SOTD: A Shalimar novice's impressions

Is it weird that I feel that I can't just say "Shalimar"? I feel the need to clarify the strength and vintage. I'm new to this classic; this is the third variant that I've tried in the past few weeks, or the fourth, if you count the Parfum Initial.

I felt that the current EDP had perceptible flaws. Not that I know Shalimar at all well, but if that EDP is the perfume, I'm not going to be a fan. It was quiet and rather dreary, the citrus and vanilla showing up for work but without any enthusiasm. The burned rubber was there, but it was in a bad mood.

A sample-sized decant of the vintage EDT, on the other hand, had sparkling citrus sometimes lifting up the flowers, sometimes good-naturedly wrestling with leather and rubber, with a velvety fog of vanilla mellowing it all. This was, I must admit, all on fabric--I was headed for a no-fresh-perfume social occasion. I'll try it properly on skin, but I think I'm going to want more.

Today I wore a couple of drops of the non-vintage extrait, and I can't make up my mind. It's neither dreary or sparkling; it's closer to a comfort scent than a bombshell perfume. I was planning to buy a half-ounce new bottle; now I'm not so sure.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

SOTD: Dawn Spencer Hurwitz Mirabella

I bought this blind. And I'm glad I did. On principle, this was the wrong thing to do; I bought it because I read rhapsodic reviews, and it was gone and then was back, but only temporarily. In other words, it was an uninformed panic buy.

In practice, after wearing it, I'm not even a little bit sorry. I need to wear it again to find the right language to describe it. It's dark, but in the sense of dim lights and deep textures, rather than moody or threatening. Dark. Layered. There's sweetness but it's not a sweet perfume. That's all I've got right now.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Sewing: SWAP 2013

It's SWAP time again!

This year's Sewing With A Plan contest on Stitcher's Guild requires two coordinating "capsules" of clothes, each of them containing either three tops and two bottoms, or two tops, one bottom, and one dress. Plus a "bridging" garment that links the two capsules.

I normally join the SWAP, babble a little, and then drop the whole thing on the floor. When I started typing this, I mistyped the site's name as "Stitcher's Guilt"--apparently I'm feeling bad about not finishing my SWAPs.

But here I go again. The above rules require nine to eleven garments, depending on how you use the dress option. One garment can exist before the SWAP. So that means that I need to sew at least eight garments before the end of April, to finish a SWAP for the very first time. Will I make it? Suspense!

I'm going with maximum predictability. I've already made four Liberty Shirts, so I have that pattern down. I've made two of that Burda six-gore skirt, so that's pretty reliable too. I have a lot of linen and a little wool that's been waiting to be made up in those patterns. And I would be perfectly happy to own a closet full of them. So the lowest-ambition SWAP for me would be:

First Capsule:

• Liberty shirt: Yam-colored medium-weight linen
• Liberty shirt: Grass green medium-to-light-weight linen
• Gored skirt: Chocolate medium-to-heavy-weight linen
• Gored skirt: Brown-sugar-colored lightweight glossy linen, plus lining.
• Tank or, if there's enough, Liberty Shirt: Same linen.

Second Capsule:

• Liberty Shirt: White medium-to-light-weight linen
• Liberty Shirt: Black wool blend
• Gored skirt: Black wool blend
• Liberty Shirt: Black linen (preexisting)
• Gored skirt: Small-scale black and white houndstooth.

Bridging Garment: 

• I have absolutely no clue.

This still isn't totally predictable. I'm not quite sure that the brown-sugar linen is going to work for that skirt; it may be both too lightweight and too crisp, and therefore may crumple like tissue paper. And I'm not sure about an Asian shape like the Liberty Shirt in a houndstooth pattern. But the yam, green, and white shirts, and the chocolate and black skirts, are perfectly straightforward, so that's weeks of sewing before I need to think about the less certain garments.

And two of them are cut! I cut out the green shirt and black skirt before I even remembered the existence of the SWAP. And the Serger of Majesty and Wonder should make the skirt, in particular, far easier than it would have been on the regular sewing machine.

