Fragrance du jour, recent sniffs, random notes.
Camel is that delicious import shop halfway down a dark alley that greets you with dried roses in enamel vases and sticky dates on brass trays when you walk in the door.
Cedar boxes of incense, the animal musk of raw silk tapestries…
The shopkeeper has smuggler’s eyes, and you laugh when he tells you there’s a djinn in the bottle but you buy it anyway because he’s so incredibly sexy.
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This whole album is amazing.
This is all the ingredients for an Italian cream cake stored safely in Tupperware bowls.
Vanilla for days, orange flower water, ground nuts, sugar, but with a note of plastic underneath.
It’s such an odd fragrance–too pretty, like the buttercream frosting no one will swipe with a finger for a taste so as not to mar the icing; the child with the best manners and cleanest white dress that no-one will play with, for fear of getting her dirty.
Undeniably sweet and somehow slightly sad.
I saw Tori do this one in concert. It was amazing.
This was my first lesson in flankers. I’d mistakenly bought it thinking it was a back-up bottle for my LL Midnight Sun.
LL Stardust Midnight is sharper and sweeter, closer to the original Lolita.
It opens with bright hot anise and settles down to licorice candy and sugared violets, then lingers on skin and clothes and sheets with an effervescent vanilla.
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A darker Lolita:
Decadent yet disconcerting, like having dessert cocktails at a mortuary.
Chocolate vodka and a shot of caramel liqueur in the coffee afterward, but in the basement is sandalwood coffin sawdust, candle wax and dried flower petals.
Seductive, androgynous, macabre and delicious.
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Here’s a song as decadent, and macabre.
I loved this passionately for three days–a torrid affair of chocolate tangerine jellies and peppery flower bouquets boldly stolen from the neighbor’s garden at noon–but then the ashtray dust and sweat socks became too hard to ignore, and I broke it off.
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Dzing! smells like a bunch of hippies had a love fest in the rare and out-of-print section of the library.
It’s carnal–almost like the zoo funk in the big cat exhibit–with a touch of sticky sweetness, leather fringe and old paper.
Fresh, just out of the hotel room shower, squeaky-clean, man.
Big handsy citrus, a rub of green herbs, a switch of summer pine.
No personality whatsoever, but that isn’t what you hired him for.
Versace came out with Eau Fraiche in 2006. This song–“Stop. Forget it.”–was the hit in Italy then.
Put on that waxy red lipstick you can’t get rid of, bite a chocolate cherry cordial, then kiss the mirror. Voilà! Lolita Lempicka Sweet.
This one wears a short skirt with torn fishnets and whistles at construction workers and laughs outright when anyone tells her she shouldn’t do exactly as she pleases.
Drunk in Love by Beyoncé is by far the best song of 2014–when Sweet came out–but Lorde’s Royals is more lighthearted.
This is gorgeous.
A strike of a sulfur match, then a sip of mulled cider. An autumn crocus blooms from fallen leaves.
A lost-n-found sweater with leather elbow patches, soft enough to wear on bare skin, and as it warms to the body, traces of the rosewater worn by the previous owner drift from the wool.
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Here’s a fun and comfy-sweater saffron:
The first bite is delicious sugar cookie made with vanilla and almonds, the center filled with lemon drop hard candy.
There’s a sudden hit of seltzer-water fizz, a loud ginger finger-bang, and then it settles down to D&G’s Light Blue amber musk…
And stays there.
For two days.
It’s kind of amazing.
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More fire:
kira a. gold 