Perfume / Cologne

Was just watching the David Geffen profile on Netflix and he talks about acting as Laura Nyro’s agent, and arranging for the lyric sheet of Eli and the Thirteenth Confession to have a lilac-infused ink to ensure it smelled of lilacs….So there’s the answer I guess.

(Multiple x-posts to J. Sam)

Thanks, Luna! I posted my question on the Steve Hoffman board, and someone pointed me to that same documentary. Lilac-infused ink seems to be the answer, if David Geffen's memory is to be trusted (I could imagine someone confusing licac for lavender)

someone needs to go insult christopher brosius and imply that he don't have the grit to recreate this particular temporally-specific-aroma-artifact and then he'll do it, because ego challenge. it's 1968, you're a freshman at oberlin, you've made two friends that you're not yet sure of, your dorm room is really crappy for what your parents paid for you to go here, you use your nail file to slice open the plastic on your laura nyro album and are immediately swathed in the aroma of lilac, ink, paper, and vinyl notes. i bet you can't do this, christopher brosius. you (the girl in the original imagining) are probably wearing corduroy and have lately felt your salinger obsession to be fairly bourgeoise, but everything around you suggests so many futures. you wondering if you can hold on to this moment in space and time forever. it swirls. help us, christopher brosious, you're our only hope. shyness is nice, but shyness won't help you, christopher brosious, from doing the things in life you'd like to. i think you'd like to do this.

i got a ds & durga sample pack. coriander, mississippi medicine, bowmakers, and cowboy grass. all of them are pretty damn good, but not 260 dolla good. coriander is light and sweet, so modest. home, it's where i want to be. it's your backyard garden on a sunday afternoon, you're blocking out the city around you. i guess you're already there. such comfort. someone upthread said they smelled someone who was wearing some complicated hipster shit, and i think that phrasing is ds & durga's stock and trade. em eye ess, ess eye ess, ess eye pee pee eye medicine is deliberately difficult. like the buzzcocks said, something's gone wrong again. this feels wrong, but in the right way. i like it. it'd woody, and medicinal, like camphorous but slightly industtrial solvent-y. lalique encre noire a l'extreme is kinda similar but for 235 dollars cheaper. bowmakers is also awesome, but i like comme des garcons wonderwood for half. cowboy grass, it's a vetiver, like tom ford grey vetiver but some with some added tincure of herbal sweetness and we close our eyes and dream, and that dream is of wyoming. i'm on a horse. i call him d'artagnon, it's an in joke between me and the horse. we both stare off into the flat horizion, and have thoughts we can never share with each other, and we laugh.

ds & durga, they make true the promise of aughts brooklyn. what you get resembles the artifact it's meant to resemble. which not every indie hipster brand does.

i didn't get debaser or cosmico. am innerested.

there's a slight wind that fusses with the horse's mane, and i rustle around in the inner pocket of my barn coat for my cigarettes before i remember that i quit.

My god, slugbuggy, you should get paid to write reviews!

I got my latest Scentbird order Etat Libre d'Orange's I am trash.

It says it's made from discarded rose, apple and real sandalwood pieces...it's fantastic because it reminds me of my mom's hair salon or starched shirts I think it's the presence of iso-e-super, dunno.

The touch of apple is brilliant.

I'm going to add it to my signature list...definitely the one for getting dressed up and going out on a warm afternoon.

$260 is ludicrous, but you could score decants if you want to try it. Or you could put a down payment on a horse in Wyoming...

Ok, I’m a sucker. Has anyone gotten any Le Labo city exclusives and are any worth even considering?

lol at that CB challenge, my friend (with whom I went to Oberlin, lol) lived very close to his shop at one point and we'd pop in all the time.

