White spring flowers and more white flowers and jasmine and some white citrus-y flowers and some white summer flowers and tuberose.
Very high quality ingredients, and pretty, but I was the kid who ate her Crayolas because I wanted to taste the colors, y’know?
Lasts half an inch above the skin for an hour, and on cotton until laundry day.
Here’s another pretty butterfly from the king of K-Pop.
(That feeling when you finally get your hands on the one everyone told you about and you’re all “Okay, I get it now.”)
All the treats of all the winter holidays bottled into Aladdin’s lamp, doled out in wishes.
Smoked spiced plums and sweet purple flowers–violets and iris–that get creamy with tuberose after an hour, turning the cinnamon sticks to sandalwood.
Later, vanilla and benzoin incense leave hazy trails like warm season’s greetings for days.
Lou Lou came out in 1987, along with INXS’s Kick. Here’s a sweet cover from Beck and Annie from St. Vincent.
Candy sweet artificial red, like the lollipops from the bank teller.
Childish despite the white musk, Barbie perfume in plastic go-go boots.
Lasts through the play-date and nap hour, but fades before snack time.
*
A fun song for kids and adults.
The bottled perfume smells like high end floral shampoo and wet garden–a bit meh, and doesn’t last long.
However, the candle has more of the spicy rosewood notes, and the wax brings out the creamy sweetness of the gardenia, so there’s a lovely hot cocoa accord, perfect for snowed in afternoons.
I bought three.
*
Another Sparrow.
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.)
*
Different circus, better monkeys:
Squirts sharp orange out of the bottle–then sniffs some happy springtime flowers that haven’t realized they will be cut for a funeral arrangement.
Later, a furtive pistachio hides in white musk.
Over-designed, like a lovely semi-precious stone turned cheap and sad by a clumsy electroplate setting.
*
Another chain link.
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.
*
More fire:
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.
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.
*
A song about carrion crows–
Pavlova starts as fingernails on a chalkboard, gives a stern lesson in botany, then hands out sugar pastilles while dismissing class.
Gen X girls got this as a hand-me-down from Mom in the seventies. She was gifted it in a holiday present swap, bought because it was cheap and the packaging was pretty.
We stashed it in the bottom of the pink jewelry box with the ballerina who spun to a wind-up version of Swan Lake; we never understood the significance.
A shrill chypre powder grenade with a dry sweet finish.
This is my favorite arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece.
kira a. gold 