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Saturday Question: What Is Your Favorite Fruity Perfume?

Following great tradition started by two wonderful bloggers, Birgit (Olfactoria’s Travels) and Portia (Australian Perfume Junkies), once a week I or one of the guest writers will keep the lights on in this virtual leaving room, but I hope that you, my friends and readers, will engage in conversation not only with me or the other host, but also with each other.

 

Saturday Question on Undina's Looking Glass

 

Saturday Question #26:

What Is Your Favorite Fruity Perfume?

Fruity perfumes have not the best reputation. Mature perfumistas usually associate themselves with chypres or orientals, concession might be made to gourmands and maybe florals (especially those big and white), but fruity? The confession is usually framed with: “Normally, I’m not a fan of fruity perfumes, but…” So, my question is: do you have a name to finish that sentence? Are there any fruity perfumes that you enjoy wearing?

Bonus questions: How much fruit do you eat daily? What are your favorites?

My Answer

As if whatever is happening with the pandemic weren’t enough, in different parts of the world more human-made and natural disasters keep unfolding.

Following extremely hot weather, about which I complained in the last week’s Saturday Question, last Sunday we had a night-long dry thunderstorm in our area. It resulted in multiple wildfires all around SF Bay Area. My town is safe, but the air quality goes from moderate to unhealthy and back dependent on the wind. And we all feel (and smell!) it. The fires devastate large areas, significant number of people have been evacuated, and firefighters, while doing their best, still cannot contain most of the fires.

But since I cannot do anything to change the situation, I choose to talk about things that do not really matter on a big scale, but without them brightening my life everything that’s happening would have been even more intolerable – perfumes, fruit and Rusty.

As someone who is admittedly a floral perfume fan, I’m just one step away from embracing my penchant for fruit in perfumery. There are several perfumes with prominent fruity notes that I enjoy wearing, but since my favorite fruit is mango, for my answer today I’ll go with Neela Vermeire Creations Bombay Bling!, a bottle of which I got in Paris (when we were still traveling abroad).

 

Rusty and NVC Bombay Bling

 

Speaking of mango… Having missed most of this summer seasonal fruit (farmers markets were closed first and then or heavily restricted, while selection in stores was subpar and 50%-100% more expensive than a year before), I really look forward to getting my favorite Keitt (not to be mixed with Kent) mangoes in the next 2-4 weeks. Meanwhile, my daily ration includes a plum or nectarine and an apple or two. I like fruit and would have eaten more if I weren’t trying to limit my food intake (I just can’t call it a diet – but I’m trying to do something).

 

What Is Your Favorite Fruity Perfume?

 

Disclaimer: this blog doesn’t use any affiliated links or benefit from any of the G-d awful ads that some of you might see inserted tastelessly by the WP engine inside the post and/or between comments. Encouraging readers to post more comments does not serve any purpose other then getting pleasure from communicating with people who share same interests.
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Review by Narth: Penhalgion’s Belgravia Chypre

I hoped that after a while everybody gets used to seeing posts written by my guest-cum-co-bloggers Narth and Portia, but a couple of times recently when Narths posts were mistaken for mine, I decided for a while to add her name to the titles (and Portia is doing something along the line already) – at least until everyone learns to check the By line (Undina).

* * *

I’ve always been someone who likes strong flavours. If a flavour must be delicate, it should be a work of art to make up for its delicacy. I was raised on robustness; mega garlic and onions, chillies, the darkest of pumpernickels. Food was praised in my childhood for how much of a flavour bomb it was. I didn’t eat sliced white bread until I was at least 15 as this was regarded as poison by one parent and pointless by the other. Why would you eat this when you could eat rye with caraway? Don’t people realize white flour is stripped of all its nutrients?

The last time I was travelling, I had a revelation as I sat in the hostel kitchen and ate my free breakfast. A slice of white toast, spread with margarine (an abomination) and some thin, sugary strawberry jam. At home I would have used butter, and my jam would have been either an expensive brand or, more likely, made by myself and intensely flavourful. Here, drinking some over stewed black coffee and munching away at this testament to blandness, I shocked myself by appreciating the very blandness itself. It wasn’t about beautiful simplicity in food, it was a sudden shift in my thinking from an almost religious belief that all food had to be purposefully wonderful. Now you could say this enjoyment of blandness was a byproduct of travelling, we all know that the McDonald’s breakfast you have at 5am in the airport is the best McDonald’s breakfast you’ll ever have. But it was more than that, and since returning home I’ve found myself enjoying food in a different way. Perhaps, the last snobbery of my upbringing has finally dropped off, or maybe I’m just a lame-o hipster. And of course, I’m still overthinking everything, but that’s what perfume people do. So, has this played out in perfume for me? Not as readily as with food, but there have been a few times my hostel breakfast has come to mind as I enjoy a scent.

