Nosy Interview: D.S. & Durga (David Moltz and Kavi Ahuja)

Kavi & David in The Large Magellanic Cloud in Ultraviolet , © NASA, Swift, et al. 

Regular readers will know I'm an ardent fan of D.S. & Durga (a.k.a. David Seth Moltz and Kavi Ahuja), a perfume line whose storytelling I appreciate and whose scents I adore. East MidEast and Sir are my enduring favorites (When I learned that the former was being discontinued, I enlisted understanding friends around the country to scour their local Anthropologie stores for the precious remaining vials), but I'm eager to learn whether either will be unseated by one of the dreamy-seeming new offerings in their HYLNDS series. I'm delighted to share interviews from both D.S. (David) and Durga (Kavi) here.

D.S.'s responses: 
What do you smell like? 
Usually a combination of 4 different trials - 2 on each arm.  Sometimes three.  Thus, it varies!  If I'm going out at night, I wear our "SIR" - a rich rose/jasmine chypre.  Sunny weekend days, I like cologne water (one I made, but not released).  I like to wear pure sandalwood oil from Mysore.

What do you like to smell? 
Almost everything. There is something interesting to smell in most aromas...I like to pick apart what I am smelling.  I love the smell of good tea: most of the high grade chinese "red" (black) teas, tung ting jade Oolong from Taiwan, Gyokuro from Japan, first flush Darjeeling from Margret's Hope plantation.  I love the smell of Glenlivet 18.  The smell of my home town in New England--ocean and forest combined.  The beach roses that grow on Phillips Beach in the summer.  The "bacon" smell my cat used to have when he would cold inside after being outside in the cold winter night.  Clover.  Good patchouli.  Leather.  Mandarin.  My 2 month old daughter's pure breath.  Hibawood.  Wild olibanum (frankincense) from Oman or Kenya.  Motorboat exhaust over the water in the summer.  Hyssop. Ground Ivy.  (those two very similar).  Orange blossoms on the Cote d'Azure.  Eastern Hemlock Spruce.  Haitian Vetyver.  Bonfires.  Tobacco.  Motia (jasmine sambac).  Any white flower in the real world.  Most any flower.  Lilacs! Lilies obv. English Roses.  Endless.


Durga's responses: 
What do you smell like? 
Whatever D.S. has last created and we are testing out.

What do you like to smell?  
All sorts of things. Fresh lilies, tuberose, cut grass, peaty scotch, bread baking, the beach. 

nosy girl gift guide vol.2

It's that time of year again! When the gift guides multiply like wet mogwai, and my debit card, melty due to overuse, starts to smell like a perm. Gross! Here are some gifts that smell so good you'll forget you were really trying not to buy so much this year: 

1.  Topping my personal wishlist is this tremendous vanilla fragrance from CB I Hate Perfume. Even before reading the story behind 7 Billion Hearts, I thought it smelled like it had a soul. 

2.  For my money, Theo is the best bean-to-bar chocolatier in the country (and if you're in Seattle, a factory tour would make for a fun & fragrant gift to share). Choose their Eastern Congo Initiative Bars for their festive packaging, amazing flavor (The Pili Pili Chili has a real kick!), & support of important work being done in a troubled region.

3. Help fill your friends' kitchens with delicious aromas courtesy of two cookbooks I loved this year: The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook by Deb Perelman and Jerusalem: A Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi. Aftelier’s Chef Essences Food 52 Starter Kit makes a lovely addition for a more experimental chef. (You should probably buy yourself something from this section as well, and bring a homemade treat for your host.)

4. A scented candle in a pretty package is still my go-to hostess gift, and you can find sweet little mercury glass votive holders all over these days. (Some of my favorite candles are discussed at great length here.)

5. If you've deemed Campfire Cologne a safety hazard, or your mountain man is beardless, I recommend Juniper Ride Natural Room Spray, as it's the most forest you can get indoors (all real tree, no Little Tree-rearview-window-dangling tree). If you want to help someone smell irresistibly dapper, go with the grown-up, balls-to-the-wall beauty of Sir by D.S. & Durga.

6. For the nosy writer in your life who still hasn’t finished her novel, why not pair the promise of a fireside celebratory toast from a bottle of this cheeky whiskey with Freedom, a tool to help her spend less time online (and more on her writing). You're such a good friend! 

