Perfume / Cologne

In the mid-90s or so, my roommate took me to some mall store in the Delaware Valley area where you could mix your own fragrances. I remember there were glass containers of fragrance with glass swizzle sticks in them that you could pull out and smell.

Does anybody remember anything like that?

Body Shop!

Was it???? I'll be damned.

Yup I did it too and my scent was groooooss

Totally forgot about that!!

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/art-and-olfaction-awards-what-did-qaddafi-death-smell-like

why

add to list of "links I will never click"

No no it's actually really interesting!

It's about an art exhibit of smells.

The Art and Olfaction awards. The award winner that created a smell narrative of celebrity deaths is only a part of the article.

just got in another shipment of scents from my friend joseph

excited :D

Got CdG Amazingreen for xmas, reviews of it are so middling but I am telling you it smells so fucking incredible, a bit masculine but definitely not assertively so, very foresty and green with hints of like gunpowder and spice, it is like everything I have ever wanted in a fragrance. I might like it even more than Margiela's "untitled". Cannot recommend enough.

stop assaulting my disposable income!!

get a tester of it, all these ppl whine and moan abt how very BLUE it is and how very PEDESTRIAN and MASS-MARKET it is, and i agree that it's much more approachable and less challenging than many other CdG frags but it does NOT read pedestrian or mass-market to me, it seems v unique and interesting, and also i'm not really getting the blue, it seems so green to me

I mean I know you are v into CdG Black and also wearing black clothes and Amazingreen is much softer so idk

I am wearing a $3.50 Acqua di Gio knockoff. The scent is dead on but fades quickly.

nah, I had a tester it's nice

It pains me to say it, but I don't think I've ever heard a better Badn

was just looking for Stevie's recommendation and have to say amazingreen is really nice

It's great but its longevity is poor and it stays very close. I couldn't spent £80 on something that disappears after an hour. It is a really beautiful scent for 30 minutes though. One of my favourites but doesn't have staying power.

yaasssss

rn I am into a bunch of these things I got at some boutique perfumirie in Berlin:

https://www.frau-tonis-parfum.com/en/

I just bought four Demeter frags for super cheap! Dirt, Grass, Tomato, and Greenhoue (the first 3 were $25 ea and came in a set for $30 total, which was great bcz I was specifically looking to buy Dirt and Grass).

Have not tried them on yet but am super stoked

(also Greenhouse was a free gift for ordering the $30 set, idk what they are doing over there but I'm not complaining)

I'm realizing that I've gone from "dabbling in frags w/ a slight curiosity" to, like, being in possession of 20 diff frags now (most of them v small testers but still)

slippery slope

been wearing a mix i made of black poplar, douglas fir, rosewood, hinoki and orange lately

can we just take a minute to appreciate what a great name for a perfume 'Fracas' is

Better than http://oldschoolmemories.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/tramp.jpg?

but not as good as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPKigfGYwKE

the demeter stuff is p cool, whether in the context of it being used in theatre, or as a cologne, or just for general amusement. dirt is really good as a cologne tho.

the earl grey one is nice. there are so many. there's one called funeral home that is good if you want to wear a strange scent as a joke.

in theatre??

i think my new frag is gon b 1 spritz each of dirt and grass

my boyf and i saw funeral home on the web page and were horrified

there's an immersive theatre company called punchdrunk and they use the scents a lot in their shows. like you walk into a room and it is a forest and smells of dirt. their only running show is in nyc at the moment, sleep no more - i think that uses some demeter stuff too, most of their shows do. i've noticed other companies copying this a bit.

people still do this?

rather than put an air freshener in my car I used a half dozen sprays of a nice neutral scent on a paper towel and threw it in the back seat

smells way good in there

Which chemicals?

ethanol mostly but that evaporates real quick

I'm wearing CB I Hate Perfume's Soaked Earth, kind of an evolution of Dirt by the same perfumer. Good rainy day scent.

is that the one that's milky white? I think I've tried that before and I liked it a lot; it was the first thing I thought of when I smelled Dirt (well, the second after "omg this smells like dirt")

Yes - it's one of their accords, a building block for other scents. I also have the North Atlantic accord, a really fresh but delicate scent I tend to use in warm weather. Soaked Earth has a bit more of an organic quality than Dirt, and I suspect it may play a role in some of their earthier scents like Wild Hunt and Invisible Monster.

i have a tester of lalique encre noire and it's really compelling. not saying you should like it but i can't stop sniffing my arm. it's vetiver-heavy like terre d'hermes but replace the orange with cyress. it's supposed to have an inky note to it and i don't know if it's power of suggestion but i have an inkstone and some inksticks with the japanese characters on them and a bamboo brush for doing swoopy washes and that's the concrete manifestation of this. i like it.

i also have the narciso rodriguez for him bleu noir which i bought straight up from the department store; it was so good i didn't want to wait to dick around online and buy it cheaper. it's just a good and quality scent if you like that kind of thing. the regular narciso rodriguez for him is supposed to be a take on the classic aromatic fougeres from back when but they didn't have it. anyone familiar with it?

in the same category i sampled the cartier declaration essence. also vetiver-heavy, though not as intense, with lime and tea top notes. nice, and relaxed. one time i told a girl she was cute and she was insulted. i told her, you don't even know. i think that it's the same sort of thing; you can attack by retreating. not as immediate as terre d'hermes or encre noire but it keeps working on me.

also i was gifted bvlgari aqua marine. it has that seaweed note which comes off as swamp thing initially and i was like that ren and stimpy horse with the "no sir, i don't like it" but it dries down to a different type of marine note: cold, murky lake water instead of salty sea breezes like the usual. it really is chilling, like diving off a dock at a lakeside campsite in late september after the boys of summer have gone, but you realize the clouds have obscured the sun and it's really too cold out to be in the water and you get out and you're shivering and a bit stank and you dry off with a towel and get all up into the campfire but the chill is set into your bones. that's what i get, which is pretty refreshing in this heat right now.

others i think i like:

dolce and gabbana the one
hermes un jardin sur le nil
bvlgari black (just black, not man in black or man black)

i'm sticking to designer mostly because niche is pricey.

hermes concentre d'orange verte i also like enough.

"cypress" not "cyress" for the lalique. cyress i believe was the only good thing abt real world boston.

nb i know he's cyrus but jokes.

i looked it up, it's syrus. joke still holds.

jason still kind of a dick, although there was that time when he and syrus and sean were going to get the log for the kids at the youth center to do the log rolling thing and "more than a feeling" came on the radio and sean instinctively turned it up and he and jason bonded over that intersection where they both visualized maryanne walking away and the division within the house dissipated, at least in that moment, so i guess he's ok, but syrus was like, whatever.

i'm really focused on vetiver-based scents at the moment, is what i'm getting at. sean seems like he'd be into tom ford grey vetiver eu de parfum, which is kinda dull and serious, but also clean and purposeful and sorta trustworthy.

that's probably the greatest moment in the history of television, although i'm not sure that tom ford is the way to tie it into the concept of fragrances.