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.

Interrupted Review: Ayala Moriel Guilt

I feel as if I've been called out in the middle of a fascinating play, and no one can tell me how it ended.

See, I finally got around to trying my sample of Ayala Moriel Guilt this week. And, Oh. My.  I've mentioned my question for just the right orange perfume, right? This may be it.

Most orange perfumes are too sweet or too floral or, in the case of the admittedly lovely Theorema, too mulled-cider to truly be the essence of orange. I always want more bitter, a good sticky dose of orange peel. But the few that give me any peel are usually dry, mouth-pinched pith traveling with bitter humorless companions. It's a misunderstanding--I don't want a bitter perfume, I just want a perfume that acknowledges that bitterness is an important part of the charm of an orange. This appears to be that perfume.

It started out with the citrus peel, the glorious drippy-oily-sweet-bitter citrus blast that I've been craving, but it's doused with honey and sweet-buttery flowers and not too much chocolate. And not just for a few fleeting top-note seconds, but for long enough to really settle in and drown in the orange.

While I was still reveling in orange but juuuust starting to entertain the thought that maybe, someday, after snuffling it for a while longer, I might find it overwhelming, it started to subside, ever so slowly, into something gentler, the peel stepping back and gesturing the flowers forward just a little.

And then I got distracted! Did the flowers take center stage? Did the chocolate bully its way forward? Did the orange get juicier and sweeter? What happened?!

Tell meeeeeee!

OK, OK I'll try it again and I'll let you know.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Perfume: Rambling, organizing, and a couple of Ayala Moriel mini-reviews.

It's the weekend.

Ha!

I note that I'm several thousand words behind on my NaNoWriMo Blogging Thingie, and I see no hope of catching up. But I'm going to ramble incessantly all the same. So there.

I've been waiting for a chest cold to go away, and it's been raining outside, so gardening has been out. And the weekends have been a little too busy to allow for large blocks of sewing time. So what to do after work? Inventory my perfume, of course! (Oh. I should have been writing? Yeah. Well. Um. Moving on....)

I've entered every sample into OmniOutliner, complete with house, perfume name, whether it's a sample or a decant or a mini, and where it is. (For example, "Paperclip sorter" or "A->D Baggie.")

Don't mock me.

I have slightly under two hundred samples, including a couple of dozen decants. I'm surprised that the number is that small, and I'm embarassed that I'm surprised.

Putting samples in different places has made me realize (duh) that I could also put bottles in different places. This is an obvious but dangerous realization, because when I was keeping all of the bottles in one place, then that place limited the collection. If I start moving them, well...

I could move the For Reference bottles into boxes. I have, for example, modern LouLou, waiting for me to get my hands on a sample of vintage LouLou. The plan is to get the sample, wear them both, learn what there is to learn from the comparison, and then give away the modern, because I don't actually like the modern. Now, that was also the plan for Vent Vert, and now that I have a vintagesque bottle of Vent Vert (right bottle shape but script logo, no string, screwcap instead of stopper, plastic outer box, so it's not the oldest) that I love, I find that I'm able to love the modern Vent Vert because I'm less resentful of it for being a travesty of the original.

And then there are the bottles that I own because they're classics and I want to learn to love them. This is really not a good category to have; it's pretty hoarderish. Right now, it's very small, consisting of Coco and Mitsouko. It used to be Coco, Mitsouko, and No. 5, and then I actually learned to love No. 5, so, yay! sometimes it works. But I'm threatening to add Shalimar and Jicky and Coco parfum and for that matter Shalimar has more than one modern and infinite vintage options. And that's without looking at any lists.

Anyway, so, I moved the bottles for the ill-fated Under Twenty project, and some other "Hey, a full bottle is less than twice the price of a decant!" modern things into a box, awaiting my attention. I should really make an "attention or freecycle" deadline; Lady Stetson has been waiting for at least a year.

I moved all the dabber bottles into a drawer. Originally, it was a bedroom sock drawer, but then I opened the drawer and realized that there's no way Himself is going to put up with a slow-building bedroom perfume fog, so I moved them into the one and only drawer in my den. Which means that the power cords and foot pedals for my sewing machines had to go from that drawer to the sock drawer, but, well, so be it.

Oh, and the tall skinny minis and decants all went into a Ziploc in the drawer, because I'm tired of tiny Hermes Discovery Set bottles falling all over the place when I take anything out. It's like horizontal Jenga.

This left mostly niche and a few designer... well, mostly niche and Chanel in the breadboxes. OK, and a Fendi and a Lancome (the other Lancomes are in the dabber drawer) and a Lauder and a Miyake and a Piguet and a Balmain, but, wow, my collection is really niche-heavy.

