Ariana Grande’s Moonlight opens with prunes and clean sheets–but then dries down to peach yogurt cups–the lactose free kind with the pro-biotics.
The bedroom pillow marketing vibe doesn’t quite jive, either. The stuff smells more like a desperate middle-of-the-night countermeasure to imminent digestive issues than mattress lingerie.
Ariana and Miley in pajamas covering Crowded House is marvelous, though.
Liaisons Dangereuses scrubs down with Ivory soap in a hot shower while drinking chardonnay, then does something extremely kinky with peaches.
For a long time.
*
A chaotic but fun song–
A beach wedding.
Opens with grapefruit, sugar and a silver spoon, then the frangipani* kicks in.
Waxy flower leis, festoons of them everywhere, sweet and heavy, lovely, but overdone.
The bride carries orchids, but you can’t smell them.
Hours later there’s breezy musk on dunes, and driftwood drying in the sun. The next day, an odd amber citrus still clings to the skin, like sand in unexpected places.
*(Does anyone else think “fancy-panties” when they read the word frangipani?)
(Only me?)
(This is awkward now.)
*
This is NOT a wedding song, even with the deceptively easy beach vibe–
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.
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.
*
Love, love, love this sultry cover.
Sweet, slightly peachy, and gone in seconds.
Edit – 10/4/21
This one was disappointing–the performance is just so bad–and the canister has sat on a shelf for three years. I don’t know anyone in the 5-8 year old range (old enough not to lick it, but young enough to pretend it has any scent) who might enjoy playing dress-up.
This evening I scooped out the solid with a butter-knife (it has the consistency of ChapStick) and smushed it all into a tealight.
After 90 minutes of burning, my hallway lav smells nicely of sweet, slightly scorched peaches.
I’ve paid more for lesser candles, so no complaints.
*
Another angel, with better projection.
All the Lolita Lemicka sexy goodness has been stripped out and replaced with DKNY Be Disappointed.
Might be good for starting campfires.*
Edit – 8/27/21
Eau Jolie was relegated to decorative bottle shelf–but today I wondered, could this be a reasonably good perfume? Did I go into this sniff with biased expectations of my favorite design house? (Lolita Lempicka’s fashion aesthetic was a big influence, back in my costume designing days.)
And, well…
The top notes aren’t bad, just a little shrill–the pear’s sweetness is turned up one notch too far by the black currant.
The middle is some generic floral musk that’s definitely not the “coquettish heart” of the ad copy.
But there’s some reasonably nice neroli lingering with the cedar at the base for a little while.
Would I be impressed if it came from the house brand of a tweeny-bopper mall store?
Perhaps with the quality of the ingredients, but not by the blend.
*Never spray or splash perfume near an open flame.
(Crayons and dryer lint work well, too.)
*
Eau Jolie came out five eight years ago. So did Carla Bruni’s pretty little riff on Chopin.
Spring break hangover in a bottle–which sheds its lovely color on the hands–a generic tropical in a take-home plastic cocktail glass, garnished with artificial flowers.
Passionfruit vodka on top, vinyl couch cushion musk and failed midterms on the bottom.
Edit – 1/4/2022
I discovered this a gazillion years ago, in a “Things You Left In My Apartment” break-up box.
It wasn’t mine, and I’ve occasionally wondered if it belonged to the girl before me, the one during, or the one after.
*
A college roommate–she was a drummer–turned me on to Peter Gabriel’s Passion, the soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ. I’ve yet to see the movie, but we played the album for two semesters straight.
Happy, happy.
The best New Year’s party ever, that changed its name from Champagne for copyright reasons.
(Perfume is technically alcohol, so it cannot legally be sold with the word champagne unless it is made from specific grapes by a specific method in a specific region.)
The new name is a play on YSL and the word ivresse, which means intoxication.)
Yvresse does sparkle out of the bottle, a joyful room-filling effervescent peach muddled up with delicious spices, that calms to petal-soft fuzzy apricot florals in slow dance space for the evening.
Finishes with lovely sweet wine notes over resinous woods–another pun on the cork–that last the night, leaving rosy dregs on the skin in the morning.
Rich and light-hearted, but not silly.
‘Til next year!
*
Marie wants to be “Candied Lemon, Honeydew, Cassis, Sugared Violet, Ylang-ylang, Creamy Musk & White Woods,” but winds up being pale lilac clementines, in a surreal watercolor wash of cake icing.
At the very bottom is a wisp of incense smoke that makes it decadent and sexy, fruity sweet dessert dressed in Rococo ruffle lingerie of sheer organdy, while getting stoned on joints rolled in gardenia scented paper.
My favorite of all the TokyoMilk’s I’ve sniffed. I wish it were offered as an eau–I’d bathe in the stuff.
*
kira a. gold 