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So what I did not realize when the entirety of fandom seemed to start talking about perfume was that at least two people I know in real life are super huge perfumery nerds, the kind who have a million carefully-organized samples, and that I can therefore actually smell some of the things that Dreamwidth is talking about in real life instead of just standing in Whole Foods huffing essential oils in order to try to get some reference for all these wonderfully evocative essays that keep cropping up on my reading list.
But what I also did not realize is that it's hard to smell things accurately! My previous experience with smells is pretty much "Bath and Body Works body mist" or full-on patchouli oil, with very little in-between, and that Herbal Essences fruity-floral thing that happened in the late 90s was super not my bag; I kind of assumed all perfume smelled like that, so the explosion of perfume fandom onto my reading list has been good for exploding my prejudices! Still, I feel a little bit like my notes here are like a baby trying to describe sunlight: SOMETHING IS HAPPENING TO ONE OF MY FIVE SENSES. I DO NOT HAVE THE TOOLS TO TELL YOU WHAT, EXACTLY.
Do not expect any coherency from this list, but I did smell a lot of things and note down initial impressions. I'd like to go back and smell all of these in a more rigorous way with less of a crazed dash through the samples.
Eau Nomade Thirdman: manufacturer's notes say "Indian cardamom, Sicilian lemon and blood orange." Fragrantica says mostly blood orange with some cardamon in the background.
What I smelled: PERFUME with dreamsicle. like someone hit me with a department store perfume sample while I was eating orange candy. My initial notes say "for perfumey smell it is not bad?", which was because it was the first thing I smelled and I didn't know it was going to get better from there.
Jean Patou Sublime: Fragrantica says that this is a chypre ("sheep-ra?") floral with top notes of "bergamot, tangerine, and coriander along with green accords", midnotes of "floral caresses of rose, jasmine, ylang-ylang along with neroli oil" and base notes of vanilla, sandal, cedar and civet.
What I smelled: Soapy smell! Lots of soapy soap soapness. Like the soap in grade school soap dispensers. After I looked at the manufacturer's description, I guessed that some of that was jasmine? Also this made my throat hurt a little.
I don't think I like chypre.
Hermessence Ambre Narguile: This was part of a beginner's set for learning to identify amber notes that my friend had, which is pretty cool. The manufacturer's description is: "a fruited amber honey mixed with the spiral curls of smoke of a blond tobacco, it conveys the Orient: hot, voluptuous, inspired by the savoury scents of the hookah." Oh goodness, I see what rydra_wong was talking about when she talked about the literary history of the oriental perfumes.
What I smelled: My notes say "honey? Vanilla? Dessert-y in a bpal way. I would put this on my person I think. After looking at the notes I think I can smell tobacco?". It's interesting that this had musk in it, according to the Fragrantica notes, but I didn't hate it. I wonder if I'd been assaulting my nose with fewer things and put on a good dab of it if the musk would have come out more and I would have had more of a reaction, or if maybe musk is not the complete deal-breaker I thought it was. I will say that now that I know it was supposed to smell like hookah, it totally smelled like hookah; I'm not around a whole lot of hookahs in my life at the moment, so I kept going "... familiar? Hippies? What?" without knowing why.
Parfum d'Empire Ambre Russe: manufacturer's notes say "tea, incense, vodka, champagne, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, ambergris, vanilla, leather"
What I smelled: I smelled this before looking at the description, and was absolutely convinced that I was smelling wrong and this couldn't be intended as boozily as I was smelling, so I finally wrote down "rum? Irish coffee?". After I looked at the notes I realized that in addition to sweetness and vodka notes I was in fact smelling the whackload of cinnamon, and some tea and smokiness, and maybe the birch and juniper that Fragrantica swears are in there. This was very, very sweet, but it was the first one I hit on this smell-round that was complicated and spiky through the sweetness, and that was pretty cool. After progressing through everything else on this list, I suspect that the thing I liked about it was the incense and possibly the tea.