Penhaligon’s Belgravia Chypre, a limited edition now making rounds of the discounters, has at its very heart a strange staleness. It’s pretty, clean and patchouli minty. A thin rose, it smells like old musk sticks left in the bottom of a paper bag. Musk sticks for the non-Antipodeans are pink, musk flavoured sweets that people are either delighted by or grimace at the sight of. Found in the corner shops for a few cents each, many an Australian childhood included buying this cheap candy and eating it out of little paper bags. Musk is a strange thing to use as a flavour if you haven’t grown up with it. In my perfume swapping days, I would often include some Musk flavoured Lifesavers as the “extras” in an overseas swap because it is such a surprising thing to try if you’ve never had it before. Belgravia Chypre dries down to a stale paper bag infused with the flattest of musks, and I absolutely love it. It’s become my favourite evening simple scent, when I want to wind down. It often makes me laugh because of that not very good musk note, and I would not wish it any other way. I think they were going for a sheer musk, but if they had achieved that, it would have lost all its personality for me and been just another musky rose.

Do you have any scents you appreciate for their failure to be exceptional?

 

Penhaligon's Belgravia Chypre

 

Penhalgion’s Belgravia Chypre (Fabrice Pellegrin, 2018)

Top Notes: Raspberry, Pink Pepper
Middle Notes: May Rose, Mate
Base Notes: Patchouli, Cistus labdanum

 

Image: my own

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Saturday Question: Is it Ever Too Hot To Wear Perfume?

Following great tradition started by two wonderful bloggers, Birgit (Olfactoria’s Travels) and Portia (Australian Perfume Junkies), once a week I or one of the guest writers will keep the lights on in this virtual leaving room, but I hope that you, my friends and readers, will engage in conversation not only with me or the other host, but also with each other.

 

Saturday Question on Undina's Looking Glass

 

Saturday Question #25:

Is it Ever Too Hot To Wear Perfume?

There are perfumes we choose to wear in winter. There are perfumes that suit summer heat better. Sometimes we like to mix it up and wear crisp citruses in the dead of winter or heavy orientals in the dog days of summer. But for you personally: is it ever too hot to wear perfume?

My Answer

I rarely skip wearing (or at least testing) perfumes because of any reason. Maybe if I’m not feeling well. Or sometimes I might be too busy to apply perfume in the morning – but I’ll still get to it later in the day. But until recently I would have probably answered to this Saturday Question: No, heat influences my perfume choice but not my desire to wear it or not.

We had heatwaves in previous years. I wore perfumes during my trips to Hawaii, New Orleans and other hot places. But today, working from home after a very warm night, while the peak temperature outside reached 38 C / 100 F, I realized that I didn’t feel like applying any perfume in any form or amount. It was just too unpleasant – even though it was relatively nice inside because we’re lucky to have an A/C (not something usual in place where we live since we rarely have temperatures that require any aids in cooling our homes), and because we were double-lucky because we weren’t affected by power outage or state’s imposed rolling blackouts. And I’m happy to report that it has never got to 24 C in the closet where I store my perfumes (I have a thermometer that monitors temperature on the shelves).

 

2020-08-14 Weather

 

It was still 31 C / 88 F outside at 9 in the evening when we went for a walk. Before going out, I put on Atelier Cologne Jasmin Angélique (from a sample – I’m still trying to decide if I want to get any). It didn’t feel right, so I might skip wearing perfume tomorrow if it doesn’t cool off. How about you?

 

Is it Ever Too Hot To Wear Perfume?

