new year, new smells

Mwaka Mushya, Nosy Readers! I've neglected this space lately, but I’m still experiencing all sorts of new smells in Rwanda. We’ve relocated from Kigali to Huye/Butare, where the dusty red roads, rows of semi-abandoned storefronts, and legitimate cowboys give the place a real Wild West feel. But the people are warm, and Butare is home to the best ice cream and coffee in all of Rwanda (more on both in later posts), so it’s a good move. I will be back with new Nosy Interviews soon, but in the meantime, here are some of the best and worst things I’ve smelled in the last few weeks:

The best:

Image via Mallee Native Plants

1. Eucalyptus seeds! Have you ever seen these? They look like darling vintage buttons, bell-shaped and clustered together, their star-shaped openings secreting the stickiest rich sweet smell of their seeds. I’ve had a dried cluster on my desk for a couple of weeks, and it still yields its plummy (more in terms of the color of the smell than the actual smell), tangy, resinous scent. Let’s hope I don’t get one of these gum nuts stuck in my nostril.

   

   (so overwhelmed by the scent that I've gone blurry)

2. These yellow bell flowers! Their smell is totally insane! (That’s me above, standing under them, drunk with delight. Does anyone know what these are? I must get myself a field guide.) These bloom at dusk and in the evenings and they will give you a new understanding of the word intoxicating, their sexy indolic smell enough to make you wish to become one of the bugs or birds that goes bell to bell, helping these plants propagate.

   

   An inyambo gets scented up 

3. It’s been far too long since we’ve discussed manure around these parts. I recently smelled some very fine dried and burning cow dung (royal cow dung) in Nyanza, where the royal herd is kept. The herders burn a huge stack of dried dung to keep flies away from the cows, and these majestic (and smart!) creatures come over and stand inches from the fire to season their skin with the smoke, and make its fly-repellent power last.

The worst:

1. Burning tires/garbage still holds my top-spot for smells I like least in Rwanda. On a walk, my dear friend D. mentioned how the smell reminds her of her childhood, and because of this, she likes it. People are often surprised to learn that others like smells they consider gross: manure, gasoline, skunks. This might be the first time I joined in such surprise, and even though the odor of burning tires still makes me want to gag, I do think of it a bit differently since she shared her nostalgia with me.
2. A new contender for grossest smell in Rwanda is the sausage-like aroma that rises up from one of the toilets in our new place (Welcome/warning, future houseguests!). Yesterday I think I came closest to an accurate description when I described it as ‘hot-rot turkey carcass.’ We’re working on it (both getting rid of the smell (me & my husband) and figuring out how best to describe it (mostly me, as he doesn’t think it’s quite as bad as I do—hopefully future houseguests will find they agree with him.)).

I’ll be back soon with some recommended reading and more notes on smells, but in the meantime, I’d love to hear about the best and worst things you’ve smelled so far in 2014.

pocket treasure

In June, my friend Tina sent me a sweet, chocolate-themed care package that included a stick of ISUN Antioxidant Lip Balm. She wrote that it was "incredibly nutritious and delicious," and implored me to "Read the ingredients!" I'm sharing the ingredients with you here as they appear on the tube, since a list like this brings me such delight (especially since it catalogs the herb oils by name, rather than lumping them together as "fragrance" or "essential oils," as so many ingredient-lists do):

Beeswax;  Mango seed butter, Olive butter, Herb oil (Jojoba oil, Life everlasting, Green tea, Gotu cola, Rosemary, Calendula, Lavender, Milk-thistle, Lemon balm, Licorice rt, Roobibos, Hibiscus, Rodiola, Gingko, Plantain, Amla, Ashwaghanda, Acai, Goji berry, Horsetail, Comfrey lvs, Comfrey rt, Rose petal, Echinacea, Ginseng, Lotus, Boswellia, Blue violet); Avocado butter;  Aloe butter;  Buriti oil; Kokum butter; Vit E tocopherols; Goji berry oil; Acai oil; Urucum oil; Raspberry oil; Rosehip ext; Seabuckthornberry ext; Cocoa absolute; Vanilla absolute; Orange oil 

