Perfume / Cologne

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.

not funny or good

yeah, i shouldn't drink and try to talk about things. even when i was typing all that mess i realized maybe djp at most cared about mtv's real world minutiae and there's no reason to drag him into this.

i read that iso e super is widely used in woody scents and florals as an intensifier and an extender. it's such a large molecule that it can block receptors and cause temporary anosmia and headaches. last few times i used the terre d'hermes i couldn't smell it at all, and it has one of the highest concentrations of iso e super out there. it wasn't just olfactory fatigue from getting acclimated to an overused scent because i couldn't smell anything else for a good hour after that.

the lalique and the cartier also are high on the list of scents with iso e super. i like the warm, buzzy effect that i attributed to the vetiver but i think that's the synthetic extender so i might have to go easy or cut them out. before i stated messing around with this the most recent fragrance i had was cool water, which i think is ok, but a lot of modern scents are too sweet/ gourmand-y like the muglers, or too light and citrus-y aquatic like all the aqua di gio progeny, or intensely spicy or powdery, musky club and date night scents like spicebomb or le nuit de l'homme.

i'm still entry-level and experimenting so i like to smell things before i get samples to see how they wear, which limits me to the selection at sephora and nordstrom.

this was a good revive and had me lolling on a blue saturday

very well done

considering some escentric molecules fragrances

i think i want to get a sample of molecule 01 just to see if i can smell the iso e super in isolation. i'm guessing i wouldn't smell much of anything in particular but would still recognize the visceral buzz i'm getting from the hermes or the narciso rodriguez which i might like more than the actual scents.

i ordered some cb i hate perfume samples from the perfumed court: at the beach 1966, wild hunt, and memory of kindness. these seemed like good starting points for this line as from what i've read they're pretty literal snapshots of the scenarios invoked, as opposed to their scents inspired by poems or novels. they didn't have the soaked earth so i got the demeter dirt. the imaginary authors line looks interesting too but i dunno just yet.

I have samplers of the escentric/molecule varieties and a couple of the molecules do seem like they're more the suggestion of a scent than an actual scent. The formulas using them as a base scent actually smell like perfume, and the molecule odor is actually more discernible than it is on its own!

ugh i have been meaning to go to cb i hate perfume for years and keep forgetting

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

do you do this still? i got the cb i hate perfume samples and i really like memory of kindness and wild hunt as both wearable scents and as personal memory/ primordial image switches but the water perfume is as ephemeral as the demeters (maybe the cb absolute perfumes have more projection/ longevity) so i was thinking for a lot less (20 bucks per 4 oz. each vs. 100 bucks per 100 ml.each) i could get the demeter dirt, grass (or just earthworm instead of both since it's soil plus green notes), tomato, thunderstorm, snow (or frozen pond), cypress and/ or fraser fir, and log cabin (cedar plus oakmoss) and reasonably approximate a good six or seven (memory of kindness, winter 1972, black march, the fir tree, etc.) of the cbs using the note breakdown on fragrantica. i know the cb accords are supposed to be a step up but i have a compromised sniffer from smoking so the soil note in wild hunt seemed pretty close to the demeter dirt. i still would like to try some of the individual cb premium accords like north atlantic or wet pavement london, though, because cb seems to really focus on quality of individual notes, cf the rare flowers series.

also just having smelled dirt i feel like i've at least entered the 1990s scent-wise. you miss a lot of history if you don't keep up.

in defense of mediocrity and mall culture:

i also read a few christopher brosius interviews and i get the knock against the perfume-as-accessory orientation of mass-market designer scents but that of-the-moment quality is what makes hungry like the wolf or take on me so great. armani pour homme or farenheit, maybe those were good or maybe not ever or just not anymore given what we know now, i don't know anyone's tastes, i like them, but i grew up when monoculture and branding really meant something. the ubiquitous look of herb ritts ad campaigns, the wonderful pastels and warhol-derived newsprinty-dotted halftone graphics on OP t-shirts, nagel posters. some of those scents were loud and stupid but so was everything else and i have some awesome swatch watches from the 80s and early 90s, made almost entirely of plastic, and christopher brosius can't have them even if they're crap. i missed CKone and l'eau d'issey so they don't mean anything to me now, i smelled them at the mall and they're just ok, but that's like never having seen a tarentino film or having heard sneaker pimps or fastball. it's not the best the culture had to offer but it's mostly what the culture was and i'm not necessarily smarter for not knowing that stuff.

