Perfume: Another Take on Seasons

So, I've posted (here, here, here, here, here and here) about the effect that the seasons have on my fragrance tastes. Traditionally, the pattern has been that as day lengths shift after the solstice, I gradually lose interest in perfume, and then as we're past the curve and roaring into the next season, I get excited again. Well, that's how I remember the pattern; not all of those posts agree. This winter is a new twist--as we edge into the seasonal turn, my interest in perfume is climbing, not falling.

I want sweaty or dirty or syrupy perfumes. Right now, I'm having a strong craving for MCMC Kept. (I'm in Portland, where most of my perfume collection isn't.)  I'm also eager for the right occasion for my shiny new birthday bottle of Papillon Salome, which Now Smell This just gave 7 on the skank scale.

And I'm thinking that I really must get another bottle of Aftelier Cepes & Tuberose, because I don't want to run out someday.  And after reading EauMG's review of Thorn & Bloom Orange Blossom, I'm craving it without ever having smelled it.  (But Thorn & Bloom wants fifty dollars for samples. Meep! Also, meep!)  And I'm craving the freshly-bathed-soapy-cat smell of Caron Alpona.

Dirty perfumes. Mmm.

Image: By Dwight Sipler. Wikimedia Commons

Perfume: Solstice Bad

Here we go again. We're a few weeks past the winter solstice, and suddenly I don't like any of my perfumes. Well, hardly any. I thought that this was happening ahead of schedule, but looking at my blog, it's actually behind--in 2011, I whined about it on January 9.

The other day, I didn't like Santal Majascule, a perfume that I liked before. I don't like Carillon Pour Un Ange, today's scent, and I adored it before. I don't like Une Crime Exotique. Or Serge Noire, or, for that matter, any incense. A La Nuit smelled clean and sweet and pink when I sniffed it yesterday. (Eeew.) Bvlgari Black? Meh. Oriental Lounge? Feh. Tea for Two? I don't even like Tea for Two today!

Cadjmere. L'Eau Rare Matale. Tubereuse Couture. Gardenia Grand Soir. Un Lys. I don't like any of 'em right now. I don't dare smell No. 19, because if I say anything disrespectful about her, she'll kill me.

But I like Cuir Venenum better than I've liked it in years, better than I've liked it since the day I bought it. And I loved Lorenzo Villoresi Sandalo, all day yesterday.

I'm thinking that Saturday I'm going to sniff until my nose falls off, to see which other fragrances I like during the cold-to-warm season change. Because spending four to eight weeks as a non-perfume-lover twice a year is starting to annoy me.

That is all. I'll probably enthuse about Sandalo tomorrow.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

SOTD: None. And seasonal shifts. And poultry skin.

I seem to have suddenly--and temporarily, I'm sure--lost interest in perfume. I theorize that this is day length--it's cold, but days are getting longer, so I'm being reprogrammed to want warm-weather perfumes, but I don't want them yet. It's just a theory.

Actually, I am craving scents, but they're not scents that my collection offers me. I want the brown-butter dusty scent of the cepes note in Aftelier Cepes & Tuberose, but without the sweet tuberose. And I want the scent of garlic. And crispy chicken or duck skin. And bacon. I want smoky meat instead of smoky sweetness or just plain smoky smoke.

Salt, smoke, butter, and crisp fat. I don't think that the perfume world has anything for me right now.

But I still want to buy perfume. Badly. I want to select it, and click the Buy button, and wait for the package to come, and have the unwrapping ceremony. But I don't want to wear it.

My brain is confused.

Image: By Evan Swigart. Wikimedia Commons.

SOTD: Serge Lutens A La Nuit, and the waxing/waning model

Remember those voles?

My fragrance cravings have been changing for several days. Bottles that were hidden behind the green- or tea-focused summer scents have been coming out, and some of those summer scents have lost their appeal. This makes me think about the day length thing again. Days are getting shorter now, and I wonder if that's why my taste preferences are very different from my preferences in late June, when it was just as hot as it is now.

In mid-July, A La Nuit was perfect - I wanted more more more. Today, it was still pleasant, but just barely pleasant - it was on the edge between "Mmmm, jasmine immersion..." and "Help! I'm drowning!"