So it could happen. This year. Really. Maybe. It's not completely inconceivable.

Are you sewing? For winter? For summer? For crafts? Needlepoint? Tell!

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

SOTD: 28 La Pausa

Smells like Chanel.

No, that's not a review. But that was my first thought when I applied this, this morning. And all day, when I caught those now-and-then whiffs.

What makes Chanel smell like Chanel? I need to think about that.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

New Year's Two of Two: Light and Fluffy

New Year's!

Have I ever actually carried out my New Year's resolutions? I doubt it. But here we go anyway. What do I want to change? More importantly, what might I actually change?

Pefume: Remember the collection. So, I read perfume blogs and forums. I learn about new and exciting fragrances. I buy samples. I wear the samples. Occasionally I blog about them. Occasionally I buy a bottle. Then I read perfume blogs and forums... lather, rinse, blah.

Do you see any place in here where I actually wear the perfume in the bottles? No, you don't. Worse than that, there are many days where I don't wear perfume at all (gasp!), because I put off applying perfume until I have time to choose a sample.

The resolution is to wear perfume from my bottles more often. I wasn't sure how to make that happen, until I chose the following weird strategy:  If I haven't chosen a scent in the first half hour of the day, then after I put the electric toothbrush back on its little charger I'll apply whatever's next in the alphabet, based on the names of full-bottle or large-decant scents in the collection. Whee! That means that tomorrow's candidate is 28 La Pausa.

Perfume: Evangelize. OK, this is cheating; it's just casting something that I'm already doing as a resolution. See, I want more perfume freaks. Especially in town. I'm already inflicting little baggies of samples and decants on friends; I'm going to keep it up.

I might even (gulp) work on resolving that Postal Regulation Phobia and start swapping. Basenotes had a recent thread on the exact regulations that gave me some hope that I might be able to do this legally, so, well, maybe. It could happen. You'll all send me perfume in jail, right?

Perfume: Squelch the hoarder within. I was pretty good at this for a while--there are dozens of dozens of bottles that I'd like to have, that I restrained myself from. But as the IFRA cliff approaches (OK, I guess it's not a cliff with a specific date, but there's certainly a steep slope there, with lots of sharp rocks), I sometimes fear that we're seeing the last couple of years of decent perfume, and that adds energy to the craving to buy.

But how to suppress that energy? One possible compromise would be to make a 10ml decant the default "buy" action, rather than an actual bottle. The danger of that is the thought of, hey! what about all those coffrets? That way I could get my bitty dribble of perfume in a manufacturer's bottle! And then we're into money again.

There's also the worry that decant bottles might allow the perfume to decay faster than a manufacturer's bottle, but does that make any sense? I doubt that Tommy Girl, at (lemme check...) twenty-two dollars for a one ounce bottle, is in a museum-archival-quality vessel. Any opinions here?

Diet: Evict sugar (again.) I did a pretty decent job of cutting milk and sugar last year, and lost enough weight to wear new clothes sizes. I fell off the sugar wagon over Christmas; I'll be back on it starting this coming Saturday. (Start a diet at the same time that I go back to work? Very funny.) "The sugar wagon" means cutting most sugar and sugary foods, most dairy products other than butter, and most white starches. Specific scheduled treats are then added back in. Large quantities of turkey are consumed. Efforts are made to increase vegetable consumption. No effort whatsoever is made to reduce fat consumption; that may happen when the sugar wagon is reliably on the track.

Writing: Keep writing. I write, and stop, and write some more, and stop. I want to form a reliable habit, ideally one that grows over time, ideally one that includes some fiction writing, but first let's start with the habit. Three hundred words three times a week, on any topic (a blog post counts) seems like a nice, very modest, start.

Sewing/Wardrobe: Press stuff. That is, once a week, press all the self-sewn clothes that came out of the laundry that week. This sounds like a trivial, itty-bitty resolution, but if I don't press on the weekend, I'm just going to wear jeans and tee shirts all week. And if I don't wear my spiffy sewn clothes, I won't be motivated to sew more of them.

