SOTD: Parfumerie Generale Cadjmere - and let's talk about powder

Well, yes, I have already discussed this one. Coconut milk, sandalwood, warm friendly cloud, all that. I'm still in love with this, and don't anticipate falling out of love.

Did I mention the powder? I officially dislike powder, but I discovered that in Cadjmere I like it very much. It's a much finer powder than most perfumes - which I realize makes no sense whatsoever, because it's not as if there's any actual powder; it's just a scent.

But for some reason, powder is a note that produces a disconcertingly convincing illusion of physical reality for me. When I smell lemon, I don't expect to see a citrus fruit. When I smell Brosius's Burning Leaves, I don't expect to see smoke. But when I smell a powdery fragrance, I feel as if I should see the puff of powder in the air. After a big sniff, I feel as if I could brush my hand across my face and see white traces on my fingers. And with Cadjmere, those imaginary white traces would be impossibly fine, almost liquid.

It's a mystery.

Picture: Wikimedia Commons

SOTD: Yosh Kismet

This one's going to need another try. Even on a very light application (I learned from the last perfume oil), it starts with a slight overkill of spice and something heavy and dark. It almost makes me think of curried meat. Or curried wood. Or curried furniture. Very odd.

But several hours later, exactly that same note has mellowed into something much lighter, almost a fresh-air smell. I think that I've learned to recognize the "hay" note - it does remind me very much of Bois Blond, which is also said to have hay.

Review roundup: Perfume-Smellin' Things.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Rambling: Perfume and Being a Girl

I've never been Girly.

It started with clothes. I'm one of those people on whom shirts untuck, linen spontaneously wrinkles, piles pill, wool willingly provides a buffet for moths, food charges headlong at anything white, matched separates cheerfully turn different colors in the wash, and so on.

Combining that with the lack of an Audrey Hepburn figure, I pretty much abandoned any interest in clothes altogether sometime around junior high. And, along with them, makeup, jewelry, haircuts beyond a basic trim, and fancy skin treatments. Pretty much, the whole Girly Arsenal.

In fact, I recently declared a wardrobe strategy that can be expressed as: "Black." This way, everything matches and nothing can stain. My clothes do their best to foil my efforts by changing color in the wash, but there's really a limit to how much black can clash with black.

But... perfume came along. Perfume snuck in not by the closed girly door, but by the wide-open gluttony door. Food and perfume have a great deal in common. Flavor is scent, pretty much; those paltry four (or five, if you accept umami) tastes are barely the beginning. And of course, perfume has huge geek appeal. It makes perfect sense to me that one of the biggest figures in the perfume world is Luca Turin, a biophysicist that used quantum mechanics to explain our sense of smell - and wrote a perfume guide in his spare time.

But with the perfume came the Girly. Perfume is a wearable that doesn't wrinkle, stain, or fade. It has no size. It can go out of fashion, but once you go beyond a few well-known names, how many people even knew what was in fashion? Perfume gives me my Girly Membership Card, after all these years. It gives me something to do at the cosmetic counter. It lets me carry out gilded bags with fancy boxes nestled in colored tissue paper. It means that my response to the phrase "free gift with purchase" is sometimes "Ooh!" instead of, "Great. Something new to Freecycle."

So my accelerating Girly Focus is all perfume's fault.

Because under the influence of all those fragrance fumes, I noticed that, y'know, scarves also have no size. And while they technically could wrinkle and spot, they don't seem to. Rather than joining the war waged against me by the rest of the garment world, scarves seem to like me. Maybe they enjoy the undiluted impact that they have on all that black.

And there's a dangerous trend in shoes. Just a few pairs, and I mostly just wear (black) flats, but the presence of short (black) suede boots, and a little pair of thirties-style (black) heels, suggests that the Girly Onslaught is progressing. I even have a pair in (gulp) green.

And there's a little bit of velvet and angora in the expanse of black clothes. And the black velvet wrap that somehow persuaded me to take it home has a midnight blue reverse. And I actually got a proper haircut. Once. It's grown out, but I'm considering a repeat.

All of this leads to the most dangerous sign of all. The other day, to go with that black angora, I put on a little bead choker that I kidnapped from my mother's jewelry box I don't know how many years ago. And it looked sort of nice. There is now a book on collecting vintage costume jewelry making its way to me from Amazon.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. I am.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

SOTD: Bois 1920 Sushi Imperiale

Ahhhh.

This one just makes me happy.

Someone described it as smelling like root beer. I can see that, though it's really old-fashioned root beer that's still made with real roots. There's also a ginger beer vibe, the strong real-ginger ginger beer. This isn't warm, bready gingerbread; it's a brighter and more electric ginger than that.

It's happy. It's silly. It's Christmas. It doesn't shine, it sparkles. White twinkly lights. White twinkly lights on an ice-covered tree luxuriating in billows of snow on a sunlit winter day, when you don't have to do anything but sit inside by the Christmas tree and admire the view outside. And the holidays are still ahead of you, and they're going to be good, and there are cookies in the house and, of course, you're going to eat them with the ginger beer. Ice cold ginger beer, but that's OK, because it's warm in here.

