black lab

Lady Gaga's ink-black Fame perfume comes out next week, and Haus Laboratories, where all the chemists work shirtless, has released this trailer for the scent. I can't imagine Fame possibly smelling as dark and strange as the ad suggests, but Gaga did initially request that the fragrance be built around the molecular structures of blood and semen: 

"You get the after-feeling of sex from the semen and the blood is primal.  [The blood element] was taken out of my own blood sample so it’s a sense of having me on your skin. I wanted to extract sort of the feeling and sense of blood and semen from molecular structures...That is in the perfume but it doesn't smell like that. Actually the perfume smells like an expensive hooker."

  
The pitch has evolved since then, and, even if the flower in question is among the deadliest of nightshades, the press release now contains the celebuscent standby promise of "floral and fruity elements." Charlotte Cowles at The Cut offers this nutshell version of the release: "[Fame] looks black in the bottle but won't stain your clothes, and it smells like honey, saffron, apricots, orchid, and jasmine, which sounds nice."

The trailer had me imagining plum, tar, antique face powder, latex, crude oil, and bulletproof spaceship glass. What notes does the ad suggest to you?

'sex in the air i don't care i love the smell of it'

 You and me (and at least 6,714 others) both, Lily Allen.   

What about smelling like Rihanna? Internet sinkhole the Daily Mail reports that "We all want to smell like Rihanna" and that her second fragrance has outsold all other celebrity fragrances in the UK, and is on pace to sell 4 million bottles by the end of the year. 

 Images via @badgirlriri on Instagram

But unless the notes are sex, drugs, and coconuts, there is no way Rebelle smells as dreamy as I suspect Rihanna does, based on her Instagram feed alone, which gives off a distinct tang of leather, yacht wax, lipstick, high-quality marijuana, five-star hotel lobby, several sweats, nail polish, beer & champagne, that smell that passes between women when they spend every day together, sea salt, fresh avocado, sunscreen, cotton, cocoa butter, and gold.

(Post title comes from Rihanna's song, S&M. The lyric is discussed with great depth and sensitivity here.)

cheap...thrill

[image via]

If the quarter machine has temporary tattoos or animal-shaped erasers, I'm probably buying one. The same is true of nearly any perfume under ten dollars, which is how I wound up with a bottle of With Love...Hilary Duff. (I'm pretty sure the ellipsis is part of the name, but what is being whispered in that pause? With love and...what?! Affection? Squalor? Sunshine? Hilary, you elusive minx!) The opening is too sweet and coconutty for me (Chandler Burr's description of being "hugged close to the suntanned neck of a pretty volleyball player on a Malibu beach" fits perfectly), especially now that it's pitch black by 6 p.m., but it dries down into such a pleasing, shimmery, woody powder that I'm counting the purchase as the best $5.99 I spent this weekend. If you spot the satisfyingly-faceted little bottle at your local T.J. Maxx, snap it up. It's a fruit-bomb at first, but it grows up fast.