Perfume / Cologne

nb i assume ppl aren't posting here just for my edification but i'm really on this tip and get carried away.

I follow this thread obsessively, cannot begin to match slugbuggy posts so I just sit back and enjoy.

Last weekend I was in airport duty free and put on some Chanel 19, which was my sole scent from age 18 to 28. Now I am 43 and just don't like it, can't really understand the chick who did.

I also put on some Diorissimo which I found too fruity (peach?) upfront but more my style than the 19.

Need to try some La Panthere. Old ladyish is more interesting to me these days than Chanel Chance and all the other young gal stuff.

kinda need a new daily scent - i've been using clinique "happy" for a long time - not partic exciting but don't feel the need to blow my coworkers away or wear a hugely expensive scent day in day out. i have wonderwood and one or two others for more special occasions. have considered aesop, pretty simple but distinctive.

I use Musgo Real No 1 (Orange Amber) for work. I like the smell, it's relatively cheap and it doesn't feel like I'm flirting with my colleagues. I suppose its a bit "old man" and/or "shops at Labour & Wait".

I've also got some Murdock samplers - the intention was that they were for away from work (to emphasise home/work) but I do often carry one with me.

I've recently discovered Miller & Harris (at a garden centre, of all place) and do like some of the bloke ones. They last well and seem kinda "grown up".

i wore grey flannel today, because it was moderate temp-wise with some post-rain humidity in the air, perfect march weather that's not actually in march but that's what it was.

i'm really getting that bitter floral in the opening, which i think is narcissus flower? fragrantica voters cite hermes' eau de narcisse bleu as the closest analogue to gf. maybe it's the galbanum. i don't know either of those notes. memory is not your friend, but i remember the smell off the top of the splash bottle all those years ago, and it's not ringing the same bells. close your eyes and i'll kiss you, tomorrow i'll miss you. i remember there was a radiant ultraviolet glow and an oily leatheryness that's not in the current formulation. i'm trying to separate out selective memory from reality; i think all the current notes and accords were always there but the gestalt has side-shifted from sexhammer to a very you don't have the proper discernment to appreciate this niche construction. i think the current formulation is difficult but rewarding, while what i think i remember of the original is straight lothario.

there's a scene in the second miami vice episode, the first one in the proper series after the pilot episode, where crockett and tubbs are preparing to go out undercover, and sony is going click-click-click with the rotating cap of his patou pour homme, which i don't know from then but is really animalic and way too stinky for miami heat so totally crockett, tubbs, however, is seen pouring out the love potion from what could be none other then a grey flannel bottle, sleek nyc swag and style, steel blue eyes and open-shirted confidence, and i swear as much as i know that god is a bullet that the thing tubbs was melding with his eternal essence isn't the same thing as exists today as much as i know that gravity's rainbow isn't quite the same thing as infinite jest, which i have and swear i'm gonna read before the exam, sir.

i looked at the miller harris section of fragrantica and that seems like a good call if you're looking for a quality house that's traditional with serious intent but not too pretentious. it's like in a hitchcock movie, you know, where they tie you up in a rubber bag and throw you in the trunk of a car. you find fragrances. it seems like a quality house for people who like good things. also ds & durga, you could pick from a multitude of indie perfumers, i don't know where to start, but there's a vibe, they have fragrances with names like beartrapper and cowboy grass and mississippi medicine so i'm homing in on the artisanal buffalo burger and saffron-infused sweet potato fries thing, by which i mean, people in the future will refer back to this as totally emblematic of the zeitgeist in the nostalgia of the nostalgia of the period sense, cf i wore vintage 80s pendleton shirts back in the 10s, and i know it's that type of thing but in a post-post era game recognize game and you connect with what you can use. i haven't smelled any of their stuff but i can see how if your life circumstances put you where you have access to this sort of thing, which i readily don't, it would slot into your groove with satisfactory clearances.

there are people online who are indiscriminate, insofar as they consider themselves fragrance aficionados and their purview is the whole of fragranedom, it's just aromachemicals, labels are an artifice. that's right, but i still like the illusion that certain things are created for certain people in certain circumstances. this is what moms wore who drove ford ltds in 1978 and this is what was worn by gay men in clubs in 1993 and this is what suburban jocks wore in 1997 and this is what investment bankers wore in 1985 and this is what urban 20-something women in new media wore in 2008, because that's a thing that also happens.

by people online i mean the fragrance youtubers and bloggers who regard everything because it's all online, so i hear about things i wouldn't otherwise, but then i feel like i'm losing the natural progression like when you had to know where to find the right zines or have the right friends to find out about certain bands.

