“Four legs good”

Pets-related stories

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In the Search for the Perfect Grapefruit

 

I think I was about ten years old when grapefruits first appeared in our grocery stores. Nobody knew exactly what they were but the rumor had it they were a hybrid of orange and lemon. Since beside those two the only other citrus known to the population was mandarin, the information didn’t seem all that absurd.

Masses hadn’t appreciated the novelty: even though it was bigger than an average orange it was too bitter. The idea to peel each wedge didn’t occur to people at first and once it did seemed like too much work.

Fruits were scarce and expensive and there were hardly any I didn’t like. So I liked grapefruits as well.

Rusty and Pomelos

Since then I’ve tried many more different varieties of citrus including grapefruit’s real parent pomelo but grapefruit is still one of my favorite fruits and I enjoy it in many forms.

 

Perfumes

This is a perfume blog so I’ll start with the perfume-related part (though for whatever reason – holidays? – my thoughts are all over the place). Grapefruit is a popular note in both supporting and leading roles so I am not trying to cover even all grapefruit perfumes that I’ve ever tested and still have samples of but will mention only several in-you-face grapefruit fragrances that I liked the most.

Aqua Allegoria Pamplelune by Guerlain is probably one of the best-known grapefruit perfumes. If you want a real review, I suggest reading Suzanna’s (Bois de Jasmine) five-star rated review. If you’re familiar with the perfume, I recommend reading Vanessa’s (Bonkers about Perfume) post Bonkers “In Edinburgh”: The Guerlain Pamplelune Sniff-Off And A Bid To Rescue Birgit’s Grapefruit Scent Squeeze – just for laughs. I like Pamplelune and two mini bottles will satisfy my grapefruit cravings for a while. Once they are gone I suspect I’ll want more.

Guerlain Pamplelune

Not surprisingly, Grapefruit by Jo Malone is the second perfume that comes into the conversation every time somebody raises the topic of perfumes with the homonymous note. Gaia (The non-Blonde) in her review was even more generous towards this perfume than I would have been: I think it’s nice but not interesting enough to tolerate the usual Jo Malone perfumes’ vanishing act and too expensive to use it in, again, usual for the brand’s DIY layering games. But I love Jo Malone’s Grapefruit Body & Hand Wash Gel. My travel-sized bottle is gone so now I’m thinking about buying the real bottle. I do not like the price but I enjoyed taking showers with that gel so much that I might just take the plunge.

JM Grapefruit‘s half-sibling, Pomelo by Jo Loves… (same perfumer but different brand and relations become even murkier if to consider fruits themselves), starts like a juicy grapefruit (well, technically pomelo but those two are close enough) but the drydown on my skin is very similar to the older brother’s one. And with an even higher sticker price this one isn’t making it into my collection. For real review of Jo Loves… Pomelo read Lucas’ (Chemist in the Bottle) post.

Another half-sibling, Assam & Grapefruit by Jo Malone (same brand but different perfumer), much more subtle with grapefruit, was a limited edition a couple of years ago (it’s still available online) so even though I have a bottle of it and wear it in summer from time to time, I don’t think it’s special enough to recommend hunting for it.

Eau de Pamplemousse Rose by Hermès in its opening is an unmistakably grapefruit perfume. Every time I try it, for the first couple of minutes I have to hold myself from leaking my wrist – so believable Eau de Pamplemousse Rose smells of sweet and juicy grapefruit! But then it dries down to a floral skin scent. It’s pleasant but the only reason I might go for a small bottle is because I like those colored bottles from the line. Birgit (Olfactoria’s Travels) thinks that Eau de Pamplemousse Rose can be trusted to revive the spirits, even if the rain keeps falling.

Rusty and Guerlain Pmplelune 

Drinks

I’m not a tea connoisseur (so if you are please disregard this part of my post) but I like tea and throughout the years I found different teas that I enjoy drinking. One of such teas is Lupicia Grapefruit Green tea. It’s very fragrant and has a very believable grapefruit smell. I bought this tea more than once which I do only with teas that I really liked – otherwise I just move on.

