My friend Lauren in her jellyfish getup, with one of my fragrant petals creeping into the frame.
This year I was a BOOquet for Halloween (glamour-shot below). I weighed down a flimsy green dress with a dozen hot glue sticks worth of fake flowers, tied a florist's bow around a cellophane skirt, and topped it off with a flower headband so gigantic I'll need a royal wedding-invite to have occasion to wear it again. In the interest of verisimilitude, I coated myself with Rossy de Palma Eau de Protection. Though my costume didn't feature any roses, the scent matched the bright green and iridescent gloss of the dress, and seemed tough enough, somehow, to stand up to the chaos of Halloween. Maybe it's the bloody knife note that Chandler Burr describes in an article about The Art of Scent: 1889-2012, his upcoming show at the Museum of Arts and Design:
The fragrance is called Eau de protection,
Burr explains, and it is “one of the most fascinating works ever
created, in any art form.” It was designed as “a portrait of a woman who
is so beautiful that rose runs in her blood. And a man comes with a
metal knife, and plunges it into her heart. And it is the smell of her
blood, running down the blade.”
It was interesting to wear so much perfume (the dress hangs like a giant sachet on the closet door, scenting my whole bedroom even days later), especially since I'm usually a pretty restrained sprayer, perhaps in part due to my love of big ol' overpowering fragrances. But I went bananas spraying this costume, and this meant a lot more reaction to my smell than I typically get, ranging from the positive: "I just want to keep hugging you to breathe you in!" to the not-so-hot: "You smell like that one women's deodorant, you know, the famous one." Okay!
Boo! Highly-filtered selfies are the Glamour Shots of our time.
Another guest at the Halloween party, lanky and in all black, was dubbed Vanilla Bean due to her lack of costume and the serious waft of lovely vanilla she was projecting. She told me it was Jo Malone's Vanilla & Anise, a perfume I'd never sniffed before, but will definitely try when I next have the chance, even though I think part of its appeal might have been the ease with which she wore it, and the way its homey tonka bean comforts contrasted slightly with her sharp wit, luminous North London accent, and "nihilist's wardrobe." I'm on a serious "non-yicky vanilla" (term courtesy of Katie Puckrik) kick at the moment, though, having fallen in love recently with the smokey, soulful vanilla in the gorgeous CB I Hate Perfume's 7 Billion Hearts (so like me to fall for priciest car on the lot) and the woody beauty of Le Labo's Vanille 44. Maybe my nose knows that winter is coming and wants the warmth of rich, real vanilla, worn by humans huddled together around a fire.
L'Artisan Parfumeur's Séville à l’Aube: Inspired by "one of the most beautiful nights in [the] life," of popular perfume blogger and writer Denyse Beaulieu, the reviewsofthisfragrance, created by Bertrand Duchaufour, hit all my sweet spots: orange flower, beeswax, frankincense, jasmine, smoke, and benzoin. I am chomping at the bit for a whiff, veering precariously near full-bottle-sans-sniff territory.
A Lab on Fire's What We Do in Paris is Secret: When Dan Rolleri, Katie Puckrik's perfume pen pal, calls a fragrance
gorgeous, I sit up straight and order a sample.
I'm also wearing a bucketload of sunscreen.
What I'm wearing this week:
Perennial humid-weather favorites Nuit de Tubereuse and Boyfriend. I understand the desire to wear sheer, citrusy perfumes in the summer, fragrances the color of celadon and the texture of cucumber seeds. I keep my robot rosewater in the fridge to satisfy this need for breeze. But my fragrance, when it's this muggy, needs to dig in and open up a bit wild. I can't be wearing something frothy or delicate to the swamp; it's got to be juicy and a bit animalic to hold its own on days and nights like these.
Dunham as Hannah Horvath on Girls. Summer smells and swells in this photo for sure.
A stray smell from Lena Dunham's essay on first love in the latest issue of The New Yorker:
"I don't think about it very often, but occasionally there's a smell--a whiff of cat, of stale air-conditioner, of a frozen, gluten-free pizza warming--that is so purely ours that I could resume being a woman who cries dolefully every fifteen minutes at some perceived slight."
