Nice for a guy who wants people to believe he just bathed.
Opens with a bit of watery citrus, then the spice-bush kicks in, smoky sweet and earthy–kind of nutmeg-ish with frothy lime flowers–and then ends with ginger tub cleanser.
I bought this one in my quest for calycanthus scents–here the sweet-shrub is overpowered by the bergamot notes and comes across soapy.
It’s nicer on clothes.
This cute song also came out of Italy in 2012.
Opens with a faceful of white flowers, and I’m suddenly claustrophobic–have I been trapped in a hot elevator with this, when I was a child?
(When did this come out, anyway?)
Slowly drifts into soapy milk suds for a while, then settles down with jasmine and woodsy amber a foot off the skin–and stays there all day long.
Complicated–there’s a trace bit of musk that cuts through the sweetness and ages it up. This would be a great Boss-Lady-shows-her-soft-side perfume, in an up-do and day-to-evening shoes.
Fragonard opened in 1926. That same year Carl Nielson’s flute concerto opened in Paris to huge success.
Peach blossom candy and fortune cookies, creamy tuberose sharpened with cardamom, and a bite of sandalwood on the bottom.
There’s a voluptuous mystique to it, gorgeous but with an edge, the sweetheart next door with a femme fatale secret.
Elusive on skin and lasting on silk.
I love it.
I loved Chinatown, too, all the crazy smells and the languages and the colors, the shops with fish and spices and trinkets. The restaurant with the sweetest old man who taught me to eat with chopsticks when I still needed to sit on a phone book to reach the table–
Deee-Lite is also from New York. This song always makes me happy.
The solid goes on with cool waxy watermelon and warms up to a creamy tuberose with a bite of peach.
Lasts for an hour with faint but big sillage, then dissolves into caramel on the skin.
It’s much nicer than I expected–delicate and lighthearted and fun–so nice to find a teen perfume done really well.
This song came out at the same time, cliche and cute (with a teenage fantasy revenge video), but still charming.
A hard liquor splash of orange flower water spiked with amaretto, made clever with spice, then a dump of vanilla sugar heavy enough to hurt the head.
This smells like that sassy chef at the corner bakery who drinks on the job and sets aside cupcakes for the cops who give her a ride home.
(This is what happens when you watch that Baking Show while testing House of Sillage.)
This is a good tune for mixing batter–debuted in 2012, same as Benevolence.
A great one for sweet tooth cravings.
TokyoMilk #10 is a spilled pot of syrupy tea with cream, smoky jasmine and sugared violets.
Sandalwood at the bottom gives the honey a nice bit of bee-sting.
Pretty and warm, with good sillage and amazing longevity.
Edit– 2/27/21
This one has grown on me lately. The quarantine mixed with winter doldrums has made me miss my childhood home and the scents of my step-father’s apiaries.
Honey & the Moon is simpler, and less animalic Bee, but has more woods at the base. Beehive boxes are usually made of pine or cedar, for their non-bee insect repellent properties–Absolue Pour le Soir nails this note perfectly–so I like that bit of structure.
The candle is quite nice, too. Margot Elena’s hand creams are also popular. I’ve tried a few and they feel lovely, but I’m always testing something on my wrists, and I avoid scented lotions. She makes a Honey & the Moon “crema” creme eau de parfum as well, that I’m curious about–always nice to have something travel friendly.
Santana and Michelle Branch came out with this sweet song in 2003, too.
Orange blossom.
Starts out sugar sweet, the dust on marshmallows, then turns jasmine-like, with a touch of honey.
Finishes fruity-juicy, more gourmand than neroli’s greener woody-spice edge.
It’s the floral note easily found in the opening of Coco Mademoiselle, and tastes delicious in Italian Cream Cakes.
This one was bottled for a mini collection for tourists from the Borsari 1970 Museum in Parma, in the seventies–the caps are hideous plastic, but they’re effective–it’s quite well preserved for being so old.
Honey sweet erotic tune from Princess Nokia–
The magazine peelie was raspberry lemonade and tentative patchouli, in an unassuming way.
The bottle in the store was more strawberry ice and jasmine musk and lasted the car ride home close to the skin. She didn’t offer any stimulating conversation on the way.
Definitely from YSL’s conservative good-taste-over-personality line, rather than the avant garde bare-a-boob, Broadway Boogie-Woogie and Studio 54 editorial Opium and Kouros.
Yves Saint Laurent released Mon Paris with Lee-la Baum’s cover of U2’s Love Is Blindness. (Jack White’s is also incredible.)
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.
This is a forgotten gem of a scent–
Opens with sharp green herbs and a squeeze of citrus, then immediately blooms with lilac and honey. Projection for miles, yet the flowers change closer and closer to the skin: lily of the valley, then rose, then violet.
Lasts forever, ending with the softest civet-y oakmoss and more honey.
A new favorite.
I’d never heard of it until I blind bid on a auction lot of vintage minis–then fell in love and did the research–it’s been around since 1913.
The tango was taking France by storm then, brought from Argentina. This is a modern one from the Parisian group Gotan Project.
kira a. gold 