Perfume / Cologne

Yes.

I found the bottle, it's this:

https://www.aiostores.com/products/xo-deodorant-aqua-cool-for-men

yeah, that’s deodorant

keep it to a quick spray under each armpit, tracer jr.

yes but it’s also an, er, odorant, it has a scent

look, I don't rub my solid deodorant stick all over my body

wait, am I doing this wrong?

regardless of how they're described by the manufacturer, those aquatic scents marketed to teenage boys (and adult men) are too strong and are very synthetic-smelling but not appealing

one bad thing about spraying cologne on your wrists is if you lick something off your wrists later you will get cologne on your tongue which doesn't taste good.

I was dipping into Perfumes: The Guide recently (both versions) to see what was said about two things I recently tried, and don’t think Tania Sanchez’s guide to discovering your taste had been posted here:

Stage 1: Mother’s bathroom. Early adventures splashing on Mom’s Shalimar/No. 5/Miss Dior/ Tabu/Your-Memory-Here with the bathroom door shut. Belief that Old Spice/Brut/English Leather is the natural odor that God has caused fathers to emit after shaving.

Stage 2: Ambition and naïveté. Either given a perfume by an adult or inspired to buy one at puberty: a sophisticated thing that embodies an unknown world of adult pleasures and/or a cheerful cheap spray to wear happily by the gallon.

Stage 3: Flowers and candy. Phase of belief that feminine perfumes should smell flowery or candy-like and that everything else is an incomprehensible perversion.

Stage 4: First love. Encounter with moving greatness. Wonder and awe. Monogamy.

Stage 5: Decadence. An ideology of taste, either of the heavy-handed or of the barely there. The age of leathers, patchoulis, tobaccos, ambers; or, alternately, the age of pale watercolors in vegetal shades. An obsession with the hard-to-find.

Stage 6: Enlightenment. Absence of ideology. Distrust of the overelaborate, overexpensive, and arcane. Satisfaction in things in themselves.

I’d like to think I’m a stage 6 but maybe I’m more between 5 &6 since I’ve never met a leather or amber or both that I won’t at least try.

Anyway.

Guerlain - L’Heure Bleue

Saw this on one of our bookshelves coming out of the shower last night and put some on, then did the same this morning. Have never knowingly tried this before. Tania S gives this a glowing write up in Perfumes the Guide, but has since said she doesn’t much care for the new formula. I can say based on two wears this is definitely night not day; it’s dense and full of strange ingredients like anise and violet (my two most abiding impressions, anise to start and violet after a couple of hours). The powdery/soapy vibe leaves me cold on a lot of things (mainly no 5) but I didn’t get that here.

Hermes - Galop

This one only came out in 2016 but it’s not routinely sold at concessions at airports (my main source of trying stuff atm), which surprised me. I read a review that was like “it smells like a rich person’s tackroom,” and yeah, maybe? It’s leather and rose but the leather is cool and smooth and the rose is delicate and not overpowering. It seems to stick on me a while but I need another wear to be certain (also for it to come back on fragrancex because it’s expensive).

lately have been wearing montale red vetiver - bought it out of spite bc i thought it would piss off my officemates but it's quite charming and surprisingly light, feels transparent with the vetiver being v newsprint-y and... hollow in a ellena way? and the pepper comes off kinda citrusy so oddly it works for florida summer heat. guess i need to finally pull the trigger on kouros if i want to annoy people lol

have been trying a handful of samples from the zoologist house as well as some cdg frags:

zoologist camel - v rich sweet dried fruits fades to churchy benzoin and v dark smoky oud. might be a full bottle buy, so lovely
"""" civet - not as animalic as i was expecting, smells like a powdery sandalwood and iris that is v comforting
"""" beaver - kind of a weird sickly sweet musk, wears v linearly and kinda made me nauseous after a while
"""" elephant - coconut cream pie. not for me.
"""" rhinoceros - wtf is the opening... smells like a petting zoo for about a minute then dries down to a pleasant woody note. somehow
reminds me of some brand of pencils i used in like 3rd grade.
"""" Macaque - probably my favorite of the bunch, bright fresh yuzu fades to japanese incense and hinoki cypress. smells like if cdg
hinoki had staying power. love love love.

the CDGs:
concrete - a little disappointing as i was hoping it smelled like actual concrete. actually a weirdly gourmandish rose that smells like
turkish delight, with clean musk in the base. leans more femme imo but i enjoyed wearing it.
copper - the opening is a green explosion of galbanum and realistic metallic notes, kind of disconcerting at first but couldn't stop
smelling. fades to a strong woody note kinda like bleu de chanel. lasts for days if you don't wash it off.
amazingreen - watery green tea. not a green fougere like i was hoping. pleasant, but fades in minutes to nothingness.
wonderoud - v powdery oud and sandalwood. kinda linear, but only lasts about a 30 mins before it becomes nearly undetectable.
avignon - frankincense myrrh and benzoin. so nice, wish it lasted longer.
ouarzazate - my favorite of the bunch. surprisingly animalic with some funky spices over a base of leather and amber.

