I’m a poet and I did in fact, know it
I had plans to do other stuff tonight but brain says ‘do that perfume post Avril’ and I do what brain is saying. Well, unless it says ‘drink wine’ which it says every day but I try and only do that twice a week.
Vanilla – 1990s -Body Shop. My all time favorite perfume is the 90s mix of the body shop vanilla perfume. Pure, wonderful, vanilla. The four bottles on the right here are all versions of it, I bought up bottles when I realised I no longer got headaches from perfume, and a friend gave me another bottle. The plastic bottle is the US version which has a very caramel overtone; quite a different scent. I’ve sought high and low for a vanilla that comes close to this and there is literally nothing. All have left me bereft. The current iteration of BS vanilla has a floral jasmine scent to it, which is a nice jasmine. I actually have some of that somewhere which now i think about it is odd as I have not seen it for ages. I wonder where it is!
This smells like an oddly non sweet version of that lolly called ‘milk bottles’, or even musk sticks, which are vanilla flavoured rather than musk. I don’t like sugary scents. This is not sugary.
Night Magic – Avon. I like this one. It’s a good travel perfume, a roller bottle. It’s a nice warm comforting vanilla. I have had a bigger bottle but I never wanted to wear it so gave it away. I take this one away with me when I go somewhere.
Soft Musk – Avon (not pictured because where is my bottle?). This one is a comfort smell for me. Same as Imari, which is also an Avon one i have in a roller bottle …somewhere. In my travel pack I think. Thats a vanillary chypre.
Lola and Lola’s New Dress – ZOMG smells. So I found ZOMG smells a number of years ago and went through it fast. I have used up and used a lot of (and given away the rest) a LOT of the scents here. Like this one: it’s called “Seagull eating a star fish” and it really smells like it says on the tin.
Lola and Lola’s new dress are variants of the US style of vanilla with cinnamon and they are magnificent.
Fifth Avenue – Avon. A vintage scent – I actually had the scarf for years that someone gave me in the 80s, and I found this for sale on ebay and bought it and my goodness does this make me want to floof my hair and put on my power suit. Coconutty intensity. It is trying to be the sort of perfume Red Door is, and it’s working.
Spellbound – Estee Lauder. I bought a sample pack of Estee Lauder. This one is on the verge of being sweet but it’s also really pretty. It does not take much to last a full day. It’s very in ya face. One of the others from the sample pack was White Linen, which I really liked but every day I wore it I felt really uneasy, and then I kept getting weird feelings about one of my ex managers. I checked in with someone who knew here and said “Do you know if manager used to wear White Linen?” Well yes, yes she did. I gave it to my mother. I just couldn’t wear it. Its not like I didn’t like the manager but I felt weird thinking of her all day.
Vivienne Westwood – Boudior. This is one that has almost no fruit listed, but i think BIG BOLD FRUITY when i sniff it. Again, intense and deep.
Hah, I see you Eau Arpege, creeping into your SECOND PHOTO SHOOT. I’m going to ignore this one as I covered it and go with the others.
Chanel No5 – Chanel. So. I want to like this more but I don’t. I’ve tried Coco, Coco Mademoiselle, and No 5 and I don’t really want to wear any of them more than a few times. I should just sell it, it’s a nearly full bottle of the parfum and I can’t bear to wear it any more. It actually makes me headachy (same as Coco). Also it makes me think of Auntie Clarice, who was a particularly nice lady but I don’t want to spend the day thinking of her when I wear it.
Crepe Myrtle – Unknown. I got this in an op shop and it feels pretty old. Perhaps 50s or so. It’s kind of a pretty old time sharpish white floral that I almost never wear but it’s pretty.
Shalimar – Guerlaine. For a long time I would have said this was up there as my top favorite perfume along with body shop vanilla. It’s smokey, baby powdery and vanillary and utterly sublime. I still really like it – this is my second bottle. I had no idea how good a smell could be. It’s almost perfect. But. It’s been supplanted in my absolute affection by…
Jicky – Guerlaine. I wanted to try Jicky for the longest time as I heard it was the ‘grandparent of Shalimar’. I bought it after a squirt at Paint and Powder, to celebrate being offered a full time role at my workplace, after my internship. It was my first actual purchase from that shop; I went with R. That was the occasion we both bought perfume and the staff went “OH YOU LIKE PERFUME? COME TO OUR WORKSHOP” and that is where that bit of the journey began…
So Jicky sat on my wrist and I felt a bit like I’d wasted my money and it was pretty much just another variant of Shalimar. I wore it the next day. And the next….and I was hooked. It’s different enough that it is very much it’s own thing, even if the family tree is definately there. It’s more lavendery and fresher but it’s got some of what makes Shalimar so wonderful too.
