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."

a modern girl

I thought the dogs would chase me around Fresh Pond tonight. In e-mails, women often confess that they, too, like the smells associated with menstruation (but few say so in the comments).

On Friday, I smelled Kiki Smith's perfume at the ICA and it was enormous. It was juicy and purple and rotted--something much too sweet that had just turned but wouldn't quit with its blooming. In some ways its insistence was awful, but we all kept leaning in to smell one anothers' hands and agree it was much too much. I didn't know until I looked it up just now that she was inspired by the smells of "cat pee and plant sex."

 "Born," Kiki Smith [via]

In December, I scandalized a small cluster of people at a holiday party by admitting that I preferred not to shower every day. They shocked me in turn with their disbelief, their small shudders.

Earlier today I was reading Carrie Brownstein's piece about bearded toothlessness in indie rock, lamenting  "wit and heart [without] bite." Why should we smell nice all the time? Or at all? It's true that sometimes I wish to smell like a buttery angel, but it's also true that I should sometimes stink, smell decay, be fearless, or at least less afraid of "volume, ugliness, and bombast," whether I'm breathing it in or giving it off.

stray smells

 Unleaded, Unleaded, Premium Unleaded by Eric Graham

Today on my bike I smelled violet and rice, together, in a hot blast. I don't think I would have noticed this combination were it not for Katie Puckrik's recent review of Love, Chloé (a perfume I'd hoped would smell a little bit more like what I smelled on the street today). I was riding past a Chinese restaurant and a flower shop, but it can't be as simple as that, can it? On the corner near these two stores there's a gas station that has the faintest odor of any gas station I've ever sniffed; it's a real letdown. Another gas station in my neighborhood was mysteriously abandoned today, cordoned off by a big tornado fence and bright orange construction tape. It looked like a crime scene, a diorama of a suburban ghost town. Off my bike, an oddly sour smell seemed to follow me all evening, but I refused to accept I was its origin. I can be stubborn that way.