SCENTS

Fragrance du jour, recent sniffs, random notes.

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Macaque Yuzu Edition

The new Macaque promo and vial, with a tired lemon and a bottle of bleach.

So the Zoologists cleaned the monkey cages with lemon scented Clorox.
Now the bleach musk augments the animalics for an uncomfortable hour before fading into resinous pine trees, but I appreciate the removal of the rotten fruit from the original Macaque.

Dries down to long-lasting Mtn Dew and turpentine that’s sweeter on cotton than skin.
Better, but still not the most fun exhibit at the Zoo.

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StellaCorvo (sounds better the Italian) and Cris Pinzauti–who does lots of neat looped stuff–on Peter Gabriel’s classic.

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Narciso

Mini cube of dark eau (yes, it stains) with an ecru top. The full sized bottles are lined with opaque white.

Delightful.

An opalescent woody musk–there’s a lovey creamy yet multifaceted quality about it–and blatantly rich. Starts out with a splash of Shalimar cola, then dusts up with earthy mineral powder made carnal and soft by gardenia.
A bit of rose grows up a few hours in, wild, dry and thorny over the cedars, staying in personal space all day.

Marketed to women, but would be absolutely lethal on masculine types, in a sulking prince way.

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Benjamin Haycock is a singer/rapper/songwriter out of the UK–I love the percussive techniques he uses on the guitar.

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Incanto Bloom

Mini handbag shaped pink flask and gold and red floribunda tea rose.

Honestly, I’m only writing this one up because it’s the last in the gift set and I need closure.
And the photo turned out cute and I have some time to kill while waiting to get my COVID-19 booster vax.

Incanto Bloom might be the most heinous of the collection.
(No, lady giving me the stink-eye for sneezing, I’m not contagious.)

So this mess goes on with grapefruit rind and curried sawdust, then delivers a bouquet of artificial roses before dying a sad musky death. Luckily, it doesn’t last long.

The disconnect between Ferragamo’s clothing and footwear design standards (their boots are marvelous) and this entire Incanto line of fragrances is hard to understand. The house knows what quality is, they’ve just chosen not to produce it.

(Get your booster shot, yeah? This crap isn’t over yet.)

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Maroon 5’s hit came out in 2010 too–doesn’t last long either, but it’s more fun.

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Gucci Guilty

Gold Gucci Guilty mini bottle with mirrored G motif, sitting on some lackluster peaches.

Muted peaches.

Lemon flavored window cleaner and Lipton peach tea powder out of the bottle, that turns to plain non-dairy creamer while the lilacs bloom, milky and warm in personal space, but a little dull.
The bottom is safe patchouli amber just above the skin for half the day.

There’s something oddly repressed about the whole mixture–like the fruit notes want to bump-n-grind but they’re stuck in a demure floral dress–that feels dated.
(I don’t think Guilty has been allowed anything fun to feel guilty about.)

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Even Rachel Wood was the face of the Guilty campaign–she sang this in Across the Universe–but Siouxsie did it best.

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Arsenic

Black TokyoMilk mini bottle featuring a white beetle, sitting in the eye socket of a plaster skull draped in a snakeskin printed scarf.

Now this is what a Halloween fragrance should be–weird, earthy, evocative, and tricky sweet.

TokyoMilk Dark #17 lists Absinthe, Vanilla Salt, Cut Greens, and Crushed Fennel on the bottle–and Arsenic lives up to that, and more.

Wormwood out of the bottle, a satisfying poison green, with a bit of dusty white frosting, both edible and stand-offish.
A twitch of licorice keeps it fresh and fun for several hours at the edge of social distance, and then slides down to intimate space with intoxicating herbal green woods and mineral salts–the the kind that smell a bit sour and glitter when the light hits them right–until the next morning.

The sweeter top notes linger longer on hair and silk, and the bottom blooms brilliantly in a steaming bath (or cauldron.)
Compelling and sexy.
Leans to the warlock section of the spell-book.

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Halloween

Mini silver cloche style bottle of purple eau and silver and purple box with an orchid on it.