 

Food

Several years ago at Out The Door restaurant in San Francisco I ate Jicama and Grapefruit Salad with Red Cabbage, Candied Pecans and Sweet Soy Dressing salad. It was created by a known master chef Charles Phan (Slanted Door). I liked it and started making a variation of it at home. You can simplify the preparation by buying candied pecans instead of making your own. I found a blog with detailed instructions and pictures for this salad, so I won’t reproduce it here but rather give you a link.

 

Do you like grapefruits?

 

 

Images: my own

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Entertaining Statistics: November, 2013

 

November this year was uncharacteristically warm (average high was 65F/18C) and still very dry (we’ve got only two rainy days). Work-wise it was the craziest month this year so the testing rate fell below one perfume per day. On a couple of occasions I even skipped wearing a perfume, which is very unusual for me. And I didn’t test almost anything new, which upsets me a little.

I’m trying to switch to the “winter mode” and start wearing ambers that I enjoyed so much before but because of the temperature outside most of them still feel wrong and I regret putting them on a minute after the application. But maybe in December it’ll start feeling right?

Quick November stats:

* Different perfumes worn1: 23 from 16 brands on 28 occasions;

* Different perfumes tested2: 28 from 22 brands on 28 occasions;

* Perfumes I tried for the first time: 5 (!!!);

* Perfume houses I both wore and tested the most: Diptyque (I tested Volutes before making the final decision to get a bottle and then wore it a couple of times while writing a post about it);

So since not much was happening in my life perfume-wise, in the above-mentioned post I turned to my readers for the data on their perfume acquiring habits. The question was:

Have you ever bought a full bottle of perfume on the spot, the same day you smelled it for the first time?

As I found out, I was almost the only one who has never done that so far. “Almost” – because I abused my power as a pollster and declared Lucas’ answer as No though it was a close call. The other seventeen (17) respondents said Yes (“and more than once” was a general sentiment). So instead of charting that impressive 2/17 ratio, I’ll leave you with that picture from the times when we were still having rains and my hope that there will be rain soon and that one day I’ll leave a very nice shop in a very romantic place with a very special bottle of perfume.

Rusty and umbrella

1 When I wear a perfume I apply it to at least three-four points and usually I plan to spend at least 4-8 hours with the same scent so I’m prepared to re-apply if the original application wears off.

2 For the testing I apply a perfume to one area on my arms easily available for the repetitive sniffing. But, most likely, I’m the only one who can smell it. I can test two, sometimes even more perfumes at the same time.

 

Image: my own

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Spontaneous me: Diptyque Volutes

 

When it comes to perfumes there are different degrees of impulsiveness. And while I do not approve of blind buys of any amount of perfumes larger than 5 ml (unless the bottle itself is the goal), I find spontaneous perfume purchases at a store romantic to a certain degree.

I have that dream of going into a perfume shop while on a vacation or at a fragrance event and finding perfume, without which I wouldn’t want to leave that store. It hasn’t happen to me yet but every time I read this kind of a love story by one of my friends in the Perfumeland, I make myself a mental note about the perfume.

Lanier’s tale of the premier party at Diptyque San Francisco was one of those stories. It got me very curious about Volutes – the perfume to a bottle of which Lanier had committed just after a brief first encounter.

Diptyque Volutes

The only place around where I live that carried Diptyque’s perfumes at the time was that San Francisco boutique to which I usually can get once or twice a year but I wanted to try it so much that I just had to go… to Madison Avenue Diptyque boutique in New York where I smelled Volutes for the first time.

Both my vSO and I liked Volutes but since he is even less spontaneous that I am, what could have become a great memory of that wonderful New York trip ended up being just a sample.

That Volutes sample came back with me to California and then accompanied us to our vacation in Ukraine earlier this year. I brought it with me not to use it myself but as one of the perfumes for my vSO to test-wear for me.

As I complained in that month’s statistics post, most of the perfumes I hoped I would enjoy wearing during my vacation didn’t work at all in the hot and humid weather. One day I noticed that Volutes smelled really great on my vSO hours after the application and despite the weather. I tried wearing it and ended up loving it on me as well.

Last week I went to the local Nordstrom, which now carries Diptyque line, and bought a bottle of Volutes EdT. So it took me just slightly over a year to get from the first lemming to a full bottle in my collection.

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For the November statistics post, please tell me:
Have you ever bought a full bottle of perfume on the spot, the same day you smelled it for the first time?

