This is amazing.
Opens up with glorious daddy issues of pipe tobacco and bourbon, then dresses in a chocolate velvet vest with a watch chain and takes me out to the lesbian billiards bar.
I drink vanilla shots until I’m cut off for spilling one and we go home to empty cabinets except for that fruitcake I re-gifted and got back two years later.
It’s delicious. Best date ever.
Filthiest song ever.
My cat just peed on the carpet.
No, that’s not what Civet smells like–it’s actually quite lovely. Leather and citrus and peppery carnations, smoke and it’s so lush.
But when I dabbed it on my wrist my cat freaked out, frantically pawed at my sleeve and then took a stress squirt on the rug.
Never have I felt so sexy doing laundry.
ETA:
Carpet is clean, cat is sleeping, perfume calmed down to sweet black coffee on the skin.
This Rolling Stones cover was the B-side of Jesus Christ Pose. (Best played loud.)
Fully loaded Bazooka Joe.
This stuff is like the sexy battle armor you put on before conquering your own world.
Tank Battle opens with a wet bubblegum pop, and a moment later a bright sulfur flare. Smoky haze sits at arms length–a burnt spice offering, a swallow of bourbon, metal shavings from a sharpened blade.
Sun-scorched patchouli and cloves settle to the skin after an hour, with an occasional whiff of daring and sweetness the whole day long.
The Seatbelts’ Tank! (the opener for Cowboy Bebop) is a lot of fun.
Imagine the Morton Salt girl in a pink raincoat and red rubber boots, blowing a bubble of strawberry gum.
The strawberries run the gamut from fresh picked berries in the sun, to red soda pop, then shortcake ice cream bars, and finally those smelly erasers from primary school.
The salt melts quickly and disappears into violets, then a breath of vanilla, a brief taste of hazelnut.
Sweet but strangely chaotic.
(In my head, this is what the Strawberry Letter was scented with.)
Yuna is amazing–this song was featured in an H&M video spread.
All I get from this is dried peaches in a plastic bag. Maybe a whiff of the incense aisle at the other end of the food co-op.
And it lasts as long as the 10-items-or-less line.
I’ve seen Encens et Bubblegum compared to Gorilla Perfume’s Tank Battle (from LUSH).
Nope.
This stuff is a stale sugarless dime ball from a reproduction piggy-bank next to Tank Battle’s fresh packet of Big League Chew. This is clove cigarette ash likened to Satya Sai Baba Nag Champa.
Twice the price, half the sillage and none of the longevity.
Doesn’t compare at all.
Edit – 7/3/23
(Wow. I was a bit angry about it!)
Here’s some more French bubblegum from 2006.
I got this at a mission store in Stockholm for ten kronor, and didn’t open it until I got back to the States…
…where it smelled like every Victoria’s Secret store distilled into a bottle. Entirely too girlish sweet almond, rosebuds and muted citrus with some obligatory white musk underneath.
On my early twenties daughter-child it became Earl Grey tea in a rose-patterned china cup, elegant and perfect.
Dammit, I’m old.
This Swedish song (Oriflame started out in Stockholm) was a hit in 2016, too.
Beekeepers smell like this–honey and smoke and sweet resin. Flowers and wood and hard sweaty work underneath.
Bees make a sticky glue from pine sap called propolis to secure the honeycomb. It’s been used for centuries to varnish violins and in traditional medicine to soothe irritated throats.
Smoke gets the buzzy girls high, so they don’t mind the beeman in their home. He’ll say hullo to the queen and admire the brood before leaving.
Summer afternoons, when it’s too hot for even the roses, the propolis gets soft and the honey makes a mirage of heat over the hives–this is Pour le Soir.
He actually makes the guitar bumble.
Amarena Whim is the vanilla ice cream and sour cherry cough drops after you get your tonsils out. Medicinal, comforting, delicate, soporific… one to wear to bed when sleeping alone.
The sugary musk on the bottom is delicate and delicious, but also metallic, like the scent of a tin of silver dragées.
I’ve doled this one out over a decade, my Rx at the end of a rough day. I’ll be heartsick when the last drops are gone–I look for it at every airport shop, every high end thrift store.
My all time favorite song ever, with so many different cover versions to love–I just discovered Nina didn’t write it!–originally from the 1964 musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd.
Pavlova starts as fingernails on a chalkboard, gives a stern lesson in botany, then hands out sugar pastilles while dismissing class.
Gen X girls got this as a hand-me-down from Mom in the seventies. She was gifted it in a holiday present swap, bought because it was cheap and the packaging was pretty.
We stashed it in the bottom of the pink jewelry box with the ballerina who spun to a wind-up version of Swan Lake; we never understood the significance.
A shrill chypre powder grenade with a dry sweet finish.
This is my favorite arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece.
Still here.
Still writing!
I’ve been researching scent and perfume again–I scribble about it over here, if you like reading about stinky stuff.
Had a busy year! I took a big step and converted my sewing studio into a writing room. Words seem more where my energy is flowing lately, rather than fabric.
Been doing a bunch of beta-reading and contest judging. Feels good to give back a little.
I went to RWA 2017 in Orlando, and it was overwhelming but wonderful.
I spent a lot of time with my agent, grilling her about how the whole publishing industry works, and I got to meet a bunch of awesome people I’ve known online for almost a decade.
Carina Press treated me like a rock star.
Authors and romance books and panels and classes and So. Many. Desserts.
(there *might* be an outline of a pâtisserie romance on my desk right now…)
kira a. gold 