love vetiver and frederic malle vetiver extraordinaire is my go-to but now my supply is running low and I'm budgeting. I picked up a botle of Guerlain Vetiver at the duty free this week. Doesn't last long on my skin but does the trick. I paid too much for it, though, dammit, which I realized once I went online post-purchase to check its "regular" price in order to gloat.

quincie!!! i got your vetiver!!! thank you so much <3 <3 <3

Oh god it only took like six months amirite? The box would still be sitting by the door had spouse not finally said "do you want me to mail this?" and dod the post office honors. What so you think of it?

love it - green, mossy, soapy, slightly funky and musky. definitely my new everyday scent!

anyone rate byredo?

I went to Bloom Perfumery in Covent Garden today, which I highly recommended if you are in the area and after something different.

I ended up getting Vi Et Armis by Beaufort - the perfume line, oddly enough, put out by the drummer from The Prodigy. The collection has a strong and somewhat Problematic theme of swashbuckling derring-do in British history, albeit probably somewhat tongue in cheek, so there are lots of references to gunpowder, blood, the sea and the fruits of empire. The one I got has huge amounts of tea and cold smoke. I also picked up a sample of 1805 Tonnerre which has a really aggressive smoke and lime combination and may not be entirely wearable.

I liked some of the Imaginary Authors line too - particularly Memoirs of a Tresspasser with a clever mix of apple, vanilla and subtle smoke.

The shop does a mail order sample pack service which I have already signed up to. Really nice, well-informed staff with no hard sell.

I have noticed the 1805 dries down to a much more approachable animalic leather so may be worth further investigation.

They also stock the dirt-cheap Russian drug-store brand Brocard for some mysterious reason. I picked up a bottle of Колдун, which the woman in the shop translated as “shaman” but I’m 99% sure means “wizard”, which is much dorkier. Either way, it’s a very pleasant Terre d’Hermes copy.

I have great handfuls of samples from Bloom now and have been wearing a different one each day. Yesterday was A City On Fire by Imaginary Authors - a fragrance compared to both an autumn campfire and Guy Fieri’s Smoky BBQ Sauce, depending on who you ask. It has a fairly strong bonfire smell to me - warm and rounded rather than particularly acrid. I did briefly think it developed into a much more strident, complex smouldering accord later on but it turned out that someone had set fire to the bin outside of Argos in Chatham shortly before I walked past.

Underneath the smoke there is a strong over-ripe red berry / juniper thing going on. I often like the boozy, fecund smell of slowly decaying fruit irl (I have fond memories of intoxicating orchards groaning under the weight of enormous mystery fruit on the outskirts of Guilin) but idk if I want to carry it around with me all day.

Today I am wearing Gin & Tonic by Art de Parfum which smells like gin and tonic.

1270 by Frapin, commemorating the year the cognac house was founded, smells like someone unaccountably serving pineapple alongside the fruitcake, brandy and chocolates after Christmas dinner. The fragrance also reminds me a little of the honeyed sweetness of Serge Lutens’ Arabie - which has candied orange iirc. It’s nice but I prefer the oriental fantasy of Lutens tbh.

Camel by Zoologist also has candied fruits of some description and smells much more authentically Arabian than the Lutens - or most European ‘oriental’ fragrances. It’s much heavier but stops short of being dominated by oud, which a lot of the region’s perfumes are. Frankincense and myrrh make it festive. Civet (synthetic) reminds you that most of the story takes place in a barn.

These are great reviews Sharivari.

i am venturing into this world. sampled a limited selection last week and really dug the YDL L'homme Intense

YSL

I asked for Coco for Christmas and now I feel so amateurish and uninteresting compared to this thread. But tbrr someone sprayed me with it a couple of weeks ago and I felt very expensive and it lasted like 12 hours with different notes and I was intrigued.

all the Chanels smell expensive and that is the whole point; ie your choice of Coco is highly rational.

I got so into perfume a few years back, but now I just wear Mitsouko on fancy occasions and Mandragore in summer when I feel like smelling something pleasant all day.

I have and love Coco!

my mom wore Coco, and it's the kind of thing I'd probably like, but it just has this overwhelming association with my mom.

otherwise these days I rotate between rochas femme, bottega veneta eau de velours, and various lutens. yes I'm a cliche, thanks for asking

I’m always intrigued by how smell and memory have this complex relationship. Certain scents immediately bring experiences to mind, and remembering events sometimes have a specific smell memory associated

A coworker mentioned a certain building at work having an odd smell and I couldn’t remember it, until I thought about a particular time I’d been there and boom, there it was. And I could more vividly remember events that had happened there.