 

Image: my own

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Entertaining Statistics: October 2013

 

October was very warm (too warm if you talk to my vSO), with no rain (which isn’t good whoever you talk to) and a lot of work (no comments). I’m hopelessly behind reading blogs and commenting and I suspect my testing is hitting an all-time record low so I’m glad that this month I decided my readers to help again with the data for the October statistics post.

I asked my readers: Have you ever given a perfume as a gift not knowing beforehand that the recipient wanted to get/liked that specific perfume?

I’ve got thirty-one answers (plus my response). Respondents came from 10 different countries (and 2 not disclosed locations). Out of 32 votes, 22 reported more or less successful perfume-giving experience and 10 stated that they’d never given a gift of an “unsolicited” perfume. It would be interesting to conduct a similar study on a control group of people who do not consider themselves perfumistas.

October 2013 Stats

Until today I’ve hidden only draws announcements in the body of my posts. Today I reached new heights: I’m not mentioning the results of the draw in the headline. But – as I promised – here we go: according to random.org the winner of the Scent Library by Ineke is hajusuuri (#10). Please contact me with your mailing address.

Rusty and Ineke Scent Library

For those who didn’t win: consider buying this limited edition set as a collector item before it’s gone. I have absolutely no financial interest in posting this, it’s just a “public service” type of post. I decided that I will buy one set for my collection. Rusty approves.

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A Postcard from Undina: Happy Halloween!

 

Halloween 2013

I like Halloween and we usually celebrate it with friends but this year this holiday coincided  with  an extremely busy time for me in the office so I could barely breathe – let alone organize anything during the work week.

Ironically, with all that crazy work, my biggest celebration will be in the office: we did great werewolf-themed decorations; I thought of some type of costume (I will dress up as a tuxedo cat and wear Brainwave Emotion Controlled Cat Ears), cooked a dish for our traditional Halloween potluck and even drove to work after hours to put up my entry into The Best Werewolf Detection or Protection Device contest.

I made a “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CREATURE?” twin-peaks-type poster with a picture of the werewolf, a figure of which we used to decorate the office; ten posters in different parts of the office urge everybody not to approach the werewolf and contact me. I plan to fight werewolves with silver but not by the old-fashioned intracardiac injection (a.k.a. silver bullet in the heart) but via the progressive nasal route of administration using Silver Rain by La Prairie in a beautiful drop-shaped silver bottle (I used to like this perfume and wore it for several years but not any more – so I’m glad I found some use for it).

Do you do anything special this Halloween?

Undina

 

Image: my own (it’s an actual picture, not a compilation)

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A Gift of Perfume

 

At fourteen I swapped my first love, to which I held on for four years,  for a new imaginary relationship. I do not mean that the other person didn’t exist: S. was a perfectly real 15-years old boy I met and befriended during the summer break. Our romance started months later, as the result of the frequent letters exchange, real hand-written letters sent over the regular post. Since we lived a 6-hours bus ride apart, in two years that it all lasted we spent together less than three weeks and even that was only because we had smart and understanding parents who would organize carefully supervised his visits to my city or my trips to his. We would write every 3-5 days, talk on the phone once in a while (long distance calls were expensive) and spend together several days during school breaks.

Where I lived back then, being a rare and expensive commodity, perfumes were not just acceptable but rather desirable gifts and not just for romantically involved people or relatives: a bottle of perfume could be gifted by parents to a kindergarten teacher, offered as a “special thank you” to a doctor by a patient or presented to the retiring accountant by colleagues. Personal tastes weren’t taken into the consideration. As today most people wouldn’t think twice before bringing a bottle of wine as a gift, the same way people felt about giving a perfume while knowing nothing about recipients’ preferences.

Tet-a-Tet Cologne

S. was the first person in my life to whom I gave a perfume as a gift. It was cologne Tête-à-Tête produced by Nouvelle Etoile (Moscow). I remember that I liked the scent but I have almost no recollection about how it smelled. I don’t know if S. liked and wore Tête-à-Tête: it hadn’t come up in our correspondence and six month later he outgrew our love story. I wonder if I would have recognized it today. It’s still in production but I decided not to chase it either in its modern or in the vintage form: since I smelled Tête-à-Tête only from the bottle I have no nostalgic feelings about it.