Sewing/Wardrobe: Make a dress TnT. Fitting and perfecting one Tried-and-True dress pattern in a year doesn't sound like much, until you consider that I've been trying to get that done for much of this year, and have failed. I want some bleeping dresses.

Life: Worry less. I used to think that the solution to worry was about reducing caffeine and gulping milk and gobbling turkey. But I'm realizing that when my worries call, I run after them and pat their little teeth-gnashing heads and ask them how they're doing, a lifetime habit that I think I can...well, not break altogether, but reduce. I'm hoping that a worry snubbed is a worry reduced.

Appearance: Care about it. As described often in this blog, for example in On Perfume and Being a Girl, I've always had a rather conflicted view about dressing and ornamenting myself. I still roll up my jeans hems rather than hemming them, and wear Merrells rather than girl shoes (even sometimes with skirts), and rarely wear jewelry.

I'm going to work on this; I'm thinking maybe A Touch A Month. I'll take January credit for buying skirt-to-pants girl shoes, hem all my jeans in February, and so on.

That's nine resolutions. That should be more than enough for anyone, right?

Excuse me while I eat some more sugar before it's too late.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

New Year's One of Two: Heavy and Bitter

So it was a weird year. Mom died, and that changed more things than I would have expected.

I mourn the chunk of life that Mom was cheated of, the ten or twenty more years that she had every reason to expect. I wish that she'd had the chance to live those years and to take from them whatever joy she was capable of.

But from a purely selfish point of view, I've learned that mourning what's lost is easier than mourning what can't be attained. A mother that didn't love me is a less upsetting fact than a mother that doesn't love me today and won't love me tomorrow. I suspect that I've done a good deal less crying over Mom since she died than I did in any of the last several years of her life.

Sometimes it feels as if I've spent all my life explaining things to Mom, explanations that she was determined not to hear but that she never stopped demanding. Trying to explain, trying to help, trying to connect, trying to communicate. Mom never discouraged me from trying--it seemed that she wanted me to try, and try, and try, to keep pouring myself into a bottomless vessel. But she was never going to give back, not even to the extent of understanding the explanation or accepting the help. It's as if she not only needed me to try, but also to fail, utterly, in every effort.

I wish that Mom could have those years. But there's a relief in no longer failing. Now that I know that that path is closed forever, I can walk another way.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Blogging: Identity confusion and stinky cats

I need to change my blog name.

Right?

It would be different if the blog were about fried chicken. The first post was indeed about fried chicken, and while I anticipated more than one topic ("obsessions", after all), I expected chicken to have a larger presence.

The world certainly has room for a blog about fried chicken. And a database. Proper "twenty minute wait" pan-fried chicken is harder and harder to find, and even deep-fried chicken worth eating is increasingly scarce. Someone on a layover from the airport in Medford, Oregon, for example, should be able to connect to a website, select "bone in" and "deep fried OK" and learn that the fried chicken at Food4Less is startlingly good. Eliminating "bone in" and expanding the driving distance to include Ashland would let them know that Taroko's Pattaya chicken has a very high-quality crunch, especially if ordered with the sauce on the side. That Lark's fried chicken breast, while it sadly isn't bone-in, has a glorious crust that even stands up to gravy. And so on. The world needs that website.

But I haven't created it, and odds are I'm not going to. So that returns me, to: I need to change my blog name.

Right?

But what to call it? I'm hampered by my reluctance to lose the weird altogether. Most of my ideas are sort of...pretty. I thought of names like "Fragrant Trifles" or "Savory Trifles" or names with the word "whimsy" in them. But those names make me feel that they belong to someone who wears high-heeled shoes more than twice in a decade. On the other side, I thought of things like The Stinky Typist, but, well, I dunno.

While searching for deeply-out-of-copyright quotes about perfume, I kept running into the following:


I cannot talk with civet in the room
  A fine puss gentleman that's all perfume.
      - William Cowper, Conversation

I rather like that, in a contrary sort of way--I'm talking not only with perfume in the room, but in large part talking about perfume. And I love civet as a note, and they don't actually torment cats for it any more, right?

