The Scent of Music: Christmas Time is Here (Vince Guaraldi Trio)

The scent of what, you ask? Well, perfume lovers associate a lot of things with perfume. What perfume would James Bond wear, and does it depend on whether he's being played by Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan? What does the color chartreuse smell like? What perfume goes best with prime rib?

For Christmas, some of us are blogging about the link between a piece of Christmas music and a perfume. The choice of music is up to the blogger. And I'm a weird blogger, with a taste for the dark.  The chorus of Christmas in Prison, as performed by The Boxmasters, keeps running through my head. The same album (Christmas Cheer)  includes I Won't Be Home For Christmas, also about Christmas in prison. And My Dreams of Christmas, about a child's disappointed Christmas dreams. And Slower Than Christmas, about a dysfunctional family. And Blue Christmas. And...

I love that album. And I'm slightly disappointed that August: Osage County (the movie based on the play about a dysfunctional family, by Tracy Letts) isn't actually opening on Christmas day. And I'm feeling the urge to watch Christopher Titus's Norman Rockwell is Bleeding again. It's been one of those years. Or two of those years. I'm supposed to be happy and sparkly, and I'm failing to fulfill that expectation. There's no particularly good reason why, but all the same, without an excuse, I'm failing to sparkle.

Like Charlie Brown.

We watched A Charlie Brown Christmas last night, right before watching It's A Wonderful Life. They both gave me just what I wanted, and, more surprising, they seem to fill the same need that's filled by the Boxmasters album, the Titus special, the Letts play, and similar dark work. I suppose that the common element is that they all address disappointment, address it not so much as an incident in life, but as a part of its fabric. The best comedy comes from darkness and disappointment, and I suspect that the best music does as well. I don't say that that makes it all worthwhile, but that's not really the point. You start with what you have, and you make something of it.

This is really not the kind of Christmas post that you were expecting, is it? Then again, Christmas is about darkness, too, in its way. I'm not religious, but that doesn't mean that the story of a dark world being presented with hope, hope coming from a humble and poor place, doesn't have power for me. A manger and a baby. A tiny Christmas tree facing scorn and growing when it's loved. I can't really make a tidy analogy there, but all the same, it works for me.

Christmas Time is Here, the music that opens A Charlie Brown Christmas, is sweet and sad and happy. It glimmers and ripples, like candlelight on glass. It communicates childhood, but without the frantic heartless pace of so many children's songs.

How do I translate that to a perfume? My first thought is that it's a perfume with some dark notes, not just simple pleasing sweetness. But there must be brightness, glimmering and comforting, and a touch of childhood, or at least innocence. My usual Christmas perfume is Bois 1920 Sushi Imperiale, and my loyalty to that scent hasn't weakened. But Sushi Imperiale isn't Christmas Time is Here, it's the jazz number, with Snoopy dancing and Schroeder playing at the pageant.

I considered Sutra Ylang, Sushi's shy little sister, but there's not enough darkness there. After a good long sniff, I decided on Aftelier Cepes & Tuberose. No, it's not a "Christmasy" perfume--no cinnamon, no ginger, no woodsmoke. But the trail of this post led me looking for dark and light, complexity, glimmering sweetness and sorrow and joy. Cepes & Tuberose fits the description, with its forest-floor darkness mingling with luminous sweetness with that vibe of innocence, and the edge of browned butter. So there we are.

Please see the other Scent of Music posts at these fine blogs!

Australian Perfume Junkies
Chemist in the Bottle
All I am - a redhead
Riktig Parfym
Olfactoria's Travels
Undina's Looking Glass
Another Perfume Blog
the unseen censer

Image: Wikimedia Commons

What I Wore Friday: 21st Century Jeans (And a Note on Aftelier Cuir de Gardenia)

The world must be ending. I wore non-Mom jeans.

I don't mean that I wore those scarey low hipster jeans. But the "hug" of today's jeans ends two or three inches lower than I'm used to. It's giving me the sensation that my pants are falling down, and I keep checking to make sure that my top is long enough to hide my underwear. Because I'm still wearing Mom underwear. (I'm providing too much information here, aren't I?)