***

It’s hard to predict whether I would like a perfume – even though I know my tastes, read notes and other people’s impressions. So with other people it’s almost impossible to guess the right perfume for them. And for many years I steered clear of gifting people with perfumes unless I knew which one they liked. The brand that has changed it for me is INEKE.

On my last trip to Ukraine I brought two travel bottles from Ineke’s Floral Curiosities line – Poet’s Jasmine and Sweet William – as gifts to two of the relatives who do not wear perfumes much but I thought would appreciate them: not revolutionary but pleasant perfumes created by a perfumer from the city where I live (well, if you look from Europe) and with the impossibly cute packaging (I couldn’t resist and bought four “books” for my collection). Both recipients liked their gifts.

Ineke Scent Library

With upcoming holidays that involve family gatherings and gift exchanges, I want to suggest a perfect, in my opinion, gift for somebody who isn’t into perfumes, is in the beginning of their fragrant journey or uses mainstream perfumes primarily: Scent Library from Ineke. It’s a set of samples of all five perfumes in the Floral Curiosities line presented in an unbelievably attractive package. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a presentation of samples with more attention to the smallest detail. For $22 (including S&H) you’re almost guaranteed to get a smile from your mom or sister who still remembers old library system with the paper pocket in each book and library cards or a conversation with a younger niece about the changes that happen during the lifetime of any generation, hand-written letters and rotary phones. And if they end up liking any of the perfumes in the set they will be able to redeem the full price of the set against any 75 ml bottle purchase from the site.

Ineke Scent Library

Scent Library set was sent to me by the brand (without any conditions). I haven’t decided yet if I should get one for my collection: I love it but I have four perfumes from the set already and the packaging of each fragrance “book” that I bought is almost as cute as the one for the Library. Meanwhile I decided to have a draw for the set I’ve got. It’s new but I sprayed one of the samples twice (Briar Rose) and Rusty “helped” me with the pictures. I will send it anywhere in the world but I won’t be responsible for the package if your postal service decides it’s too cute dangerous and destroys it.

Usually I don’t have any special conditions for entering into my draws but this time I have a requirement. To be entered into the draw answer the question below (I’m gathering data for this month’s statistics post) and tell me the country where you live (this way I’ll know that you want to be in the draw). If you do not want to enter, just answer the question for my stats. I’ll close the draw on Thursday, October 31 PDT, and announce the winner in the October Entertaining Statistics post in the beginning of November.

Rusty andI neke Scent Library

Have you ever given a perfume as a gift not knowing beforehand that the recipient wanted to get/liked that specific perfume?

 

Images: Tête-à-Tête from some auction site; all others – my own

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Perfume Bottle Splitters: Friends or Foes?

 

Recently Elena (Perfume Shrine) has published an interview with Andy Tauer, the owner of and the nose behind Tauer Perfumes brand. I like Andy Tauer and I enjoy reading what he says – in that interview, on his blog and in other media. But there were a couple of points in that interview that made me thinking.

Now to your question “Do perfumistas form the bulk of niche perfume buyers in your experience?” No, they don’t. By far not. An educated guess might be: 1/4 of niche perfume buyers in my experience are perfumistas. For sure not more.

My first reaction was: “It can’t be true!” 25%? It’s an extremely high estimate. There are not that many of us… Or are there? I started looking around. Probably there are not as many perfume-related blogs as there are blogs about fashion, books or cooking. By rough count we’re talking about a hundred blogs – give or take a few. The largest Facebook group I’m a member of has just 3,775 members. But then I went to two most popular perfume sites/forums. I do not know what Fragrantica calls “Perfume lovers” but 385K+ of those mentioned there. And Basenotes says they have 100K+ members. Of course, those numbers accumulated over time, many of the registered users aren’t active any longer but still it’s a huge number. So unless most of brand’s sales are done exclusively through high-end B&M boutiques, how is one to know what percentage of the sales should be attributed to perfumistas?

Perfume Enthusiasts On The Web

The second point felt outright wrong:

[…] bottle splits and doing decants is pretty much not good and you hurt the creator. It is actually worse than not buying a bottle.
[…] It hurts because I do not only create a scent that I launch one fine day. As creator, I am constantly building on a universe, a brand universe. I put my scents in a context of values, and esthetics, and experiences. And these I try to communicate through everything that is around the scent. The flacon, the packaging, the hand written note, the way how and where you can get the scent.|
[…]Getting a decant in a simple spray bottle is nothing of all that. It is like a stripped down to the bones scent experience. The scent is still the same, but everything else that I wish perfume lovers to experience is gone. I feel it would be better, from time to time, to just get one fragrance, instead of 5 splits.

