I love this woman's writing. She's funny, and doesn't go on with the purple prose, straight to the point. I love that its both entertaining and informative.
"This glorious leather chypre starts off with a wonderful fresh/bitter herbaceousness combined with a very prominent body odor note from cumin. Please note: the cumin here doesn't suggest just your run-of-the-mill body odor, either. The BO note in Aramis is the smell of a man's arm pits who's been exercising for a while and possibly hasn't bathed in a couple days. It has that almost metallic sharpness that accompanies the aroma of an especially ripe pair of pits. Jarring — but sexy, in the way that smelling the body odor of someone you're attracted to can be both repellent and erotic."
Aramis by Estee Lauder (1965)I love how in the perfume world you can just be like YES I love the smell of a sweaty armpit, what's YOUR problem? Stinky stinks is a blog topic for another day...
I'm so blindingly jealous of her vintage perfume collection too. I often wonder how perfume junkies afford their habit. I can see that she's soliciting donations - and why not! Its better than stealing your nan's VCR.
Personally, I feel this duel emotion, like nothing is more exciting for me than the knowledge that new perfumes are in transit and will be arriving on my doorstep soon, meanwhile I experience great guilt every time I drop a wad of cash on some new stinks. I've limited myself to $90 a fortnight - which isn't that much considering I don't drink or smoke or buy expensive clothes or buy my lunch!
I love buying presents for myself - it's like Christmas but better because I don't have any laden anxiety that I might unwrap something that I don't like but will have to pretend to like in front of some obscure aunt, and will have to use it conspicuously in front of her for the next few months. My parcels always come in at 9 am or so on a Saturday. I literally leap out of bed. Through bleary eyes, I sign whatever the courier waves in my face, and then I spend a good long while playing with my new toys. Perfume is actually pretty nauseating on an empty stomach, first thing in the morning - but like a kid insisting on having birthday cake for breakfast, I just don't care. Then I get back into bed and thrust my perfumed wrists and elbows under my husbands sleeping face and order him to sniff me and give a nuanced commentary and comparison.
So, in an attempt to economize and not end up with full size bottles of perfume I don't even like in the end - I just purchased three vintage perfume samples off of trademe (ebay in New Zealand)
It was a choose three off the list kinda deal. I picked:
L'Aimant by Coty
Orient Parfums - Which I actually know nothing about and cannot find any information about it online but it is vintage, oriental and inherently mysterious. It ticks all my boxes.
Soir de Paris by Bourjois - I was told by a Tabu collector on fragrantica: "the scent is just exquisite.The kind of perfume one would be careful with - it smells so precious, so well balanced, like a beautifully rendered piece of baroque music by The Academy of St Martins in the Fields."
I love Tabu, it will always be my classic favorite but the girl who sits next to me at work doesn't seem all that impressed I suspect... Might have something to do with the fact that she exclaims "I can smell you from here!" while fanning the air or "I don't want to get too close to you in case some of your perfume gets on me!" She's subtle for sure. I'm thinking I ought to migrate to something more work friendly. Dousing myself with Tabu seems to have totally crossed the line to downright offensive. I don't mind, any excuse to buy more perfume is fine.
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