Wow, that Zoologist line looks fascinating

from what i've tried so far it really is unique, can see these fragrances being very polarizing. other than the above ones i liked, i really want to try bee, moth, and squid

also i take back what i said about amazingreen; with a heavier spray it has better longevity, the marine notes in the opening are more apparent and the drydown has a really nice inkiness to it (the "gunpowder accord" the description mentions?)... kind of a perfect office scent, can't conceive of anyone being offended by this

clouds, from where did you get your samples? general sample website, specific brand website, or you live within humanoid travel distance from actual brand boutique or whatnot?

i always assumed that what ppl refereed to as the blue aspect of amazingreen was supposed to impart a feeling of humidity or dampness like you were in a rain forest or jungle to support all the leafy green notes that evoke a verdant environment. it works for me because i bring this to the experience, but, is this too much to ask? i'm going down this path because i've read criticism of amazingreen that's the blue aspect makes it aquatic and generic like dolce and gabbana light blue which is understandable because calone is calone, regardless of your intentions of how it's supposed to be received. but it hits me differently because i have a different concept of what it's supposed to represent.

like, when i first read about imaginary authors i was v v intrigued, because i was old school previously and now with the internet and opinions i was introduced to fragdom and fragnerdery and the idea of narrative perfumery blew my mind to smithereens. polo was polo and giorgio red was giorgio red. i knew there were ingredients but so what. now you can smell a storyline? boom, for real! all the individual notes represent a different part of the mis-en-scene, but what if i didn't know the context, and just smelled an imaginary authors fragrance in an uninformed context; would it smell any different from a non-narrative fragrance? i'm not emotionally equipped to deal with such matters.

nb eternity was my last purchase for a long while so when ck one came out i was confused by the concept. unisex? you have butch and femme, what is this sorcery with these hot sexy models all wearing the same fragrance? and gap grass? why the hell would you make a fragrance that smelled like an actual THING? a thing, fer crissakes. that was an alien concept. fragrances were in and of themselves, not referential. now, unlike most people who would use a time machine to go back and kill hitler or invest in microsoft i would go back and buy up all the gap grass and a bunch of 80s nike air jordwn t-shirts, but mostly the gap grass. that shit was glorious.

also can i get a round of applause for the ilx collective in general? come on up and get your trophy. if the medium is the message, then what is fragrance mediating, or is that the wrong construction? we're figuring out something, and like ron funches says, molecular structure ain't nothing but a thing. fragrane is a good field for that kind of thing. it's the optimal field. why does anything mean anything? who knows, but here we are. why do we we think i matters that we ascribe aesthetic qualities to purely sensory input; why do i think armani pour homme and cartier roadster sport are the olfactory equivalent to the auditory sensation of slave to love? people dance in certain ways to different kinds of music, so there's a correlation between media, so wondering what fragrance is the most pouissin-like should not be too outre. i bet that kind of thing already exists. i know that one brand had a scent called warhol but we need to get together and monetize this concept. the egon schiele line would be exceedingly angular, whatever that means. we go from there. ilxellent fragrances do or die.

i think that was reggie watts, not ron funches

I was wearing my Fox in the Flowerbed today and yesterday and I think I like it best in cold weather despite the name. It lingers longer and it’s warm and bright.

i'm referencing the eternal return in this post. both the concept and the jules shear album.

thee is a story about what i got for christmas fragrance-wise and how it was the same thing i got someone else, thus the eternal return. then i thought about how memories burn hard is as melancholic and lachrymose a song as a different corner, and if memories burn hard was a fragrance it would have papyrus as a prominent note. that's pretty much it. fragrances are songs. songs are paintings, and paintings are fragrances.

look back, look back through the red and rotted leaves, when jewelry turned your head and brought you to your knees. letters burns easy, with one little spark, but i'm afraid memories burn hard.

i love how sad fragrances can make me feel.

