Fragrance du jour, recent sniffs, random notes.
In the summer it’s eye-watering: all the hot sauces at the taqueria–tabasco, nopales salsa verde, pico jalapeño–uncorked and spilled over the table.
In the winter it cools down, becomes herbal, sweet bell peppers with a touch of rose on a base of cedar and metallic musk, but it’s no less potent.
Xeryus Rouge came out in in the mid nineties, along with this sweet spicy tune from Cuba.
Big alpha leather with a lemon creme center.
This guy shows up at the party in work boots, carrying a box of chocolates. He appreciates your top shelf liquor cabinet, but doesn’t stay long.
I like him.
Ievan Polkka–also known as the Leekspin song to Bleach fans–by the Finnish group Loituma, is awesome.
Blue roses are a botanical impossibility, but if they did exist, they’d smell like this.
Nest’s Wisteria Blue opens with pretty wisteria in the rain, then big magical roses in full fantasy bloom–and stays there, just inside personal space, for hours.
A nice wet weather floral–brilliant for moody teens.
I love this gloomy day remake.
Herbal Essence shampoo and towels.
A splash of citrus, some lemony herbs and a bit of sterile musk. Mild projection, mild longevity.
It’s marketed as feminine, but would make a good first scent for any pre-teen.
Here’s a nice clean kid-friendly song, also from 2007.
Opens with bergamot then rolls around on forest floor with violet leaf and lily-of-the-valley for a few hours.
Finishes with musky rose and wet ambergris on the skin.
Very brooding male pixie.
I love it.
(I may have posed in a compromising photo with a certain lawn ornament, many many years ago…)
This duo from Cleveland is doing fun things with music and video.
Wild flowers and rose, in a gorgeous high fashion editorial.
Sweet powdery mimosa at the opening, roses from top to bottom, and ending with a breath of organic green musk.
Lasts minutes on skin and hours on clothes. I really like it, but it might be too posh for me.
Azzaro Couture was first released in 1974, then re-launched in 2008 for a boutique show.
Here’s another sweet-and-lovely claimed by the next generation.
I was sixteen when I saw the Stravinsky Fountain in Paris, and fell in love with Niki de Saint Phalle’s wonderful sculptures.
She released her perfume in 1982–as a way to fund her life-long Tarot Garden sculpture project–with a variety of illustrated bottles, including a zodiac series called Eau Defendue.
The eau de toilette opens with peaches and wormwood, and mint–that has just enough of a toothpaste-and-orange-juice dissonance to make one wake up and pay attention, not unlike the vibrant color-blocking of her sculptures–weird and bright, yet pretty.
Carnation and patchouli and some green-dyed-leather twists it around for several hours, and woodsy moss covers the skin for the rest of the day.
Jean Tanguely, Niki’s partner, insisted that moss be allowed to grow on the Centre Pompidou sculptures, as Nature’s contribution to the art–so it can’t be a coincidence that the perfume carries the same green notes.
For more about the artist and her Tarot Garden, check out this New Yorker article.
Igor Stravinsky (watch a video of him conducting here) was a huge influence on John Williams, as well as The Beastie Boys, who sampled The Firebird Suite in two of their songs from Hello Nasty.
I like to think Niki de Saint Phalle, whose artistic style included found materials and juxtaposed media in her feminist compositions, might have approved of this cover by Robyn Adele Anderson. (And the guy on the Theremin is awesome!)
Opens with a gasp of L. L. Stardust Midnight’s iris musk then breathes fermented raspberry jam and spruce.
Nice, but sadly finishes quickly with AXE body spray cedar.
This is my favorite Raspberry Jam at the moment.
This smells like everything else at Macy’s, but with a glass of red wine rather than a caramel frappe or a peach smoothie.
Bergamot and black berries on the top, jasmine and tuberose in the middle, musky patchy vetiver at the bottom.
This song came out in 2017 in Italy, same as.
Have you ever opened a box of old vintage sewing patterns at a rummage sale, and gotten transported back in time–before you were born, even–just from the smell?
Sortilège whispers vintage lily-of-the-valley out of the bottle, then powdery peachy aldehydes a la Chanel No. 5 trample the flowers to dust.
More try to bloom, some feeble jasmine, whimpering mimosa–the rose survives, bolstered by iris, but then they are bowled over by great gobs of amber with vetiver musk in the wake.
This makes me want a wasp-waisted dress with piping and a built-in crinoline, and wrist gloves with matching bows.
Le Galion released Sortilège in 1937, when Fred Astaire was hanging out at The Stork Club, famous for singing Gershwin. I prefer Lady Day’s cover.
kira a. gold 