Joy (reformulated, original) and Eau de Joy – Jean Patou. I didn’t include joy in my rose scents because to me it’s jasine and tuberrose, quite a different scent. Apparently it’s been discontinued (for now, I guess). My main problem with any of these Joys is they only last about 2 hours and then the scent vanishes entirely.
Mitsouko – Guerlaine. Sometimes I read the descriptions of what these perfumes are and I wonder if everyone is on crack or it’s just me. Mitsouko is a floral to me, even if it’s a chypery one. I don’t wear it often. I went through a number of Guerlaine classics and some stuck and some didn’t. I almost never want to wear this one but sometimes I just DO.
The thing with the blue lid – by I’ve forgotten.Hah, this is terrible. I can’t remember the name of it. It’s a big perfume house, it’s a white floral, of the sort I don’t wear a lot of but it’s pretty if I want that. Oh deary me. Other than going into my room and having a look, I’m never going to remember this. Well there you go.
Givenchy III – Givenchy. This is a second hand bottle of a perfume I remember loving when I was younger and that smells nothing like. It’s …ok. I think the perfume has ‘turned’ a bit. I’m going to use it up dutifully and forget it every happened.
Private Collection – Estee Lauder. I have here the big and the small bottle. BOTH LEAK. I bought the big after going through the small. I used to have the small at work. OOOOH WAIT. WORK. That is where some of my ‘missing’ perfumes must be, I know I have a bottle of Youth Dew somewhere, that’s where it is! Ok back to the description….It’s an amazing, sharp, beautiful fragrance.
Le Dix – Balenciaga. Huh, this is an aldehyde is it? It’s very sharp and bright. I don’t wear it often. Again, this was a blind buy and it’s a bit ‘eh’. I may on-sell this one as I never think of it. I don’t mind wearing it. I don’t think of it.
No 19 – Chanel. The only Chanel I really like. It’s very green. I used to mostly wear orientals and spices and vanillas but I’ve changed over time and I sometimes am in the mood for this sharpness. It very seldom gets my attention. My eye wanders over it and I think vaugely ‘oh that’ but i always like it when I wear it.
Eau Via Lanvin – Lanvin. This I kind of classify as the same feeling of perfume that no 19 gives me. Sharp greenish floral. Again, blind buy, and I wear it and find it hard to remember what it is but it’s a nice safe scent. The bottle is bizzare. You stick your finger into a hole and give it a squirt and the squirt always feels like it goes on a bit too long. Like a hug from a slightly creepy person in the social group you would rather not hug (these days I don’t hug them but I used to feel obliged).
Did I just compare this perfume to creepy dudes. Yes I did. Very unfair, the perfume is perfectly fine.
Juniper Sling, Penhaligon’s. R bought a set of Penhaligon’s and disliked them all and let me have them and I disliked most of them (i have rehomed them) but this one was nice. It’s…similar -to me- to 19 and Eau Via Lanvin. Sharp, greenish, florally. Gin. I do like gin.
Baroque – Fragonard. Apparently this is warm and spicy and blooming rose…but again, someone is on crack. I can’t even. I think of this as green. There you go. This was a different friend who brought out all the samples she had and didn’t want and I sniffed my way through and liked this one. Mabye I just havn’t worn it enough to know what it smells like and I misclassified it!
Byzance – Rochas (decant sample). I was sent this when I bought some perfumes on ebay as a thank-you for buying so darn many. I used to have a bottle of this: I bought it when I visited Paris in 1991. I bought Byzance and wore it doggedly for about a year and then gave up and gave it to my mother who then wore it till it was one and I regretted that because I had to put up with it as her going-out perfume for years and I couldn’t escape the smell. So I was intersted ot get the sample and it transported me back to my uni days. So i’ve kept the decant sample out of pure nostalgia. I also bought “Maxims” based on the fact that Rebecca was my favorite book, and I hated that too. LOL. So much poor choices in perfume in my early days. And yet. Body shop vanilla.
So this is the end of my perfume journey; other than some at work and around in a drawer somewhere, this is it.
I also have many rants about ‘perfumes I have hated’ – like Womanity -that i sat next to on a plane and it gave me waves of nausea. And Angel. Oh my hatred of Angel. And Flowerbomb. OH MY WORD YUCK.
And Perfumes I really like but they make me sneeze, like Calvin Klein’s Obsession…only I just gave away the story there, didn’t I? I also can’t wear Opium and I love the smell. Again, the spicy ones make me feel ill. I mean, womanity made me feel ill because it smelt like fishy celery and it was fucking disgusting.