 

Disclaimer: this blog doesn’t use any affiliated links or benefit from any of the G-d awful ads that some of you might see inserted tastelessly by the WP engine inside the post and/or between comments. Encouraging readers to post more comments does not serve any purpose other then getting pleasure from communicating with people who share same interests.
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Rusty the Cat: On Boxes

As someone whose watch lists on different streaming services mostly consist of police procedural shows, I have to concede that this post, being the third after Rusty the Cat: On Food and Treats and Rusty the Cat: On Comfort Temperatures, moved the topic over the threshold when it definitely qualifies as serial… I mean, series.

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Do you know that cats love cardboard boxes?

Even though my grandparents had cats with whom I spent my summer breaks in the same house, and despite of the fact that my vSO and I had a cat once (I told this story many years ago – Orange Cats in My Life – Part I: Found and Lost), somehow I had never been privy to that cats’ trait.

I’m not sure why that was: either those particular cats that I observed were not adventurous; or maybe breeds of cats in my native country had different inclinations; or can it be that back then we didn’t have that many boxes in general, and those that we were rarely getting weren’t left out for pets to play?

Whatever it was, the first time I realized that it was “a thing” with cats was when many years ago a friend told me about the famous Japanese cat Maru and shared a couple of YouTube videos of him packing into different boxes, including the tiniest ones (it was years before he was certified by Guinness World Records as the most viewed single animal on YouTube).

And then we got Rusty, who over the years demonstrated to us how much cats love boxes.

Whenever a new box only gets in our house (which these days happens even more frequent than before), Rusty immediately plops himself on top of them. He notably likes wine boxes – probably because they are very steady and safe to jump on and off.

 

 

All other boxes are also fair game, especially once they are emptied. Rusty would pack himself into almost any box – be it large, small, tall or shallow.

 

 

Usually he stays in a new box for a while, probably until he impregnates it with his scent. After that he loses interest. But there are two boxes that we keep (replacing them from time to time on the same spot), and he uses them for years: one is a box to where he runs and hides when I yell at him for doing something he isn’t supposed to do (like trying to steal meat from a hot frying pan); and the second one is a “Greeting box,” as we call it: it stands facing an entrance door from the garage, and Rusty sits in it when we’re returning home from somewhere (on a picture below it’s a shallower box to the right from the temporary Rusty’s toy).

 

Rusty in a Box

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Portia’s Theory of Fragrant Relativity

Hi there, ULG Perfume Buddies. I have a theory. Well, I’ve called it a theory, but that’s because I suffer delusions of grandeur. It’s just a thing that’s been rattling around in my brain for a while. It didn’t really have much fom till I mentioned it to some mates, and they all piled on with thoughts and japes. It was kind of out-of control. What came out of it was a crystallising of my thoughts, and then I thought it might be fun to discuss it with you all.

In 20-40 years time, the perfumistas will be reminiscing about their love for perfumes from Juicy Couture, Jessica Simpson, Agent Provocateur, Lady Gaga and Benefit.

They will dream of fruitchoulis, calone and rose/oud combos like we do about oak moss and musks.

The prices of these scents will skyrocket on the future equivalent of eBay, and we will finally get our long lost fougere, chypre and galbanum rich beauties for next to nothing.

Now, I also have a confession.

When I heard that Agent Provocateur had gone bust, I went straight to FragranceNet and bought two 100ml of three from their range. Maitress, Lace Noir and Blue Silk. Then I went searching high and low for their original Agent Provocateur EdP, found two bottles of that for quite good prices and am awaiting their arrival. Finally, I saw Fatale Intense in my local chemist and snaffled that too.

NOW I have to find somewhere to put the damn things…

Also, have you noticed Jessica Simpson frags getting harder to find? I might have panic bought some of them too.

 

 

The only bottles already in my collection were original Agent Provocateur EdP and Jessica Simpson Fancy Nights (not pictured). They have been long standing regular use perfumes in collection, and I’ll be sad to not have them. So, buying them makes sense, right? Backing up your disappearing beauties is a perfumistas stock in trade. Everything else, though, is a freaked out blind buy. There is no rhyme or reason to this. Suddenly the urge was upon me, the hunt was on, my cart full, checked out and sent. It’s like all my impulse control goes flying out the window.

Do you ever panic buy stuff just because it’s going, going, gone? What do you think of my Theory of Fragrant Relativity? What will you want to hoard?

Portia xx

 

Image: my own

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Saturday Question: Have You Ever Bought Perfume Just For Its Bottle?