A blog named Civet in the Room? civetintheroom.com? I already nabbed the domain name, but that's not a commitment, that's just for security while I dither; I could always release it.

Opinions?

Chicken Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Perfume: A basket of quick sniffs

I've been wearing perfume without reporting back. Shocking. I'll probably review these properly someday, but as I laze around on holiday vacation, I'm going to record my first impressions.

Sylvia Grojsman 100% Love didn't quite hit the right note for me. The vanilla and chocolate were lovely, but the roses and berries seemed to clash with them, rather like... like... OK, I don't know what like. To quote Buffy, "un-mixy things." I did enjoy the drydown, but I don't like having to wait for a clashing note to go away.

Parfumerie Generale Gardenia Grand Soir was just as lovely as it was the day I tried it in the shop--before I broke all rules and bought it the same day. But I didn't have any new thoughts about it.

I ordered a tiny 2ml decant of Mary Greenwell Plum because I remembered it being mentioned fondly more than once by Mals over at Muse in Wooden Shoes. The initial fruit note was exactly what I wanted--an idealized plum, or perhaps plum jam. Dark and intense but not sweet. But then the aldehydes came out, simultaneous with the thought, "Doesn't Mals refer to herself as an Aldeho?" and indeed she does, and Plum lost me for the next hour or so. The drydown turned likable again, but I think that this one is too grownup for me.

Montale Chocolate Greedy was a nice enough vanilla with just a dusting of chocolate. It brings to mind chocolate meringues or other chocolate creations that depend on cocoa rather than melted chocoalte for their flavor. Perfectly nice, but not what I had in mind. Is chocolate always either a fleeting note (Cacao and Guilt) or a dusty background presence (Greedy)?

Lady Stetson was pretty nice, and that's all I remember.

Sung by Alfred Sung was not what I expected. I expected green; I got only the faintest hint of galbanum trapped behind prickly thorny flowers, followed a good while later by knee-deep powder. Meh.

That is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Group Blogging Project: The Ghosts of Perfume Past, Present, and Future

Christmas--the secular festival, rather than the religious one--is about fantasy. Elves and sugarplum fairies, and a jolly old grandfather climbing down the chimney to give you sparkly things, never forgetting the batteries.

So as I thought about ghosts of past, present and future for this group blogging project (thanks to Natalie for organizing and Undina for the theme!), I found myself interpreting "ghosts" not as the dead, but as all those fictional spirits of Christmas. Santa Claus. Charlie Brown and Linus. Mr. Scrooge and Bob Cratchitt. Rudolph and Yukon Cornelius. Harry Bailey and Zuzu. Frank Cross.

"Frank who?"

Frank Cross! You know, the gleefully evil work-driven television executive played by Bill Murray in the movie Scrooged. ("When you don't work late, I can't work late. When I can't work late, I CAN'T WORK LATE!") When people of taste debate the best version of A Christmas Carol--the old-fashioned charm of the early Alistair Simms film, the drama of the George C. Scott version, blah de blah de blah, I hold firm to my favorite*. Scrooged. So there.

So... what fragrances would the Scrooged ghosts wear?

The Ghost of Christmas Past is a madly cheerful and cheerfully mad cigar-chewing cabbie who forces Frank to relive his early years. This ghost enjoys life--or would enjoy it if he had one any more. The office party, the young lady handing out portraits of her anatomy at said office party, the love of Frank's life (Claire, played by Karen Allan at her most incandescently adorable)--he enjoys them all, and lectures Frank on his lack of appreciation.

Ghost of Christmas Past: Let's face it, Frank. Garden slugs got more out of life than you. 
Frank: Yeah? Name one!