First of all, let’s do away with small decants (5 ml) – the size I see a lot in both private decants exchanges and Facebook splits. Nobody sells perfumes without samples and/or testers calculated in the price of the product. And I feel that in case of 5 ml decants we, perfume enthusiasts, are paying our own money for niche brands’ marketing. So that cannot be bad for a brand. A small brand cannot expect too many blind buys (unless you’re an heir of the rich dynasty or a spin-off of a behemoth conglomerate strategically positioned in places where people habitually pay for the novelty itself), so allowing more people to try niche perfumes we increase the probability of the future full bottle purchases.

Now to bigger sizes of decants.

As a consumer, I do not really care if, acting within the law, I find a way to save money at the expense of an entity that tries to make money off me. But I won’t use that as an argument since as a perfumista I do care about brands and perfumers who produce perfumes that I love, especially when we’re talking about small brands and perfumers who are as nice as, for example, Andy Tauer, Laurie Erickson or Dawn Spencer Hurwitz. But I do not think that selling/ buying decants hurts them.

In order for somebody to buy five decants somebody else still has to buy those five bottles. So for each split there is still a person out there who has the “complete experience” – the original bottle, box and a hand-written note (or whatever else the brand chooses to use for creating their universe).

Rusty and Une Rose Vermeire

I will argue that for people who really cannot afford much, having five decants of perfumes they like is better than having just one, even a super special, bottle of perfume. And these people, once their circumstances change, will buy a full bottle of the perfume decant of which they used up and wished they had more. If more companies followed the suit and released their perfumes in smaller bottles like Sonoma Scent Studio‘s travel sprays or Tauer Perfumes’ Explorer Set (by the way, I was surprised that nobody has mentioned it in the discussion on Perfume Shrine), I would buy only official bottles.

For those of us who chooses which full bottles to buy and when to go with a decant, it’s usually not a question of buying a full bottle of the one out of five perfumes, decants of which we entertain using for a while, but rather of not buying any of the five at all. For example, currently there are no perfumes I really want to add to my collection but do not do that for financial reasons. But there are several perfumes that I know I want to get to know better and see if they grow on me. If I can’t buy or swap small decants of those I won’t buy them at all.

My conclusion on this part is: if anything, while buying decants we are helping perfumers, not hurting them. We increase the number of full bottles sold and people exposed to the experience brands had in mind while creating their perfumes. And then we talk about those perfumes we got to try. Five reviews should be nothing on the marketing scale of Guerlain or Hermès but I can’t imagine them not being important in our Internet age for tiny brands with no budget for a two-page spread in Allure or a live ballet presentation at Saks.

A separate note on experiencing a brand universe.

While I like a nice perfume bottle and on a several occasions even went for a bottle of a perfume that I merely liked, not loved, because of the “everything that is around the scent” (see my post Does the size… (strike that) bottle matter? Yep!) and I was one of the first to object to Chandler Burr‘s experiment of stripping perfumes off their packaging and substituting brands’ marketing with his own (see my post (Open)Sky is the limit?), my experience shows that when it comes to actually wearing perfumes I equally enjoy those perfumes that I spray from the original bottle and from the decant (earlier this year I had a statistics post about it).

In the last week’s poll Lucas asked his readers which shape of a perfume bottles they preferred. Most people voted for a “fancy” type, which was a catch-all type for everything that didn’t go into other categories. So the next point I’d like to make is: it’s harder to have any special experience with standard bottles in line. I have to really like the perfume to add a second identical bottle to my collection. With Chanel Exclusiffs, Dior La Collection Privee or Serge Lutens perfumes I feel like after buying one real bottle it’s enough to have just decants for other perfumes from those collections. Had they been unique – like Shalimar, Angel or Flower, – I would have felt a much stronger urge to have them in my collection. So since it’s economically more feasible for small brands to create their universes around standardized bottles they shouldn’t hold a grudge against us for not being too impulsive about buying every next perfume released and finding a more economically sound solutions for experiencing those perfumes. I promise: we’re trying to put them into the best available atomizers and create nice labels.