i was obvs riffing on that quote luna schlosser posted, but it seemed to me the vignette that it suggested is precisely the type of imagery CB traffics in, like the old england thing he created for that one guy in that bbc doc (except in that instance CB was drawing inspiration from disparate englandisms from all over the place, not relegating his efforts to one specific scenario like i was doing with the nyro-dorm-album thing. also, the doc never showed if the guy liked it or not, see my concerns about how discrete notes combine to form totally different scents two sentences hence in regards as to why it may not have succeeded). it's not just the lilac scent, but the gestalt engendered from all the attendant particulars: lilacs, ink, vinyl, paper, and given that nyro was proto-nicks with all the candles, maybe the scent of wax and smoke, which is what a nyro acolyte would be doing, i assume, maybe incorrectly, but let's go with it, burning candles while listening to the album. the only problem is that aroma chemicals don't always retain note separation and meander towards at you independently from different angles, they're all crammed together and make a new, unintended consequence. i have a wild hunt CB sample and it's supposed to be all these woodland aromas wafting towards you as you trundle through the wilds but mushed together it ends up, to me, smelling like a mushroom turkey stuffing. i contend that we're pretty far into the near future sci-fi wise but as far as photo-realism vis-a-vis fragrances we're in the olden days, even if CB is our nikky tesla opening up the great wild yonder to what is yet to come and we'll all take it for granted once it's here but as of yet, not yet, but that's just me and i don't have enough experience with this sort of thing.

the reason this is a something i thought about is i remember getting boys and girls from dingleberry's records in centerville, nowhere, ohio, summer heat and asphalt stickyness, in 1985 and tearing the plastic off the cassette in the parking lot in front of the store in my cutlass supreme that my dad bequeathed to me and my younger brother although i treated it as if it were mine alone, and the smell of that cassette, i don't know what. it were pungent, wonderfully so, the smell of aesthetic existentialities from someplace else. i categorize that particular smell as "the chosen one." maybe it was a different ink than usual, but it was a strong, wondrously alien ink smell, or maybe the cassette fermented in a hot warehouse for a bit, but i have that fragment implanted deep down in the remembery places while other unboxings remain aloof and irretrievable. except low-life. that also smelled. i'd like *waves hand saucily* all that bottled, if you could.

also, while i'm here. like every normie suspect, who in the mid 80s to early 90s only had ONE bottle of whatever and wore it out and then got a different bottle (i think the iconography of my lived experience goes grey flannel, polo, armani fucking excelsior pour homme, obsession, drakkar, tuscany, eternity, giorgio red) and then nada until recently. HOWEVER, i did the sample vial thing thing in the mall all the time. what a glorious era! so many free sample vials. a conscientious grifter could could subsist on samples along during that era. you have to beg for them now, back then they shoved them in your face. dancing in heaven, i was.

i figure there are at least a dozen or so vague impressions of scents from the goddam free sample era i'll never identify specifically but moby dick white whale quest. i remember a dense floral that came across like a liquor. closest i can ascribe it to modernly is tom ford black orchid. passion for men, maybe? there's about 30% certainty on that one. also a lancome that had to be either sagamore or programme homme. homme was compared to grey flannel in something i read online so i think that's it because that's my jam. not how flannel is, how it was or at least how i imagine it was. if my memory of how it was is wrong then i want something that correlates to that false memory, if you know what i mean. the liquid was green, the lancome. i know i had a fahrenheit sample that i wore in summer and someone said it was way too strong which it would have been in the summer but what did i know. my memory was that it was liquid sunshine. fendi uomo! i swear it was real, and it was spectacular, but it's lost to me now. liz claiborn for men, craptacular now, but i remember how it was. the rest i forget, but i know i smelled so many.

wd totally hang out with slugbuggy for a deeply indulgent fragrance session, riffing on each other's olfactory vocabular, and recording our reactions for posterity.

Would patreon

i used to use brut when i was a kid but i wonder what elon musk would smell like!

God, all I remember about my scent use in high school was using Joop! Homme for a lot of it. :shudders:

I recently ordered a gift set of the sadly discontinued Rive Gauche Pour Homme (OG tin can) plus the body wash, was less extortionately priced on eBay than usual. Totally worth it. As fougeres go, I love Tom Ford Beau De Jour and Rogue Bon Monsieur just about as much, but Rive Gauche has a gentle, refined, clean glow about it that makes me want to live in it all the time

slugbuggy, your Nyro-dorm-room perfume concept has to become reality. How does one go about pitching ideas to perfume houses?