Following great tradition started by two wonderful bloggers, Birgit (Olfactoria’s Travels) and Portia (Australian Perfume Junkies), once a week I or one of the guest writers will keep the lights on in this virtual leaving room, but I hope that you, my friends and readers, will engage in conversation not only with me or the other host, but also with each other.

 

Saturday Question on Undina's Looking Glass

 

Saturday Question #24:

Have You Ever Bought Perfume Just For Its Bottle?

We discussed it more than once, and most perfumistas agree: while a nice packaging matters (more or less for different people), perfume itself is much more important. But this question isn’t about it. Have you ever spent money on getting perfume that you hadn’t smelled before or didn’t like but just wanted to get a bottle?

My Answer

While I have in my collection several perfumes purchase of which was partially influenced by my liking bottles – otherwise, I would have probably gone for a decant, there is one bottle that I bought not intending to wear: Van Cleef & Arpels Feerie EdT. I got it five years ago for my Thinking outside the Box project. I’m still glad I bought it, I enjoy looking at it and regret not buying the EdP bottle of the same perfume when they were much more affordable.

 

Van Cleef & Arpels Feerie EdT

 

But that’s not all. Recently I started thinking about getting a classic Shalimar bottle (not the newer spray bottles, but the original urn bottle with a stopper). It’s bizarre because after years of trying, I still do not like this perfume and doubt I’ll ever change my mind about it. But that bottle… It is so beautiful that I want to have it. Maybe I should buy an empty vintage bottle and pour something into it – just to put it on a display?

 

Have You Ever Bought Perfume Just For Its Bottle?

 

Disclaimer: this blog doesn’t use any affiliated links or benefit from any of the G-d awful ads that some of you might see inserted tastelessly by the WP engine inside the post and/or between comments. Encouraging readers to post more comments does not serve any purpose other then getting pleasure from communicating with people who share same interests.
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In the Search for the Perfect Mimosa, Take 6

Even if you were new to my blog (which not too many of my current readers are), just from the post’s title you could guess that I like mimosa in perfumes. Correction: I like mimosa. Period.

Mimosa

My perfumista friends clearly made that connection, and in the last couple of years I’ve been getting different mimosa-related gifts from them.

Previously, I wrote about the shower gel Cotton Flower & Mimosa (Yves Rocher) that my perfume twin Lucas (Chemist in the Bottle) sent to me when it wasn’t yet available in the U.S. and Elizabeth Arden’s Green Tea Mimosa perfume that hajusuury, my other perfume sibling, gifted to me.

Last year in London, Tara (A Bottled Rose) gave me a beautiful Mimosa soap by Molinard that she brought back from her trip to France. It smells so wonderful that I did something I haven’t done before but remembered from decades back – a custom from my childhood to keep fragrant soaps in a drawer to scent lingerie. But I plan to start using it soon, before it loses its aroma.

Molinard Mimosa Soap

Then last Christmas I got another unexpected gift from Lucas: Mimosa perfume by Monotheme Fine Fragrances Venezia. Before then I had never heard about that brand, though Fragrantica has 72 (!) perfumes listed for it. Even without it being a gift from a friend, Mimosa is quite nice. Simple, uncomplicated but nice and surprisingly wearable.

Rusty and Monotheme Mimosa

But this is not all the “damage” Lucas has done recently: first he shared with me a sample of Amouage Love Mimosa, and later he found a bottle at a great price, and he, hajusuri and I split it. If you haven’t tried Love Mimosa yet, read Lucas’s great review.

Amouage Shop in London

The picture above is from my last year’s trip to London. [Un]fortunately, that day the store was closed – or I could have left it with a full-price bottle of Love Mimosa. I didn’t get that cute yellow bottle, but I got more than enough perfume to wear for the next many upcoming mimosa seasons, especially considering all other great mimosa perfumes that I accumulated over the years and previous five takes on this single note exploration. I like, own and wear Jo Malone Mimosa & Cardamom, Givenchy Amarige Mimosa, Sonoma Scent Studio Bee’s Bliss, Frederic Malle Une Fleur de Cassie, Atelier Cologne Mimosa Indigo and Elizabeth Arden Green Tea Mimosa. And I’m extremely close to needing a replacement for the decant of Prada Infusion de Mimosa.