Sonoma Scent Studio Champagne de Bois: Manufacturer's notes: Aldehydes, jasmine, clove, sandalwood , labdanum absolute, vetiver, amber.
What I smelled: I think the fact that it was named "champagne" made me interpret all those aldehydes as champagne. I also wrote down "vanilla and something kind of unpleasant", which, knowing me, was probably either cloves or jasmine. I am amazed at how often jasmine sneaks up on me.
Sonoma Scent Studio Rose Volupte: Manufacturer's notes say: Rose, plum, amber, labdanum absolute, sandalwood, cedar, vetiver, heliotrope, clove, cinnamon, oakmoss, subtle aldehydes.
What I smelled: I've been trying to reform my opinion of roses. They were on the Absolutely Not No Never smells list in my childhood household, to the point where I didn't actually smell a real alive rose until I was ten or eleven, and I remember it as a crushing early moment of Nature vs. Artifice, because by that point the smell of roses was so much more strongly tied in my mind to cheap laundry detergent than it was to the plant that I couldn't get over the association. I stood in the middle of this massive formal garden and felt disappointed right down to my boots, and also like I was doomed to never understand any flower references in literature because from that point on I would just think "Gain Extra Suds by any other name would smell just as much like laundromat".
Later I read Michael Pollan's excellent pre-famousness history of rose cultivation and understood that in fact the rose by any other name that Shakespeare was familiar with had itself later been scrubbed and sanitized, smell-wise, to turn it into the kind of tea roses that grew in Victorian formal gardens, and that there were still roses out there that probably smelled interesting and non-soapy, like the invasive but delightfully spicy-scented rosa multiflora that I had unknowingly been smelling for years. I felt much better. Lately I've been considering that maybe among the rose-derived smells in the world there are probably some that come from more interesting, non-Victorianized roses, though I don't know exactly how to find them.
In the bottle Rose Volupte smelled, in fact, like the kind of actual-plant-reproductive-organ spicy non-scrubbed-up rose that I'm curious about, so I put some on my skin, and it did a sonic boom from "spicy and probably interesting" into "soap" and then made a weird left turn into fake grape flavor. Once I read the notes I could smell the thing that is probably labdanum, and I think if I was willing to give it time there might be a lot more depth under the rose, but as was I was already braced for Rose Disappointment and scrubbed it off.
Chanel Coromandel: Man, Chanel fragrances can be hard to find good listings for. Everything I click on goes on about wooden screens and Coco Chanel's personality. Fine, I will hover over the little icons on Fragrantica and list them here: top notes: citruses and neroli. Middle notes: jasmine, rose, patchouli, and orris. Base notes: incense, olibanum, benzoin, woods, musk, tahitian vanilla, white chocolate.
What I smelled: in the vial: AUGH CATPEE. I mean clearly spices but also something I am intensely not enjoying that hits me first as catpee. It was so intriguingly awful that I put it on my wrist immediately, because I have heard of this happening, and in fact the second it hit skin it turned into honey and vanilla. Then my notes say "also it is becoming licorice or something! It just went rootbeery! What am I even doing? I smell kind of like a Pepsi!"
I did end up washing this off too, though I should have stuck with it and seen if anything happened past Pepsi. But that is where it landed, on smelling like a Pepsi.
Comme des Garcons Avignon: apparently Comme des Garcons did a series of smells that were supposed to evoke world religions and this the Catholicism one. The manufacturer's description has some very pretty language about old cathedrals and then lists the notes: "Roman chamomile, cistus oil, elemi, incense, vanilla, patchouli, palisander, ambrette seeds."
What I smelled: I think I have the smell privilege of not having grown up Catholic and having only the faintest idea what church incense smells like, so I thought I was smelling something woodsy or foresty, in the best possible way where I have never smelled anything so good before. And then my friend noted that that is frankincense and I went "ohhhhh". It didn't do anything spectacular on my skin besides smell exactly like it smelled in the bottle, where it was kind of woodsy and spicy and warm. This one I might honestly buy a sample of and wear on purpose, as opposed to for science. This was also the only one I smelled all evening that was zero percent floral and zero percent sweet, which I suspect was a strong factor.
