SOTD: Revlon Charlie, and stand-ins

When put to the test, however, it invariably produced a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

"Daddy, how come in Kansas City the bagels taste like just round bread?"
Abigail, Calvin Trillin's daughter, as quoted by him in Feeding a Yen: Savoring Local Specialties, from Kansas City to Cuzco

Long, long ago, I fulfilled my work study obligation at the Kiltie, our college cafeteria, in Pittsburgh, PA. There was a girl who came to me on Sunday mornings, always looking for sliced raw onions. This being the days before twenty-four hour salad bars, she was always turned away disappointed. One day she explained her need: Back home, far from Pittsburgh, she was accustomed to eating bagels, cream cheese, and lox for breakfast on Sunday mornings. Sunday just wasn't right without that breakfast. So she was trying to duplicate it, and the closest that she had come was bagels, cream cheese, and raw onions.

One of my books, The Rituals Of Dinner, describes a culture's customary meal of soup accompanied by a heap of small balls of bread, which the eater dipped in the soup. When times were hard, and bread was not available, and the soup was the thinnest of broths, the bowl would be accompanied by a heap of round stones, to represent the absent bread.

Calvin Trillin's piece, "A Softball, a Lump" describes the travails of three young lawyers exiled to Omaha, far away from the gastronomic delights of Kansas City, Missouri. They rhapsodize over the shape and dimensions of the steak at a Nebraska steakhouse, in an effort to convince themselves that it's just as good as what they ate back home.

People will go a long way to reproduce the comfort of the familiar. I suspect that this explains the continued existence of perfumes that are reformulated to be almost, but not quite, entirely unlike themselves.

And that's what I thought of when I smelled Charlie. It smells like a memory. A faded memory. An attempt to resemble something else - a something else that was probably Charlie in a past life.

Now, the memory that Charlie is trying to imitate is not in my memories - to the best of my recollection, I have never before smelled Charlie. For all I know, the modern version may be utterly true to Charlie's original inner self, and I may just not be a Charlie fan. But I'm doubtful.

There seems to be some disagreement on the notes for Charlie - if I combine sources, I get aldehydes, citrus oils, lemon blossom, hyacinth, tarragon, jasmine, peach, rose, orrisroot, lily-of-the-valley, cyclamen, carnation, vanilla, sandalwood, oakmoss, musk, and cedar. And, yeah, I can smell it trying to accomplish that, but it just doesn't have the resources to do the job thoroughly.

The top notes smell thin, and jumbled, and prickly. They don't seem to be part of the show, but instead something that you need to wait out, rather like a band tuning up.

The middle is better. Hyacinth, yes. Jasmine, yes. I think that I can even distinguish between them, rather than just getting "shrill mixed floral". The orrisroot is presumably represented by the powder, a bit coarser than the silky powder that I prefer, but it would pass with powder-lovers. And it's not pure sweet or pure floral - I can't pick out the oakmoss or whatever's playing that role, but there is something calming and darkening the mix, just a bit. And the base is better - vanilla and wood, yes, I get that, and the remaining floral notes are deeper in pitch.

The notes list is that of a lovely fragrance. The fragrance itself makes an attempt to present those notes. But there are just too many compromises. This is the round bread, not the bagel.

Review Roundup: Now Smell This and MakeupAlley and Basenotes (I think - what's Charlie Blue?) and Fragrantica and Feminine Things and Yesterday's Perfume.

Link Roundup: The Scented Salamander (a retrospective of Charlie advertisements).

(Edited to expand the Review Roundup.)

Image: By Alnokta. Wikimedia Commons.

SOTD: Stetson Lady Stetson

I can't decide. I just can't decide.

Lady Stetson is an extremely inexpensive drugstore perfume, but one that Luca Turin decorated with four stars. So I didn't know what to expect. And I still can't decide what I think.

Now, I have no doubts about the top notes - I fervantly disliked them. Sneezy aldehydes combined with a touch of artificial sweetener. Blurgh.

But as it dried and developed --

I'm going to pause here to note that it did develop. Lady Stetson is definitely not linear. There are at least three distinct phases.

-- as it dried and developed, I liked it better. There was a growing warmth and depth, a sort of glow behind the sneezy aldehyde prickles. And also a large dose of soapy white musk, but a musk thoroughly pureed with something woody, something sweet-gourmand and perhaps something the faintest bit animalic. The blend works - this is the rare perfume containing white musk that doesn't give me any basement washing machine vibe at all. That, alone, is a significant accomplishment.