Rusty and decanting bottles

 

Images: my own

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As Wild as It Gets (for me): My Hawaiian Vacations

 

Reality almost never lives up to great expectations or formed mental impressions.

A decade ago when I came to Hawaii for the first time I was slightly disappointed: it was nothing like I imagined a tropical island would be. Waikiki Beach where we stayed looked like Las Vegas Strip but with an ocean one block away. As much as I like big cities in general and Las Vegas in particular, that felt wrong. But I should have known better when I decided to start my trip from Honolulu, the state capital with one million people population.

 

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In three days we moved to a much more tropical (and fitting my imagination) island – Kauai – where we got to appreciate the only good thing about Waikiki Beach that we left – the beach itself where you could easily walk into water and swim.

Being a well-known favorite place for windsurfing, most of Kauai’s beaches are too rough for swimming and corals and rocks of the ocean floor make it an injury-prone activity. We got enough nature from those four days on the island where we were moving from one place to another trying in vain to find a beach where we could swim. I didn’t like Kauai much.

 

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Whereas it’s hard to repeat a perfect experience it’s much easier to improve something that wasn’t ideal the first time around.

Ten years and several visits to other islands later, this year we decided to go to Kauai again.

We rented a house on the North shore on Anini Beach that is one of the calmest beaches in Kauai since it’s protected by a large reef. From the bedroom window I could see the ocean and during the day we heard coconuts falling down from palms. There even was an owners’ cat – Money – who visited us making sure I’d get my daily “orange cat fix” – that’s what I call “service”! I’ve experienced the first in my life real tropical rain. It was exactly like it’s usually described in books or shown in movies: a wall of rain falling vertically down and soaking everything within seconds. It was wonderful! And the wildest part of my vacation was a very spotty … WiFi connection, ceiling fans instead of an A/C and a mean wild hen who tried chasing me off the beach park a couple of times. I was scared first but stood up to her in the end and won.

 

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It was one of the most relaxed vacations I had in a long time: since during the first visit we couldn’t swim we visited most places recommended to tourists; so this time we spent all our time swimming, reading, talking to friends who were there with us and eating tropical fruits and local fish.

Tropical Fruits

Pitaya/Dragonfruit, carambola/starfruit, papaya, mango, longan, canistel/eggfruit, pouteria caimito/abiu and avocado

Speaking of fruits, what is your most favorite fruit (including berries) to eat and as a perfume note?

My answers: mangos I ate in Hawaii (on all islands, not just during this trip) were probably the tastiest fruits I’ve ever eaten. Black currant is currently my favorite berry in perfumery.

Give me two fruits, not necessarily tropical, that you like the most (one as food and one as a note or one if it’s the same for both questions) and I’ll use your answers in belated September statistics post where I tell you which eleven perfumes I took with me on this eight-days tropical vacation.

 

Images: my own

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My First Bell Jar: De Profundis – Celebrating Life

 

Reading adventure or historical fiction books as a child I couldn’t comprehend the significance of death. Characters being threatened with death would betray their allies or help enemies – and that was very strange to me: it wasn’t a torture or a threat towards their loved ones, it was just death, what to be scared of? It was definitely not a good enough reason for treachery.

I read a lot of books. And still remember having all those thoughts. And I remember that finally the realization of the value of life came to me. I was ten or eleven. I don’t remember what happened and what caused that change but I remember that it was an epiphany.

…

When I came across information about De Profundis by Serge Lutens for the first time the idea seemed appalling: I’d just experienced a couple of losses and the thought of a perfume somehow linked to death felt wrong. The only reason I wasn’t completely offended by it was Serge Lutens’ age: I told myself that it was probably fine for the man, who was statistically closer to the final destination than I or people I love, to toy with death. But, as I said in the comment on Asali’s review of De Profundis (All I am – a redhead), I didn’t plan to test it because of the connotation.

Soon after that I won a decant of another perfume on the same blog and Ines was kind enough to send me a sample of De Profundis also. I’m grateful to her because knowing how stubborn I might be I think I would have avoided trying it otherwise. I loved De Profundis from the first application. It smells so unusual. I adore the green bitterness of chrysanthemums even though I never really liked the flower itself. When I was choosing a bell jar of which perfume I wanted to add to my collection De Profundis was the only one I considered.