I didn't buy the jeans for the non-Momness, but instead for the (compared to my other jeans) narrower legs and heavier fabric, and a much nicer solid black "wash". (Why is it "wash" and not color? I'm sure there's a good reason.) My other jeans are a weird streaky light blue that signals gardening grubbies no matter what I wear them with.

The Momness or otherwise of the jeans is largely irrelevant, because today's top, a drapey cowlneck sweatery thing, hangs to somewhere around mid-hip. But it feels weird all the same, both rebellious (against my determinedly fashion-blind stance) and compliant (for exactly the same reason.)

Purely for entertainment, I took off the drapey sweatery thing and considered how the jeans looked with just the dark-pumpkiny tee underneath, and to my surprise, there was some good there. While I wouldn't wear that combination without (shudder) "shapewear", I was surprised to see that my overall bulk has a half-decent curve in to the waist and out to the hips. I'm not a column. Who knew? Then I put the sweatery thing back on and there's a subtler version of the curve even then. So I'm rather pleased. This is by far the most close-to-current-fashion jeans look I've worn since--I was going to say "since forever", but there was a moment in my teens, in snug jeans and a gauze top...

Momentary "have I told you this before?" divergence: You know how sometimes on What Not To Wear, they'll ask the subject of the show when they last felt beautiful? If I were the subject, that would have been my answer--that moment when I was fourteen, more or less, looking in a full-length motel mirror while on a driving trip to meet one of the parents' relatives. I thought that I looked beautiful--and I thought that, therefore, the mirror must somehow be defective.

All right, moving on. I didn't feel beautiful in today's jeans, but I felt good.

Did I mention that after I bought boots, and more boots, I remembered that I already owned boots, and more boots, purchased several years ago? I now have four (four, count 'em, four!) pairs of little short boots. Aparently I've been having a little-short-boot craving for quite some time, one that I didn't know how to actually deploy.

Today's boots waited a very long time (five years? ten?) to get to work. I wore them for the very first time a couple of weeks ago as part of an undocumented skirt outfit, with brown tights, to avoid the effect of, "Oh, my God, someone cut off her foot and glued on a boot!" that I got when I tried them with plum-colored tights. I wore them again a few days later with the gardening grubbies jeans. They didn't seem all that happy about that; I think that they crept in while I was sleeping and instilled a post-hypnotic suggestion to buy the non-Mom jeans. Except, I'm told that brown boots with black jeans are not ideal, so perhaps they got the message a little muddled.

It snowed today and I needed a hat when we went to lunch. I quite forgot that I owned this one, a sort of plaid newsboy cap, so I didn't wear it. However, that may be just as well--I'm beginning to conclude that a newsboy cap with long hair is "cute", and I definitely don't want to be cute. It's better if I put my hair up, but my hair generally declines to stay up.

The perfume? Aftelier Cuir de Gardenia extrait; I've started buying samples again. I didn't give it a proper review-esque monitoring, even by my rather slack review standards, but I like it very much. It started out both feminine-ladylike and delightfully animalic-dirty, two separate aspects that managed to mesh perfectly. It was fairly emphatic, though it still wasn't a projection bomb--a good thing, in my book, though I realize that many people wish that naturals would speak a little louder.

Over a few hours the ladylike aspect grew stronger, and I got a whiff of New Barbie Doll Note. I always assumed that this scent came from something synthetic; now that I've experienced it in a natural perfume, I'm determined to figure out exactly what produces it, similar to the way that I figured out that Pencil Eraser Note is iris.

New Barbie Doll Note was accompanied by Smelly-Doll Note--that is, sweet peas. That tiny doll in the photo, one of my favorites as a child, came pre-scented in a perfume-bottle-shaped plastic clamshell. Officially, she was a Liddle Kiddle, but we called her Smelly-Doll. I always assumed that she just smelled of "perfume", until I encountered my first real life sweet pea at a relatively advanced age and immediately flashed on "Smelly-Doll!" Did Mattel really spring for a photorealistic sweet pea scent? I can't evaluate her scent any longer to try to answer that question; it's long faded.