Bonus ideas: Everything on last year's inaugural gift guide still smells great, and I recommend stuff all the time around these parts, including & especially these amazing books by past Nosy Interviewees. Happy gifting, and may everyone you love enjoy the smell of your hugs. 

scents and a song

I love perfume, but it's a rare week that I change (or even wear) it every day. If you're versed in the language of perfume blogs, you'll recognize SOTD as an acronym for "scent of the day." Two weeks ago, I noticed I wore a greater variety of perfume than usual, so I made a little SOTD list (that it took me two weeks to post this brief list, and that I couldn't even sustain the note-keeping through the weekend proves I will never be a perfume blogger). I also listened to "Same Mistakes," the song above, every single day that week, so it's an SOTD doubleheader. 

• Monday: Byredo's Pulp. Sooo juicy! I have a sweet tooth for fruits in life and in perfume and Byredo Pulp makes me want to bite into my own arm (in a good way).
• Tuesday: My beloved East MidEast. Please, D.S. & Durga, bring this beauty back! 
• Wednesday: Liaisons Dangereuses, the jammy By Kilian dream with a deep plum-colored heart and the creamy warmth of a blown-out candle. This one makes me swoon every single time.
• Thursday: Rossy de Palma by Etat Libre d'Orange . Elisa (who thinks of SOTD as "spray of the day") introduced me to this gem, a bright thorny green stem and its rose. (My main squeeze says: "A snake in the flowers.") I like the conversation that Victoria and Elisa have in the comments about the texture of this perfume, because even though I appreciate its darkness and "leathery balsamic notes," there is something about it that just shines. Dark sparkles. Sequins. 
• Friday: Frederic Malle's Portrait of a Lady. What a way to close a rose kick of a week! This perfume makes me want to put on a dress more beautiful than any dress I currently own. I especially love the touch of mint, married as it is to one of my husband's favorites fragrances, Geranium pour Monsieur.

stinky springtime links

image via

Some fresh stinky tidbits to send you into your weekend (May it be fragrant!):

• Hitting right in the sweet spot of Nosy Girl's Smells & Stories Venn diagram is this New York Times piece, "Your Brain on Fiction:" 

"Words like 'lavender,' 'cinnamon' and 'soap,' for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells."

• Also squarely in that sweet spot, a beautiful, pertinent passage from The Art of Fielding, a book I finished yesterday and highly recommend: 

  "He could smell the way Owen's life and habits--weed and gingery cleaners; bookbinding glue, stiff white soap and garlicky tang of his skin; hardly a trace of Henry except for a faint bouquet of ribbed gray sock--had imagined themselves deep in the walls and floorboards of the place."  

• Nosy favorite D.S. & Durga gives New York magazine a peek at their studio. I love the details and the promise of those tiny bottles. Woodyamber! Beaver extract!  

 The makings of East MidEast must be on those shelves somewhere! [photo by Wendy Goodman]

• In a column called "Politics, Odors and Soap," Nicholas Kristof mentions a study that found people "offered harsher, more moralistic views after 'fart spray' had been released in the area."  He also notes that conservatives "secrete more skin moisture when they see disgusting images, such as a person eating worms. Liberals feel disgust, too, but a bit less." Does this make for sour-smelling conservatives who grow harsher and more moralistic in the company of their sour-smelling brethren?
• Do you read the blog Letters of Note? They recently posted a letter of advice, well worth a read, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter. The letter referenced Shakespeare's Sonnet 94 and this couplet burrowed into my brain: "For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds/Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds." 
• Thanks to Britta, Beth, & my dad for these last quick links:
• Astronauts lose their sense of smell in outer space (so they crave hot sauce and look like Charlie Brown).  
• Hot on the heels of their story that spicy foods may promote heart health, NPR reported that "intense aromas lead to smaller bites." This story does not address the inverse phenomenon of instantly needing to take a giant bite of anything yummy that you smell.
• The pope gets his own fragrance, and you'll never wear it!

'some scent of yourself that you can hold up high'

 [image is a detail from the tour poster, post title is a lyric from "Three Peaches"]

Just typing "I saw Jeff Mangum perform on Friday" makes me tremble a little, filled again with disbelief, but this time at something that actually happened, rather than something I couldn't believe would. Waiting in line to pick up our tickets, I warned my companions that I might start sobbing during the concert. What is it about devotion that can make us sound so disturbed?