Rusty and Serge Lutend De Profundis

Where I grew up chrysanthemums weren’t associated exclusively with funerals though it was one of the common uses for the flower. For me a much stronger association is September 1st – the all-national first school day of the year. On that day all students would bring bouquets for their teachers. Chrysanthemums were popular flowers on that day.

September 1st

September 1st would start with students from all ten grades (there was no elementary/middle/high school separation) gathering in the school yard, in dress uniforms. After some official greeting words from the school director and other stuff members, a boy from a graduating class would pick up a tiny girl from the first grade and would carry her around the yard as she would be ringing a bell to symbolize the First Bell in a school year – the beginning of a new life, school life, for all first graders.

I didn’t get to ring that First Bell (or the Last one in the end of the year) though I secretly wished I had been chosen. But now I got my personal (and personalized!) bell [jar]. And I choose to see De Profundis as homage to life.

Rusty and Serge Lutens De Profundis

For a real (and very detailed review) see Kafka’s Perfume Review- Serge Lutens De Profundis: Purple Twilight

 

Images: De Profundis – my own (can you find Rusty on the first one?); September 1st – from my school’s classmates group, author is unknown.

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In the Search for the Perfect Berry: Blackberry

 

I was in my late 20s when I tried blackberries for the first time. Before than I knew of them but where I lived they weren’t grown commercially so I wasn’t even sure how blackberry looked or smelled.

Blackberries

I still do not know how blackberries smell. I checked just yesterday: at least those that I buy have almost no detectable scent. Are there any other varieties that actually have a smell?

So it’s fair to say that I wasn’t really looking for a perfect blackberry scent. What I was (and actually still am) looking for was a limited edition bottle of L’Artisan Mure et Musc Extreme that looked like a blackberry.

I wanted this bottle. I found a special bottle of Premier Figuier Extreme but for the last year I’ve been stalking eBay for that blueberry bottle without much success. But to be ready to jump on a bidding game if a bottle is offered for sale I wanted to try the perfume: at least to know what to expect.

Mure et Musc Extreme by L’Artisan Parfumeur, created by Karine Dubreuil in 1993, includes notes of … all sources agree on blackberries and musk, and some type of citrus. But then I saw “red berries”, “black currant”, “hint of raspberries”, etc. I don’t smell any of those. I can smell some citrus in the opening; I can smell something that I classify as musk. If you want, I can say it has a blackberry note – but only to the extent of it’s not smelling of anything distinctive, same as those blackberries I buy to eat. Mure et Musc Extreme isn’t unpleasant but I do not see any reason to buy and wear it. Not unless I find that cute bottle.

Mure Et Musc

I still wasn’t looking for a blackberry perfume when an SA at Nordstrom almost forced a Trish McEvoy No 9 Blackberry & Vanilla Musk sample on me. Created in 2000, Blackberry & Vanilla Musk includes notes of blackberry, vanilla, rose, musk and Cashmeran. I can’t believe how much I disliked that perfume! Of course, I rarely test mainstream offerings nowadays so I lost my immunity towards that type of perfumes so I should have expected that could happen. But I didn’t. And I wanted to test different perfumes for this post. Blackberry & Vanilla Musk is sickly sweet on my skin. Once I applied it I did not want to smell any nuances or trace changing notes. All I wanted was for it to go away. Right… You know how persistent those synthetic musks are. Never again.

Still not looking for a blackberry-centric perfume I unexpectedly got one. It was a gift from a friend who got persuaded by an SA at Heathrow airport that this perfume wasn’t available in the U.S. It wasn’t true: by that time I’ve already tested and liked Blackberry & Bay by Jo Malone. But I don’t complain: it was a great gift.

Jo Malone Blueberry & Bay

Blackberry & Bay by Jo Malone, created by Fabrice Pellegrin in 2012, includes notes of blackberry, grapefruit, bay leaf, floral accord, vetiver and cedar wood. Fruity perfumes are not widely represented in my collection but Blackberry & Bay is one of a few that I truly enjoy. I like the sweet and tart mixture of this perfume on my skin. It’s fruity, bright and dark, deep and playful at the same time.

 

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Images: my own (all but L’Artisan blueberry bottle)