And in June, I couldn't imagine wearing Cadjmere as a comfort scent, and I wore Tubereuse Couture instead. But yesterday, Cadjmere was perfect, and I couldn't imagine wearing Tubereuse Couture at all, much less perceiving it as a comfort scent. I loved Cuir de Lancome in February, and loved it again on Sunday. I suspect that the thought of wearing it in June or early July would have been horrifying.

And was Osmanthe Yunnan unexciting recently because I missed the window of time when it was hot and days were growing longer? Would it have been magnificent in early June?

So the theory is that my scent preferences are determined by hot or cold weather in combination with the current day length trend - and that the day length may be the greater factor.  So "hot" or "cold" give way to more complicated designations like "hot waning", for hot weather when the day length is shortening, like now, or "cold waxing", for cold weather when the days are getting longer, like February or March.

Did I mention that I'm a geek? Can you tell that I'm thinking of making charts?

I also wonder about the definition of day length.  Is it strictly the number of hours of daylight, as if I were an onion or a flower bulb, or is it about the earliest sunrise or the latest sunset? If I got blackout curtains in the bedroom so that sunrise became irrelevant for another couple of months, would my fragrance taste suddenly shift?

Questions, questions.

Review Roundup for A La Nuit: Is here.

Image: By Bruce McAdam. Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Seasonal Perfume Preferences (And Voles)

So I've formed a theory about the seasonal change in perfume preferences.

As I mentioned in another post, my perfume preferences change drastically when the season changes.  As the season starts to shift from summer to winter, citrus and fruit and mint and fresh bright florals are right out for me, while sweet gourmands, leather, musk, wood, smoke, and spices are in. And the whole process reverses as we approach spring.

Now, this makes sense if you just explain it by context. When the leaves start to turn, it looks like fall. So you start to want things associated with fall.

The problem with this theory is that the phenomenon starts in late August and early September. At that time, the leaves aren't turning. In California and Oregon, where I hang out, everything still looks and feels like summer. It's warm, it's bright, everything is still blooming. It seems premature for context-driven preferences. Nothing has really changed.

Except for day length.

The longest day of the year - the most hours of sunlight - is around June 21. After that, the days start getting shorter.

Day length triggers all sorts of things. It tells onions to start bulbing. It tells birds when to get moving in their migration. It tells plants when to flower and fruit. So I suppose there's no reason why it shouldn't tell humans when to start craving coffee and wood, rather than lemon and mint.

And, once I got the idea to search on things like "day length" and "scent cravings", I went Googling and found that meadow voles change their odor preferences based on day length. So there we are. All explained.

At least, all would be explained if we were meadow voles. Female meadow voles. Apparently the voles like the smell of other voles in the winter, when nesting together is useful, and dislike the smell of other voles in the summer, when nesting alone is the appropriate behavior.

So what survival characteristic is triggering, or mis-triggering, in humans to produce changing perfume cravings?

I can theorize that part of it is exactly the same as the voles. In winter, I like scents of musk and leather and civet and other animalic or sweaty scents, better than I like them in summer. In other words, in winter, I have a greater liking, or at least a greater tolerance, for smells associated with being near other creatures. For a season when being indoors with a bunch of warm people is probably good for survival, this seems like a useful thing.

Another part of it is surely about food. More Googling tells me that winter sunlight deprivation causes a winter shortage of serotonin. Eating carbohydrates helps cure that shortage. As a result, people commonly have cravings for carbohydrates in winter. So that seems like an explanation, right there, for the winter craving for sweet foody scents.

So the theory, totally unsupported by any data, is that in the winter, I crave the scents of things that are good for me in the winter - or the things that were good for my ancestors in winter thousands of years ago, when my wiring was being designed. No big surprise there. And the other part of the theory is that that craving is triggered not by actual winter - not by changing leaves and cold - but by the earlier and more subtle signal of shortening days.

That is all.

Photo 1: Wikimedia Commons. By Andre Karwath.
Photo 2: Wikimedia Commons. By Needsmoreritalin