Happy Friday! It’s also Star Trek Day and International Literacy Day. Our community project for today: wear a fragrance with saffron, if you have one.
What fragrance did you pick? As always, do chime in with your scent of the day even if you’re not participating in the community project.
It’s hot out there — again! — so I’m happily copying all of you who took saffron points in Hermès Eau de Néroli Doré…
Am I the only fragrance lover who sometimes anthropomorphizes perfume? For instance, to me Caron Tabac Blond is a woman of a certain age who used to be edgy and still won’t suffer fools, but now spends a lot of time reading novels she pulls from her leather handbag; Frédéric Malle Carnal Flower is a radiant starlet almost too beautiful to behold — to the point where she can exhaust you after a few hours; and Guerlain Shalimar is one of the few who can pull off devoré velvet without looking like a Stevie Nicks wannabe.
Similarly Byredo Black Saffron and Seven Veils have distinct personalities. Black Saffron is an introvert who wants to be known as an androgynous intellectual but is too shy to attend any of the parties she’s invited to. Instead, she gorges herself at home on raspberries sprinkled with rosewater while she reads Oscar Wilde in her leather club chair and is in bed by nine o’clock…
My “to review” list is now so alarmingly long that I try not to look at it at all for more than a few seconds at a time. Yesterday, in despair, I decided to cross out all of the niche fragrances I wasn’t even interested in smelling again and could barely remember from the first try (scents that “fill my head with a deep, profound, Zen-like nothingness”, to quote March at Perfume Posse). All of those samples were thrown into the purgatory basket, where they may end up living out the rest of their days unless either a) I get more productive or b) the fragrance industry gets less productive.
Felanilla — and let’s not even talk about the name, ‘kay? — is one of the latest fragrances from Parfumerie Generale, and it did make an immediate impression…
I love the richness and unabashed potency of Middle Eastern and Indian fragrances. One of my first ‘exotic’ fragrance purchases was a tiny jar of waxy sandalwood-amber paste from India; a few dabs of that dense perfume paste on my collar bone scented me all day long. The perfume paste also came in the scents of orange blossom, rose, lotus and jasmine, and the entire line was advertised using the image of a turbaned man applying the perfume paste to his throat. Slowly and, unfortunately, turban-less, I ventured into floral territory with my fragrance purchases. The simple, inexpensive Indian perfumes opened up a new world to me: I started reading about the history of perfumery, I created “to-smell lists” of individual plant and animal perfume notes, and I started burning incense and wearing fragrances from India, Nepal, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Morocco. Both Montale Red Aoud and Agallocha Tedallal Homme were inspired by Middle Eastern perfumery…
I’m sure many of you have had this experience. You find a new perfume. You love it. You wear it a few times, and the love fades. You decide it isn’t you at all, and you give it away to a more deserving home. Then….it keeps popping into the back of your mind — perhaps it really was all that after all? You get another sample or bottle, decide your original doubts were on target, it just isn’t right for you, so you give it away again. And then…