Cream soda cocktails at a retro ’90’s New Year’s Eve party.
She shows up to the festivities with bourbon fumes and bubblegum on her breath, then dances with sparkling rose geranium over vanilla amber. Fades to a sweet kiss of powdery patchouli for the Bare Naked Ladies’ cover of Auld Lang Syne.
Here is said cover.
Opens with caramel cubes and sweet flower water in a blast of candy store goodness, then snacks on marshmallow fluff on toast, the crusts cut off, pretty please?
The sugar rush is loud but cute, and lasts three-quarters of an hour.
This was my favorite song when I was little:
Fun, but would make a better ice cream flavor.
Maybe by Ben & Jerry’s, with some sprinkles of head shop funk and first crush blueberry sweetness.
Goes on cheap, dutch-date artificial giggles, but slowly gets comfortable and sexy–sugary incense ash a breath off the skin–for several hours.
Perfect for ditching class and finding your chakras, the clitoris, or lay-lines.
Love this dreamy tune by Jay Som. (Check out her NPR Tiny Desk Concert.)
The opening of this one smells exactly like the Jewish bakery on Montague Street on Hanukkah, the windows fogged with the scent of chocolate and poppyseed hamantaschen, and red jelly donuts–
–but then the sequoia note pulls it out of feminine gourmand territory and gives it nice depth.
Good sillage, and the dry down is amazing–a masculine woody cocoa powder that lasts forever on clothes.
My new favorite of the Nest line.
L’Chaim!
Weird–sugar cookies that have been dropped in the dirt.
There’s tobacco, but it’s muddy–cigarette butts left out in the rain.
And there’s honeysuckle, but they’re kind of bruised, like the sun shone too hot.
The spice is nice, powdered ginger and cloves, a soft baking mix for shy cooks.
Stays close, grubby sweets snacked on in private, but lasts all day.
I can’t explain why I like it, but I do.
This Nirvana cover is also weird and sweet.
Opens with a gasp of L. L. Stardust Midnight’s iris musk then breathes fermented raspberry jam and spruce.
Nice, but sadly finishes quickly with AXE body spray cedar.
This is my favorite Raspberry Jam at the moment.
TokyoMilk #09
Cake and lemon sorbet syrup–and waxy sweet flowers that are probably poisonous to cats–hover a foot off the skin for an hour, then settle to sour fruity sugar.
I like it, but aside from the jasmine-scented pancake make-up note, I get no sense of Japanese theater.
A Swedish jazz group mash up with traditional Hogaku instruments.
A big mouthful of Buttered Popcorn flavored Jellybelly beans, sticky sweet and stuck in the teeth for hours.
Later, powdered sugar and clove dusted gingerbread crumbs cling to shirt cuffs.
Fun, like that holiday party at the boss’s house that you weren’t expecting to enjoy–but I’d do better with it as a candle. It’s too sweet for me to wear on my skin.
By the Weather Girls, who brought you It’s Raining Men:
Nice flirty cantaloupe and jasmine, with a smart woody tonka bean ending.
A good “young-adult” scent that doesn’t take over the entire house, street and neighborhood on the way to the high school–a safe blind buy for your favorite teen-thing this holiday.
And five points to House J. Couture for the “Bows before Beaus” line.
I love Lizzo.
Artificial cherry, and the dregs of cheap wine.
A bit of cigarette ash, too.
The ElDO ad copy is a big story about parties and shoes and iris centerpieces, and I get the booze and the hangover, but this scent has been done already, and better–without the feet–in Lolita Lempicka’s Sweet.
Here’s a much better Cherry.
kira a. gold 