Images: my own

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Zoologist Bee

Have you ever had a perfume note that was never center stage enough for you? A supporting note that warms, cools or brightens the star of the fragrance. You talk about how much you love the inclusion of that note, how wonderfully it is used! But the more you wear it the more you think: why can’t this note be the star? Always the bridesmaid, never the bride! In Zoologist Bee the main player is honey sodden beeswax, and all the floral attributes serve only to praise and fete the delightful waxiness.

I’ve found beeswax to be an elusive note in fragrance, I can remember only a few times being absolutely delighted by its presence. BPAL and Arcana perfume oils have scents with a beeswax note, but even while smearing on a generous amount of oil, I’ve always wanted it to be more intense. Penhalgion’s Sartorial has a waxy note designed to evoke the wax blocks used with thread by tailors, and I’ve huffed my arm trying to focus on those waxy, wonderful moments. I’ve found many honey perfumes are just sweetness without the wax, which doesn’t work for me. If you eat really excellent cold pressed honey, that wax note will be there.

When I was a child, my Dad would often bring home honeycomb, and I’d sit at the table spooning up great gobs of it, chewing away at the wax until only a tiny bit was left. Sometimes there was even a bee in the honeycomb! It was a far cry from squeezy bottles shaped like bears full of sugar syrup. Zoologist Bee is truly all about the bee and his creations. The floral notes capture that mouthwatering moment you try some fresh from the hive honey and marvel at how many flavours you can taste in it. Orange blossom, pollen, a resinous goodness, honey is a work of art. I’m honestly astonished to find all these beautiful tastes so vividly portrayed in this scent.

 

Zoologist Bee

 

Zoologist Bee (Cristiano Canali, 2019)

Top Notes: Orange, Ginger Syrup, Royal Jelly Accord

Middle Notes: Broom, Heliotrope, Mimosa, Orange Flower

Base Notes: Benzoin, Labdanum, Musks, Sandalwood, Tonka, Vanilla

Bee is quite linear. Potency gradually softening is the extent of the journey. And potent it is, no delicate wafting breeze here. This is a wonderful thing when beeswax is often only a bit player in a vanillic drydown. Is it too sweet? Is excellent honey too sweet? There’s your answer. It’s too sweet because it’s supposed to be. The only thing holding me back from acquiring a bottle is that I have yet to try Hiram Green‘s Slow Dive, another true beeswax and honey scent according to reviews. I’ve sniffed it once, and I suspect it is richer, while Bee is simpler. Both are very appealing, but I probably do not need two intensive honey and beeswax scents. I’m looking forward to our lockdown being over, someday, and being able to take myself off to the perfume shop and have a Slow Dive sniff.

And here’s an odd tidbit about Zoologist Bee. I have accidentally eaten some of this fragrance, and it tastes just like it smells! I honestly think you could make this into a liqueur or a gelato flavouring. This is not the first time I’ve accidentally eaten perfume, and usually it is a vile experience, so I was quite surprised.

 

Image: my own

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Saturday Question: Are there Perfumes That You Associate with a Co-Worker or a Friend?

Following great tradition started by two wonderful bloggers, Birgit (Olfactoria’s Travels) and Portia (Australian Perfume Junkies), once a week I or one of the guest writers will keep the lights on in this virtual leaving room, but I hope that you, my friends and readers, will engage in conversation not only with me or the other host, but also with each other.

 

Saturday Question on Undina's Looking Glass

 

Saturday Question #23:

Are there Perfumes That You Associate with a Co-Worker or a Friend?

As California passed a half-million count of Covid-19 cases, and our governor in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus has announced new closure measures, it looks less and less likely that we’ll see inside our offices this year. And it got me thinking about the things we miss (or not) from the times before the “social distancing.” And since it’s a perfume blog, and we’re trying to keep the topics of these Saturday Questions somewhere in the vicinity, today’s question is about perfumes – just to stay on a lighter and less serious note.

Are there perfumes that you associate with a co-worker or a friend – either from the pre-Covid times or from the more distant past? Are those good associations or bad? Did you like those perfumes or couldn’t stand them? Do you miss not being able to smell them on those people now?