So Cuir de Gardenia shifts, for me, from a delightful animalic-ladylike melding to equally delightful childhood nostalgia--dolls, flowers, and candied notes. I love it, but I doubt that anyone else will share exactly my experience of the drydown.

And that is all.

Images: Mine.

Perfume: Resolutions. And, by the way, Youth Dew.

So I've been declaring perfume acquisition resolutions.

Rule 1: Buy the smallest available bottle.

I have no need for 100ml of perfume. Or 30ml. Heck, I have samples of things that I love that I haven't used up. I would have said before that there's no reason to own more than 15ml; now I'm concluding that for most fragrances, there's no need for me to own more than 5ml.

Rule 2: Spend my money where it counts, in terms of encouraging the market to produce the perfumes that I want.

Right now, I've decided that "where it counts" for me is small and indie and artisan perfumers. (What's the difference between those three? I dunno. A number of houses seem to qualify on all three grounds.) Perfumers that rebel against annoying regulations--for example, participants in the Outlaw Perfume Project--get bonus points.

Why am I telling you all this? Because, for once, I've actually followed some of my resolutions. My perfume purchases of the nearish past are;

• Aftelier Honey Blossom in the itty bitty "Barbie fifth" 2ml bottle.
• Providence Perfume Co Moss Gown in the small 7.5ml size.

Yay resolutions!

Today, on the other hand, I wore Estee Lauder Youth Dew. The perfume, not the bath oil. New. (Ish; I bought it a few months ago.) My first thought, when I sprayed it, was "hairspray." Except, I can't actually identify any hairsprayish note in Youth Dew's fog of spicy, er, spiciness. My theory is that every beauty parlor that I entered as a child was filled with women wearing Youth Dew.

That is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Quick Sniffs: Aftelier Honey Blossom, Fig, and Wild Roses

I was going to wait until I'd tried these thoroughly, done a Review Roundup, written and edited and edited my impressions, chosen just the right cat picture--you know, review stuff. But when I do that, I tend to forget, and I don't want to forget these. So:

Honey Blossom: The top is very tangy wrestling with very very sweet, honey-syrupy flower, which was a little too much for me on the first try, but I suspect that I'm going to learn to love it, because I adore the softer, grainer drydown and I'll need to smell it many more times.

Fig: This one struck me as startlingly similar to Tea for Two--it has a similar comforting foody but not too foody vibe. A similar odd combination of spicy and quenching. That doesn't match any of the reviews, but the reviews don't match each other, so I suspect that this is one of those chameleon scents.

Wild Roses: I rarely like rose perfumes. I love real roses. I love this perfume. I agree with the "candied rose", but it requires a redefinition. "Candied" usually means that any bite has been eliminated from the thing in question, and then the resulting blandness is brought back up to acceptability with sugar. That's not what's going on here. The rose still has its bite; it's tangy-orange-peel-bitter tangled with rose-soaked candied sweetness. And there I run out of words. But in case you had any doubts, I love it.

Perfume: My Favorites

I love Hostess Ding Dongs. (I'd better run out and find some before they're gone forever. If they aren't already.) I'm not under any illusion that they're a high-quaity example of the pastry-maker's art, but I love the things anyway.

I mention this because I've been thinking about the difference between the perfumes that I hold in the highest regard, and the perfumes that I love the most. If I were required to come up with a list of the ten finest perfumes, I'd spend a long time fussing and researching and come up with a list of mostly well-regarded creations. If I were required to come up with the ten perfumes that I'd limit myself to for the rest of my life, I'd come up with a different list, after just as much fussing and researching.

When I want to come up with the perfumes that I love best, there's really not much fussing and researching; they just come forward and announce themselves. I'm slightly relieved to see that there are no real guilty pleasures in the lot, but that's just how it turned out, not evidence of any good taste on my part. 

So here they are, with links to the relevant Review Roundup. They're not presented in any particular order, except for their leader.