When we took our seats in the pews at Sanders Theatre, my friend Dorothy remarked immediately on how amazing it smelled. I agreed; it felt like being inside a roll-top desk: old wood, old books, varnish, worn lacquer, and leather blotter. Plus some dusty human smell that comes from sitting still for long stretches of time.

I was wearing East MidEast that day, but added Avignon because I couldn't imagine not wearing it to this show. The way Neutral Milk Hotel and Avignon make me feel are not similar, but they are related. More and more, this has become what interests me about perfume. Of course I like to smell good, but even more I like what I smell to make me feel a certain way, or think about things a bit differently, and I also appreciate being able to put on a certain fragrance and remember more fully a time or a moment in my life. Avignon, a fragrance that it's easy to feel religious about, now has this added weight for me, having risen from my wrists in the church-like atmosphere of Sanders Theatre during what, in some ways, is the closest I get to any kind of church at all.

Some people find Avignon distant, too dark and cement-like in its heavy Catholic incense, too cerebral, too cold. And some people surely find Neutral Milk Hotel somewhat inaccessible, too strange, too distorted or obscure. But they are two of the most beautiful things I know, and they came together for me, warm as fingertips, in a theater that smelled like a well-loved desk, sitting among one thousand weepy, joyful, reverent people who knew nearly every word.

nosy recommends: muggy-weather scents

My friend Charlotte urged me to make more recommendations on the site. Charlotte is a great encourager, and my first recommendation is to befriend her if given the chance. In terms of scent suggestions, I've been thinking lately of what I reach for now that the muggy-monster is among us. Boston is humid as all get out, and these are the fragrances that have served me best during my least-favorite weather:

East MidEast by D.S. & Durga 

I'm a jerk for recommending this (though I recommend it without reservation for all seasons) because it's impossible to track down. But maybe we could rally enough nosy demand to inspire D.S. & Durga to re-release this beauty? (This worked for me once with a seasonal flavor at an ice cream shop in Madison, Wisconsin). I didn't discover East MidEast until it was already on clearance at Anthropologie, and though I was able to manage to hoard a couple of small bottles, I still wear it less than I'd like to for fear of running out. I mention it despite this scarcity because its notes ("saffron, Indian cardamom, Russian roses, & red mandarins") would have, at one time, seemed to me to make it a big no-go for the summer months. In our haste to subsist on watermelon and ice-cold margaritas in the summertime, we forget how excellent spicy foods taste when it's hot. I think the same goes for perfume--though the natural inclination might be to reach for your sheerest citruses, the right big rose thrives rather than cloys in the heat.

Recommended for: Anyone who likes to smell really good, people who can't stand being told what to do, and Katie Puckrik.

Nuit de Tubéreuse by L'Artisan Parfumeur

Nuit de Tubereuse may be my favorite muggy-weather scent; I rarely wear it when it's not crazy-humid. I bought a bottle, somewhat impulsively, on a super-hot day in New York last summer, and I'm not sure I would have had the weather been milder. Something about this peppery, dirty, juicy-fruity, sexy, incensey stunner just heats up so right. Reviews point to the abundance of white florals (though are quick to correctly note that you won't get your creamy-tuberose fix here), but this smells so green to me. NdT almost (almost!) makes me look forward to muggy weather, and this makes me believe the ad copy claiming narcotic qualities isn't just fluff. I've also noticed that I get more compliments on NdT than on any other fragrance I wear. This could be due in part to the odor-amplifying days on which I tend to wear it, but it also speaks to the tenacity of the scent (especially notable since people's biggest beef with L'Artisan seems to be that their scents fade too quickly).

Recommended for: Women wearing backless dresses, glamorous outdoorsy types, and people who like to flirt on the bus.

U4EAHHH! by Yosh 

I've mentioned this mellow fruit-bomb on the site before, and while it can be a bit too sweet for me, it's perfect for those muggy days when all I want to do is eat popsicles and read the kinds of magazines generally reserved for waiting rooms and long flights. 

Recommended for: Lemonade stand salespeople, freckled stoners, and teenagers attending their first spring formals.

If you have other sweaty-weather favorites, please share them in the comments!