just between us fragnerds, i got rive gauche pour homme at the perfume kiosk at my local mall for really cheap, $58 us for a 1.7 oz. which i figure was the original retail price. i also got kenzo tokyo 1.7 oz. and dior aqua farhrenheit 4.2 oz. for retail even though these things are discontinued and literally go for hundreds of billions of dollars on ebays. some ppl online complain that they got fakes from these places but from what experience i've attained this shit is legit. i live in a pkace where the ebay vultures haven't yet figured this out and cleaned up, maybe where you live it's different. maybe this is the trade-off: i don't have access to all the fancy boutiques but i gain on the low-end. also the good shit might be buried in the back so ask, and they'll open up a sealed box and let you sniff it.

the tom ford beau de jour, the local sephora should have that asince it's signature and not fancy niche line so ima gonna go smell that with a quickness. the rogue line also looks innerestin as it's non-ifra complaint.

Curious to know what you think about Beau de Jour when you get around to trying it. I'm relatively new to this game, but it feels like the platonic ideal of a fougere to me--some of the freshest, cleanest lavender imaginable followed by a soothing patchouli/amber drydown. It's easy to see why Ford moved it from Private Blend to the mass-market Signature Collection; it just smells really nice, fresh, and accessible. I'm hoping mainstream tastes move in its direction and away from blue ambroxan bombs like Sauvage, Bleu de Chanel, etc.

My favorite fragrance of theirs is L'Eau Trois which is basically frankincense, but it's not for every day

I just hunted down a bottle of this yesterday, at the one Diptyque store in NYC that actually stocks it. I was expecting something closer to CDG Avignon, which is the frankincense/myrrh frag I'm most familiar with, but L'Eau Trois a completely different take on incense--ancient, austere, unexpectedly green, and utterly gorgeous. Once it dries down it's like pure myrrh resin has melted into my skin, radiating a holy balsamic aura. I definitely agree that it's not for every day, and it feels more like a meditative self-care fragrance than something you'd wear to impress others. I'm looking forward to rocking it throughout the colder months.

The other Diptyque I'm excited about/hoping to cop soon is Eau Lente, which smells to me like a luxe version of Johnson's Baby Oil at first, then dries down into a blend of spices reminiscent of the original L'Eau. I guess some people find that off-putting, but it's a very comforting scent to me.

Slugbuggy, if I wanted something like Elizabeth Arderns Green Tea but more refined and elegant, do you happen to have any recs? It’s super cheap, and it’s rough, but I’ve always liked it, even though I’ve been wearing expensive perfumes for 20 years.

all i really know is that the bvlgari eau parfumee au the vert seems to be the standard for that kind of thing. it's a jean-claude ellena cration, feels good when we kiss, nobody ever made me feel like this. it's been a while since i've smelled it but it seems that what followed was pretty much based on that. i think it's better than the arden but i'm not sure if it tracks price-wise. i have the banana republic vintage 78 and i feel it's a pretty good tea fragrance for the price i paid but it's discontinued and already hard to find online.

i'd say check out fragrantica and look under tea in the notes section. there's all kinds of teas at various price points: the body shop, roget and gillet, armani prive, guerlain, and so on. jo malone does green really well from what i can tell and they have some teas.

i've also smelled bvlgari pour homme, which i think is just ok, l'artisan tea for two, which is a very cinnomany tea, kenzo tokyo, very spicy and hard to find, and bvlgari black, which is ostensibly a tea fragrance but really a leather thing.

i feel like i have the highest noise-to-signal ratio on this thread. i spew a lot of word salad; i have a lot of thoughts because intp like a lot of ilx but then a coupla whiskeys and then here's everything i know about a topic. also i work in a refernce from whatever modern rock thing i'm listening to at the time; i'm a slave to love in that respect. i'm too young to reason, too grown up to dream. how poignant and lachrymose is that lyric, now that we're so much older? if that resonated so long ago, how much more so now, now that nobody hardly remembers or cares about that song?

what was i talking about? i think fragrances in general are under-represented as cultural products: smell is the most evocative sense but all the smart people talk about movies and visual arts and music in that regard. ck one is as much a dividing line between eras as nirvana. maybe that's a bad example. i feel clever enough to be on ilx but just barely; i posit positions as a starting point for someone of advanced erudition to run with. dare to be stupid. almost everyone else who posts on here seems to know as much or more about fragrances as i do. i'm just the loud drunk poster.