Chanel No. 19 Parfum: When the call comes for the favorites to come on stage, most of them gather together, chatting and giggling. They hang back and wait for No. 19 to calmly, coolly, push her way through the curtain and stand--arms folded; why am I wasting her time on this?--before the audience. No. 19 isn't easy, or friendly, or affable; she won her position on grounds of sheer beauty. Clear, knife-sharp green softened with just enough floral sweetness to barely--barely--keep her from drawing blood. I'm a little afraid of her, and so I should be.

Shiseido White Rose: I've been struggling to explain White Rose, and I finally realized what I was recognizing but failing to put into words: Her personality. See, White Rose is utterly beautiful; I can imagine falling down and drowning in the rose and being perfectly happy to die that way. But beauty, however glorious, can be dull without context, some dominant aspect beyond the beauty--without personality. For Chanel No. 19, that personality is the abstractness, the other-worldliness, the razor edge of the green, the fact that I can see her standing on that stage, impassively watching me and daring me to declare White Rose to be her equal.

White Rose has enough beauty to spare for caricature; when I smell her I get a vibe that's exaggeratedly classic. I see debutante balls--not the debutantes, but the still-beautiful mothers in their ball gowns. I see The Shop Around The Corner, the well-dressed lady settled comfortably by the counter, tended by deferential shop assistants scurrying with perfume bottles. I see black and white photos of ladies lunching, and lengths of pink taffeta, and those little hats called fascinators. White Rose is classic, gorgeously so, but she's laughing about it.

Aftelier Cepes and Tuberose: I sniffed this one quite early in my perfume obsession, after reading about it in 100 Fragrances every Perfumista Should Try. It was beautiful then, before I developed my craving for the weird, and it's still beautiful as that craving grows. Tuberose is a wonderful inseparable mix of clean and dirty, bright, clear sweet floral beauty and warm, close, unwashed animalic notes. Cepes & Tuberose adds earthiness and forest floor and fungus as another contrast with the clean and bright, and in time it also introduces an oddly edible browned butter note. The result is deeply strange, faintly repellent, and therefore glorious. 

Bois 1920 Sushi Imperiale: Fire; brilliant cold flying sparks. Ginger tapdancing on a shining marble floor. That gulp of ice-cold root beer quenching a thirst that was created just for root beer to quench. An ice-coated winter tree with the sun blazing through it. This is winter joy, but a comfortable joy, not the almost-too-deep kind that nudges up to sorrow and sometimes makes you cry.

Balmain Ivoire: I mean the fairly recent version in the ugly square-column bottle, not the earlier versions, or the newer version in the nicer bottle, neither of which I've ever smelled. It's odd to love this one, knowing, as I do, that it's probably a sad travesty of the original. Odder, given that trumpeting aldehyde blast at the top, when I'm still not sure that I like aldehydes. But I don't care. I love that aldehyde blast, and the dry now floral/now green top that's tippety-tap-heels ladylike, a lady with old-fashioned manners but feminine power. My favorite part is the drydown scent of expensive soap, one of the most luxurious smells of any perfume. 

Serge Lutens Daim Blond: And here's more luxury, a warm silk-and-fur pool of it. Daim Blond smells of suede and fur, but the apricot and heliotrope merge with those smells, making them almost edible. Sushi Imperiale is a dancing scent, one of movement and freedom; Daim Blond is a long nap, wrapped in scented fur.

That's only six perfumes. What happened to Cristalle? Serge Noire? Tea for Two? Cuir de Russie?  don't know; I still love them, but at least today they didn't step forward with the crowd of favorites.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Perfume: Artisan Chocolates for Thanksgiving

Haaaaaaappy Thanksgiving! Are you eating turkey? What are you wearing? Chergui? Eau de Gravy? We are not cooking this year; we're on vacation, watching home improvement shows in the hotel, and seriously considering just going with room service. That sounds so perfect that it must surely be wrong.

Yesterday, in anticipation of the celebration of Eating Everything, I tried some artisan chocolates. No, not candy--perfume. I dabbed on samples of Ayala Moriel Film Noir, Ayala Moriel Guilt, and Aftelier Cacao. None of them are going to quite fulfill the role that I had them fitted for, but I want them anyway.

