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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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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.