This winter, I never moved my bike from the back porch to the
basement. This was a huge difference from last winter in Cambridge, when
the snowbanks were high enough that you couldn't tell which ones
concealed cars, and the bike lane disappeared for months. As a
result of all that cold and grey, I got on a serious amber kick,
culminating in the purchase of a big old brick of Annick Goutal's Ambre Fétiche, a sticky (but still somehow so dry!) syrup blanketbomb whose bottle alone felt as wrong
to the touch this winter as my all-wool leggings.
During
this weird nether-weather winter, I got hooked on Narciso Rodriguez for Her. Something about NR for Her came especially alive for me, some
bright
cottony aspect that blooms best
on sunny, chilly days, a burst of warmth that I don't usually smell
until at least the third spray, and then puff, there it is (that there even is
a third spray of this not-timid fragrance should reveal how hooked I
am). It wears like a mood ring, knows when to scale back its musky bits
and when to purr, shimmers and recedes throughout the day like a scarf that knows how to read a room's temperature in every sense of the word. NR for Her seemed even to
go with the clothes that I wore all non-winter: a thick canvas jacket and
fingerless gloves.
NR for Her and Lana Del Rey's "Video Games" have more in common than my inability to quit them
I ignored NR for Her when it came out, in part because I'd heard
(and agreed at first sniff) that it was "reminiscent of Miss Dior Cherie,"
a perfume I get too much of a cheap beer note from to enjoy wearing,
though smelling it on others does take me back to my college days. (To
be clear, I'm still fond of cheap beer, but these days I prefer to
enjoy it in contexts other than basements coated in spilled beer, party
sweat, and a cloud of competing Bath & Body Works body sprays. Sweet
Pea! You were so good to me. Do college girls still wear Bath &
Body Works sprays? Or is it all Victoria's Secret Extreme Sexy Dream
Harbor SexyHot Angels' Mist?)
There are perfumes I love more than Narciso Rodriguez for Her, but I haven't had such a
monogamous run with a single fragrance since Lolita Lempicka circa 2001.
I would call it a rut if I weren't so eager to coat myself with NR for Her, even today--the day before the first day of actual spring, 73 degrees outside and everyone in Cambridge playing tennis and wearing t-shirts--when I'm tempted, but can't quite bring myself, to mark the season change with something new.
The advertisers have reached me in my dreams! How else to explain that I dreamed of Prada Candy last night, dreamed of loving the smell of it on my arm, dreamed of that same frustrating back-and-forth of-course-I don't-need-it that happens in real life when it comes to any perfume purchase. But I've never even smelled Prada Candy! And though I love both candy, and the girl in the ad's hair, I think it's the perfume blogreviews of this benzoin bomb that have me dreaming candy perfume dreams.
This isn't the first time I can remember dreaming about perfume. This summer in sleep I was outrunning a storm, or the law, or some other encroaching menace, but I still took the time to spray my arm with huge amounts of Keiko Mecheri's Tuberose, and then, in my dream, in the night, in reality, I smelled that scent
as clearly-- more clearly maybe--as I had when I sprayed it during waking hours, which I did as often as I could get away with at Colonial Drug's stuffy (depending on the employee) fragrance counter this summer.
Anyway, I'll try to get to a real life fragrance counter sometime this week, and I'll let you know if Prada Candy is as sweet in real life as in my dreams.
Joy never did it for me. My friend Joan Juliet Buck, then the rédactrice en chef of French Vogue — and what’s known in the business as a very good nose — showed me Mille when I was visiting in Paris and said, ‘‘This would be great for you.’’ From the moment I smelled it, it was mine in a way that no other perfume had been since Blue Grass, which my mother first gave me when I was a child. It’s round and floral and warm, with just a hint of spice without being too hippie, and just floral enough without being too sweet. It smells like midnight in the Bois de Boulogne — sexy and mysterious. I think it creates a mood. It’s alluring. It says, I’m interested in life, in olfactory senses as well as visual ones. It says, I’m in the mood for something. It also says, I’m feminine, I’m complete. It stands to exist with my mother’s perfume, Shalimar, which haunts me to this day. I even wear it to go to bed: I spray it behind my ears, old style. (Unless I’m wearing pearls.) People really like it. Even when I was a smoker, they told me I smelled good — which is saying something! When you find yourself in an embrace and someone tells you that you smell good, it’s wonderful and unexpected. Mille is rare, hard to find, which I like about it. It means I don’t bump into many people who smell like me.
