white floral

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Truth or Dare

Madonna promo card and sample with the same black & white versus color branding of her Truth or Dare movie

Brilliant busty bubblegum and bisexual bananas.

Edit – 10/19/21

Truth or Dare was the first movie I ever saw where on-screen homosexuality wasn’t portrayed as a hardship, flaw or deviance.
I still think about that sometimes.

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And this how you change the standards of the entertainment industry:

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Tea Rose

tea rose edgy
Tea Rose’s elegant, unisex brown and silver packaging and stately bottle belies the price tag, and the scent does too. A bottle can be had for an hour’s worth of freshman workship wages, yet smells like tenured faculty pay.

Tea Rose is cultured pearls and effortless good manners having gin and tonics at a garden party.
Uncompromising rose, it will strip all other scents in the room of their flowers, and curtsies only to Joy.

I wore this in college when I could only afford silver jewelry, and needed my rayon dress to hold its own in a room full of silk.

This one came out in 1977, along with Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. Here’s a brilliant and eerie cover.

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Spring Jasmine

Shanghai Tang mini with gold ball cap, green longevity symbol, on green plant stems.

Supposed to be bamboo, jasmine and flowers, and olibanum, and that’s nice, but I mostly get Old Skool lilac. Is that what they mean by “flowers”?

Edit – 2/18/23

I bought this set of minis–The Silk Road Collection–curious about what kind of scents Shanghai Tang (a very cool fashion house dedicated to the revival of Chinese culture of the 1920’s–I’ve used several of their pieces on stage) might put out.
Turns out their perfumes were designed by two French-trained Western bigwig master perfumers.

There’s an excellent article over here about China’s fragrance history–Mao banned perfume in the Cultural Revolution.

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This album came out at the end of 2013, just before Spring Jasmine was released. Hebe Tien was the front woman for the Mondopop mega band S.H.E.