Neighborhood Sample Pass: The Sequel: Round One: Two Faces of Serge Lutens: Chergui and Bas de Soie

A lot of colons in that title there.

So if you're a regular reader of my blog, you may be saying, "What sequel? I've never heard of this Neighorhood Sample Pass thing." If you're a participant in the previous Neighborhood Sample Pass, you may be saying, "Blog? What's this blog thing? Are you going to try to make me click on ads and buy a vegetable chopper?"

If you're both, hopefully you'll be un-confused instead of doubly confused.

No ads. No vegetable chopper. I just figured, I write for the sample pass,  I write for the blog, why not combine them?

Clash of worlds! Aiieee!

Ahem. OK.

Background:

In 2012/2013, I organized the original Neighborhood Sample Pass. I made up ten(?) little baggies of fragrance samples and decants, each with a theme, and gave each one to a friend in my neighborhood. (My often-discussed Postal Regulation Phobia ruled out including friends not in my neighborhood.) Said friends sniffed for a couple of weeks, then passed their baggie on to the next person in the rotation, until the baggies had made it all the way around, and the first pass was ended and I announced my plans to start a new pass.

Time passed. And passed. And passed some more. And suddenly I want to do it again.

This time I'm doing it as a sort of "perfumes of the month club". (But I'm sticking to the original name anyway.) This time I'll choose two or three or four perfumes and make up sample-sized decants for all participants, so that we can all talk about the same perfumes at the same time. This involves far less bookkeeping, and is nicely flexible.

First round! Bwahaha! Only two scents, because I'm temporarily short on decant bottles.

The Perfumes: 

Serge Lutens is both a man and a Paris perfume house. In my mind, the house balances on the line between niche and mainstream. Many of the fragrances have the delightful strangeness of niche creations, and when one of them is not strange, that fact often results in criticism from the online perfume wearing community. But the line is fairly frequently sold at department stores, which makes it feel not so much niche to me.

Now Smell This classifies Serge Lutens as niche, and I don't argue with Now Smell This on matters of definition. Or much of anything else. You can read their background for the house here. They also have a page (here) on Christopher Sheldrake, the nose behind many (most? all?) of the Serge Lutens fragrances.

Marla, in Perfume-Smellin' Things, asked "So do you like the warm, North-African amberfest Serge Lutens, or do you prefer his cold, austere, Northern European perfumes?" Inspired by the question, I've offered one of each.

My first choice, Chergui, is classic Serge Lutens. To me, it's pipe smoke, honey, leather chairs, and musty house. It's complex, spicy, syrupy, very popular, and moderately strange. And Lutens is supposed to be strange.

I discussed it here, and then went into the old-house vibe that it gives me, here. It's also discussed at (links! links!) Bois de Jasmin and Perfume-Smellin' Things and Perfume-Smellin' Things again and The Non-Blonde and Parfume da Rosa Negra (scroll down for the English version) and Perfume Patter and Now Smell This and Kafkaesque Blog and Olfactoria's Travels and Australian Perfume Junkies and The Fragrant Foodie and EauMG (video!).

The second fragrance, Bas de Soie (translation from the French: "silk stockings") is far less strange. It's a floral, primarily iris root and hyacinth, and it's pretty. Normally, pretty does little for me, but this one... When I first sniffed it, I classified it as one of the house's "well, they have to produce something conventional if they want to pay the bills" scents. Meh. And then, the very same day, it dragged me back; I couldn't say why, but I had to have it. And it keeps doing that to me; sometimes I shrug, and sometimes I want to dive into my own scented skin and I wear it for days on end.

My main, enthusiastic but short, post on this fragrance is here. For more detail, try (more links!) The Scented Salamander and Grain de Musc and Bois de Jasmin and Perfume Posse and Cafleurebon and Perfume Shrine and Perfume-Smellin' Things and MakeupAlley and Now Smell This and The Fragrant Foodie (scroll down) and I Smell Therefore I Am and The Non-Blonde and Megan in Sante Maxime and Olfactoria's Travels and EauMG.

First image: Wikimedia Commons.
Second image: Wikimedia Commons.
Third image: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Rambling

So, not so much the writing. Lately. But it's Friday night, and a person should be able to write with a whole weekend in front of her, right?

Hmm.

Remember how I was going to give away Serge Lutens Bas de Soie? Well, it was on the shelf--waiting to be given away--and I grabbed it and sprayed some on just because, the way I do, and I fell in love. It wore it every day for three or four days. It appears that Bas de Soie is what I crave in that fall-to-winter temperature transition time when I dislike so many perfumes.

So I'm not giving it away.

I am giving other things away. Like perfume. Other perfume. I sent out a Stinky Giveaway email to a bunch of local friends, offering twenty-two bottles and eighteen decants and minis to the first takers. I'm hoping that this is just the start of an all-around mass decluttering. But whether it is or not, a dozen or so fragrances are already in Ziplocs waiting to go out the door, so it's a start.

The remaining perfume still doesn't fit in its allotted storage and display space, though.

Coke is tasting too sweet to me, the past several days. As is Thai iced tea and chocolate and hot chocolate. What's with that?

We went to Portland. I went to the new Josephine's--the fabric store that closed because the owner retired and then reopened under a new name and in a new location and under new owners.  They're good. Really good.

I'm reading Best of Food Writing 2014, edited by Holly Hughes. It's really good. Various pieces are raising various thoughts, but apparently my head hasn't cooked them enough to blog about them yet.

I bought a copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo. I don't know what I think. I was most struck by her method of folding clothes, which is an odd thing to be struck by.