I used to organize the bottles by categories--fresh greens! Boozy Orientals! Bombshell florals! And then I'd approach the collection asking myself something like, "OK, did I categorize Un Crime Exotique as an Oriental or a gourmand?" and never, ever thought anything like, "Hey, I'm feeling prim and ladylike today." So I abandoned that whole idea and re-sorted it mostly by house. Parfumerie Generale and Lutens each make up a looming mob of bottles, Chanel is a mismatched gang, there's a modest Jo Malone contingent and another of l'Artisan, and then there's a random jumble in the middle.

Speaking of bottles falling like dominoes, I'd like to communicate my preference for short, squat bottle designs. The Different Company's fat little cube. Aftelier's short columnar parfum bottles. Serge Lutens' bell jars. You could shake a drawer like you're popping popcorn and they wouldn't fall over. On the other hand, the Lutens export bottles seem to chatter nervously if I just walk by.

Just to add to the crazy and to the failure to NaNoWrite, I added all the samples to my Basenotes wardrobe, and I'm updating the bottle list. And putting decants and minis in the "used to own" list. And generally geekishly tracking it all far more than it needs.

But it's all getting me more interested in playing with my samples, and that's worthwhile, right? Right? Right!

In accordance with the recent theory that I should put my perfume money where the good stuff is being made right now, I've been testing a Moriel a day ("that's all we ask") and I'm in ever so much financial danger, because I like them all.

Espionage? Gorgeous; leather without that synthetic vibe--which seems illogical, because isn't the scent of leather said to be the scent of the chemicals used to treat it?--that dries down to gorgeous squishy vanilla.

Film Noir? It starts out friendly - I can imagine a dark film in front of me, but I know what's going to happen, and I have chocolate, so I'm not scared. It dries even friendlier, and (pause for dramatic effect) Himself likes it. Himself hasn't liked a perfume since Habanita. He gets cookie-vanilla-vibe from it. I'm not sure why I haven't put in the order for this one already.

Immortelle l'Amour? Yum. Sweet. Yeasty. Bready. This is not good for my low carb diet. I got distracted that day and didn't follow it to the end; I'll try it again.

Guilt? Ooooooh. That's the next post.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Quick Sniff: Ayala Moriel Sabotage

I don't like red wine. But every time Himself has a glass I try a sip, just in case that's the glass that changes my mind. And every time I eat at a buffet that offers grits, I try some, in the same hope. (No, that doesn't happen often on the West Coast, but I used to visit relatives in Tennessee.)

Chicory. White chocolate. Coffee. Mashed potatoes. Zucchini. There are a lot of things I'd like to like, so I keep trying them. Once in a long while it works, too--I once tried hummus in a Japanese(?!) restaurant in Nashville, and was sold on the stuff.

I want to like vetiver. But the few vetiver perfumes that I like never really seem to be vetiver. They're related to vetiver in the sense that those attitude-free canned olives that you find on buffet salad bars are related to the sharp, bitey olives that make me squeeze my eyes shut when I eat them. Vetiver Tonka, for example. Or Creed Original Vetiver. They're nice. Friendly. Non-threatening. I like Vetiver Tonka quite a bit, but I think that's more about the Tonka than the Vetiver. And I've been meaning to give away Original Vetiver.

Ayala Moriel Sabotage may be the vetiver fragrance that turns me around. It doesn't blow my head off, but the vetiver isn't nervously peering past a layer of cream sauce, either. It's grassy, with a little attitude and bitterness as a companion to the citrusy notes. I don't get the tobacco and tonka mentioned in other reviews, but there is something keeping it grounded. I like it. A lot.

I'll try it again, soon. Maybe it'll convert me.

(The picture? I went looking for photos of grits. I think that dish might do the job.)
Image: Wikimedia Commons.

SOTD: Ayala Moriel Schizm (Quick sniff.)

The other perfumes are bullying Schizm.

I applied some of my sample this morning, and found the slightly bitter dusty mossiness delightful. But as time went on, I began to smell...green tea

Yeah. I applied it to the same hand as yesterday's scent, and apparently the re-moistening woke up the faded scent.

So I started over on my forearm after lunch, and was enjoying it as the bitter green musty moss slowly transformed into something more floral and buttery. Then I decided to unpack my perfume Ziploc from my recent trip (I may be posting a portrait of said Ziploc tomorrow). You know that "uh-oh" moment when you feel dampness on your hands, just before the scented fog rises? Yeah. Sample vial failure. I'm now drowning in Jo Malone Blackberry & Bay.

So this is not a review. But the glimpses of Schizm that I did get were nice. Very nice.

Image: By Dick Mudde. Wikimedia Commons.