i like the fig leaf in hermes' un jardin de mediterranne so i'm gonna sample the philosykos, per thread recommendations, as well as the wonderwood and amazingreen, since i'm not completely averse to quality.

i havne't done this in a while, tbh they don't last long! also idk if i hyped it upthread but this is the price of 1.5 bottles but you get 3 bottles

http://demeterfragrance.com/20th-anniversary.html

thanks! i was looking at a discount site that only had the 4 oz. size but i just need the small bottles in the anniversary set. i figured the weak longevity would be a problem if you actually wanted to wear these out for a personal scent but it would still be fun to play with. i got the marc jacobs bang for cheap a tj maxx because it gets compared to encre noire and it's just pure pepper. i layered it with the cb memory of kindness (tomato leaf and green notes) and now i'm a salad.

what did arty kids and downtown types do for scents before the internet, with all the fragrance blogs for intel and direct access to niche houses for supply or the grey market for affordability? back then i could just go to the mall and get polo or tuscany because i didn't know anything else and it suited my needs, i'd wear any cologne in any weather for any and all occasions. now i can watch a few youtube reviews and decide that avignon or kyoto from comme des garcons or l'artisan parfumeurs' voleur de roses would be a good choice to wear while listening to disentegration on a cold november night. i assume if you were in a major urban area and had the cash resources you'd have a network of like-minded friends to clue you in to what was hip and you could shop at exclusive or avant-garde boutiques but if you lived somewhere else or didn't have the funds was there an acceptable sector of the designer market i missed or did you just pick up vintage scents from thrift stores and flea markets and wear those? or did that division not exist then, and everybody just wore opium and beautiful or grey flannel and eternity?

i have azzaro pour homme and paco rabanne pour homme samples and i think i'm getting a handle on 70s aromatic fougeres. the azzaro has a latin feel because of the anise note and it has a tinge of barbershop but not too much, while the paco is pure sweet green soap but in a not entirely unpleasant way, to my nose. way weaker than the original versions afaik so over-projection isn't a big problem. i wish i could pick out notes better because these classic fougeres were supposed to be heavy on the oakmoss, and i don't know what oakmoss smells like specifically, especially now since it's restricted in use. i think if you're old to have worn these or remember adults wearing these they may or may not seem offensive but not weird but under a certain age these aren't even recognizable as scents a human would but on his body. i also have a dior eau sauvage (the steve mcqueen eau sauvage from the 60s, but in the reformulated version, not the contemporary johnny depp sauvage) samples and i like it for a summer citrus aromatic.

tbh trying to smell all the old popular scents i missed and trying to connect them back to the culture they came out of is a really bad idea since they've mostly been reformulated to the point that they've lost all the qualities that made them part of the culture in the first place.

i still have guerlain vetiver and habit rouge samples coming but because they're supposed to be good and something i could like and not just artifacts.

i ordered habit rouge from amazon and fucking UPS would never ring my buzzer or call me and just said that no one was available so they wouldn't deliver >:(

have you smelled it before or are you getting it to try? i'm wondering how this smells to someone else. i got my samples and the vetiver seems like a timeless classic, no big surprises, really fresh and wearable today, but the habit rouge seems rather like something out of time, something that fell directly through a temporal portal instead of persisting throughout the years, something that's not supposed to exist in the here and now. maybe not that weird but it seemed really elegantly louche and dandyish, as opposed to crisp and buttoned-up with maybe a hint of five o'clock shadow, which is what i was expecting. i was thinking cary grant and i got tom wolfe, if he were standing next to quentin crisp.

that was the first wearing. i got a really floral and powdery vibe after the citrusy notes blew off, and then a really sweet and gentle leather eventually. today it feels a touch more woody and spicy, so it makes a little more sense that this was keith richard's favorite. maybe i'm overthinking it a little, but this is a little more complex than the reliable and serviceable old-timey scent i thought i was getting.

now it just seems nicely balanced. i don't know if this acts weird on my skin or my nose is just settling down and getting used to it. sorry about all the fuss.