idk, otoh i'm ruining a pretty good thread by imposing my thesis about aesthetic synesthesia on all you nice people. i know exactly what in between days smells like and i know what pink turns to blue smells like. i know the scent of talking to someone on the phone and there's somethin you anted to say ut it's hall and oates, somethings are bettr left unsaid. there's [probably a dry vetiver in there and some sweet saffron. maye it's the sterility of a overwrought frank stella installation, waiting to fall over onto some stupid gallery visitor. i have emotions about things.

me too, slugbunny! almost everything you write makes sense to me, resonates. a cranberry voice, a musk and concrete saturday, not just direct (diagetic) associations of grassy=field, etc, but the associative ones that work along the same axes as metaphor, poetry, good fiction. the way an electric guitar solo can sound like springtime.

for me the challenge wrt perfume is that i am very bad at registering and -remembering- the "names" of smells. no matter how many times i sniff a chypre or whatever, i'm still like "what's that?" when i read about it - until i pick up a bottle, inhale, and am like "oh riiiiight, that." which leads to v clumsy personal mnemonics like "no matter how much you like the colour green or notion of 'greenness,' nota bene sean taht you do not like 'green' fragrances!"

Need to hear more about the Christmas gifts!

not really much of a story! for his birthday i got my brother the dior homme that had been discontinued and replaced with a blah version and also bvlgari aqua which i think had also been discontinued because prices on fragrancenet are going up. that transitioned them from ok designer stuff that's just always around to cultural artifacts from a specific time period that are full of memories and nostalgia and longing for eras past. for christmas he got me the exact same thing. maybe not an eternal return, but a return nonetheless.

somehow not being able to get something anymore makes that thing more meaningful and then i associate that thing with a wistful 80s pop song like coming up close or we close our eyes by oingo boino or pop goes the world.

a cranberry voice, a musk and concrete saturday: a hermeneutical deconstruction of classical aesthetics from watteau to oldenberg. beatrice treseangient, phd emeritus princeton university, padgett press, 1972.

I was influenced by perfumetok and bought a travel size of Eauso Vert’s Purple Noon. I don’t know what drugs these ppl are on but this smells like some generic boring cheap bullshit. This person claimed the smell was so good that she gets stopped on the street by strangers asking her what she’s wearing but that is clearly a lie and EV is must be paying her. There is absolutely no way anyone is going out of their way to ask a stranger about this perfume.

that's disappointing. there are a number of products (including fragrances!) that have some very weird social media virality that's definitely artificial

My boyfriend gets a perennial Christmas gift from mom: a section of samples of various colognes, he selects his favourite, and then can redeem an entire bottle. Problem: it’s all drugstore cologne, so he wafts a wristful of this Versace or that Gauthier and I cannot help but respond with unenthusiasm

So for his birthday? I recreated the gift, but using a selection of my own personal favorites, a few rungs up the ladder. The luxury store doesn’t typically give out samples of their Creeds or Frederic Malles but I convinced them. He was delighted!

His pick at the end of it all was a Jo Malone (the grapefruit) which was both positive (it’s not one of the more expensive choices) and a negative (I was hoping he’d pick the Bigarade Concentré because it’s my personal favourite)

I was travelling last month so I held off on getting the bottle until I was at the Jo flagship store in London, where I knew I could get a complementary engraving. Duty fulfilled.

I typically buy my cologne in the country of origin so to reduce import fees— my preference is Creed Virgin Island Water. I’d run out a couple years ago because I wasn’t travelling through pandemic. In Dublin, a friend took me to one of the most head-expanding perfume stores I’d ever seen— Parfumarija. The two staff members were super adventurous and knowledgeable and I smelled things I’d never smelled before.

I ended up being tipped off to the Marc-Antoine Barrois line, and fell in love with and purchased a bottle of Ganymede, which apparently won a bunch of awards when it was introduced five or so years ago.

Encelade by the same maker was also a new favourite— reminded me of the CDG Rhubarb scent but with massive adjustments and improvements. Cologne enthusiasts: seek out these Barrois creations, I’m an enormous fan

Virgin Island Water is the first fragrance I bought my now-husband. I thought it was nice but my now mother in law said he smelled like someone had poured a drink over him…

Anyway I haven’t heard of that place, mainly because I don’t spend much time in Dublin when I’m home but an interesting mix of brands. I wish I’d known you were into perfume cos I’d have recommended you visit Bloom and Les Scenteurs for niche/smaller stuff and also Liberty and Selfridges, the latter for the extremely passionate Fracas woman.

Ooooh I will visit both, next time, thank you for the tip.

