Rambling: Free associating again

So I'm realizing another reason why the perfume blogging comes and goes. I have four states:

• Interested in perfume but not feeling verbal.
• Feeling verbal but not interested in perfume.
• Not feeling verbal and not interested in perfume.
• Interested in perfume and feeling verbal.

Perfume blogging has to wait for the fourth type of moment. Well, it doesn't "have to". If I had a job and punched a timecard for this, I could spit out words whether I felt like it or not. But I don't. So I don't.

This is apparently all to explain why that brief run of SOTD posts promptly hiccuped and stopped. Despite having dozens of samples waiting for attention, I'm not in the mood for anything challenging right now.

Instead, lately I'm wearing Thymes Agave Nectar, aka "grapefruit"--I don't know why they bother to claim any other notes for this fragrance. Well, at least in the lotion. The cologne does have a stray spicy note that isn't pure grapefruit, which is why I hesitated to buy it, but this weekend I was out and about and had just bought a lovely length of silk matka that I didn't need, so I rounded off the afternoon by buying a bottle of cologne that I didn't need.

Really, has anyone ever needed either silk matka or cologne? Oh, and I left out the five yards of pale-grass-green bias silk ribbon that I bought to go with the maize-yellow silk in a yet to be determined garment. Silk matka is coarse-woven, fairly heavy and not terribly drapey--not flat-out crisp, but it doesn't have that liquid collapsing thing going like, say, wool crepe does. It would work fine in all sorts of nice fitted garments that I don't yet have the skills to make.

I bought the silk because I love the color and I've been staring at it in the store for months, but I suspect that now that it's joined the stash, it's hearing all sorts of stories about how long it's going to have to wait to become a real garment. Rather like the stories told by the toys in Holly and Ivy, the ones that are waiting and waiting on the toy-store shelves to see if they'll be given to a child for Christmas.

Have you read Holly and Ivy? It's a children's book by Rumer Godden, and I suspect I've mentioned more than once that Rumer Godden's children's books are my favorite books in the world. It's about a little girl who wants a home, and a doll who wants a little girl, and that all sounds horribly sentimental and "awwwwwwww..." but you know I'm not the awww type, right? Trust me and try to read a copy. Except, sadly, the only edition in print is, I believe, missing the Adrienne Adams illustrations, and you really need those illustrations.

It occurs to me that the scene where Ivy (the little girl) falls asleep in the flour sacks against the warm wall of the bakery is not unlike the scene where Alys falls asleeep in the warmly decaying dung heap in Karen Cushman's The Midwife's Apprentice. As you might guess from the phrase "dung heap", The Midwife's Apprentice is a good deal further away from "awwww..." than Holly and Ivy, but they're both about people fighting for a place in the world. Ivy wants love, though she wouldn't put it that way; Alys doesn't know enough to want that.

Interestingly, while I'm not interested in wearing challenging perfume lately, I am interested in sorting and categorizing it. I sent off for a big glob of decanting supplies, including a bunch of baggies, and I just finished sorting my samples into baggies within baggies. (The Serge Lutens baggie shares the larger S->Z baggie with several other baggies, for example.)

And I'm making up perfume samples for friends. Having finally accepted that I may never get over Postal Regulation Phobia, I have increased my efforts to inflict perfume on folks in town. This means smelling some perfumes that I haven't smelled lately.

I've noticed that my tolerance for prickly incense is particularly low right now--for example, I found Chergui and, as previously noted, Tobacco Vanille, quite upalatable. I made the mistake of wearing something incenseish on the back of my neck, and now all of my sweaters need dry cleaning before they stop annoying me. (Neck to sweater to coat to next sweater the next day...argh!) I assume that my taste for this category of notes will return, but right now I can't imagine it.

On the other hand, Yosh Stargazer (the oil; I see that now there's an eau de parfum) made me want to fall over and take a long nap with my nose on my wrist. That was surprising, because there's a very strong clean note, almost soapy, about it. On the other hand, I love the soapy note in Balmain Ivoire, and in the oil version of Jo Malone White Jasmine & Mint, so... hm. I always assume that "soapy" means "white musk", but maybe there's another completely different note that also has the soapy vibe.

That is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

SOTD: Yosh Kismet

This one's going to need another try. Even on a very light application (I learned from the last perfume oil), it starts with a slight overkill of spice and something heavy and dark. It almost makes me think of curried meat. Or curried wood. Or curried furniture. Very odd.

But several hours later, exactly that same note has mellowed into something much lighter, almost a fresh-air smell. I think that I've learned to recognize the "hay" note - it does remind me very much of Bois Blond, which is also said to have hay.

Review roundup: Perfume-Smellin' Things.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

SOTD: Yosh White Flowers

As I mentioned, the Nice Man At Barneys gave me several samples of Yosh perfume oils. This morning I remembered my statement that white flowers generally leave me unmoved, and, contrarily, put on a couple of drops of the Yosh White Flowers sample.

A side note: Perfume oils are strong! My two-drop application was excessive. A smear from a stopper that's already been wiped off on the bottle rim would probably be closer to the right application, if I were working with the real bottle. This means that the apparently horrifying price is actually much more reasonable than it seems, in terms of the number of wearings that a person would get out of a bottle.

A second side note: So what are white flowers? I think of the phrase as meaning a mixture of tuberose, lily of the valley, jasmine, narcissus, and the like. Not just flowers that are white, but flowers that happen to be white and have specific strong, sweet scents, scents that often have a hidden agenda. They have notes referred to as animalic and indolic and other words that, as I understand it, refer to some of the scents of bodies and food and decay. I'm just going to point you to the "skank" post on Perfume Posse and an "Indolic?" thread on Basenotes and then run away from that subject.

So, yes, this is white flowers. Lots of them.  I think I was looking for something softer, shyer, and more buttery - this is "perfumey", fairly high-pitched, fairly aggressive, with a lot of projection and sillage. This may not be an entirely fair assessment, since I probably used too much. I'll try again, but even hours later, it doesn't seem to have changed its nature, just its volume.

I should note that I don't like flower bomb, femme fatale scents. Someone who does might absolutely adore this. It's a fine, high quality, complex flower bomb, though, speaking of indolic or not indolic, it seems very, very clean. Sparkly clean. This is all sunshine and no shadow.

I like it enough to wish that I liked it better. I'm going to try it again with a lighter application, and also try layering it with a simple wood-heavy fragrance, like Art of Shaving Sandalwood, or maybe I'll get a straight cedar accord from CB I Hate Perfume.

And maybe I'll also layer it with an incense, like Serge Lutens Serge Noire. I like my mental visual of Serge Noire -  a desert of blowing powder-fine black sand, wider than the eye can see - combined with my visual of this one - a huge and endless stream of white flowers spilling past one's gaze. Black and white and endless. Yes, I realize that mixing visuals is not exactly a recipe for mixing perfumes, but, hey, where's the harm?

The tiny vial should be enough for several experiments, and enough to pass on much of it to a lover of femme fatale fragrances, in the hope that Yosh might get the sale that it probably won't get from me.

Review Roundup: I can't find any reviews! (Update: Ha! Got one from Sweet-Diva.)

Oh, and a last side note, speaking of white flowers: Remember how I said that Van Cleef & Arpels Muguet Blanc left me completely unmoved? Yeah. I was wrong. It's coming to mind regularly. Frequently. I'm going to be getting a sample.

Edited to add a link to an interview with Yosh Han from +Q Perfume Blog.
Photo: Mine