This is also why Chanel No. 5 causes me to feel irritated! Too many stressful memories.

(xp: the bottega veneta's probably my favorite recent scent, a spiced-plum leather that with my luck is probably going to be discontinued since it's both a flanker and really good)

Proust to thread xp

i got miller harris la fumee and montale full incense samples. i can't decide between the two. ideally i'd still get cdg man 2 but it's never discounted enough. cdg is only moderately costly and something to just get but i'm bouncing around from thing to thing and if she knew what she wants he'd be giving it to her but she wants everything. mh and montale are affordable enough and can be found discounted, so they make more sense from my pov. montale is slightly creamier and earthier, miller harris is more floral and spicy, but both have a discernibly prominent and persistent incense note, unlike other stuff i've tried in which the incense is integral but blended into the gestalt. there are pricier niche houses like amouage that are lousy with incense frags but at those price points i don't have the discernment to justify the cost difference; i feel like the cover of fleetwood mac's mystery to me in this situation.

i've given up on the azzaro visit as an incense frag per se, but it's a nice fresh-spicy type of thing, where the incense and pepper and other spices coalesce into a vague smoke accord and the bergamot smooths it out rather than seeming like an afterthought to cover up the the litany of individual notes all barking for attention i was getting when it was warmer. i could detect a distinct incense note before when the temp was higher, but the overall effect was chaos. i can't much tell any individual notes now, but now it's achieved actualization, so there's that. it's nice, it smells good, it's ok. we can be heroes, just for one day, for about twenty bucks.

i also got a givenchy xeryus rouge sample because annick menardo, who is grebt and did laura biogetti roma and bvlgari black, so it was worth trying out. it's a different kind of fresh-spicy. there's a cactus note contrasted with a pimento note. it feels very generic and mainstream, in the sense there's not a lot of texture, just this kind o accord and that kind of accord, but it's generic and mainstream in a slightly divergent world where love like blood and proud to fall were top ten pop hits and the apotheosis of mall culture.

nb using terms like generic and mainstream implies i have enhanced sensibilities which i do not. if it weren't for the internet and reference sites i'd have no idea what was in anything or have any any notion o the history of perfumery whatsoeverhow. i wonder about authenticity; sometines i feel like i'm wearing a notion i got from a blog post instead of an actual scent i enjoy. my fantasy has turned to madness; i will have you, i will collect you and capture you. i feel like there's meaning to smells like there's meaning to music that i sense but don't quite get but everyone else does. there's an artistry to niche scents that requires a knowledge base of aromatic structure and the attendant nudging of subtle nuances but otoh historically nothing contains multitudes like the unabashed punch of a zeitgeisty designer offering that doesn't give a fudge about subtlety.

also i am posting drunk again.

Bvlgari Black is one of my all-time favourites, at least in the formulation I have from about ten years ago. It’s such an odd fragrance for something so inexpensive and widely available - vanilla and tea but a huge hit of rubber and burnt sugar to go along with it.

You def get some niche houses willing to push the envelope but there are just as many that’ll sell you a bottle of Ambroxan + iso E Super for $150 and call it art.

"sometines i feel like i'm wearing a notion i got from a blog post instead of an actual scent i enjoy"

I'd say this is true in a sense that goes way beyond fragrances and stretches out to the enjoyment of music and art sometimes too, to varying degrees.

Also: booming posts all.

I’ve got (well I say, “got” but share a bottle of) La Fumée as well and really like it but have to be in the right mood for it. For MH, I prefer Feiulles de Tabac, which is warmer and smokier and dries down really nicely.

Chanel is great tbh there’s no shame there - esp as they still make their own perfume in house and have their own perfumery where they source a lot of their ingredients. No 5 has never worked on me - too soapy - but Chance is an all time favourite.

The most recent perfume I got was YSL’s Cinéma last year - think it’s now discontinued - based on reading recommendations from stuff I already liked on Basenotes. It’s lovely but evaporates in under ten minutes, a tragedy.

If they haven’t been recommended already, the CdG incense fragrances are gorgeous. Particularly like Avignon and Jaisalmer.

I think liking what you like is really the only thing that matters and perfume is fun but so off putting once you go online and see people talking authoritatively about formulations and heart notes. Having said that, I found the Luca Turin/Tania Sanchez book 10/10 for the way they talked about perfume as experience and feeling, although some of the descriptions are a bit off putting.