For some reason, I thought that Film Noir had vanilla, but it turns out that I was misreading the combination of soft patchouli and cocoa. It does have a similar mood--edible, sweet, soft, and friendly. The patchouli is earthier than the vanilla would have been, and with the chocolate, it gives me a feeling of falling into soft dust. Like a leaf pile of cocoa. I still don't get "noir"--there's nothing dark or threatening here. But I think I want a bottle. (Notes: Benzoin Siamese, Cocoa Absolute, Myrrh Patchouli)

Guilt starts out orange--gorgeous, bright but dense, sweet but with just the right amount of peel. It's not like eating the orange or the peel or candied peel--it's like the fog that rises after ripping open a really good orange, but more concentrated. I discussed it just a few days ago, but I'm not going to go read that post to see if my perception is consistent, because who wants consistency? There's chocolate, too, less powdery than the chocolate in Film Noir: I can imagine dark shiny melted chocolate. But it's also farther away; in the fantasy created by the perfume I can smell it, but I'm not eating it. Over time, the orange fades away and the chocolate settles into cocoa powder again, and then it's all gone, faster than Film Noir--about twelve hours after application, the Noir arm still had a gentle puff of patchouli, while the Guilt arm was almost scent-free. (Notes: Amber, Benzoin Siamese, Blood Orange Cocoa Absolute, Honey Absolute, Jasmine Grandiflorum Orange Blossom Absolute, Rose Otto) So Guilt won't be my all-day orange perfume, but I want it too.

And the Cacao arm? At that same twelve hour point, it was back to a very faint breath of orange. It had started out as a gorgeous and gorgeously weird combination of chocolate and bright orange--a little brighter and more aggressive than Guilt--and. And. Um. And what? Something animalic, something absolutely not edible, something that I would have predicted would be just wrong with those food scents, but it worked perfectly with them. Looking at the notes (Blood Orange, Pink Grapefruit, Jasmin Sambac & Grandiflorum, Chocolate, Vanilla), I have no clue what it is, except maybe a delightfully dirty aspect of the jasmine. The orange fades, the stinky animal fades, and for a few hours it's hard to tell Cacao and Guilt apart. But at that twelve hour mark, oddly, the orange seemed to be back--a faint breath of it--and I do like that as a final note.

I want a full bottle of them all. So there.

Go eat more gravy. Hurry. Image: By Alchemist-hp. Wikimedia Commons.

SOTD: Aftelier Cacao (First wearing)

Yum.

I bought a mini of this on kinda-sorta impulse last week, where "impulse" means that I only thought about it for two days. I finally wore it properly today.

At the beginning, the orange struck me more than the chocolate--a good bitter orange that makes me resolve to look for orange notes in other Aftelier perfumes.  And there was chocolate, of course, but Cacao didn't read as a "foody" perfume to me. There was an animalic note that made it darker and more grown-up, and contrarily seemed both dangerous and comforting--fuzzy purring, but with claws in reserve.

As it developed, there was less orange and less growl; it turned sweeter and more floral. Then the vanilla at the base grew, though the whole package started to fade away before a really satisfying vanilla fog could develop. There's barely a trace on my arm now, about twelve hours after application. But that's fine. I've never quite seem the appeal of extreme longevity, so the limited life of all-natural perfumes is just fine with me.

I like it. I can't tell yet if I love it. That may come on the second wearing.

Review Roundup: The Non-Blonde and MakeupAlley and Fragrantica and Basenotes and This Blog Really Stinks and Eyeliner On A Cat and WAFT.

Image: By Ankara. Wikimedia Commons.

Perfume: January Clip Show

So, several days ago I wore L'Artisan Tea for Two, as I recall because I was late getting ready to go to lunch and it was up near the front and so I sprayed it on, even though I thought I wasn't in the mood for something so sweet and foody. And it was perfect - not sweet and foody, but smoky and comforting, like wearing something with the warmth and squashiness of wool but the skin-softness of... well... not-wool, because I always find wool scratchy.