in conclusion and in summary, does anyone know if au the vert is pretty much it or is there better, and is it worth the price differential? also, does anyone want to dread pirate roberts me and be the drunk posting fragrance and cultural reference person? it's really fun and people seem to like it; at least so far no one has said shut up, voices carry.

how elegant is that slave to love video? if that's not the aural equivalent of armani pour homme then i don't want to live in this world, because i'm right and the world is wrong. i can hear your laughter, i can see your smile. such sexless sexuality, so much jawlines and hemlines. the height of cultivated artifice. i can so remember pulling the cap off of my bottle, and whatever it was i was contained therein, it was clearly something i was only ever to imagine from afar.

Pls post more not less, especially pls post about Cool Water

Thank you! I’ll check those out. I loved bvlgari au the blanc but I wore it during a really shitty time in my life so I’m not sure I could wear it again without that taint.

i dunno, i feel like cool water is a legacy fragrance: it's a thing and you can't detract from that. there's a blog from an old-school guy, called from pyrgos, and he has a post about the history of dihydromyrcenol or whatever and cool water is def a part of that iconography. you got paco rabanne ph, drakkar noir, green irish tweed, aspen, and cool water. i read it and i guess cool water is part of that lineage.

i had cool water during my fallow period because somehow i fad read that it was transitional and important. wait, here comes linda richmond: cool water is neither cool nor watery. discuss amongst yourselves. i don't know if it's a proper fougere but it's lavendery so it's probably is. then you had eternity which is to cw what bush is to nirvana: it's the call is coming from inside the house type of situation. the first is the shot across the ramparts, the second is we took the shot and decided to market the damn thing back to y'all. i think.

like i said, after i stopped buying thugs and before i really started buying all the things, i had cool water as my only bottle. i liked it okay but i wasn't in love with it. i liked it, but not like liked it. we're still friends, though. the crrent iteration is supposed weaker that the original so i can't really comment on how good it once was.

i still haven't smelled the tom ford beau de jour but i plan to. why is something that is in the signature line and not the high-end line 190 dollers? that's too many dollers. i'm still all san dimas football rules about ysl rive gauche, though. how the hell is that discontinued, when it's clearly the shizznit? shizznit should be axiomatic.

proudly posting despite grammatical and spelling errors.

great post slug buggy!

funny enough, i tried cool water last night from a tester at Sam's Club. it was glued down to the display and I had to angle my wrist in a weird way to get a spritz. it's a pleasant scent, but I don't think it's for me, tempermentally. i can still smell traces of it close to my skin, which is a positive. i also feel like I would have to dress better to make it work. it wants qualities of fabric greater than what is achievable by Target Corp.

counterintuitively, I've been an occasional Silver Mountain Water wearer for the past few years. for me, Silver Mountain Water isn't inhibited by my lack of sartorial refinement, but I do need certain atmospheric conditions to make it work - generally only in cool/cold crisp weather. Last month, noting that my bottle was depleted about halfway and not feeling great about the prospect of dropping another $200+ on perfume (speaking of too many dollers) I looked into knockoffs and picked up Franck Olivier Sun Java White Men, based on Fragrantica comment chatter, for about $20. While the power of the fragrance is there, and the notes are obviously similar, they were arranged in a way that made me nauseous.

which brings me to Aventus. i thought based on my love of SMW that i should try out the most expensive of Creed's line. I've tried their Santal, which was of similar quality, but was just not my scent. picked up a vial of Aventus for way more than a sample vial should cost. but expecting similar strength to SMW (which definitely projects for a good portion of my day and can stay close into the next), the aventus that I got was barely audible from the start. i really had to bend down to my wrist to smell it throughout the morning, and that was about as long as it lasted. did not inspire confidence in me to spend whatever exorbitant price they are asking for a full bottle. it's a shame, because the fragrance itself was well composed and interesting, but again not justifiably $400+ of interesting.