This was also not the only unisex perfume, but it was the unisex-est of them, which is probably more predictive than I would like it to be.
Aftelier Secret Garden: so this one I'm almost embarrassed about liking so much, because it went on with exactly that same licorice-raspberry note as the Chanel Coromandel, but good instead of deeply annoying and cat-pee-ish, and it kept developing and getting more and more interesting to me. I scrubbed most of these after a couple of minutes or smelled them on paper/in-vial, but I put this one on and it kept getting better and cooler and more fun to smell, and then I looked at the notes on Fragrantica, and: civet and castoreum. Like, the real kind, from manufacturing deadstock. I mean I also noted some frutiness (bergamot and raspberry, says Fragrantica), and some woodsiness (Brazilian rosewood, says Fragrantica). But castoreum also smells like raspberries, according to some sources. It made me wonder if maybe the Coromandel had been trying for animalics with artificial sources and that's what didn't work for me. I even started picking up some actual recognizable animalic smell as it developed, like the fur of a clean animal, and I loved it a lot. I'm glad it's from deadstock, for sure, but also the perfume I most liked that smelled Like Perfume and not like an incense stick in a forest was the one with the actual catbutts in it. Boo.
It's worth noting that this actually has a whackton of florals that I normally think of myself as not liking, and yet I enjoyed the crap out of it. Possibly my love of catbutt and beaver butt is just that overwhelming. ... I will probably try to buy a sample of this if I buy any samples.
Bvlgari Black: my friend told me to close with this one, on the grounds that it's COMPLETELY BANANAS. I haven't had a chance to look at the notes until now, but I mostly huffed it (and put it on my skin after spraying it on paper, because it was just so confusing) and wrote down a list of increasingly artificial things: ("clinical? rubbery? like a dentist glove? new car smell?") and finally settled on "like the air inside a computer". On the skin it picked up some vanilla-y sweetness. Fragrantica says it smells rubbery/leathery with lurking vanilla and sweetness "like the romance hidden in the corners of the city".
Honestly I would call this more the smell of the movie Hackers, with the kind of teenagery associations I have with foodie vanilla hidden in this big staticky electronic smell. Also, I like how the bottle looks like a tire. That's pretty hardcore.
Perfume, it turns out, smells REALLY STRONG. I am learning that if I dilute essential oils in jojoba oil to the recommended concentrations (to avoid skin irritation, mostly) I have to cover a pretty good percentage of my body with the stuff to get anything like the sillage that most of the perfumes I've tried have had after I've washed my wrist once. I'm still experimenting with the woods and citrus thing - yesterday was cedar/lemon/lavender, and I do suspect that I smelled like hamsters and furniture a little, but it was also very pleasant and hung on a little longer than previous combinations have. After discovering via perfumes that I really do have a limited tolerance for sweetness, I'm also on the lookout for things I can stabilize smells with that aren't beeswax - it adds a really nice honey note, but after a while I start to feel a little sickly about it if I can't get a break from it.
Out in the world the Bradford pears are blooming, which fills the air with a kind of stale garbage smell, but at some point some considerate soul also planted a row of some white blooming plant around the dumpsters in the parking lot. I don't know what they are, but they smell like coffee flowers, which smell kind of like Lemon Pledge. So the rows of floral trees smell like garbage, but the row of actual garbage smells like the best kind of flowers. It's pretty good.
But what I also did not realize is that it's hard to smell things accurately! My previous experience with smells is pretty much "Bath and Body Works body mist" or full-on patchouli oil, with very little in-between, and that Herbal Essences fruity-floral thing that happened in the late 90s was super not my bag; I kind of assumed all perfume smelled like that, so the explosion of perfume fandom onto my reading list has been good for exploding my prejudices! Still, I feel a little bit like my notes here are like a baby trying to describe sunlight: SOMETHING IS HAPPENING TO ONE OF MY FIVE SENSES. I DO NOT HAVE THE TOOLS TO TELL YOU WHAT, EXACTLY.
