This hit me with pruned roses in a vase, overly sugared lemonade, then amaretto non-dairy creamer–gorgeous wild things tamed and tempered to be generic.
I felt the need to mind my dirty mouth, to check my shirt buttons for too much cleavage.
Then the guy said, “You smell like my mother.
So that’s that.
I’m not often one for acapella, but this is kind of amazing.
Paris et Moi is one of those pastel chiffon scarf perfumes, but with a mouth-watering hard candy edge.
Opens wide with strawberries splashed with bread-and-butter pickle brine, then settles down to lemon macarons and rosewater.
The finish lasts long and bright, with a sassy hit of watermelon rind and lingering matchstick ash.
She’s an innocent little sister to Eau de Star, paler pink and smoking menthol lights rather than weed, but no less juicy.
Sutter Home White Zinfandel.
Pleasant enough for a bluejeans lunch date with the girlfriends–fresh tart fruit, woodsy nuts at the bottom–and cheap enough to order the whole bottle.
*
A fun tune for an easy afternoon spent with friends.
This one is fruit syrup made from Italian plums and fresh picked raspberries, purple flowers and vanilla underneath, but with a hint of metal, like that sourness of sucking on a penny.
The amber musk base gives it enough gravitas to take a high school girl into college, and it lasts for days on skin and weeks on clothes.
It’s a rather brilliant note in Britney Spear’s collection–a teenage lipstick fashionista graduating magna cum laude with advanced studies in sociology.
One of my guilty pleasure songs–
Charonge–carrion–sounds prettier in French.
Also, ew.
Edit – 10/21/21
Yep, this is as gross as I remember.
Starts out with white funeral flowers, then devolves into rotted meat and fecal smearing, with some vanilla on the bottom to make it even more disgusting.
*
A song about carrion crows–
Eye of Civet and Thorn of Rose, Rind of Bergamot and Moss of Swamp.
This is Shakespeare’s Macbeth in a single spray: opens with “Enter three Witches,” and in their cauldron is a bubbling neon chartreuse potion.
By the third act it tries to come clean, the murdering queen taking a skinny-dip in a hidden spring, but it fails to wash off all the traces of evil.
Savage green, in a weird fertile spell-chanting way.
Led Zeppelin’s The Rain Song, from Houses of the Holy came out at the same time. Page and Plant re-released a version (as Jean Couturier did Coriandre) two decades later.
This one started sticky and turned to mush on my skin, like fermented fruit, ending in a rosy wood alcohol. I gave it to the props mistress at the children’s theater and on her it became frosting flowers and sass.
Pinkest song ever.
I once had Swedish Moose Cheese at a fancy-ass gallery opening thing. The stuff is a thousand euros a kilo.
All these people standing around making o-faces at their crackers with gold leaf, and I’m thinking what is wrong with me, that I don’t get it?
It’s a nice feta, but…
Moonlight in Heaven is a nice perfume.
I get some artificial coconut and a good mango popsicle, then a bridal dress store–creamy powdered lilies with a dish of foil-wrapped chocolates on a side table.
Maybe I’m just not classy enough to appreciate this properly.
La Rose Angel smells like you’ve been heating cotton candy over a can of Sterno in the back of a florist’s shop.
Sugar floss and hothouse blooms, but dank in the shadows.
*
A fast bubbly splash of Coca-Cola, cheeky spice and snappy sweet citrus, and then it’s gone.
Too much caffeine for a children’s party, too juvenile for cocktails. This is the quick kiss at a high school locker between classes–fresh laughter and a pop of effervescence–then nothing but a memory.
Liking this one right now–check out how much the drummer gets out of just that tambourine.
kira a. gold 