A breakfast salad in a garden.
I get cantaloupe and delicate flowers, and honey. The finish is a musky trail of almonds that lingers six inches above the skin for an hour.
It’s too pretty for me.
Here’s a pretty tune from Blind Melon.
fruity
Eleventh Hour
I get lime and cigarette tobacco–freshly lit.
Maybe baked apples with cloves, but possibly dried figs and sweet pepper, and a quick finish to what I can only call “expensive coat closet”–slight animal, cedar and rum.
The liquid bites at the skin a bit, and it doesn’t last long.
I could almost compare it to Tank Battle, with the spicy bubblegum notes, except this has more Y chromosome at the bottom.
I like it.
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I love Leonard Cohen songs. Especially when sung by other people.
Pulp
Aptly named.
A walk through the produce aisle in sexy shoes that only come in European sizes.
Byredo’s Pulp is lush fruit rind you want to press your thumb into to check for ripeness. Tart currants spill onto a heap of figs, then there’s a nuttiness, a bite of candy bar like a bawdy pick-up line, funny rather than insulting.
Drunk apples sit on the skin for several hours, waiting for elegant lipstick bites, then they fade to a woody stem.
I bought the biggest bottle I could legally take on the airplane.
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Saw her live, ages ago–so good. This one is a bit bawdy, too.
Macaque
Not my monkey.
Pissy alpha pine flings fruit and the dregs of metal teapots in the air for hours, then disappears into trees after smearing indelible green musk on the skin.
Edit – 11/16/2021
Discontinued, with new flanker editions. Yuzu is a slight improvement on the original. (The Fuji Apple wasn’t available when I placed my order.)
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Different circus, better monkeys:
Pêche
A loud catcall of fantastic peach nectar, with a pinch on the ass of cloves.
Later she steals a flower from a neighbor’s garden to tuck in her hair, on the way to buy sweet Meyer lemons and flirt with the fruit vendor in the square.
Fresh and brash and juicy.
Peach was my favorite ice cream flavor at Baskin-Robbins.
Sun Moon Stars
Remember when you were a kid and you’d rip open the packet of Koolaid and huff that first little wisp of fruit powder?
Only me?
Alllrighty then.
There’s a weird wet/dry to this one, like slippery elm and peachfuzz. Three hours later it turns creamy floral–bright in the winter and soft in the summer–but at the end of the day it dries into a fantastic vanilla tree bark.
And the bottle makes for great curtain rod finials.
Moonlight
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
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.
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A chaotic but fun song–
Cape Heartache
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.
Angel Eau Sucree
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.
kira a. gold 