Paloma Picasso? Thoughts? Perfume not the lady/jewelry/etc.

the description sounds great and it's on my wishlist, but never tried! the bottle looks really cool

it's... fine, not particularly my thing. I find it more masculine than a lot of actual masculine fragrances

Replica's "Soul of the Forest" has dried really well on me.. It's making me question my initial reactions to the other scents I sampled Friday, much of them seemed too cool and sharp for my rudimentary taste

master: as quickly as you can, snatch the pebble from my...

brimstead: *snatches pebble*

master: damn, grasshopper

i kid but that's way faster than i figured that out - the landscape kinda changes as you move around it but doing so also changes you so there's maybe no privileged pov, only where you are at any point, or something. whatever the point was that seems like a good point to have, at that point.

in related news, i got a 100 ml cdg 2 man for crimbus presents. when i got the sample i thought it was the only game in town. now that i've sampled the aforementioned miller harris and montale i know there are more incensey incenses, and stuff i haven't even tried yet, but this is like the epitome of high-end designer or low-end niche, for me. it's where i want to be. i get enough note separation to feel like i can see how the main players bounce off each other but otoh there's just the visceral impact of liking the gestalt of how it smells, so there's that.

in return i gave my brother armani pour homme and encre noire. he likes the armani enough, he's all about the classics, i could have given him dior eau sauvage, the original not the johnny depp sauvage which shoudn't share the same name, dior, we lived in italy when we were younger, it's very italian, i can borrow it. encre noire is pretty good, wonderwood is the only woodier thing i know but it's all the woods; that's too much wood.

the armani is not quite the same, but it gets it nonetheless - i have a 90s vintage mini and a current reformulation mini. they did what they could, given how things are now. at least it's a proper reformulation; they admit it and aren't trying to sneak anything past anyone by pretending otherwise. o, armani, how werest thou the soul of manly elegance! that ad campaign. lookit that guy in the print ads. you never him. there's real 1984 in there in a way that you can't ever know unless know what it means to know what it sounds like when doves cry.

i'm dreading reading this tomorrow when i'm soberer.

I love your posts slugbuddy

We all do!

feel like there's a correlation between talking about fragrances and ski jumping: many may know what they're doing and have perfect technique but the guy that downed a half-pint of maker's mark before hurdling down the slope is gonna provide a hellava show.

i don't mean to drag anyone else into my soused ramblings but the three day interval from brimstead's "hi, i'm new to this and am trying out some things" post to the "restructuring my process to include new data such as how a scent changes throughout development; consequently am considering how new objective approaches to formal qualities of the observed affects subjective perspective of observer" (that's how i'm reading it, re: questioning tastes and impressions) post seemed like a really accelerated evolution.

in my experience this is shockingly common with this

yeah, i might be an outlier but it took me a while longer to figure out neither i nor what i was smelling were fixed entities. more than three days, anyway. like sometimes i smell something months later and it's totally different because it's now a different season and the thing presents itself differently, or maybe i've encountered similar notes and accords enough to have references to fall back on and it's not a new thing anymore.

also i excluded my entire mid-80s to early 90s go-round where none of these concepts existed whatsoever in my consciousness, like seasonality or development or note breakdown or quality of materials (tbh designer output back then was top-notch, if there was a butterfly wing note in a fragrance then you could be assured there were real butterfly wings in it, until all the butterflies were gone). i'd get grey flannel and it smelled like grey flannel and i'd wear it for every occasion year-round til i ran out and then i'd get giorgio red and do the same thing.

until all the butterflies were gone: a reminiscence on the golden age of mainstream perfumery by some guy who didn't know about anything that existed beyond the suburban mall, available in hardback by houghton mifflin harcourt available twelve years ago.

today i am wearing:

Atelier Cologne Café Tuberosa

i kid but that's way faster than i figured that out - the landscape kinda changes as you move around it but doing so also changes you so there's maybe no privileged pov, only where you are at any point, or something. whatever the point was that seems like a good point to have, at that point.

i appreciate it! i'm lucky to have a super knowledgeable SO to guide me

i think what threw me was the sudden shift from ysl to maison martin margiela. in retrospect it's totally reasonable you'd be sampling over a wide range but i was projecting my own process and ended up with the impression that this person just blew through all the merit badges between the two fragrances in record pace, like i assumed i'd have to pass the exam process on dior dune before they'd let me try out tauer l'air du desert marocain, which is totally my own neurosis at play here, like i think if i tried to order the tauer sample i'd just get a curt notice of rejection with a patronizing encouragement to try again at some future point in time, not right away though. .