I've mentioned, I think, that I like this stuff?

Ahhhh.

Oh! And the Review Roundup: Smell-O-Vision and Fragrantica and Vetivresse and Perfume Posse and PeredePierre and Perfume Patter and EauMG.

(Edited to add to the Review Roundup.)

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, by Jake N. Click for more details.

Books: The Sarah Kelling series, by Charlotte MacLeod

"Not by word, glance, or so much as a flaring nostril did Jeremy Kelling indicate that he found the plastic reindeer only the second most detested object present. He merely got on with the agenda."
(The Convivial Codfish, Charlotte MacLeod)

These mysteries are like well-crafted wooden toys. Neat, nicely built, brightly colored, effortlessly interlocking pieces that are a pleasure to play with.

OK, I may be going analogy-mad, but, anyway, this is good stuff. The series reflects a detailed, affectionate view of Boston and its long-time residents. The primary character is Sarah Kelling, a member of the eccentric Kelling clan of blue-blood, baked-bean Bostonians.

"Show me a Kelling who'd leave a valuable antique unguarded in a place like this, and I'll show you six other Kellings trying to get him certified as a raving lunatic."
(The Bilbao Looking Glass, Charlotte MacLeod)

Over time, Max Bittersohn, a detective specializing in stolen and forged art, joins her in center stage, often giving voice to the outsider's view of this society.

"...bellies trained on baked beans and boiled dinners didn't heave easily. So far Max had seen various of their ... friends amorous, bellicose, and somos but almost never nauseated, except perhaps by a misquoted passage from John Greenleaf Whittier or a laudatory reference to Franklin Delano Roosevelt."
(The Convivial Codfish, Charlotte MacLeod)

These are home- and family-bound cozies - the action is seldom far away from the dining room and the broom closet, and the motives are always tangled with family and society relationships. The characters are fully-fleshed people, and the ongoing characters move in their lives as the stories continue - and often as a consequence of the story - rather than running in place and solving one murder after another, as happens in some series.

I read several mysteries a week, but only a few stay on my shelves for re-reading. These all have a permanent place on the shelf.

Picture of Old State House, Boston, by Daniel Schwen. Wikipedia Commons - click for details.

SOTD: Yosh White Flowers

As I mentioned, the Nice Man At Barneys gave me several samples of Yosh perfume oils. This morning I remembered my statement that white flowers generally leave me unmoved, and, contrarily, put on a couple of drops of the Yosh White Flowers sample.

A side note: Perfume oils are strong! My two-drop application was excessive. A smear from a stopper that's already been wiped off on the bottle rim would probably be closer to the right application, if I were working with the real bottle. This means that the apparently horrifying price is actually much more reasonable than it seems, in terms of the number of wearings that a person would get out of a bottle.

A second side note: So what are white flowers? I think of the phrase as meaning a mixture of tuberose, lily of the valley, jasmine, narcissus, and the like. Not just flowers that are white, but flowers that happen to be white and have specific strong, sweet scents, scents that often have a hidden agenda. They have notes referred to as animalic and indolic and other words that, as I understand it, refer to some of the scents of bodies and food and decay. I'm just going to point you to the "skank" post on Perfume Posse and an "Indolic?" thread on Basenotes and then run away from that subject.

So, yes, this is white flowers. Lots of them.  I think I was looking for something softer, shyer, and more buttery - this is "perfumey", fairly high-pitched, fairly aggressive, with a lot of projection and sillage. This may not be an entirely fair assessment, since I probably used too much. I'll try again, but even hours later, it doesn't seem to have changed its nature, just its volume.

I should note that I don't like flower bomb, femme fatale scents. Someone who does might absolutely adore this. It's a fine, high quality, complex flower bomb, though, speaking of indolic or not indolic, it seems very, very clean. Sparkly clean. This is all sunshine and no shadow.

I like it enough to wish that I liked it better. I'm going to try it again with a lighter application, and also try layering it with a simple wood-heavy fragrance, like Art of Shaving Sandalwood, or maybe I'll get a straight cedar accord from CB I Hate Perfume.

And maybe I'll also layer it with an incense, like Serge Lutens Serge Noire. I like my mental visual of Serge Noire -  a desert of blowing powder-fine black sand, wider than the eye can see - combined with my visual of this one - a huge and endless stream of white flowers spilling past one's gaze. Black and white and endless. Yes, I realize that mixing visuals is not exactly a recipe for mixing perfumes, but, hey, where's the harm?

The tiny vial should be enough for several experiments, and enough to pass on much of it to a lover of femme fatale fragrances, in the hope that Yosh might get the sale that it probably won't get from me.

Review Roundup: I can't find any reviews! (Update: Ha! Got one from Sweet-Diva.)