Do not expect any coherency from this list, but I did smell a lot of things and note down initial impressions. I'd like to go back and smell all of these in a more rigorous way with less of a crazed dash through the samples.
Eau Nomade Thirdman: manufacturer's notes say "Indian cardamom, Sicilian lemon and blood orange." Fragrantica says mostly blood orange with some cardamon in the background.
What I smelled: PERFUME with dreamsicle. like someone hit me with a department store perfume sample while I was eating orange candy. My initial notes say "for perfumey smell it is not bad?", which was because it was the first thing I smelled and I didn't know it was going to get better from there.
Jean Patou Sublime: Fragrantica says that this is a chypre ("sheep-ra?") floral with top notes of "bergamot, tangerine, and coriander along with green accords", midnotes of "floral caresses of rose, jasmine, ylang-ylang along with neroli oil" and base notes of vanilla, sandal, cedar and civet.
What I smelled: Soapy smell! Lots of soapy soap soapness. Like the soap in grade school soap dispensers. After I looked at the manufacturer's description, I guessed that some of that was jasmine? Also this made my throat hurt a little.
I don't think I like chypre.
Hermessence Ambre Narguile: This was part of a beginner's set for learning to identify amber notes that my friend had, which is pretty cool. The manufacturer's description is: "a fruited amber honey mixed with the spiral curls of smoke of a blond tobacco, it conveys the Orient: hot, voluptuous, inspired by the savoury scents of the hookah." Oh goodness, I see what rydra_wong was talking about when she talked about the literary history of the oriental perfumes.
What I smelled: My notes say "honey? Vanilla? Dessert-y in a bpal way. I would put this on my person I think. After looking at the notes I think I can smell tobacco?". It's interesting that this had musk in it, according to the Fragrantica notes, but I didn't hate it. I wonder if I'd been assaulting my nose with fewer things and put on a good dab of it if the musk would have come out more and I would have had more of a reaction, or if maybe musk is not the complete deal-breaker I thought it was. I will say that now that I know it was supposed to smell like hookah, it totally smelled like hookah; I'm not around a whole lot of hookahs in my life at the moment, so I kept going "... familiar? Hippies? What?" without knowing why.
Parfum d'Empire Ambre Russe: manufacturer's notes say "tea, incense, vodka, champagne, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, ambergris, vanilla, leather"
What I smelled: I smelled this before looking at the description, and was absolutely convinced that I was smelling wrong and this couldn't be intended as boozily as I was smelling, so I finally wrote down "rum? Irish coffee?". After I looked at the notes I realized that in addition to sweetness and vodka notes I was in fact smelling the whackload of cinnamon, and some tea and smokiness, and maybe the birch and juniper that Fragrantica swears are in there. This was very, very sweet, but it was the first one I hit on this smell-round that was complicated and spiky through the sweetness, and that was pretty cool. After progressing through everything else on this list, I suspect that the thing I liked about it was the incense and possibly the tea.
Sonoma Scent Studio Champagne de Bois: Manufacturer's notes: Aldehydes, jasmine, clove, sandalwood , labdanum absolute, vetiver, amber.
What I smelled: I think the fact that it was named "champagne" made me interpret all those aldehydes as champagne. I also wrote down "vanilla and something kind of unpleasant", which, knowing me, was probably either cloves or jasmine. I am amazed at how often jasmine sneaks up on me.
Sonoma Scent Studio Rose Volupte: Manufacturer's notes say: Rose, plum, amber, labdanum absolute, sandalwood, cedar, vetiver, heliotrope, clove, cinnamon, oakmoss, subtle aldehydes.
What I smelled: I've been trying to reform my opinion of roses. They were on the Absolutely Not No Never smells list in my childhood household, to the point where I didn't actually smell a real alive rose until I was ten or eleven, and I remember it as a crushing early moment of Nature vs. Artifice, because by that point the smell of roses was so much more strongly tied in my mind to cheap laundry detergent than it was to the plant that I couldn't get over the association. I stood in the middle of this massive formal garden and felt disappointed right down to my boots, and also like I was doomed to never understand any flower references in literature because from that point on I would just think "Gain Extra Suds by any other name would smell just as much like laundromat".
