors and other surfaces covered with that “medium” hair). He’s very food-oriented (he even learned some tricks – sit, paw, down) and omnivorous (among strange things that my cat likes are mangoes, avocados, apricots and pecans). We got him from a shelter two years ago, and he keeps brightening lives of everybody around him as a small furry sun. His name is Rusty.
Dial M for… Spring or A Perfect Mimosa
A gray chilly day, gray dirty slush on the pavement, gray skies and serious men in gray gabardine overcoats with gray newspaper cones – in their hand, under arm or even sticking out of a handbag. And confined in each of those cones are hundreds of small suns.
This is how I remember 8th of March, an International Women’s Day, from my childhood. Of course, there were other early spring flowers – tulips and daffodils (back then we didn’t have “evergreen” roses yet) – but mimosa* was strongly associated with this holiday (a combination of Mother’s Day and St. Valentine’s Day). Mimosa was such a sunny and happy flower that you couldn’t help feeling Spring in the air even though it was still cold and unpleasant outside.
It’s almost never cold where I live now; all seasons’ boundaries are blurred and I gladly swapped not so “international,” as I found out, holiday for a more romantic, in my view, local one. But I still smile and my heart fills with joy whenever I see these bright golden constellations on a filigree of silvery leaves.
New Year Resolutions: February
Just recently I complained how fast January passed. Today I can’t believe it’s March already. I know, February is a short month and so forth, but there still were four weeks of it somewhere, right?
I’m getting better with actually using what I already have and love: I wore my favorite perfumes on thirteen different occasions. Frederic Malle’s Iris Poudre got three promenades (I had to be sure before I wrote my déjà vu article) and, while I’m thinking on the size of a bottle I should buy, Diptyque’s Tam Dao was granted two appearances. My other perfume loves, I’m sorry for neglecting you but I promise to spend more time with each of you soon.
Déjà vu, Episode 1: powdery fruit vs. peony oriental
“Someone jolted my elbow as I drank and said, ‘Je vous demande pardon,’ and as I moved to give him space he turned and stared at me and I at him, and I realized, with a strange sense of shock and fear and nausea all combined, that his face and voice were known to me too well.
I was looking at myself.”
Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat
I find it amusing when I come across a perfume that reminds me of another one that I know. I’m talking not about a vague resemblance, a couple of common notes or a recognizable designer’s accord, but the situation when two completely unrelated fragrances smell so similar that I would have had a hard time telling them apart were they not compared side by side.
There is no practical use for these discoveries. But even though I remind myself of Joey from the Friends episode in Las Vegas where he gets excited about finding his “identical hand twin,” I can’t help discussing these resemblances with friends, colleagues and other unsuspected victims. So probably having an outlet in my blog for this weakness of mine is the lesser of evils.
During a very successful Christmas shopping and perfume counters scouting last December my girlfriends and I found ourselves on a desolate floor of Barney’s. Two guys in the fragrance department were very helpful and attentive. Too attentive. I really dislike when sales associates hover over you watching your every move. I don’t know if it works on anybody but on me it doesn’t. I cannot be bullied into buying anything before I’m ready. Even with two of them faithfully trying to catch my eye after each sniff. By the time we moved onto Frederic Malle’s section they’d probably realized that, as well as the fact that they were outnumbered (there were three of us). So, they proudly announced that we were in luck because there just happened to be a FM’s Specialist in the house. She appeared, and under her watchful eye we tried several perfumes, but there were too many words, too many bottles and too much pressure, so I decided that it was worth paying money for samples online. But the last one I tried suddenly attracted my attention. “I like this one” – I told to my friends handing over a blotter. “Of course you like it!” – immediately responded one of them, – “It smells like Tuscany per Donna, which you also like”. And she was right: it did strongly resembled TPD as I remembered it. I was so thrilled by that discovery that I just had to share it with the Specialist. You could tell how indignant she felt about my comparison of the Pierre Bourdon’s masterpiece to some perfume she didn’t even recognize (mentioning Estee Lauder didn’t help). Either she was eager to prove me wrong or just wanted to stop the torture but she agreed to make me a sample of Iris Poudre – so that I could compare it at home to that other perfume.
I did. On more than one occasion. Since then I’ve bought 10 ml travel spray of Iris Poudre – because I like the perfume and because I wanted to compare a spray to a spray. I still think that during many stages of their development on my skin they smell a lot alike. I know that official notes listings do not mean much but for what it’s worth, out of eleven notes listed for the Lauder’s perfume only three are not present in Malle’s one (honeysuckle, Mediterranean herbs and peony), seven notes are identical (amber, carnation, jasmine, lily of the valley, rose, sandalwood and vanilla) and one note is in question (not specified citrus in TPD versus bergamot and orange in IP). Iris Poudre has extra ten notes listed. These two are not identical and have stages when I like one of them better than the other. But as far as my olfactory abilities go Tuscany per Donna and Iris Poudre are twins.
A curious fact: Luca Turin (who is not always right but still) in the Book gave Tuscuny per Donna ****. Iris Poudre got just ***. So that SA was snobbish for nothing.
Image: my own
I’m not alone in this quest. Muse in wooden shoes found another relative of Iris Poudre.
For a real review for Iris Poudre read: Olfactoria’s Travels. I couldn’t find a good review for Tuscany per Donna, so here’s a link to the page 343 from Luca Turin’s Perfumes: the Guide where he writes about this perfume.
First Love: Love
Musketeers, duels, “all for one, one for all,” the Queen, the Duke, intrigues, noblemen and beautiful courtesans.
By the age of ten I’d read The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne couple of times and even tried writing my own prequel to one of the last two – that was how much I liked those books and in general that epoch. I couldn’t decide which character I liked more – dauntless d’Artagnan, genteel Athos or sophisticated Aramis (Porthos was a comic relief so I didn’t consider him), each one was attractive in his own way, and I kept having a change of heart after every chapter. Of the book.
In real life I was much more consistent with my feelings: he was my class-mate, he was handsome (an important characteristic for that age), smart and well-read (important characteristic for me, at any age). Despite these qualities he for some reason didn’t excel in formal studying. I did. He sat next to me in math and language classes. I liked him so I would secretly help him during tests. He accepted my help but that was the extent of our relationship.
Musketeers, duche
sses, intrigues…
I Love You
Undina's Looking Glass 