not smelled before but a friend said it was mindblowing

acquisitions so far:

versace dreamer, blue jeans
lolita lempicka au masculin
bvlgari black, aqva marine
d&g the one
narsico rodriguez bleu noir
rochas man
hugo man
armaf tres nuit, club de nuit intense
grey flannel
lalique encre noire
azzaro pour homme
armani pour homme and drakkar noir minis, and claiborne for men, for nostalgic smelling

the hugo man is pretty synthetic and mall-generic but i got it because it seemed pretty 90s-ish and i'm ret-conning my past. i figure i would have had this in 1995 or so if i were buying colognes then. i was taking a drawing class at community college at the time time and someone was playing "you oughta know" on a tape deck and someone walking by stuck and his head in the door and asked who that was because it just seemed so now and hugo man fits in there somewhere. we were doing gestural figure drawings with charcoal sticks and a girl liked mine so i sold it to her for fifty cents. d&g the one was at tj maxx so i just got it; it's ok but i figure i need something that's popular today instead of waiting 10 years and getting it as something emblematic of that era, which is now. the dreamer is what i assume leonardo's romeo was wearing while skulking around verona's cafes scribbling poetic vignettes and romantic idylls in his moleskin, mooning over claire's juliet as his hair flopped around insouciantly while everyone else was off doing violence. it's pretty good; it's a dirty, smoky le male for people who are afraid of le male. the armafs are clones of creed's green irish tweed and aventus for way less because i don't need to spend that much on what i can't tell the difference. rochas man is a good gourmandy espresso. grey flannel is grey flannel.

i want guerlain homme but that can wait until next year. it's a pretty basic summer scent but i like it just fine. the lime, mint, rum (mojito) and vetiver notes just seem really natural and uncomplicated. i don't know what else is good for summer or i'd get that. all the other fresh summery scents, the versace man au fraiche, d&g light blue, azzaro chrome, montblanc legend, etc. that i smelled seem interchangeable but maybe that's just me. l'instant de guerlain is supposed to be a modern classic but i can't really get a handle on it yet.

prada amber, it's really clean and elusive and zen-like. it barely smells like a fragrance but it feels like it's knocking all the kinks out of my chakras at the same time. i should get this.

i'm also gonna get:

narciso rodriguez for him. strong violet leaf note like fahrenheit, which i also want, but rainy and moody, instead of a kerosene fire accord. i'd forgotten about fahrenheit but it's the really the apex of human achievement. i have a hard time not drinking it straight out of the sample vial. gucci pour homme ii has that same note but i'm already getting the other two.

hermes terre d'hermes, un jardin sur le nil, and concentre d'orange verte, why not. i know i like them already, but they're more pricey. also want to sample rocabar, equipage, and bel ami.

i keep sniffing the empty vial of habit rouge. if i were david niven, sporting a velvet smoking jacket and glancing up from a leather-bound tome to address a bbc audience who just popped in via the telly to hear a narrative on the crimean war i'd be all over it but i can't pull that off.

i'd also like a bespoke fragrance series based on and titled after popular music selections, specifically in between days, strangelove, silent morning, her head's revolving, cities in dust, green eyes, lake of fire, and blister in the sun if anyone wants to get on that.

my friend joe would actually probably be up for that

i don't know you'd translate subjective sonic perceptions into subjective olfactory perceptions, but i figure out of the tens of thousands of perfumes out there, one of them best matches the impression new order's ceremony leaves on me, for example. it's likely different for someone else but that's an interesting question for a nose, how closely can the feel of a fragrance be matched up to the feel of a song, even if that experience is unique to him or her.

true faith, if you could just bottle true faith i'd be all set. my life depends on the morning sun. i need that inner sensation externalized, bottled. how soon is now? is also a song i need to smell.

i don't feel like 80s fragrances i know match the perceptions i have of 80s culture: bright, shiny, immediate, corrosively seductive, NOW! krugerian/ haringesque/ nagalesiac/ lynchific pop offerings in music, film, graphic design, and fashion, but the fragrances seem like they kept to a narrow leathery, fougery tangential corridor left over from god's own whenever until joop! homme and fahrenheit arrived at the very end of the decade, and those only posthumously capture the pop! zeitgeist. you get these words wrong. armani pour homme at least feels like bryan ferry in mood and texture, louche and elegantly disheveled, everyone has left the piano bar save the two chic personages exchanging wry repartee at the end of the night, tuxedo and unbound tie and rumpled satin dress, and they're totally gonna go home together and do sex things, except this is only a vague memory of what you once felt was once possible. you can't wear armani pour homme anymore; you're too grown up to dream. slave to love reference.