Later I read Michael Pollan's excellent pre-famousness history of rose cultivation and understood that in fact the rose by any other name that Shakespeare was familiar with had itself later been scrubbed and sanitized, smell-wise, to turn it into the kind of tea roses that grew in Victorian formal gardens, and that there were still roses out there that probably smelled interesting and non-soapy, like the invasive but delightfully spicy-scented rosa multiflora that I had unknowingly been smelling for years. I felt much better. Lately I've been considering that maybe among the rose-derived smells in the world there are probably some that come from more interesting, non-Victorianized roses, though I don't know exactly how to find them.
In the bottle Rose Volupte smelled, in fact, like the kind of actual-plant-reproductive-organ spicy non-scrubbed-up rose that I'm curious about, so I put some on my skin, and it did a sonic boom from "spicy and probably interesting" into "soap" and then made a weird left turn into fake grape flavor. Once I read the notes I could smell the thing that is probably labdanum, and I think if I was willing to give it time there might be a lot more depth under the rose, but as was I was already braced for Rose Disappointment and scrubbed it off.
Chanel Coromandel: Man, Chanel fragrances can be hard to find good listings for. Everything I click on goes on about wooden screens and Coco Chanel's personality. Fine, I will hover over the little icons on Fragrantica and list them here: top notes: citruses and neroli. Middle notes: jasmine, rose, patchouli, and orris. Base notes: incense, olibanum, benzoin, woods, musk, tahitian vanilla, white chocolate.
What I smelled: in the vial: AUGH CATPEE. I mean clearly spices but also something I am intensely not enjoying that hits me first as catpee. It was so intriguingly awful that I put it on my wrist immediately, because I have heard of this happening, and in fact the second it hit skin it turned into honey and vanilla. Then my notes say "also it is becoming licorice or something! It just went rootbeery! What am I even doing? I smell kind of like a Pepsi!"
I did end up washing this off too, though I should have stuck with it and seen if anything happened past Pepsi. But that is where it landed, on smelling like a Pepsi.
Comme des Garcons Avignon: apparently Comme des Garcons did a series of smells that were supposed to evoke world religions and this the Catholicism one. The manufacturer's description has some very pretty language about old cathedrals and then lists the notes: "Roman chamomile, cistus oil, elemi, incense, vanilla, patchouli, palisander, ambrette seeds."
What I smelled: I think I have the smell privilege of not having grown up Catholic and having only the faintest idea what church incense smells like, so I thought I was smelling something woodsy or foresty, in the best possible way where I have never smelled anything so good before. And then my friend noted that that is frankincense and I went "ohhhhh". It didn't do anything spectacular on my skin besides smell exactly like it smelled in the bottle, where it was kind of woodsy and spicy and warm. This one I might honestly buy a sample of and wear on purpose, as opposed to for science. This was also the only one I smelled all evening that was zero percent floral and zero percent sweet, which I suspect was a strong factor.
This was also not the only unisex perfume, but it was the unisex-est of them, which is probably more predictive than I would like it to be.
Aftelier Secret Garden: so this one I'm almost embarrassed about liking so much, because it went on with exactly that same licorice-raspberry note as the Chanel Coromandel, but good instead of deeply annoying and cat-pee-ish, and it kept developing and getting more and more interesting to me. I scrubbed most of these after a couple of minutes or smelled them on paper/in-vial, but I put this one on and it kept getting better and cooler and more fun to smell, and then I looked at the notes on Fragrantica, and: civet and castoreum. Like, the real kind, from manufacturing deadstock. I mean I also noted some frutiness (bergamot and raspberry, says Fragrantica), and some woodsiness (Brazilian rosewood, says Fragrantica). But castoreum also smells like raspberries, according to some sources. It made me wonder if maybe the Coromandel had been trying for animalics with artificial sources and that's what didn't work for me. I even started picking up some actual recognizable animalic smell as it developed, like the fur of a clean animal, and I loved it a lot. I'm glad it's from deadstock, for sure, but also the perfume I most liked that smelled Like Perfume and not like an incense stick in a forest was the one with the actual catbutts in it. Boo.