My cologne story is interesting, maybe, I'll type it. For many years I found cologne (both practically and conceptually) to be obnoxious. Then, in 2005, I was backing up David Bowie in New York City, and David arrived in a car, and I was adjacent to the door of the car when he emerged. I am reasonably sure that he had just-applied a cologne upon emerging, because the smell was powerful, and also so spectacular that in that one moment, my outlook-regarding cologne entirely changed. I don't remember if I remarked to David about how wonderful the fragrance was, but I know that I didn't ask it to be identified.

For years I remembered the scent mentally but had no idea what it might've been. I started wearing Le Labo Bergamot, because that was popular amongst my gay friends in New York. I was shopping in Paris with my boyfriend a few years later and we were looking at colognes, and we came to the Creed desk. I smelled a number of them on the card stock, and when I smelled the Silver Mountain Water, I immediately said "that's it! that's the scent that David Bowie was wearing!" I googled it afterward, and discovered that Creed had designed it specifically for Grace Kelly, but that Bowie was also known to wear it. (Articles published later, including after Bowie's death, confirmed that this was the case). I bought a small bottle of the Silver Mountain Water, but soon realised that it was simply too ostentatious, too honeysuckle-forward for anybody who wasn't an A-list celebrity to really pull off. I still have that bottle, unfinished, on my shelf, some fifteen years later.

I did develop an interest in Creed colognes, as a result. Vetiver is lovely but somewhat too run-of-the-mill to justify the price. Millisme, despite apparently being one of Creed's bestsellers, smells like urine to my nose after 30 minutes on the skin. Virgin Island Water was The One for me, and it continues to be the scent I fall back on. Creed later introduced the Aventus scent, which I REALLY love, and is my go-to gift for people in my life who deserve expensive presents.

Virgin Island Water is one that I can imagine being fine with an imposter version of. Silver Mountain Water, which is the only Creed I love but do not yet own, no way.

Erolfa, though, has become my signature scent when it's warmer than 60 out.

Every time I put on Silver Mountain Water I find myself feeling bashful about it, like I should be in full drag or something, like there's nothing in my closet that could possibly match its ostentatiousness

xps that’s a great story! Have you ever read Perfumes: The Guide? I think you’d really like it and I don’t know if we’ve ever discussed it (our mutual friend felicity is also a big fan). The updated version covers a lot of niche stuff but the original is classic.

One of the reasons I love the writing so much is, besides it being pretty funny, they will tell you that fragrance is as personal as fingerprints. Groundbreaking I know but! The notion of a scent that suits everyone doesn’t work. I don’t always agree with their assessments but I think the book is really useful in helping you to find things you may like. And they are writing from a place of deep love and knowledge and that’s always pretty compelling. I strongly recommend it, it’s a great read. Here’s some of the reviews for a sample of what it’s like:

https://i.postimg.cc/VsZxCXcz/0079997-C-A3-D2-4775-9859-876-BC8-B53-EC4.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/zvQ4YYky/82-D2-FC92-0-A3-D-418-B-BF8-A-9-D2-B7-B8537-EA.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/yN7Q5Nzf/2-CA2-ACBD-E4-C5-4-FD1-883-C-79-C103-BB3168.jpg

I recently finished my Fracas I have had since 2009(?) and it was still perfect; I am getting another for my birthday. Really hope it hasn’t changed again.

Every time I put on Silver Mountain Water I find myself feeling bashful about it, like I should be in full drag or something, like there's nothing in my closet that could possibly match its ostentatiousness

Holy shit I'm buying it right now!

Well, two weeks ago I bought that book, and thousands of dollars and multiple tours of suburban strip-mall discounter perfumers (and a couple of debatable eBay purchases) later, I have a stupid number of fragrances on hand. I think I have about 30 bottles on the go right now. My favourite is Chanel Sycomore EdP.

Luca Turin's specific dogma is a mixed-blessing entrypoint into this world, I feel educated in all these amazing ways, I'm easily picking out passing odours at concerts and on the street, I feel genuinely elated to sit and work with the stink of something nice evaporating off my skin to reveal something even nicer. Mixed-blessing: aside from the bias-against-what-he-thinks-is-bullshit that his book instills in you (my nose is prejudicially unsympathetic when a scent guy urges me to try a Marly or a Xerjoff), Turin's entire historical mode does seem to be one of documenting a dying empire. Those classic Dior femmes? can't get them anymore, and their reformulations are bad. That once-inspired Amouage experiment? they lost the plot and even their classics are changed and/or discontinued. Gucci Rush? reformulated, now discontinued. Mitsouko? not what it used to be. All the joy of discovery I've felt in wearing Jicky for the first time has been tempered by reading about the extinction of sandalwood, the restriction of oakmoss and citrals, the triumph of commerce over art, and the desperate weirdness of people trying to buy (or trying to sell) fifteen-year old bottles of Dior Homme and all the identifying markers that will ensure you're getting the iris of Polgé Jr.'s original formulation.