What does the Ghost of Christmas Past smell like? To look at him, you wouldn't imagine him wearing any sort of fragrance, but we'd all argue that perfume is a part of enjoying life, right? Right? Don't laugh; just humor me here. When I  conjure him up in imagination, in his cab, I smell a tiny thread of artificial pine, one of those hanging car fresheners, in a desperate losing battle with an ocean of stale cheap cigar. But if we imagine him on a date after a hard day of reforming the living, what fragrance does he wear? I struggled with this, until Himself presented me with the only and obvious answer: Hai Karate. Of course.

What about the Ghost of Christmas Present, played by Carol Kane? This spirit is playful, charming, ruffly-pink--and intermittently violent. ("The bitch hit me with a toaster!") She sings, she dances, she plays Trivial Pursuit along with mortals that can't see or hear her. She covers Frank's ears to keep him from hearing about his Christmas gifts. And then she hits him some more. ("The truth is painful.")

This one was a struggle--what fragrance is playful and loving, vain ("Oooh, a Christmas party! I’m so glad I wore my pretty dress!") and occasionally vicious? It occurs to me that that's a personality profile of a cat, but that doesn't give me the answer. After long deliberation, I'm going to go with Chanel Cristalle. It's beautiful, feminine, even swirls-and-ruffles feminine. But that galbanum sharpness hints at claws, perhaps as sharp as those of No. 19, even though they're better-concealed.

And the Ghost of Christmas Future? Dark. Cloaked. A skull for a face. Screaming creatures hiding in the folds of its robes. (Frank: "Did our people do that? We're gonna get letters.") For this ghost, I choose the most frightening, most soulless, most despair-filled fragrance that I know, so horrible that it has no name known to the general public, despite sharing our lives from cradle to grave...

White laundry musk.

Shudder.

That's the end for my scented ghosts. But don't forget to visit the other bloggers in the project!

All I Am - A Redhead 

EauMG

The Muse in Wooden Shoes

Olfactoria's Travels

Perfume Journal

Undina's Looking Glass 

Another Perfume Blog

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Footnotes: 

*(Our household is not unanimous on this--Himself argues for the WKRP in Cincinnatti version as the very best, but he does give Scrooged second place.)

**(A side note: You may recall my Postal Regulation Phobia. I have a similar level of Copyright Regulation Phobia. Therefore, I will be linking you to images of the characters of Scrooged, rather than pulling them into the post.)

SOTD/Review: Byredo Pulp

Fruity.

I almost left the review at that one word, but then I started having thoughts. For example, Pulp is indeed fruity. It's a little abstract; it doesn't conjure up completely realistic three-dimensional fruit. But it makes me imagine warm, overripe, crushed pulp with bees just starting to investigate, rather than candy or sorbet or Torani syrup, as so many other fruity fragrances do.

It also announces "perfume" in the topnotes (Aldehydes? Something else?), as if to assure me, with a wink, that it has read its job description, and that it knows I'm a grownup. But that fades; within perhaps ten minutes it's just squashed fruit. And that's fine.

What fruit? The notes list has a lot of fruit and a few flowers. (Bergamot, cardamom, black currant, fig, red apple, tiare flower, cedar, praline, peach blossom.) But it all blends, so that it smells to me like a single unknown fruit, rather than an orchard or a salad. A stone fruit, I think, related to but very different from peaches or plums. Bigger and wetter and more brightly colored; the kind of fruit that you carry outside to eat over the grass, because it's going to drip that much.

But there's a gesture toward melon--it has a fair bit of that note that can make cataloupe smell just a little bit sickly. I'm guessing that's what makes some people smell decay in this, but it stops before it goes over the edge, and in fact I might like just a little more of it. It's this note that makes Pulp work for me on a winter day; it provides just enough sun and warmth without any risk of seasonal jetlag.

FTC Disclosure: I got the sample for free (bwahaha!) but in my role as a sniffsniffsniffing customer roaming the wilds of the Holt Renfrew perfume floor, not in my role as a blogger.

Review Roundup: MakeupAlley and Basenotes and Now Smell This and Perfume-Smellin' Things and Katie Puckrick Smells and Fragrance Bouquet and Perfume Posse and No Dissasemble Charlie No. 5 and WAFT.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.