I got a bunch of samples from

https://adqperfumes.com/products/explorer-set

and am pretty impressed.

got some alkemia testers in the mail and holy shit is YDALIR ever a dank monstrous haunted old reliquary

I don't know how, but I ended up watching an unboxing video for this Chanel no. 5 advent calendar (£610 in UK, I think maybe $825 US?) and it's full of the cheapest, shoddiest shit and hardly any actual products!
https://www.chanel.com/gb/fragrance/p/105997/n5-the-calendar/

I know you can get great beauty calendars, luxury ones, good value ones and lots filled with worthless crap but this one surely takes the prize for pissing on its own brand? Or do die-hard Chanel fans actually enjoy tiny samples and stickers... so many stickers...?

also it starts on 5 and goes to 31, which is terrible.

Lol. I saw this as well, not overly impressed either. I think Chanel do a great job branding (well they should, the amount of money they put into it) and the beauty products are legitimately good ime. I still have a bottle of Blue Satin I bought in 2008 from getting paid from my first real job and the formula is still perfect. However, I think you’d have to be a real completist to own that. I think I have said that I don’t really care much for no5 myself at all but Chance is a legit great fragrance and I always try to own some.

Has anyone tried Les Nereides ? I really like their approach to jewellery, so am trying their Etoile d’Oranger out of curiosity. It smells a bit like geraniums to me and I was initially a bit disappointed - but I’m liking it more after a few days use.

I’ve also just received a very generous gift of a pack of 3 different Acqua di Parma Colonia (regular, Intensa and Pura) which I am looking forward to trying.

Xpost self

The two sales assistants were both heavily pushing the ‘patchouli antique fragrance’, sowing the seeds for self-doubt, and I’ve got buyer’s remorse now.

Last time I got a full 100 ml of Boucheron perfume (Jaipur) for free on top of four second-hand chairs (100 $), felt like a good deal.

Also I finally got onto the Liberty box subscription so I’m looking forward to going to the perfume department and getting something with my credit in the new year. Am getting this Frederic Malle discovery set as a Christmas present, was thinking of Portrait of a Lady if I like it.

Musc Ravageur by Frederic Malle is still my s**t: two sprays at 10am today and still present at around 5pm. This after lots of bike riding, a bit of rain.
Worst recent buy was CDG Kyoto EDT - a scent I fell in love with via samples. No longevity whatsoever. Barely 30 minutes. Bah Humbug.

I love Kyoto and I find the opposite with longevity, but I do find that some perfumes that people online praise for their sillage seem to evaporate off me :( I have a bottle of Cinéma that I love but after an hour it’s almost entirely faded. Maybe that’s part of why I like Angel so much, that stuff survives baths.

I love Kyoto too but like xp I find it doesn't last very long on me. I don't mind re-applying throughout the day though. My current fave from the CdG Incense series is Zagorsk--cold, austere, piney, vaguely soapy, and perfect for winter. Supposedly smells a lot like Eastern Orthodox church incense, which I'm not familiar with.

I also tried Guerlain Jicky (EDP, new 2021 bottle) for the first time a few days ago, and the opening has to be one of the most beautiful things I've ever smelled. Lavender, citrus, herbs, hay--clean and rustic at the same time. It smells old but feels timeless rather than dated. I got a bit of the infamous civet funk in the drydown, not in an unpleasant way. Similar to the clean/dirty dichotomy of Kouros but mellower and more welcoming.

Got Frederic Malle’s 12 piece discovery set as an asked-for present yesterday and the Imaginary Authors perfume as a surprise Fox in the Flowerbed.

Wore Fox in the Flowerbed yesterday and tried Portrait of a Lady from the Malle set today, so these are just initial impressions.

Fox in the Flowerbed:

My husband said he thought of this for me because it has a jasmine top note same as Alien, which I’ve worn and loved for years. Alien is a beautiful fragrance but it’s not for everyone and some find it a lot. Turin and Sanchez don’t particularly rate it but I’ve always found it to be very special, and have gone through several bottles in the last twenty years. Anyway, Fox…is a fresher scent than Alien, it’s designed around the theme of a whimsical book about a fox that falls in love with a butterfly. Insufferable as all that sounds, it’s a beautifully presented bottle (in a box that looks like a book), and the notes echo the fiction it’s supposedly inspired by. The jasmine ofc is pretty notable, but the pink pepper lingers on as well for a little kick. It’s very pretty and well done, and was a nice touch of spring in this dour winter. I wish all surprises were this great.