Isn't that a lovely list? Seabuckthornberry,  I could say it all day. And the best part is that this lip balm is reminiscent of Aftelier's Cacao, enough so that using it brings back some of the same happy memories that Cacao does when I dab it on my wrists. Cacao is one of my favorite perfumes, and I travel with the mini, so wearing it transports me especially, to a cement room in a 12th-century house in rural France; a hot-rock beach in summertime Nice; and a pine-strewn Pacific Northwest forest, clouds heavy with rain. I'd love to own the Cacao EDP one day, spray myself silly with it, dab a bit of the perfume on my wrists, put on a little ISUN lip balm, and take myself out into the world smelling like some of the happiest days I can remember (and like cocoa and blood orange and jasmine, too).

smells like summer longing

 Image via L'Artisan Parfumeur

Two perfumes I'm itching to sniff:

•  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 reviews of this fragrance, 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."

nosy new year

My bottle acclimates to its Midwestern surroundings.

Happy New Year, nosy readers!  I wish you a 2012 filled with new smell discoveries as well as familiar or forgotten scents that make you swell with emotion.

The holidays were the usual sensory riot. I had a bit of a cold, but still managed to eat more than my share of cookies and breathe in some nice smells:  

• The smokiest scotch I've ever smelled (Pop, if you're reading this, what was that delicious scotch?)
• I drained a full sample of Sweet Redemption for my parents' annual holiday party, and people seemed more eager to hug me than usual (they lingered due to my fragrance rather than their scotch intake).
• I was so happy to unwrap a bottle (pictured above) of Un Bois Vanille (the ideal fragrance to spray on your wool scarf, and I agree it's perfect for layering) and a bundle of beautiful beeswax candles. Both will go a long way towards making the bitter Boston winter warm. 
• The weird, unseasonable warmth in Wisconsin meant that I could smell more manure than usual in winter, when the ground is often frozen. For reasons not exclusively olfactory, I dread the completion of a harrowingly gigantic factory farm under construction right off the highway on the route between my hometown and Madison. (The cows, I heard, are on their way from Nebraska in the new year. Not that I'd prefer Wisconsin cows meet their fate in such a place, but I'm puzzled as to why the Dairy State needs to import its livestock.)
• Alterra Coffee! I visited the main roasting facility on Humboldt, and wanted to set up permanent shop at one of the tables, eating pie, breathing in toasty beans, and talking all day with old friends. 
• A friend had a Mrs. Meyer's Iowa Pine candle going in her bathroom, and I was teased for emerging from the bathroom more than once exclaiming how great it smelled in there. The candle seems to be sold out all over, but I'll be keeping an eye for one out next winter.
• Oh man, if you're ever in Iowa, do yourself a favor and purchase some AE French Onion dip. You may be thinking, I've tried french onion dip in a tub before, and it's not that great. I agree! It usually isn't, but this stuff is so delicious that dipping your chip so deep that your hand comes out creamy is one of my family's most sacred holiday traditions. Viva Midwest!

game changers

 Detail from Panel V of Romare Bearden's The Block

The seasons are changing, every day it seems, and sometimes over the course of a single day. Last Thursday, in New York again, I could feel the air lean towards winter, in that way that makes it harder to take a very deep breath. But the night air was mild, even a little warm. I was running late, and wearing too many layers, but also wearing Bois de Paradis. Just as you sometimes read the right book at the right moment, there are days when you make the exact right choice with your perfume. Bois de Paradis was a fine choice that afternoon, but as I ran down Lexington Avenue on a weirdly warm nearly-winter night, it became perfect. Sometimes I'll honestly forget that I'm wearing something lovely, and ask around about what smells so good. But that night I didn't wonder; Bois de Paradis was like some golden amber orb around me, pulsing with a beauty that grew as the evening warmed, and darkened.  

