She sits close, with powdery lemon cake for an hour or two.
A white cotton dress perfume, worn for afternoon tea and croquet, or sweet iced tea and horseshoes.
Pretty, but shy.
Colette Magny was a French blues singer and activist. I love this cover. It’s a little shy, too.
Weird fruit tart with sprinkles.
Shrill kiwi slices on top a white cupcake iced with white chocolate, decorated with some white flowers.
Lasts long after the party is over, ending with woody vanilla and birthday candle wax (that may be a feature of my solid scent rather than the spray) and musk.
Enormously popular, but the best of Britney’s lot is by far Midnight Fantasy.
This cover of Womanizer is pretty good–
TokyoMilk #15
Clementines and waxy white flowers and vetiver–but sadly dry, not a tongue-crazy kiss on the Eiffel Tower at all.
I’d love this as a linen spray on chaste nights, a goodnight sweetness rather than un baiser amoureux.
A cute little song sung by the former first lady of France–
There’s a high-end bridal shop dressing room vibe from this one–jasmine and chrome with infinite good taste.
Airy white flowers, with enough sandalwood on the bottom to make it shiny smooth.
The wet violet note (water violet is actually a type of aquatic primrose0 on the bottom lingers longest, into the late afternoon.
Mirror Lover is kind of shiny and smooth, too.
There’s a pun here, because it opens with a breath of incense, like a burning vanilla bean–
Then it settles to the skin with a sheer dry cedar-y vanilla warmed by amber, and slowly fades to nothing.
I wish it had better performance–I’d love it on the artist with rough hands who eats from bowls they’ve made and has a houseful of rescue dogs.
Here’s more Vanille, with Follow the Sun.
I keep trying Euphoria, because it’s made with so many things I love–pomegranate, passionfruit, patchouli and violet, mahogany–but they’re all swallowed up by the amber and musk in a way that sours my throat.
I liked the candle in the store, but at home it haunted my house and made me edgy.
Sweet Euphoria is the one song on Chris Cornell’s solo album Euphoria Morning (Mourning) that I’ve never really enjoyed. Pillow of Your Bones is better:
Moody woods and spicy leather. I like it.
The bergamot and pepper opens bright, then the suede turns up the volume. A hit of wintergreen fades into forest within an hour.
This might be marketed as unisex, but I find it very masculine, with smoke and dry musk between the trees.
I still like the original of this one.
A fabulous alpha femme scent.
Starts out with the crazy-complicated burst of smoky-tomato-leaf-lemon-sweet-spice that is geranium, then blows up into wild roses.
An hour later it settles into stiletto heel thorns, sharp with vetiver, and stays close to the skin all afternoon.
Boss woman in a bottle.
(Yes, ma’am.)
I love this cover of Nirvana–she wields her voice like a blade.
This one missed the mark on me.
There’s a weird rough plastic note that swallows up the fruit–like the mesh bag holding the Halos is consuming them–then some vague pine arrives and immediately soaks into the skin.
The ad copy talks about spices and herbs but I get nothing fun like that. Maybe I’ll give it another try when the weather is less January.
A more fun California.
TokyoMilk #31
Another well named scent from Margot Elena.
A crashing wave of flowers and seashells, but somehow sadly watery–
Then the coral blooms with terrific ylang-ylang flowers, for hours, and slowly settles on the bottom with sweet salt.
Good for mer-folk types and surfer sweethearts.
This one has a snorkeling kind of ambiance-
kira a. gold 