My Answer

In my current office I’m the only one who wears perfumes, so the only scented product I’m exposed to is rose oil one of my co-worker’s uses from time to time for her hair. It’s not my favorite scent (pure rose oil smells too soap-y to me), but I figured that it was a fair trade for me exposing her and others to all my daily changing scents. And after 5 months working from home, I would be glad to smell even that oil.

At my previous place of work though there were several co-workers who wore perfumes. One of them had a signature scent – Jo Malone Nectarine Blossom & Honey. This is one of rare Jo Malone’s perfumes that doesn’t work for me. But on that co-worker it smelled just amazing. Another coworker wore many different perfumes, and it was fun trying to figure out without asking her what it was. Sometimes I guessed/recognized correctly – unless, of course, it was perfume we both liked and wore, Deep Red by Hugo Boss (I told that anecdotal “skin chemistry” proof story a couple of years ago). While I do not miss that place in general, I still miss some people I worked with back there and perfume-related interactions that we had on a regular basis.

A friend of mine wears many different perfumes, but my favorites on her are Mugler Angel (she dares to wear it outside of her house) and Tom Ford Noir de Noir (It smells better on her than on me). We talk from time to time, but I haven’t seen her in the last 6 months. I miss her with or without perfumes.

 

Are there Perfumes That You Associate with a Co-Worker or a Friend?

 

Disclaimer: this blog doesn’t use any affiliated links or benefit from any of the G-d awful ads that some of you might see inserted tastelessly by the WP engine inside the post and/or between comments. Encouraging readers to post more comments does not serve any purpose other then getting pleasure from communicating with people who share same interests.
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You or Someone Like You by Etat Libre d’Orange – Portia

Hey Crew, You or Someone Like You is a fragrance but it’s also the title of a 2009 semi-autobiographical novel by Chandler Burr. The fragrance was created as a matching couplet and released 2017. As so many of the Etat Libre d’Orange oeuvre does, they take an old trope and freshen it up with a new twist, ingredient, direction or emphasis. As you all up there in the Northern Hemisphere are sweltering in the summer heat, I thought you might like refreshing spritz that is a bit more interesting and longer lived than a cologne. This fragrance has a wonderful lifespan story of phases.

You or Someone Like You by Etat Libre d’Orange

 

 

Fragrantica gives these featured accords:
Top: Mint, anise, bergamot, grapefruit
Heart: Cassis, green notes, hedione, rose
Base: White musk

Summer in Australia, especially as we were growing up, involved visits to the local National Parklands. Our local one was nearly 400 hectares of bushland with a river running through the middle. It had loads of grassy playing areas with little wood fired BarBQs and cement picnic tables & chairs around the outsides. We would go as a family, often with other families, and while most of the Dads would get the BarBQ going and most of the Mums would organise the tables, bread rolls, salads and condiments, the kids would be taken off for a bushwalk. It was hilly and rocky, and the cooling eucalyptus would shade and scent our walks. We would be shown native flora and fauna, given little info bites about everything and surviving in the bush. We would invariably end up at the weir where there was a large colony of ducks and geese. Everyone would get a couple of pieces of stale bread, and we’d feed them. Then we’d all head back and the meats would be sizzling on the BarBQ, all the adults would have had a couple of boozy bevies, and we kids would run off adventuring or playing cricket till it was time to eat.

You or Someone Like You is a perfect summer spritz with the cool green wash of eucalyptus from my childhood memory. Not noted but definitely smells like it should be. It smells like finding the shade after walking through the hot sunshine. Something else not noted in the list is salt water. I get loads of it as well. Not in a very aquatic style but hinting towards some of the L’Eau d’Issey Pour Homme line.

On opening, a sharply sweet citrus is enlivened by mint. It’s a beautifully mentholated coolness. The heart remains quite sharp green notes but feels like it’s been scoured clean by a cool sea breeze. There’s no hint of noxious seaweed under the pier. I also get no notion of the rose, and the white musk dry down still has green hints of mint and what I read as eucalyptus. So it never veers into that safe, bland, white musk laziness we smell so often after the initial fragrance fireworks have collapsed.

Totally unisex but veering towards mid 20th century traditional masculine, longevity is excellent, and projection is moderate.

Not the strangest of the Etat Libre d’Orange’s but also not a usual or expected scent.

Have you tried You or Someone Like You? Does it sound like you’d like it?
Portia xx

 

Image: my own