It's worth noting that this actually has a whackton of florals that I normally think of myself as not liking, and yet I enjoyed the crap out of it. Possibly my love of catbutt and beaver butt is just that overwhelming. ... I will probably try to buy a sample of this if I buy any samples.
Bvlgari Black: my friend told me to close with this one, on the grounds that it's COMPLETELY BANANAS. I haven't had a chance to look at the notes until now, but I mostly huffed it (and put it on my skin after spraying it on paper, because it was just so confusing) and wrote down a list of increasingly artificial things: ("clinical? rubbery? like a dentist glove? new car smell?") and finally settled on "like the air inside a computer". On the skin it picked up some vanilla-y sweetness. Fragrantica says it smells rubbery/leathery with lurking vanilla and sweetness "like the romance hidden in the corners of the city".
Honestly I would call this more the smell of the movie Hackers, with the kind of teenagery associations I have with foodie vanilla hidden in this big staticky electronic smell. Also, I like how the bottle looks like a tire. That's pretty hardcore.
Perfume, it turns out, smells REALLY STRONG. I am learning that if I dilute essential oils in jojoba oil to the recommended concentrations (to avoid skin irritation, mostly) I have to cover a pretty good percentage of my body with the stuff to get anything like the sillage that most of the perfumes I've tried have had after I've washed my wrist once. I'm still experimenting with the woods and citrus thing - yesterday was cedar/lemon/lavender, and I do suspect that I smelled like hamsters and furniture a little, but it was also very pleasant and hung on a little longer than previous combinations have. After discovering via perfumes that I really do have a limited tolerance for sweetness, I'm also on the lookout for things I can stabilize smells with that aren't beeswax - it adds a really nice honey note, but after a while I start to feel a little sickly about it if I can't get a break from it.
Out in the world the Bradford pears are blooming, which fills the air with a kind of stale garbage smell, but at some point some considerate soul also planted a row of some white blooming plant around the dumpsters in the parking lot. I don't know what they are, but they smell like coffee flowers, which smell kind of like Lemon Pledge. So the rows of floral trees smell like garbage, but the row of actual garbage smells like the best kind of flowers. It's pretty good.
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Longer reply to follow, brain permitting, but: permision to link?
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Noooo, don't be. The "raw" notes are sometimes the most engaging and fun.
I feel a little bit like my notes here are like a baby trying to describe sunlight: SOMETHING IS HAPPENING TO ONE OF MY FIVE SENSES. I DO NOT HAVE THE TOOLS TO TELL YOU WHAT, EXACTLY.
That's where we all are with smell to some extent, I think. I mean, you can build some vocabulary and learn how to identifying which note is which, but when it comes to describing overall effects -- we're all reduced to floundering and waving our hands around and saying, "It smells spiky! It smells like burning Barbie dolls, but in a good way! It smells like a woman who had some complicated affairs in her youth and has just seen someone more interesting over your shoulder!" *g*
And the most eloquent responses come when people just jump in and go with it, in one way or another.
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Awww. But it sounds like you got mostly "soapy floral" from that one; I wouldn't write off chypres just yet.
You should check out
http://lindensphinx.dreamwidth.org/439200.html
Also, you're doing a mean job starting to define what interests you and what you might be curious about: incense, tea, complicated spiky smells, animalics (don't worry, the modern synthetic animalics are very very good so you should be able to enjoy some stuff not from actual beavers/cats), no sweetness, no florals, possibly interest in complicated realistic spicy roses.
(And I am rubbing my hands with glee and going: I can work with this! WILL YOU MAYBE BE WANTING RECS I THINK I WILL HAVE RECS FOR YOU.)
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Uh, yes. Please be reccing me the things if they occur!
