SCENTS

Fragrance du jour, recent sniffs, random notes.

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Moth

Cream honey on a tarnished spoon, with Zoologist bottle testing strip and a decant vial filled with slightly gray eau.

Starts with honey and the Di Da Jow bruise medicine my step-dad used after his Kung-Fu sparring workouts, and ends with a dirty penny.

Edit – 3/2/23

Wow, does Zoologist do honey well. (See Bee and Hummingbird.)

Di Da Jow is a lovely sweet camphorous mash of ginseng, spices, and herbs, meant to be used as topical pain relief. When I was little, I’d sneak drops on my cuffs to sniff at all day. I’m sure my parents knew, from the smell, but they never said anything.

Between the opening and the weird sweaty bit that comes across as screechy metal, somewhere inside the floral powder, are a few moments of smoke.
That’s kind of demented, honestly.

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Olivia Newton-John died yesterday. (Breast cancer sucks.)
She was amazing.

Like the perfume, this song starts marvelously, and ends with some odd squeaky notes.

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At Last

Mini bottle with white lacy floral motif, and metal tube of lotion with the same design on yellow.

Overly friendly envelope glue and laundry starch.

And the “handcreme”, though nice and rich, smells even more deliberately boring.
I’m not one for lotions, but I’ve been gardening today–my neighbor (who probably wore some slinky Chanel back in the day, but doesn’t bother with all that silliness now) gave me a Dior sized heap of lily-of-the-valley bulbs–so my knuckles are thirstier than a pumice stone.

I have no idea why Margot Elena thought anyone would want to smell like this.
Lollia This Moment is a much better choice–not weird or fusty at all–and the bottle is cuter.

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Also not frumpy:

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Lavender & Thyme

Cut crystal flask with a purple and gold label, and blooming lemon thyme from my garden. (My herbs did really well this spring!)

A nice clean herbal, but almost too soapy to wear on the skin–I feel itchy in it, like I haven’t rinsed enough.
This one stays in the laundry room, to spritz on wet towels before they go into the dryer. (Did you know fabric softener sheets make your towels less absorbent?)
Doesn’t last long, even on cotton, but the folding is more fun.

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Insolence

Small frosted Guerlain bee bottle with purple label and pink eau, with strawberries.

Scintillating strawberry baby powder.
Brilliant, with a delicate dissonance that shifts between sparkling floral dust and sweet berry syrup, for hours and hours.
Chaotic, with the lure of a candy shaped bar of soap, and easily worn by anyone from age 9 to 90–

–unless if you happened to be in elementary school in 1980.
Because this smells exactly like Strawberry Shortcake doll hair.

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Here’s another dissonant Insolence that works well:

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Sole 149

Squat jar of perfume with domed lid in a yellow Pucci line design, and a tomato plant.

This one has stayed true to memory–or maybe I’m finally spiraling upward from this latest mini relapse–with sun after rain on a vegetable garden, green and fresh and perfect.

Sole 149 is as green as Envy, with the same jasmine on rosy wood stems, but wet tomato leaf takes the place of the fruity celery, turning the bitterness more herbal than citrus.

I love the vibrancy of the top notes–the verdant piquant strangeness of the tomato plant is so unexpected yet immediately recognizable–and the shower clean drydown is soft and nice.
The jasmine in the middle is a little thin, but perfectly suits the translucency of a Pucci silk scarf.

Wear on summer evenings.

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A garden song–a cover of one of my favorite by Joni, here turned shadowy.

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Poe’s Tobacco

A white cat sniffs an apple on a green leather bound collection of Edgar Allan Poe, with a TokyoMilk bottle featuring a raven.

“Long Covid” is a thing.
I’m getting better, just more slowly than I thought. It’s been 10 months, now.
(The guy hasn’t got his taste back properly, and says the sky looks pinker than it should.)
The waves of exhaustion come and go, with joint pain popping up in odd places–a ghost in the machine–and shrouding sensations that make me doubt my nose and my playlists.

Sometimes my most beloved songs seem flat, the blues going gray.

I took a break from the sniff tests for a few months, nervous that my receptors were too scarred to function properly.
I’ve found comfort in my old favorites–Tank Battle has been a constant through this two-steps-forward-one-step-back recovery–spraying more, pressing my nose deeper into my skin, rejoicing at the familiar notes in the muted performance.
Not all have stayed the same, though.

Poe’s Tobacco–which used to be an autumn go-to, with apples and amber and tea–now seems more summery, orchard blossoms and sun in trees, and maybe some jasmine I wasn’t aware of before.
The tabac still gives it depth, but the woods lean more floral now, and less toward books in shadowy corners. I’m sad about it, that the niche-but-accessible cleverness has worn off.

A nice, easy to find vintage–but not quite as offbeat and fun as I remember.
I hope it’s just me.

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A haunting rendition that still rings true.

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Beaver

Decant with pink eau, on blue dyed pelt.

Wet blue fur.

Edit – 7/3/23

A soft animalic musk that does an interesting back and forth between soap suds and woodsy pond water–but not my favorite wetland creature.

I pulled this out to compare the castoreum with a few others–Mad Madame, another strong “fur,” has a lot of it. Amouage Fate has only a little, just a touch of soft texture to the leather, and I love it.

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Sunflowers

Amber eau mini capped with white, with a yellow flower crest, sitting on a pile of salted seeds, against a flag blue background.

“Take these seeds and put them in your pocket, so sunflowers will grow when you die here.” -Ukrainian curse

Elizabeth Arden’s iconic 90’s soapy melon salad smells of Scooby-Doo fruit snacks, Beanie Baby pellets, and Bill Clinton’s saxophone spit, and nothing like sunflowers, or war.

I’m a bit sideways today. The world seems unreal, sometimes.

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The Ukranian Armed Forces asked a soldier–Taros Borovok–to write them a fight song, the day Putin invaded. He praises the Turkish combat drones that slowed the Russian forces that day.

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Brune Melancolia

Black and white solid perfume canister, with orange and yellow rose.

Sad rose yogurt.

The citrus opens too tart–soured by the sandalwood, maybe–but then berries and a bit of spice get stirred in, sweetened with floral syrup.
The moody violet/cassis finish on the skin is nice, after the first disappointing hour–the start seems like something you’d taste in the dairy aisle at the happy-hippy food co-op, rather than a fragrance.

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The most melancholy song ever–