Portrait of a Lady:

I’ve owned Carnal Flower (another Christmas present), and wanted to try some more Malle fragrances but haven’t made it out to anywhere in 2021 to do so in person :( This one came highly recommended and I was keen to try it first. The notes are very reminiscent of Twilly eau poivrée (which I also own and love). The initial impression is of the rose, warm and luminous, but after a while some of the other notes come to the fore. I got the cinnamon and sandalwood hints a bit stronger but other people may perceive it differently. Am I the kind of person who wears this, I wonder? Maybe not, it’s very sweetly feminine and ladylike and I think I might slightly prefer Twilly au Poivrée’s slight bite but I have a few more goes of this. It’s a very beautiful perfume, I can’t quite work it out.

Also just realised that Dominique Ropion, who did Carnal Flower and Portrait of a Lady, was also behind Alien so that was nice to think about the similarities between them.

More Frederic Malle:

Musc Ravageur

Was excited about trying this one but undecided on it. I had read other people's impressions of this as this towering, sexy fragrance and it's...a bit weak? I don't know. Will try it another couple of times, but it doesn't come close to Fracas for sexy.

En Passant
Well named. Evaporated almost as soon as I put it on.

Une Rose

The description of this interested me.
An earthy rose is tinged with Périgord truffle for a subtle taste of the gothic. This crimson femininity is bound by wine dreg to a darker base, the rose’s secret roots. A garden flower with hidden depths.

It's sweet, it's warm, and I definitely get the wine dregs - like an evening after an engagement maybe, but the word I keep settling on is nice and it's not £172 nice.

I'm not a hugely perfumey person but I want to smell all these!

Next time you're somewhere they have perfume you can try, try Twilly. Incredible. I bought it in the airport on the way home from Ireland in the summer and I haven't liked anything so much in years.
https://www.fragrantica.com/perfume/Hermes/Twilly-d-Hermes-46145.html It's fresh, it's bright, it's warm, it's gorgeous. Haven't loved anything like this in a long long time.

Isn’t that the one you bought Gyac? The one with the bottle that looks like it’s wearing a little hat?

My trusty fave is still Narciso Rodriguez “For Her” but I also recently got Juliette Has a Gun’s Not a Perfume and I love it so much.

xp yep, I have the Eau Poivrée one as well!

btw I've never tried Narciso Rodriguez For Her but Luca Turin & Tania Sanchez gave it a good writeup in Perfume: The A-Z Guide.

But give Narciso Rodriguez to someone you like, and stand at attention as she sweeps past. You then realize that some fragrances, like gravitation, reliably generate an attractive force day in and day out, without fuss or explanation, though theories abound. LT

Memorable mostly for mating a big, somewhat masculine patchouli-musk to its harsh, chemical-smelling orange-blossom floral. TS

It’s gorgeous.

Musc Ravageur

Was excited about trying this one but undecided on it. I had read other people's impressions of this as this towering, sexy fragrance and it's...a bit weak? I don't know. Will try it another couple of times, but it doesn't come close to Fracas for sexy.

I went to a Frederic Malle store a couple months ago, mainly to try that one and Monsieur. I had a similar reaction to Musc Ravageur; it was definitely more subtle and less aggressive than I expected. Monsieur, on the other hand, I loved immediately. The drydown smells exactly like Minorien Fu-In Kyara japanese incense, which is amazing stuff and worth checking out if you're into that kind of thing.

A couple weeks after that I got a sample of Le Labo Labdanum 18, which smelled really familiar to me in a way I couldn't articulate. Turns out it's basically Musc Ravageur with a slightly more animalic edge (also by the same perfumer). I really like it; it's both soothing and sexy at the same time. Makes me want to give Musc Ravageur another shot and do a side-by-side of the two.

Also gyac, you're OTM re: Fracas. Easily my favorite "women's" perfume ever. Fun, sexy, glamorous, and miraculously undated for a perfume from the 40s. I got my girlfriend a bottle of it, but I keep my own decant just to sniff once in a while and spray some on if I'm feeling adventurous

my friend who like me loves Frederic Malle was taken aback by Musc Ravageur, he said wearing it felt like the experience of waking up in a bed next to a stranger