Two days later, on the dress I was wearing again, I could still smell the wood. The sweat had lifted, and some of the sweetness was gone, but there remained this sturdy beauty that I love. I wish I could explain to you all the reasons that this was the perfect fragrance for this week, for the things I heard, the people who showed me something of what it means to do more than endure, but most of that has already faded into the fabric, and it will take some running on my part to remember.

my little jasmine memory

I was once the proud owner of My Little Pony Baby Bonnet School of Dance. [photo via]

This weekend, a friend gave me a vial of Royal Jasmine Roll-On Hanky Perfume that he picked up on a recent trip to India. Jasmine is one of my favorite notes, and this particular version is lovely. Thick and bright green at first, it dries down into a scent that matches exactly a toy I recall, but can't place exactly, from childhood. Something sweet and rubbery, something I held often, something worn. My suspicion that some of the My Little Ponies (Hasbro introduced scented ponies in 1987) may have had this soft jasmine-plastic scent led me to this perfume review which in turn led to this article about fried bubblegum "tast[ing] like My Little Pony turds." It doesn't shame me to admit that this description makes me want to try the marshmallow treat described more rather than less. 

Do any readers remember a jasmine-plastic scent coming from their My Little Ponies? Or maybe you remember a different toy-of-the-80s having a jasmine aroma? I wish I could send a little puff of what I'm sniffing through the screen, so you could smell exactly what I mean, see if it transports you, too.

perfume dreams

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 blog reviews 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.

'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.

you smell cro-magnon

My friend Britta first introduced me to Yosh Han's perfumes with the gift of a six-piece sampler set. I fell hard for U4EAHH!, with its batty name and sweetness so fresh it seemed just-squeezed from some kind of maniacally-relaxed melon who surfs a lot and has the perfect sprinkling of discrete nose & cheek freckles. (It's more pear than melon, but somehow melon seems like the more laid-back fruit to me. Can you picture a pear on a surfboard?)

this guy looks pretty laid-back, though

The title of Mireille Silcoff's post (discovered via Elisa), "Smell is the nearest thing we have to bottled time travel," reminded me of how much I want to get my hands on another Yosh sampler set: the Timeline of Frangrances she created exclusively for 826LA's Time Travel Mart. I'm such a sucker for lists of notes in fragrances, especially when they include inscrutable things like white pearl and sparkles:

Caveman (34,000 B.C.E.) — notes of: earth, washed suede, galbanum
Sheherazade (818) — notes of: African musk, opium, cardamom, rose
Silk Road (1280) — notes of: bamboo flower, peony, China lily
Aztec (1494) — notes of: chocolate, rose, nutmeg, pink pepper, cardamom
Gold Rush (1849) — notes of: musk, denim, pink pepper, river
Victorian Violets (1888) — notes of: violets
Studio 54 (1977) — notes of: white pearl, juniper, coriander, lime, champagne & sparkles
2012 (ditto) — notes of: Egyptian musk, blue tansy, peppermint
Utopia (77777) — notes of: French vanilla, nectarine blossom, cassis, green tea
Dystopia (77778) — notes of: kukui nut, foraha, tobacco, peppermint, peach, galbanum

 image via

I looked up foraha; supposedly it smells like pecan ice cream (what, no butter in the dystopia?). The lack of a shared language for scents allows for some beautiful imaginative leaps. What does denim smell like? Indigo dye and cotton? Or like jeans? Metallic zipper & button, detergent, dirt.  And corduroy--what is its smell? Velvet & heat, tiny rhythmic burnings. Silcoff:

We all know that scent is the most emotional of the five senses, and linked to memory like none other. We know this because we have all smelled fresh-mown grass or the hair of a passing person on the street or the notes of a shot of Jägermeister, and been instantly transported back to a childhood summer in the country or the arms of the first person we kissed or some bender weekend that occurred over a decade ago. There is a certain uric smell in certain London Underground stations that can literally make me cry from the number of stacked emotions it brings up. Ditto for the smell of Dove soap with Listerine and corduroy, which is the smell of my grandfather.