Cheap, and smells it–thin watery flowers that turn pale violet, then get sad and cloying with generic musk and vanilla.
If this were a costume it would be a Disney knockoff from the Dollar $tore with a vinyl cape and hard plastic mask.

A scent named after the best holiday ever should be exciting and mysterious. Maybe a little weird, a bit earthy, or candy sweet and spicy.
And it doesn’t have to be expensive–Lolita Lempicka is perfect for the occasion (with much better violet vanilla musk), Coriandre is a brilliant witchy scent, Dead Sexy is spooky fun–or get creative and give that adorable homemade Snow White a dab of apple candy flavoring oil on her cuffs.

Stay safe, and have fun.

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One of my seasonal favorites:

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XII: L’Heure Mysterieuse

Cartier Red and gold box and sample vial, on an antique clock face reading 12:41.

L’Heure Mysterieuse has a lot of ties to LUSH Lord of Misrule, but where LoM measures time on standing stones, XII is a church clock-tower.

First strikes with dry spice and jasmine–peppery sharp, then resin and incense waft in, with a fifteen minute chocolate and cigarette break.
At the half hour patchouli chimes loud, taking over, only occasionally letting a few seconds of vanilla slip by.

Lasts the day at social distance with woody amber, brassy and stern.

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Sonoran Bloom

Canister and gold capped bottle featuring a red and fuchsia illustration of a cactus bloom. Yes, I did blind-buy it on the packaging alone.

Anosmia Bloom is a better name for the opening–I worried that my covid nose had returned–two big sprays on my wrist and one directly on my cuff and for a while all I got was watery citrus.

TokyoMilk #84 lists Petrichor, Saguaro Flower, Agave and Red Clay.
(Saguaro are the big tree cacti out west, with flowers that smell like overripe green melons and are beloved by bats.)

Margot Elena’s “Desert Splendor Awakened” takes a while to wake up, but after a half an hour of weak lemonade, the flowers bloom a hand-span above the skin, herbal-sweet with earthy green notes.

Reasonably pleasant, but nothing special.
Lasts half the day in intimate space, with some dusty musk stains left on cotton.

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A night-blooming tune.
(R.I.P. Dusty Hill. Texas has gone to hell without you.)

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Mimosa Mixte

Purple pouch with tiny sample jar. Jeffrey Dame has very niche presentation at affordable prices.

Cherry vanilla ice cream, artificially flavored and freezer burnt, and awesome.

Opens with a room filling puff of mimosa and ylang-ylang, but with just enough herbal citrus to keep from slipping into banana peel territory.
Fifteen minutes later and the heliotrope takes over with powdery synthetic almonds, musk and vanilla, worthy of a Lolita Lempicka flanker if it were faceted rather than creamy.
Melts to the skin after three hours, and stays there with dusty soft-serve woods through the evening.

Cheap and chic but sweet and nostalgia inducing, like a slow club remix of a favorite song.

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Dimond Saints do some amazing mixes.

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Queens

Sample sprays, one still in Bond № 9 royal blue foil wrapper, on pic of bottle with the Worlds Fair globe sculpture in gold.

On blind sniff I got the bergamot, and what I first thought was jasmine and apricot–but turned out to be tuberose and osmanthus–with sandalwood on the bottom.
The rest was just a pleasant spicy amber fruit mush that I couldn’t deconstruct, like that purple hard candy that you wonder what flavor it’s supposed to be.
Lasts a pretty day in personal space, finishing on vanilla ice milk musk.

Really nice, but other than an apropos slight hit of Chinatown, and the gorgeous bottle, kind of tame–

Queens NY is diversity and contemporary art, and Louis Armstrong and Rockaway beach, fusion street food, Houdini’s grave, Astoria, shopping for absolutely anything in Flushing, and crazy little museums about the oddest things–but it’s not tame.

(I remember walking under the El, before “Sunny Jamaica”–yeah, I’m old.)

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Awkwafina is the best thing out of Queens right now.
(NSFW with five-borough-language.)