I haven't been paying attention to the frenzy surrounding the royal wedding (except, of course, the face-on-food angle), but this excerpt from perfumer Francis Kurkdjian's interview in Vogue UK (via NST) tickled my fancy:
Who would you love to create a signature scent for?
ActuallyKate Middleton. Coming here at this time there is so much about theroyal wedding, and it made me think: she has no intimacy with anything, everything is seen. Her dress will be seen, her hair, her ring. I love the idea that her scent, the fragrance she chooses to wear on the day, will be the only part that is intimate.
Of course, even Ms. Middleton's scent won't remain a secret if the British press has any say in the matter. What did you smell like on your wedding day?
p.s. Katie Puckrik, this week's nosy interviewee, talks about the scents she wore on her wedding day in the third installment of her perfume collection series.
Perfume blogger Katie Puckrik is a serious gateway drug. If you're at all interested in perfume, prepare to become a lot more interested after clicking through to her fragrance blog, Katie Puckrik Smells. Puckrik is the perfect pick for the first nosy interviewee I have not met in person, as I credit (blame?) her with upping my perfume-curiosity to a consuming (expensive!) degree. Her witty, addictive video reviews (bet you can't watch just one in her perfume collection series); insightful blog posts; and entertaining correspondence with her perfume pen pal, Dan Rolleri, make her site one of my favorite spots on the internet, smelly or otherwise.
What do you smell like?
Right this instant, I smell like the honeyed, musky roses of Keiko Mecheri's perfume Attar de Roses, and I can't get enough of myself! I keep hoiking the top of my shirt over my nose and huffing down myfront to create a warm Attar de Roses vacuum.
As a perfume writer with a YouTube channel and blog, my audience keeps me on the hop trying an endless parade of fragrances that far exceeds what I'd naturally choose to wear if left to my own devices. After a day of testing and writing, I often smell like a perfume version of a patchwork quilt.
On the plus side, it means I'm exposed to a great deal of sensory stimulation that really amps me up creatively. In the con column, it takes me away from quality time wearing favorite scents from my own collection, which leans heavily towards what I call "Queen of Sheba fumes": rose, incense, amber, musk, patchouli, oud.
I adore theatrical, emphatic perfumes. I've always loved wearing deep,sensual scents, but it's only in recent years that I've embraced florals, particularly rose. Like many perfume thrillseekers, I'm fascinated by the stanky barnyard element in fragrances that add the beast to the beauty. Maybe I'm comfortable with those subtle physical flourishes after my years working as a dancer, accustomed to my perpetual "clean sweat" smell. Or at least I told myself it was clean- maybe it wasn't as subtle as I liked to imagine! Regardless, I lean towards perfumes that complement the built-in saltiness of my skin: ones grounded by sandalwood, musk and oud.
What do you like to smell?
I love to smell of the air in Southern California on a cold spring night: a bouquet of fragrant weeds, sweetshade trees, fireplace smoke, wet earth and chaparral. It's almost an incense.
There's a certain plastic wrapping smell I really like. The right kind of plastic will have me snorfing deeply into a faceful of it, like Dennis Hopper in "Blue Velvet".
Most of all, I love to smell my husband's warmed-by-the-sun skin. It's sweet/salty, a little like rising bread. When I go to kiss the back of his neck, it's really an excuse to sniff him. I read somewhere once that 1800's Chinese culture was horrified by kissing, because it was considered one step away from being a cannibal! It's a funny idea, but sort of true: the pleasure of a kiss does include the beloved's smell and taste.
On Sunday, it was crazy-humid here in Cambridge. I'm glad winter is over, but please, Boston, let's not skip straight to the heights (temperature-wise) and depths (existing non-disgustingly-wise) of muggy summer. The humidity prompted me to buy a new bottle of this rosewater spray. It's mild and lovely; I like to add two or three drops of grapefruit essential oil and keep it in the fridge. Then I just sit back and let the robot-water make me as ecstatic as the blonde above.
While the weekly Nosy Interviews will continue to feature my smelly, talented, and weird friends, I also intend to interview people I haven't met, but whose writing, style, or work inspires or intrigues me. This nose of mine is curious about people I haven't sniffed in real life, people I barely know, even people I sat across from once on a train.
I will take any excuse to post pictures of interspecies friends. [via]
As always, I welcome suggestions. If you could Nosy Interview anyone--alive or dead, real or fictional--who would you choose? Jesus? Clive Owen? Let me know in the comments!
These noseworthy posts are turning into TV Guide, but I don't care! I adore Parks and Recreation beyond reason, and loved the late, great, painfully hilarious Party Down. In the Venn diagram of things that are awesome about these two shows, Adam Scott occupies a comfortable position (perfect for snacking) in the intersection.