But I'm puzzled as to what it actually smells like. It's officially an aldehydic floral. People smell peach in this, and rose. To me, it's not at all floral - at first I get aldehydes and Nutrasweet, then it turns to wood and soap with a little bit of sweet gourmand. The final drydown is much more gourmand than floral to my nose - the Basenotes reviewer who mentions eggnog is closest in my view.  Angela from Now Smell This mentions amber and ylang ylang, and I sense them as well, but they both blend into the gourmand mood.

I like the drydown very much. I hate the top notes with a fiery passion. I'm not quite sure about the middle. This is going to make it difficult to wear, because the drydown is very subtle - to have as much of it as I'd like at the end, I'll have to marinate myself in aldehydes and Aspartame at the beginning.

But I will be wearing it again.

Review Roundup: Basenotes and Now Smell This.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

SOTD: Tommy Hilfiger Tommy Girl

Luca Turin presented Tommy Girl with five stars. Like much of the perfume world, I don't get it.

To my surprise, I like the fruity opening. It's pleasant and mellow and oddly childhood-familiar. I can imagine the opening notes as a perfume for little girls, sold in a wonderful toy store in a pink bottle with glass jewels. A faceted bottle. Green glass jewels.

This vision is getting very specific, isn't it? There was a toy store once that my mother rarely took us to - a place of surpassing grandeur in my childhood world. Among its attractions, it featured big glass cases rigged up as miniature rooms with grandly attired Barbie dolls lounging on Seventies-style Lucite furniture and fur rugs, like a very small and entirely respectable Playboy mansion. Tommy Girl reminds me of that store - perhaps there really was a little girl's perfume with that apple-citrus-currant-honeysuckle combination.

As long as I'm listing notes, I'll offer the full, alarmingly long list. According to Basenotes, the top notes are camellia flowers, apple blossoms, black currant, mandarin, and tangerine. Middle notes are grapefruit, citrus orchards, crisp green notes, honeysuckle, and butterfly violets. And the base notes are desert jasmine, Cherokee rose, magnolia petals, Dakota lilies, cedar, sandalwood, and wild heather. Whew.

Sadly, the mellow fruity opening gives way to a high-pitched floral blend that doesn't interest me nearly as much, at least right now - in the winter, it's just shrill, and it stays shrill as time goes on, only reducing its volume with time. Even the honeysuckle, usually a note that I find delightful, fails to save it. So today, I'm unimpressed with Tommy Girl.

But in the summer, that sour floral blend might have some of the appeal of the lemon sorbet from the corner ice cream shop that delightfully blows my eyebrows off. I'll be trying it again on some hot summer Saturday when we're headed for the park - under those circumstances, I might fall seriously in love. Maybe even enough to agree with Mr. Turin.

Review Roundup: Perfume Posse and Sweet Diva and Perfume Shrine and Scent Signals and Perfume Posse again and Basenotes and Fragrantica and MakeupAlley and Scentsate.

Photo: By Andrew Dunn. Wikimedia Commons.

SOTD: Coty Sand & Sable (The drugstore experiment begins!)

Important safety tip: The word "cologne" on the bottle should not, under any circumstances, be taken to mean that you should spray Sand & Sable lavishly. If this is the cologne, I can imagine that one drop of a theoretical parfum version would drive all of the oxygen out of a room.

But that's not to say that I don't like it. I do - I like it very much. It's big, and friendly, and sweet. The word that comes to mind is "affable". The image that comes to mind is a big, fluffy, friendly, but perhaps not-too-bright cat.

The official notes are tuberose, gardenia, jasmine, rose, green notes, and peach. It doesn't have any of the aldehydic or shrill aspects that I expected from that list - instead, it's mellow and buttery, very comfortable. There's just enough sour to balance the ample sweetness, like doctoring your iced tea with far too much sugar and then getting the lemon just right - you know that it's all too much, practically syrup, but it tastes so good.

I can see why this is so well-loved, and why it brings up so many happy nostalgic memories for so many women. To them, it seems to be about teenage sunburned beach afternoons. I don't have that association, so I read it as, well, furry, rather than beachy. Mink stoles or feather boas or, again, that cat.

It's linear, or essentially linear.  It does shift a bit in the first twenty minutes or so as it dries, but that beginning doesn't feel like planned top notes so much as an inevitable phase that you have to wait to, to get to the "real" fragrance. Then it's all sweet, thick, flowery buttercream.

Review Roundup: Scentzilla! and Perfume Posse and Perfume-Smellin' Things (very brief mention) and Scentzilla! again and Now Smell This (brief mention) and Perfume Posse (brief mention) and Perfume-Smellin' Things (one line) and Fragrantica and Basenotes and MakeupAlley.

Photo: By Halved Sandwich. Wikimedia Commons.