Oh, and a last side note, speaking of white flowers: Remember how I said that Van Cleef & Arpels Muguet Blanc left me completely unmoved? Yeah. I was wrong. It's coming to mind regularly. Frequently. I'm going to be getting a sample.

Edited to add a link to an interview with Yosh Han from +Q Perfume Blog.
Photo: Mine

SOTD: Not Quite Everything

So, we went to Barneys in San Francisco. To put it another way, I went to the toy store! (Picture excited bouncing.) We went to several other places in San Francisco, which I may well be posting about, but this ramble is about the Barneys trip.

Barneys has perfume. Barneys has all sorts of perfume. If a perfume house has an exclusive, it seems that odds are it's with Barneys.

Though, sadly, they do not have Parfumerie Generale. I wish they'd get on that. Not as an exclusive, of course; I wish everybody would stock Parfumerie Generale. The CVS pharmacy down the street would be a nice start. Or the Safeway. Or, for that matter, the local Chinese takeout. I want all the opportunities to sniff Parfumerie Generale that I can get, and for now I'm limited to samples and longing thoughts of The Perfume Shoppe in Vancouver. And LuckyScent in Los Angeles, but it's hard to work up a realistic longing for LuckyScent because I've never seen the place. Though there are pictures. Here. Look at that place! (Scroll down to see bottles and bottles and bottles.)

Anyway, returning to Barneys - they're nice. OK, admittedly, I've never entered Barneys in grubbies, which is an essential part of the "niceness" test. Neiman Marcus in Palo Alto, for example, has passed that test. But I nevertheless remain an un-made-up, not particularly fashionable, not particularly young, woman, and they've always made me feel that they're delighted that I came in.

And they leave you alone when it's clear that you want to be left alone.  And if you can't find something, they swoop, they find it, and then they once again read the left-alone signal and they run away.

It's becoming clear that I enjoy Barneys, right?

So. Went to Barneys. Sniffing ensued.

Books: The Doll's House, by Rumer Godden

This was one of my favorite books as a child. To this day, I could still tell you exactly how to walk to the shelf that holds Rumer Godden's books in the children's room of the library - if, well, I could go back in time and the library were still there.

It's a beautiful book, with Tasha Tudor illustrations (sadly, no longer included in the current edition) that make me happy every time I see them.

It's about two little girls, and several little dolls, and the way that they all cope with an unexpected invader. It's charming and cute, certainly happily readable by children.

But Rumer Godden doesn't leave her books at funny flights of fancy. Even though the most important characters in the book are made of wood and celluloid and sawdust, this book has themes of wishes and dreams, of the desire for a home and a place in the world, of hopes fulfilled and the price that that fulfillment may demand. It has Evil and Loyalty and Courage and, most importantly, Heroism. Birdie is a heroine, one that still moves me today, even if she is made of celluloid.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Books: Death In A White Tie, by Ngaio Marsh

"You mean debutantes have gone back to being treated like hothouse flowers for three months and taking their chances as hardy perennials for the rest of their lives?"

The back cover of my copy claims that Dashiell Hammett called this "the best detective story I have read." I suspect that I agree, in spite of all the competition that's been published between 1938, when this was published, and now.

Death In a White Tie tells the story of murder and other unpleasantries during the London debutante Season. It's full of caviar and champagne and white ties and debutantes and polished floors, and polished, sparkling British society characters.

And I love these characters. Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn. The unrequited love of his life, the painter Agatha Troy. Alleyn's mother, who is always a treat on the page. Bridget O'Brien, fiercely loyal to her rebellious young man. Lord Robert "Bunchy" Gospell, described as "A relic of Victorian days".

It's witty and breezy, with turns of phrase to chuckle over. It's a pleasure to read. But it's not just sparkle and wit, and the character aren't just well-pressed, well-spoken mannequins; the plot and characters are built layer by layer from the inside out.

Photo by Chilihead, Wikimedia Commons. Click for details

Books: The Agatha Raisin series by M. C. Beaton

You know how most fictional lead characters are inherently likable? Oh, they may have a Lovable Irascibility or a Mischievous Sense Of Humor, or Low Self Esteem Covering A Lion's Heart, or they may drink rather too much, or demonstrate a little social snobbery, but in general, they tend to be sure, solid, likable people.

Agatha Raisin? Not so much.

She's vain. Passive-aggressive. Egotistical. Needy. Grumpy. Selfish. Bad-tempered. A braggart. A snob and a reverse snob, simultaneously. Addicted to lousy relationships with men. She's a thoroughly dysfunctional person, not in a fascinating and high-flown psychiatrically-diagnosable way, but in a very irrational, everyday, prosaic sort of way. Her only non-dysfunctional relationship is with her cats.

Cats are selfish. Self-centered. Egotistical. Hedonistic. Completely lacking in any desire to please. And a delight to watch and to know.  Maybe this explains my otherwise inexplicable liking for Agatha.

Photo Wikimedia Commons