A day or two later I had plenty of time to choose my fragrance, and I chose Chanel Cuir de Russie, because I was absolutely positive that that was what I had wanted when I put on the Tea for Two. And, no, Cuir de Russie was entirely wrong. On that day it felt sour and thin and not at all comforting; cold slick leather upholstery in a cold car when all you want to do is go inside.

The next day I put on Tea for Two and it was, again, perfect.

And today I put on Aftelier Cepes & Tuberose, because I was wearing that new pink silk blouse for the first time and I wanted something feminine. I though that it might not work for winter, but, no, I found that it had the same deep squashy comforting feel that Tea for Two had, but with an added feminine vibe--a sort of "optional feminine"; I think that a man could wear this too, in spite of the tuberose.

It appears that I don't know my January tastes as well as I might have thought. So I went through the blog to see what I was loving this time last year and the year before. Trends that I didn't expect include:

• I seem to have a January craving for smoke. Last year I was longing for Heeley Cardinal and snapping irritably at Serge Noire for failing to satisfy. This year Tea for Two is doing the job; I must try to remember for next year.
• In January 2010 I predicted that Cuir de Russie would be one of "the scents at the core of my wardrobe, the ones that make me smell like me". In January 2011 I didn't wear it once. So this year's lack of enthusiasm may not be a fluke.
• In 2010 I was less than thrilled with Un Lys; in 2011 I was delighted with Parfums de Nicolai Number One. I've always considered these two perfumes to be functionally redundant, though I long to own them both all the same. Maybe January is an excuse for buying Number One?
• I called Parfumerie Generale Cuir d'Iris "lovely" and "very satisfying", and I mention the sweetness in the drydown. I'm tempted to send off for some, though I said similar things about Iris Taizo. I suspect that these two are functionally redundant.
• I surprised myself by being delighted with Balmain Ivoire, a scent that I never would have thought of as belonging to winter. I should wear it tomorrow.
• I praised Aftelier Cepes & Tuberose, in a post that was more focused on crispy poultry skin.
• I enthused about biehl parfumkunstwerke hb01, a perfume with orange blossom and all sorts of fruit that I shouldn't like in January. what's with that?
• I enjoyed Cadjmere, and Daim Blond, and Aomassai, and Fendi Theorema, and Feminite du Bois. At least not everything is a surprise.
• And I wore Orange Star twice in a row.

So what does it mean? I'm not sure, but I'll be pulling out some of the bottles that the above says that I loved, to see if there's a January trend. And I may need a decant of that parfumkunstwerke thing.

Image: By Petritap. Wikimedia Commons.

SOTD: Aftelier Cepes & Tuberose

I sent off for a sample of Aftelier Cepes & Tuberose more than a year ago, as part of the kickoff of my perfume insanity. It was one of the weirder-sounding scents listed in the classic Now Smell This article 100 Scents Every Perfumista Must Try, and even then I was drawn by the weird. I also loved the idea of natural perfumery, though the prices did shock me, even more then than they do now.

When I sniffed it back then, I remember that I was fascinated, but I didn't even consider buying it to wear. Moving to the present, I wore it Sunday and I wore it today, and much to my surprise, I find it pretty. Not a bland ruffly-girl sort of pretty, but, yeah, pretty. Beautiful, too, but beautiful and weird is less of a surprise, to me, than pretty and weird. Cepes & Tuberose is all three.

When I fall in love with a perfume, I have trouble describing it. I have yet to satisfactorily describe Chanel No. 19. I may very well be having the same problem with this one. The tuberose is startlingly sweet. It starts out almost overpowering, and gradually calms down until, near the end, it's almost chilly, and a little candylike. The mushroom seems to walk in step, always perceptible behind the tuberose, but always subordinate to it so that I can never quite get a good sniff of it. It's dusty and a little brown-buttery.

That's the best I can do. But I want it.

Review Roundup: Now Smell This and Basenotes and MakeupAlley and IndiePerfumes and Perfume Posse and my own later Favorites post.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.