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?)
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:
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.
You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, and you can also pick your friends' brains about their noses. One of the unexpected delights of collecting Nosy Interviews has been how intimate reading my friends' responses has felt--how their answers have given me a look into their lives that feels more vivid and textured than an everyday e-mail, and more revealing than the average phone call. I'm grateful, and I hope they'll keep introducing me to their "unexpected weirdness" for many weeks to come.
I met Preeta when we were both graduate students at the University of Michigan, where I was lucky enough to meet a disproportionately high number of my favorite people. You can learn more about Preeta and her first novel, Evening is the Whole Day, here.
What do you smell like?
An Ethiopian phlebotomist in Rochester, NY, once told me my blood smelled like garlic. She meant it as an expression of solidarity: "We cook with a lot of garlic too," she said. I'm sure she was right, and I didn't mind it coming from her, but the question of what we smell like is a slightly painful one for anyone who has experienced racial prejudice. Racism is almost always about what you eat, what you smell like, what your body is made of, and these questions came up a lot for me during my childhood in Malaysia. So even now, whenever people happen to mention in front of me that they don't really like the smell of "curry," or that they like eating it but don't like the way it clings to their clothes afterwards, or that they don't mind it but don't want to smell it wafting across the hallway of their apartment building *every* evening, or whatever, I cannot help but put a small black mark against them in my book. I never feel the same way about them again. I think I probably do smell like curry, though not like the supermarket curry powder these people's grandmothers stored for thirty years in their spice cabinets, because no Indian person would be caught dead using that. I think I smell like garlic and ginger and shallots and the curry spices Malaysian Indians commonly use, which come in two flavours (meat or fish, neither of which contains any meat or fish), and are largely purveyed by two rival brands (Baba's and Alagappa's). I'm sure I smell like milk to my daughter. Milk and mother and home and safety. But maybe my milk smells mostly of garlic and Alagappa's (my family was pro-Baba's for decades, but recently switched!), after all, so maybe that's just a different way of saying the same thing. I've been using Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Soap since receiving it for Christmas, so I think I probably smell minty right after my shower, but it wears off after an hour or so. In college, I used to use the Body Shop's Dewberry scent, and that was the only time I really had a signature scent: people recognised me by it, and if you hugged me you smelled of it for a while afterwards. But now I don't often use scent (unless you count the lemongrass deodorant spray I use), and I'm okay with just smelling like me/Alagappa's. I think that's been part of my process of growing older and wiser.
What do you like to smell?
I'm lukewarm about a lot of the classic favourites (baking bread, baking *anything,* freshly mown grass, meh). What I love to smell most of all is my daughter. It's a cliché but it's true. We always talk about wanting to eat babies and small children up, but until I had my daughter that was just a figure of speech for me. Now I mean it almost literally; when I bury my nose in my daughter's neck, my jaws itch and ache. It's a bit like the feeling I used to get when holding to my nose those fake-fruity erasers they had in elementary school, only much, much more intense. Hers is the one smell I absolutely cannot put into words; there's nothing I can compare it to, and all our words for smells are comparisons or words stolen from our other senses.
The smell of my husband -- vaguely mossy and rainy, but in a good way -- is comforting and calming, like almost everything about him. And all the women in my family smell like spicy sweat and talcum powder, a smell that makes me feel like a child again, in both the good ways and the bad.
Smells I love in the kitchen: first and foremost, fresh coriander (cilantro) leaves. This the the most appetising smell in the world to me, the one smell guaranteed to make my mouth water, even if I've just eaten, even if I'm sick. But there are dozens of others in close second. The stem ends of tomatoes; citrus, especially calamansi limes; ginger (except when I was pregnant: then ginger made me gag). The many Southeast Asian herbs I grew up with: screwpine, torch ginger buds, lemongrass, galangal, laksa leaves, kaffir lime leaves. The food I grew up with is also rife with fishy, funky, briny smells; it's not a subtle cuisine at all. I love those smells -- fermented shrimp paste, salt fish, dried shrimps -- but I have to admit that kitchens in the Western world are not made for them. I love the smell of garlic, shallots, and ginger frying in hot oil (see above). Good black tea, especially in the afternoons. Rose essence (similar to rosewater, which we don't use in Malaysia). Coconut water. Simmering coconut milk. Palm sugar.
These Colbert clips-of-clips just make me want to watch more Colbert. And sniff the air- beneath-an-eagle's-wing note in his imaginary fragrance, I Smell American (And So Can You!). If America's national fragrance had a season, I feel like it would be summer. Smelled from inside an automobile, maybe.