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http://lindensphinx.dreamwidth.org/439022.html -- with me babbling in the comments about some of Tauer's rose scents
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Gendered marketing is inevitably more than somewhat arbitrary, but there are a bunch of rose perfumes which are widely regarded as masculine, unisex, or at least things that guys can wear without people thinking they're trying to make some sort of point. Which in practice tends to mean things that aren't overtly "floral" (apart from the rose-ness), sweet or high femme.
Which is generally about where my tastes lie, and possibly yours too by the sound of it.
Relevant:
http://www.basenotes.net/threads/227843-Which-is-the-best-ROSE-fragrance-%28for-men-or-unisex%29
http://www.fragrantica.com/board/viewtopic.php?id=52060
The Tauer roses get cited a fair few times, I note.
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And yeah, I don't have anything against the sweet smells, but I think I am probably about to discover that my skin will pick up a small trace of anything sweet and make it SUPER BLATANT (I hit honey-vanilla with Bulgari Black in the first minute, which I am getting the impression is not a universal finding, and I just realized that the sugary smell in my homemade stuff is actually the fact that straight-up cheap lavender oil goes Universal Female Bath Product on me with irritating rapidity unless I add a lot of spice or wood for ballast.) I am much more interested by the harsher/spicier smells, I think? If I could make lavender stay camphorous forever I would be very happy.
(And of course part of me has a much easier time approaching any heavily-gendered field of human knowledge - exercise/shoes/clothes/nail polish colors ffs - if I start with stuff that's somewhere between WE ARE MAKING A POINT ABOUT GENDER and LET'S EVERYONE JUST FORGET THEY HAVE BODIES IN THE FIRST PLACE. I think that was one of the attractions of Avignon for me - the smell was very "never mind all that, here's an opinion we have about medieval architecture". Which is all a little rich coming from someone who's wearing a magenta circle skirt today, but really what can you do, humans are complicated.)
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*bounces*
I was going to rec my beloved Comme des Garcons Tea (from their Series 1: Leaves), as a very tea (lapsang souchong) perfume, with the caveat that many people find it way too harsh -- I think I may have been recalling a review of it when I referenced "burning Barbie dolls":
http://www.luckyscent.com/product/23002/tea-by-comme-des-garcons-series-1-leaves
http://www.basenotes.net/fragrancereviews/fragrance/26121466
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I think I'm going to do an even ten samples from luckyscent, and I've got two spots left that I want to use for intellectual purchases: is there anything you can recommend that is either hilariously full of skank, or a good intellectual example of a chypre that is not soapy? floral?
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CDG also have opinions about packing tape:
http://www.luckyscent.com/product/21626/eau-de-parfum-by-comme-des-garcons
Though it is a floral ...
I think I'm going to do an even ten samples from luckyscent, and I've got two spots left that I want to use for intellectual purchases
Ooh, that is a good thought to ponder (though I'm not sure luckyscent has my top skank options ... hrm). What are your first eight?
(Btw, I'm having a not-great brain day, so this is very welcome distraction for me.)
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Five CDGs seem like plenty to start with; I think there are others you might well relate to (Black is wonderful smoky woods and incense), but IMHO it's more fun to sample a wide range of perfumers.
Any idea how you feel about leather scents?
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I tried some of my friend's leather scents, but they were in the amber family and were pretty vanilla-honey on me. I know you did a writeup on leather, but I had trouble visualizing it: does it basically just smell like shoes?
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Also, I am reassessing whether I need all that CDG incense now, so if you have more than two recs for interesting learning experiences I might rearrange stuff.
Thinking out loud
http://www.luckyscent.com/product/52700/knize-ten-by-knize
Rose 31 I've only smelled a few times, but it's very frequently recced as a great masculine/unisex rose, with bonus animalic undertones:
http://www.luckyscent.com/product/46801/rose-31-by-le-labo
(You might feel you've got enough roses, though.)
The hilariously-skankiest thing I know of on there is:
http://www.luckyscent.com/product/49821/absolue-pour-le-soir-by-maison-francis-kurkdjian
BUT: it's got a lot of honey in (not to mention musk), so it might very well just turn into death by sugar on you.
