Fragrance du jour, recent sniffs, random notes.
Vosges used to make a violet chocolate cream truffle that tastes like Midnight Sun smells straight out of the bottle.
It dries down quickly to aniseed powder and vanilla, anchored in place by vetiver–and lingers until dawn, a sexy Cinderella losing more than her shoes as she dances.
This was my date-night signature until I discovered Lolita Lempicka Minuit Noir.
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Love, love, love this sultry cover.
Cape Heartache is not really a unisex travel book–it’s a gender-fluid memoir.
It opens as a young girl sucking on a pink candy necklace, but the elastic string grows into sweaty teen boy burning tires on the pavement.
Then the car takes a turn, cool mint and chic college girl with the top down, winding up alpine roads–
but the pine trees are cut down by a lumberjack with a gas-powered chain saw.
Then a sultry strawberry in a red dress and bare feet watches a campfire until late into the evening, when the coals are covered by a passing dark stranger.
It’s like a romance with shifting his-and-hers point-of-view, but I can’t stop sniffing my skin to see if there’s a sequel.
A fluid song.
Opens with a big proud blast of Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry frozen concentrate, then melts down to a puff of meringue and saucy caramel.
Dregs of vanilla extract sit on the skin, rubbed dry with sweet patchouli dust.
A bit mischievous–Pippi Longstocking with fake eyelashes and a pink sling-shot.
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Love this saucy tart song.
An orange Dreamsicle and beachcombing date on Fire Island.
A drag queen in a glittering sherbet gown gets her train caught on a boardwalk nail, spilling sequins and she chooses to laugh, because it’s too nice an evening for swearing, isn’t it, darling?
Much later, sweet spicy comforting chocolate and cinnamon and flirty caramel musk, reggae night at the Latin bear club across from the Sandcastle–all the fabulous mustaches–and someone brought a marshmallow gun.
Miles of sillage.
I’m talking on the other end of the ferry on the way to the Pines. Against the headwind. They can smell clementines and vanilla before the boat has left Bayshore.
This stuff gets under the skin, deep into the hypodermis layer, untouched by ocean, shower or chlorinated hot tub–lingering tangerine peel and nutmeg and cream soda dum-dum pops–for days.
You find a glittering spangle in the sand when you come back next weekend, and it still smells like Myrrh Maid’s citrus spice smirk. She’s got a regular show in Cherry Grove serving sea-witch realness. Come see me, darling.
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Hedda Lettuce is my favorite.
(NSFW!)
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.
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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.
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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.
kira a. gold 