the contemporary grey flannel i have is so wrong. bitter herbal, green, soapy, with a mild violet note coming in during the heart note section. very pleasant and calming, a true classic fragrance that stands the test of time, once the difficult opening is past. except wrong, the grey flannel i had eons ago was a leathery, oily, floral, sensory blitzkrieg that radiated iridescent purple and stayed that way. i'm gonna get some oakmoss absolute and add a few drops to my bottle because that's supposedly the difference due to ifra restrictions. i'm not some weirdo nostlagieste who thinks old things are inherently better but there's a marked difference and it's not as good.

slugbuggy, have you ever tried Égoïste by Chanel? It came out in 1990 and I remember sniffing it at the time thinking it was the loveliest scent out there. Powdery and subtle, as I remember it. Apparently it flopped in the US and hasn't been sold here in years but still is in Europe. Maybe price was an issue - it cost about twice as much as a Guerlain, iirc. It's the favorite scent of its creator, Jacques Polge, who has created quite a number of fragrances going back to 1970.

I recently scored some online just to see if it smelled as great as my memory… and was kind of surprised by the strength and intrusiveness of it. Maybe best in small applications. Still stands out quite a bit from what you would normally smell nowadays.

*opening a french door* EGOISTE!!!

got a bottle of yatagan off amazon, kinda reminds me of the fougeres my dad would wear in the early 90s. not sure what the connection is... artemisia? it's also really spicy and woody. today's weather is chilly and wet and i notice the oakmoss notes for the first time and can't stop smelling my wrist

i've been wanting to try egoiste but it's not in stores and the sample sites i use don't have it either. from what i read the current formulation doesn't get as much love from people who had the original; at least the opening is supposed to be harsher but i gather that overall it's still pretty good. either way i'll feel like i missed out if i don't get a hold of a sample.

yatagan has a castoreum note so maybe there's some similarity to kouros?

my dad wore stuff like drakkar noir and joop! -- don't think he was fancy enough for ysl. kouros is on my wishlist though.

have you checked out luckyscent? i'm planning to get a bunch of samples from there since a friend rec'd it

i've browsed luckyscent but so far i've only used myperfumesamples since it's pretty inexpensive but limited to designer and theperfumedcourt for higher-end and it also offers different sizes compared to luckyscent. for full bottles i've only bought from fragrancex (i usually get stuff in two days) but i also check fragrancenet since prices vary and sometimes one will have a better deal than the other. there are other online discounters but so far i think i'm doing ok. luckyscent has full bottles of niche that i can't get from the others but they don't seem to discount.

i got my oakmoss absolute and put two small dollops of the resin into the 8 oz. splash bottle of grey flannel. there's a marked difference: the bitter green herbal galbanum note off the top of the current formulation is still present but pushed back into a supporting role. the problem i had with my current bottle was that one day the herbal note predominated and the next the floral or soapy notes stood out, but after i messed with it it seems pretty consistent so far. i think oakmoss is like a rug that ties the whole room together. i may have dampened the floral notes a bit in the process but this seems a lot closer to the vintage mini (90s pre-oakmoss ban) i have in texture and style if not exact smell. i'll let it settle a bit more and i don't want to futz with it too much but i might get some violet essential oil and add a bit to bring that note up. i've also added a touch of oakmoss to my screw-off top bottle of azzaro pour homme to see what that does.

nb i'm still a novice at this. mostly i can't pick out individual notes unless i see the note breakdown on fragrantica and then i go back and correlate what i'm smelling to what's supposed to be in there. like i thought d&g the one's sweetness derived from vanilla until i read it has a predominant amber note; maybe the inkyness of encre noire is the cypress? some people are really good at this stuff.

tbh i don't know what the grey flannel mania is about but if the past keeps changing i don't know how the present isn't wildly oscillating.