This is infamous -- but, again, musk:
http://www.luckyscent.com/product/36136/-muscs-koublai-khan-by-serge-lutens
I hear good and skanky things (and read the reviews; they're hilarious):
http://www.luckyscent.com/product/15268/al-oudh-by-l-artisan-parfumeur
Dzing! has a wonderful living-animal-fur note, but I suspect it might go too sweet on you:
http://www.luckyscent.com/product/15211/dzing-by-l-artisan-parfumeur
Re: Thinking out loud
Re: Thinking out loud
Musk is weird because some of the synthetic musks got seized on early on for perfuming laundry products, with the result that for a lot of people in North America in particular, their smell codes as "clean." And thus there are things like a Body Shop musk which wouldn't be considered as "animalic" at all.
Re: Thinking out loud
Re: Thinking out loud
Because: a) you know you like work by the "nose" already, b) hilariously skanky but not in a way that's based round musks (since you don't know whether musk's a deal-breaker by itself yet) -- ETA: and with lots of civet and castoreum, so you get to see how you react to the synthetic versions, c) spicy-woody and "unisex".
Re: Thinking out loud
Re: Thinking out loud
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Since he is a (cis, het) boy who rocks shoulder-length curls and regularly wears a hot pink t-shirt at the climbing wall, I feel he may be open to a certain amount of editorial commentary.
Not that he's any more high femme than I am, but if something suits him, I don't think he's going to be too hung up on "I am a MAN and can therefore only wear something in a rectangular bottle called MANLY SPORT FRESH WOODY SHOWER SPLASH POUR HOMME. FOR MEN."
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Incidentally, I have identified the gentleman in my life for whom Jack Tauer Incense Rose is perfectly in-character. The last time I saw him he was wearing a suit with a skinny tie and eyeliner.
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He keeps flicking through my copy of Perfumes: The A-Z Guide whenever he's round at my place, and yesterday spontaneously offered me "subtle and perverse" as a prompt for finding things for him.
Sometimes I feel very lucky in my friends. *g*
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Which made me dance with glee, because one of my first thoughts had been: dear god I bet he'd be devastating in MKK. Followed by maniacal cackling. And it's cool for me to smell it on someone whose skin chemistry it meshes with (on me, it smells like male sweat, if that makes any sense, so I can enjoy it but it doesn't smell like me).
[ETA: to have had the chance to smell it on someone. Sadly, our relationship is not such that I can just creepily sniff him whenever I want to.]
On him, you get some of the "clean male sweat" thing, but also the downy rose-beeswax prettiness of it. This is a thing he can rock.
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Having now read the Fragrantica for MKK, yeah, that sounds like a good smell for someone to be devastating in. I'm really interested in the rose and caraway combination, though it seems like it's not what floats to the top. I wish I wasn't so frustratingly beholden to the naturals, wearing-wise! There are so many interesting smells to smell, and smell like. Having found a musk that works, though (in Musc Ravageur) I can see why people like musks - it really does hit this back-brain note of interesting bodily smell
Though white florals can still go jump in a lake.
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Indeed. Though on him (and me) it's way less skanktastic and OTT than some of the Fragrantica reviews make it sound (I have issued a warning that it's not an appropriate office scent, nonetheless).
And on some people, it goes all the way into purring kitten innocuousness.
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Check out
http://thatyourefuse.dreamwidth.org/tag/smells
She thought she didn't like florals, then discovered that Piguet's Fracas (excellently described by
She can really relate to the great femme perfumes (whereas I can admire them as art or wear them as dress-up but they're not me), so it's particularly cool for me to read her explorations.
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I've used shea butter to mix with EOs, since it was what I had - also makes smells easier to handle than a liquid carrier, for someone prone to dropping things. It probably is a lot more neutral-smelling than beeswax. My pot of shea butter is just starting to turn rancid-smelling (still suitable for use on feet) so I may buy something different next time to see how it goes.
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