sweet

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Amarena Whim

Amarena edgy
Lolita Lempicka bottle with cloisonne almond blossom decorated cap, first out in the Caprices collection in 2007, and on its own two years later.

Amarena Whim is the vanilla ice cream and sour cherry cough drops after you get your tonsils out. Medicinal, comforting, delicate, soporific… one to wear to bed when sleeping alone.

The sugary musk on the bottom is delicate and delicious, but also metallic, like the scent of a tin of silver dragées.

I’ve doled this one out over a decade, my Rx at the end of a rough day. I’ll be heartsick when the last drops are gone–I look for it at every airport shop, every high end thrift store.

My all time favorite song ever, with so many different cover versions  to love–I just discovered Nina didn’t write it!–originally from the 1964 musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd.

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Nemamiah

Cardboard soft stick tube with angel illustration, and craft feather wing.

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.

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Aqua Allegoria Flora Nerolia

Mini Guerlain beehive bottle on a tiny white cardboard box printed with orange blossoms.

Flora Nerolia is basically everything I love in a good neroli essential oil with three times the staying power and an added touch of elegance.
Opens with spring sunshine and honey caught in a crystal decanter, then jasmine and pettigrain rough it up to make it organic and skanky.
(The lushness could get sweaty in the summer. In winter it’s like wearing hope on the skin.)

Sadly discontinued. Secondhand prices are weird on this one–I’ve seen empty boxes go for more than full bottles.

*

An elegant organic wintry song from Björk.


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Marie

TokyoMilk pot of solide parfum, with matchbox featuring Marie Antoinette holding a fan, on a dupioni dress with beaded lace.

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.

*

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Waltz

TokyoMilk bottle with label featuring painting of dancing couple, and a pink rose from my garden.

TokyoMilk No. 14 advertises linden, honeyed rose, wisteria petals and white musk, and yep, that’s all in there, for two hours.

Soft clean lime notes and honeysuckle vibes, with a gritty musk that takes it out of the country and into urban garden territory–grape-sweet wisteria hanging from pergolas, but with some city grunge in the background.

I prefer a mazurka.

Edit – 8/15/21

Found this one in a box with a post-it marked “Try In the Summer?” so here I am.
87 degrees F, and 84% humidity on the east coast of the Bluegrass, today.

The linden has a much bigger presence on warmer skin–greener, with bright citrus florals–and the musky rasp at the bottom seems less synthetic than I remember.
I’m always fascinated by how much perfume changes with temperature and weather.

*

You can waltz (or mazurka) to this one–

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Hypnotic Poison

Blood-red mini bottle perched in an icicle–This one is sublime in cold weather.

Dior’s Hypnotic Poison is the femme fatale in the upscale mall who laces the gourmet sweets with cyanide.

It took over my house and punched me in the teeth and made me watch movies about international intrigue.

Jordan Almonds and loud vanilla sex, this stuff.

hypno poison edges
Handlful of red apple Hypnotic Poison bottle at the mall.

Morcheeba, a trip-hop R&B band, has been going strong since the mid nineties, too. This song has some of the same lethal sweetness.

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Cherry Bomb

Bottle with cute cherry back-printed label, brown branding and a silver tall top, on it’s side.

TokyoMilk #05 touts Wild Rose, Osmanthus Chocolate and Vetiver, and while it’s not the pits, it does fizzle out pretty quickly.

The fragrance sprays on like the waxy chocolate one dips fruit in on Valentine’s Day–then turns into a sporty woody rose for a few minutes and is gone.
Nice, but too pricey for zero longevity.
I also bought the candle, which sadly smokes like a chimney, but makes absolutely divine furniture polish–my cherry wood table perfumes the room when the sun shines on it.

Edit – 2/27/22

Lasts longer in spring, with more herbal apricot than in my autumn test–or maybe the juice has ripened a bit over the past 5 years–but still doesn’t set off any fireworks.

Just blown out TokyoMilk candle, tin lid with cherry label, and yellow chamois cloth on a wood table.

*

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X: L`Heure Folle

blueberry cairn
Stacks of very blue blueberries and Cartier’s signature red leather-look box, and test tube of X.

Cartier’s Ten o’Clock wants to spend the ‘Crazy Hour’ picking blueberries on the forest edge but sadly snoozes with Dad’s outdated watch in the sock drawer.

Ironing starch on cotton handkerchiefs with jam stains that fade to metallic dusty rose.

It makes a nice room scent.

P!nk covered Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy in 2009, when this scent came out. It’s not dusty at all.

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Eau de Star

eau de star
Triangle bottle with blue liquid, surrounded by a rainbow of hard candies.

Thierry Mugler’s Eau de Star bottles up that summer you spent with the bleach blonde stoner cutie who carved a bong out of a watermelon.

Fresh and wet and high and unforgettable.

It was my favorite candy perfume until the guy said, “That reminds me of what (our hot European neighbor) wears.”
She’s ten years younger than me and a flight attendant.

I love this live version of Madonna’s Candy Perfume Girl, bitchy and hard and still sweet.

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Yohji

Indigo Yohji brand tag and matte black compact–that’s as heavy as cast iron–and applicator brush. The ivory powder has a faint glitter sheen, like eye-shadow.

This little powder solide came yesterday and I’m obsessed.
There’s something narcotic about it, in a sweet steamy fog way.

The dust goes on soft as silk, with creamy jasmine spices that rise from the skin as they warm. Then woody vanilla tracers float for several hours through a cloud of some the loveliest musk I’ve ever sniffed.
I can’t stop brushing it on.

The eau de parfum has a lot more green notes at the top–bergamot and cypress that I don’t miss at all–and here the freesia is more support for the nutmeg than a heart note.

But the musk is what makes this so special–delicate and clean, yet slightly opaque, like sugar frosting puffed into vapor, and impossible to stop tasting.
(I’m going to go through this stuff quick.)

*

We watched The Graduate last night, so this will be in my head all week.