This was once my favorite. It's a simple, fundamentally pleasing fragrance. But as I expanded my perfume freakery, simple and pleasing stopped being enough. I need weird. I need mothballs and gasoline and indoles and leather from undiscovered animals.
But I am enjoying Sweet Tea today, and so my thoughts are turning to other neglected old favorites. Should I wear them again?
ElizabethW Rose, for example, has always been in the bath oil repertoire, but I haven't worn the perfume even once since I started this blog. This is in spite of my incessant whining about not having the right rose. Surely it's worth at least one try?
Fresh Lemon Sugar is candy lemon verbena. It's silly. It's goofy. I like goofy. I have trouble actually respecting it, but why should that stop me from wearing it?
Fresh Hesperides, sadly, has lost me forever. Between one day and the next, it shifted away from being the perfect sparkling grapefruit fragrance, to being a vehemently synthetic citrus. It's not that the fragrance changed - it's the same bottle, and the storage conditions were just fine, and anyway, the change was too sudden for that explanation. It's my nose.
There are others that are similarly simple and pleasing, but never had a chance to become favorites, because I first tried them after I had established my taste for weird. Rochas Tocade is a nice nonthreatening rose. Modern Vent Vert is a declawed nonthreatening green. Most of the Pacifica fragrances and many of those from Jo Malone are Perfectly Nice.
I can't decide if a need to pursue the strange and threatening is a good or a bad thing. But it seems to be permanent.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
You have a soul mate in the pursuit of all things strange, threatening and...goofy. If a perfume doesn't 'walk the line' a bit, it will have a hard time holding my interest.
ReplyDeleteI also have an extremely changeable nose, like it has a mind separate from my own.
Send all your "Perfectly Nice" scents my way! I have a voracious appetite for the subtle, the "line walkers", the barely there and the borderline bland.
ReplyDelete"Vehemently synthetic citrus" is a fantastic phrase which I must borrow some time...
: - )
"gasoline and indoles and leather from undiscovered animals" - that's perfect, I comletely understand. I need something more than just pretty these days too. I just bought a bottle of the modern Vent Vert but haven't tried it yet. So I guess I'm not in for a shock? Oh well.
ReplyDeleteYo, Josephine! Yes - I've grown accustomed to the need for weirdness, but I'm still not used to the way that a scent that I once liked is suddenly dreadful.
ReplyDeleteCome to think of it, the weird ones seem to go dreadful less frequently. Why is this?
Howdy, Flittersniffer! I have the impression, however, that your skin makes the bland less bland. Or am I remembering incorrectly? While mine, I think, calms down the weird. So we might be meeting in the middle.
Yo, kj! Well, modern Vent Vert is a Nice Pretty Green, but it doesn't have that "you're deep in the forest and something is going to eat you" feel that the vintage gives me. I wonder if layering would be worth a try?