i think what i meant by that last post was that perfumery is a weird area of interest since you always have a shifting frame of reference temporally. if fragrances keep getting reformulated until they're barely the same thing anymore you don't have a stable baseline for comparisons. plus, given the "smell is the most powerful memory trigger" thing, if you change the smell you're getting a wonky signal and not getting full access to the memory bank. unless you want to pay $225 plus shipping for a vintage bottle off ebay. it's like if your mom photo-shopped your high school graduation picture every year to keep the hairstyle up to date.

like whenever i mention polo green to a sales rep as something that was really popular in the 80s they always wrinkle their noses and declare how awful it is. that kinda makes me a bit upset, not because they dislike the styles of my era, but because they've never truly smelled polo and don't know how gloriously awful it once was in all its disgraceful glory. it was truly glorious, that disgracefulness. i wore it all the time anyway.

also, clouds, have you smelled lapidus pour homme? it's from 1987 but to me smells even older, like from the deep polyester afternoon delight 70s. there's something really weird and dated about it in the opening, but at the same time i can't qualify why i feel that way since it doesn't smell like anything else from that era that i'm aware of. it's an oriental, it has rose, tobacco, honey, incense, pineapple, and some other random stuff in the notes. it think the clash of the sweet, floral, and dirty notes makes it weird, but it dries down to something that's really elegant, if you don't go heavy on it since it's pretty potent but i think it's like kouros in that aspect. fine line between love and ew gross. i think its datedness makes it kinda sad and poignantly beautiful, like a grand hotel that's fallen into disrepair.

i only figure since you mention kouros, egoiste, and yatagan; i think it triangulates somewhere in there. also i only recently smelled whatever current formulation exists so i can't speak to all that previous blather about things being different now since i don't know if it's changed any or how.

i think from the present era i like the narciso rodriguez for him and prada amber the most, but even those are like ten years old. they seem pretty introverted and contemplative and kinda soggy and passive-aggressive in their blithely transparent opaqueness that doesn't settle anywhere particular, so there's that. also i think from a raw sensory angle they also smell good to me without qualification and that's is not an idea i'm used to.

i don't know how i got from wanting to try a few new things besides cool water to wanting to learn a little more so i can make good choices to where i'm getting all upset because as cultural artifacts fragrances are texts that i don't have the skill set or methodology to properly approach so i'm not sure what i like anymore, all in the space of two or three months. i was in a store just smelling things and doing field studies and an actual customer walked in, asked to smell something, decided he like it, bought it, and then he took his purchase and left, and i think i was blown away that you could just do that.

i haven't tried lapidus, sounds interesting.

just got my pack of samples from luckyscent: unum lavs, cdg hinoki, maison francis kurkdjian oud silk mood, legrand chypre mousse and lutens vetiver oriental

wearing unum lavs atm and it's like old precious leatherbound books meets slightly metallic herbal soap.

i may have overreacted a bit but the lapidus was weird to me because i'm not really familiar with orientals in general and particularly because it seemed so far out of context with what i've tried of the old-timey scents, but it gets mentioned by the ppl who are into kouros and yatagan and the like so i thought i'd bring it up.

i looked up what you got and they all seem nicely timed for testing in the autumn weather, which is something i should keep in mind since i usually try whatever i've just read about that i think i need to put into my database, regardless of season.

also, i'm not sure if i'm trying to find scents that reflect and express something interior bout myself to the outside world or if i'm trying on things from the outside world in hopes of effecting some change in that general direction, like there's some jungian alchemical work towards actualization going on through the application of discernibly attainable qualities via the medium of scent or whatnot, or maybe just a a cargo cult type of thing. or else i just want to smell nice and carry around a nice thing on my self to smell all day. between love and madness lies obsession.

wearing unum lavs atm and it's like old precious leatherbound books meets slightly metallic herbal soap.

yeah, this is what i like about putting on smells. it's just fucking chemicals but there's old books in there and the leather seats in the dodge challenger your father drove before he got serious and had a family and violins and woodwinds and scratchy wool sweaters or whatever.

also, we're living in the near future already, you'd think by now they'd have developed sub-dermally injected symbiotic micro-organisms that metabolize and convert raw materials into designer aroma chemicals that are continuously extruded through sweat glands so your days belong to adventure and your nights belong to romance.