As I italicize the book titles above, I find myself wanting to italicize Bas de Soie, too, as if it's a story. But I refrain.

I've been wearing a little newsboy's-cap kind of hat, despite the fact that I think it looks wrong with my long hair. Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners, would tell me that I have to take off this hat indoors because it's a man-style hat, and the woman's privilege to wear hats indoors only applies to women's hats. I took a poll at lunch, and two out of three responders agree with Miss Manners, while one disagrees.

The show Mom is playing in front of me. It has Allison Janney as the Mom. You remember her from West Wing, right? She remains fabulous.

Italics again.

You notice how this blog post is going a little more free-associationish than usual. Yeah. It doesn't mean I've been drinking. Sober as a judge.  My only intoxicant is the jasmine from the bath oil from the bath that I just emerged from.

Dang. Mom is over.

Um...

OK, that's probably all. If not, I'll be back.

SOTD: Tauer Carillon Pour un Ange, and relinquishing the meh

(And this was really the SOTD on Wednesday. Me pre-writing posts? What's with that?)

I bought it too fast.

I loved the sample. Falling-down, won't risk it going away, love. Bought it. Didn't like the first wearing. Went into denial and put it away. A year later, I'm trying it again.

Nope.

Wearing it gives me the same feeling as a glass of iced tea with too much lemon and not enough sugar. I'm not saying that there's any actual lemon--just that there's a sharpness that could be lovely and refreshing if there were enough sugar.

Maybe it's my skin chemistry.

I think that for the next attempt, I'll decant a little into a splash bottle. I tested it unsprayed, after all, so maybe...

I doubt it. The next solution is to give or swap it away, maybe with a few more just-accept-reality bottles. Swapping or selling is, of course thwarted by my Postal Regulation Phobia, so unless I coordinate with a perfume freak to meet in Portland on one of our lately-not-infrequent trips there, it's not all that workable.

I eye the collection for more of those accept-reality bottles. I'm always worried that someday I'll fall in love with something that I've given away. But there's no logic in that; it's a hoarderesque mindset. For one thing I use perfume so lightly that a 5ml decant would last me years, even in the regular rotation.

And, really, it's unlikely that I'll ever fall in love with a perfume for which my reaction is "meh." The ones worth keeping an eye on are the "Oh, my God, does it smell that way on purpose?" bottles.  Those are usually blind buys, which a light sprinkling of classics threatened by reformulation or discontinuation. (My Mitsouko, for example, and No. 5 before I started to appreciate it a little.) The blind buys were either rock-bottom-price discounter products, or things from indie houses that I respect. If I panic and buy something on the verge of discontinuation from an indie house, I figure that even if I don't like it, my money went to someone worthwhile.

Today's additions to the Out box:

Creed's Original Vetiver: Perfectly Nice. A gateway vetiver. Friendly. Nonthreatening. Cuddly. I'm past it. I might have an occasional craving, but I have four (four) (FOUR) ounces in one of those big Creed bottles from a discounter. I'll take a 5ml decant and give the rest away.

Alfred Sung's Sung: This is in the difficult "aldehydic meh" category. Someday I may learn to love aldehydes, and until that day, it's hard to predict which ones I might love. But there are a lot of likelier candidates--No. 5, Climat...OK, my mind blocks memory of aldehydes, but I know there are others. I'm going to let this one go.

Serge Lutens Bas de Soie: Pretty. Also, pretty. Perfectly Nice. And pretty. If Lutens has to produce the occasional Perfectly Pretty Pretty Nice fragrance in order to make enough money needed to bottle the weird, fine. But I'm going to let someone else appreciate it.

Lancome Mille et Une Roses: I have this because I bought that little set of classics, including the aforementioned Climat. I don't like this one, and I have never yet learned to love a rose fragrance that I didn't like at first sniff. It's odd, because I love roses, but maybe that's what makes it not-odd. It's like fried chicken; I'm so attached to the "right" fried chicken that I have no tolerance for the "wrong", the kind with too much pepper or other transgressions.

There will be more.

That is all.

(I didn't bother to link the above perfume names to the posts with the Review Roundup for the perfume. This strikes me as evidence that I am less and less a perfume blog. Is this wrong?)

SOTD: Serge Lutens Bas de Soie

I wore it again. I loved it again. But I'm ready for something sweet and resinous and smoky again tomorrow.

Which makes me wonder if this one will take its appropriate place with all the greens, or if it will be illogically filed in memory with incensy smokey things? I met it in the company of the smokey things, see. I'll find out. Probably next summer.

Review Roundup: Is here.

SOTD: Serge Lutens Bas de Soie

Serge Lutens Bas de Soie is a vintage black and white photograph of a scent. It's "retro", not in a funny-nostalgia way, but with that unruffled elegance that no one seems to possess any longer. Many of the reviews refer to it as cold, with the two major notes battling for control. I see it as warm and sunlit and soft, with the iris and hyacinth napping together like intertwined cats, so that you can't tell where one ends and the other begins.

I initially made a proper and sensible decision to spend a few days with a sample, and think about a possible, someday, eventual purchase. Then I caught a whiff of it from my arm and scurried back to the shop - where Himself bought it for me. He does a very fine job of keeping me smelling green.

Review Roundup: The Scented Salamander and 1000 Fragrances and Grain de Musc and Bois de Jasmin and Fragrantica and Perfume Posse and Cafleurebon and Perfume Shrine and Perfume-Smellin' Things and MakeupAlley and Now Smell This and The Fragrant Foodie (scroll down) and I Smell Therefore I Am and The Non-Blonde.

Images: Wikimedia Commons.