It's interesting, too, online music communities are one thing, online gaming communities another, but I've encountered no weirder online community than the fragrance community. It's definitely fun.

no one is doing perfume reviews like her pic.twitter.com/BiJqoWi0XK

— brandi (@finalgirItrope) June 26, 2023

who the hell is that? i am aflame with envy. the effortless, unhinged economy, the subtle off-whjte coloring, the tasteful thickness of it.

i got cowboy grass for christmas. i looked for reviews online and none of the bigger reviewers reviewed it, so i assume it's not that big a deal? one review i found claimed it was redundant: it was an inferior copy of cdg 2 man or encre noire. i have both of those and i need all three of these things and none can replace the other. i have no idea if you should regard it or not but for me, it's my horse, wyoming plain, barn jacket scent. way off over the horizon there's an oil refinery on fire; maybe or not i can see the plume but i sure as heck can smell it. either ds or durga or both get the appeal of industrial smells. i haven't yet smelled cosmico but i can imagine.

lavender is in everything but always different somehow. i'm wearing caron pour un homme and it's the only one where lavender smells just like the essential oil or the lavender in castille soaps. a lot of things also have bergamot but only some of them remind me of earl grey tea? makes me question my basic proficiency at identifying rudimentary scent profiles. like in the cowboy grass that's def bergamot but in most other things i just get a vague citrusyness.

flamboyant goon tie included, who is you publisher and when is your book coming out?

p.s. i call my horse d'artagnan, although his government name is michael freeberg. we're both big michael york fans and did not take his passing well, and agree that the best bit of cinematic history was the "i'm basil exposition, from british intelligence" parts of austin powers. d'artagnan informs me that york is still with us, so i guess i rescind that comment. maybe i was thinking of someone else. probably connery.

xp El Cosmico is pretty miraculous imo; it just about nails the "I don't know why but I like the smell of gasoline" conceit

Anyone used this?

https://www.labourandwait.co.uk/collections/bathroom/products/4711-cologne

(Pondering as an Xmas gift but haven't had whiff).

commodity milk is my new crush

My mom wore 4711 when I was growing up! I liked it but haven’t smelled it for ages so I can’t really describe it. Fresh and citrusy without smelling like any particular fruit. Unisex for sure. I wear Cartier EDC and it is somewhat similar iirc.

I have 4711, I spritz it liberally first thing, as an accompaniment to my coffee making. Eau de Cologne is meant to be a brief ride, not a long-lasting perfume. It smells of lemon and neroli, and there is a synthetic chemical in it I can’t identify but I once described to my bf as smelling “like a concave surface, like you’re smelling the shape of a red blood cell or a clean bathroom sink.”

As Eau de Colognes go, this is the best choice for daily usage as intended, that is, it’s good value for money. If you want this smell as a long-lasting perfume (why would you? but if you do) then try Tom Ford Neroli Portofino, which was specifically designed as “4711 as an Eau de Parfum” iirc. If you want a nicer but more expensive Eau de Cologne, there are (pricey) alternatives that I’ve smelled but cannot bring myself to splurge on; I saw a 200 mL vintage beehive bottle of my favourite Guerlain EDC Imperiale last week in a random shop, but at 280 Euro I passed.

Also it’s worth mentioning that 4711 makes amazing upholstery spray. I have an atomizer of it in my living room and spritz the couch before guests arrive and always get compliments

my mom used to have 4711! the only perfume or cologne i remember her ever using

I like Imperiale, and the non-vintage 100ml version is not expensive. Guerlain pretty much does everything right ime.

Anybody have an opinion on the defunct Minotaure by Paloma Picasso? I love it and cherish my one bottle of it but you have to get the original version which has more staying power and it evolves.

Imperiale (and Eau de Guerlain, and “Coq”) are all so pricey for what that liquid is supposed to do! My fave of them all is Chanel’s Eau De Cologne, but it’s just impossible to imagine spending that much money on something I use like a freshener

I do agree that Guerlain is generally the best :)

i got my brother dior eau sauvage for christmas. i couldn't think of anything else. it's sort of a steve mcqueen wore it, who are you to disagree type of thing. it's eternal.

Is Eau Sauvage different from the one that has Johnny Depp’s cunt face polluting duty free everywhere?

hell yes