Opens with cherry Kool-aid, then grows up and drinks kirsch. Roses bloom after a few minutes, blowsy hybrid teas with a pinch of spice. Projects long and loud, and lasts a day on the skin and through the evening on silk.
Cleaner and younger than Tom Ford’s Lost Cherry, and I bet it’s fantastic in the winter.
I love this adorable little tune.
I remember Miss Dior being lovely a long time ago– but this 2017 version not so much. Just opening the magazine peelie makes me feel hungover.
There’s some throat-clenching citrus, a bang on the head of rose, and some nauseating patchouli.
Not one I’m going to chase down in the shops.
Here’s another unnecessary 2017 cover–Rihanna’s song is awesome as is–though this one does it justice, stripped down and acoustic.
Sugar and roses at first spray, then more roses, with stray woody spice underneath, then more roses (and sneezing!) with a bit of caramel benzoin and more roses.
The random notes trickling in and out seem like passing cars blaring random pop songs while one is listening to Ella Fitzgerald.
Close to the skin within ten minutes and gone in twenty.*
*ETA: lasts months on cotton–so perhaps a better one for hair and scarves rather than skin?
A funeral in the rain.
Wet ashes and limes, rose thorns, black pepper, black umbrellas and dirt.
Over in two hours.
Rather elegant, actually.
The name is from a Victor Hugo poem: Hermann, at my side, seemed like a shadow.
A wet song:
Big green leaves at first spray, then waxy flowers and roses in a huge stainless steel vase.
Eventually settles into a watery flood of black currant tea and wet dog–a fancy one with manicured paws and a pompadour.
Both swanky and skanky. Not for me, but it’s got a certain likeable strut.
Kathi MacDonald was an unsung rock and roll heroine–she recorded with The Rolling Stones, Ike & Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and many more.
She had lots of strut.
Velvet takes the roughest wool sweater and turns it into the smoothest silk.
Opens with almond, coconut and clove, but immediately blends into hot chocolate, with a faint whiff of patchouli rising with the steam.
Half an hour in, rose blooms with an intriguing hit of root beer. Eventually settles into vanilla and sweet woods, with a cool blue ambroxy undertone, and the most comfortable sillage ever.
So well named, and perfectly unisex. This stuff could turn alpha stock market bulls into teddy bears, and the sharpest battle-axes into kittens.
This one opens with a ’70’s record scratch of thorny green rose then settles into a good long roll in the hay while listening to Joni Mitchell albums–but then the pepper leaves you itchy, and you’re vaguely aware that a cat has peed nearby.
To be fair, this is a nearly fifty-year-old bottle of perfume, and it may have soured a little.
(The same might be said for my nearly fifty-year-old nose.)
“See the blue pools in the squinting sun–“
A florist in a hospital, maybe.
Anything with tuberose and peaches shouldn’t be this antiseptic.
Edit – 8/31/21
I keep going back to my favorites, just to make sure that they still smell how I remember, that I’m recovered from the C-19 anosmia–but I’ve found a few stinkers that I wrote off with some snark then forgot about, too.
This one is still sterile and generic, the rose and jasmine coming together in lemony disinfectant that kills everything organic and green, then quickly wilts to the skin.
I think it might do even worse in the summer, than when I initially tried it in January.
For the same price, a prettier bouquet and three times the performance all year round, go with Estée Lauder’s Private Collection.
*
This is as moody, but much prettier.
Dark Saphir opens with a bomb siren of green violet and spices, then grows louder with industrial roses–they’ve been stripped of innocence and turned neon blue, fluorescent sillage at arms length that doesn’t settle down.
An hour later the blitz is still on, metallic flowers and galvanized seltzer rain. Eventually it cools to a clean patchi-oudish clear-coat that lasts all night.
Complicated and tense–one to wear when sporting thorns.
This one is also tense and galvanized , in a good way.
*(sigh)*
“Les Fleurs du Dechet” sounds so much prettier, but…
I Am Trash is found object art, a lovely re-purposing of unwanted scraps into elegance.
The opening is shocking–orange rind and a vodka note of fermenting potato parings, but then apple peel quickly takes over and blooms into bruised rose petals, and it’s suddenly gorgeous.
The flowers stay for an hour or two at arm’s length, then fade into a sweet woodsy musk that lingers comfortingly on second hand sleeves all afternoon.
I love the cleverness of it.
kira a. gold 