Lostmarch - Lann-Ael

Fairyland billows of creme chantilly and caramelised apples on toasted buckwheat galettes. This smells like cake through and through. Prizes for being true to the product description. Makes me want to eat from trees that grow lunch-pails.

Diptyque - Oyedo

Alexander Calder mobile made of limes.

Parfums 06130 - Yuzu Rouge

My sister, when she was twenty.
(Translation: The Body Shop Dewberry cologne, pink grapefruit glycerin soap)

Etat Libre d'Orange - Rossy de Palma

It DOES smell like an alchemist's rose, molten quicksilver calyx, thorns that mechanically retract when someone with a black enough heart approaches it. Basilisk blood. A sylphy transparent blushing rose shimmers and wavers like a hologram, but at the expense of pricking your finger and signing "X."

Guerlain – Petit Guerlain

A long absence, I know – one exacerbated by a fuzzling conundrum – what to wear in infernally humid weather? My part of the globe was terrorised by ferocious heat, its handmaidens being headaches, ailing languor, and fatigue – whatever could provide a tonic to the endless Satan-scorch outside? In my hazy hallucinations, I even imagined that Herba Fresca was a paradisiacal balm of Alpine ice, Mentafollia pools and glaciers. The traditional summer refreshers, eaux de Cologne, proved to be too rare birds – Chanel’s version absolutely extortionate in price, and the Guerlains simply non-existent. However, luck and risk brought me Petit Guerlain, which I chanced on unsniffed.

Intended for children, Petit Guerlain is a simple, ethereal scent. Opening with exuberant mimosa and citrus notes, it later softens to a whisper-quiet, smooth violet and jasmine floral. Orange peel lies very low in the background, adding a gentle tart note and preventing the fragrance from becoming too ballerina. PG is sherbet-coloured, pastel nonpareils, dreamy and serene like the best Helen van Meene photographs. It is soft diffused light, wildflower honey, and meadowsweet. Wearing it makes me feel like I am in possession of a treasured secret – it clings close and warm to the skin, only faintly detectable to those around you. In its own way, PG is a small wonder of watercolour and mist – it is uncomplicated, dewy, so fresh and genuinely pretty that after being graced by it, other perfumes seem plodding and mutton-like. It makes me dream of garden tea-parties and cottage getaways. Never mind the original audience – PG is yours, no matter what age, for private idylls and fancies. Now don’t you want to know what dreams Petit Guerlain could give you?

Etat Libre d'Orange - Nombril Immense

I would like to review this, but all that came in the vial was sweetish beige water. Sweet . . . band-aids. I don't think a single molecule of scent reached me.
I think my sample was filled from a factice.

Guerlain - L'Instant Magic

Overly genteel wood-musk that smells of fresh lipstick. Little violets, vanilla. Made me cough. Stale gusset.

Etat Libre d'Orange - Divin' Enfant

Chain-smoking manneken pis.

Etat Libre d'Orange - Rien

Sorrowful liturgical censer/bonfire/leather fragrance, akin to witnessing the arson of a Norwegian stave church by black metallers in corpse paint.

Rochas - Audace (1971/72-1978 version)

A bit like a Guy Bourdin photo gone horribly wrong - broken fluorescent light tubes, lacquered scarlet lips, tanned glistening thighs, neatly trimmed bush, bloodspattered high heels. Prussic acid chypre that fills me with a vague sense of dread.

Caron - Bellodgia (vintage extrait)

Carnation liqueur or ratafia. LIQUEUR, RATAFIA D'OEILLETS - Steep for a month, in 1 quart (litre) of alcohol at 39 proof, 1/2 pound (250 grams) of carnation petals. Spice with a clove and 1/2 teaspoon (7 grams) of cinnamon. Filter.
Add a syrup made from 2 cups (500 grams) of sugar and 2 cups (500 grams) of water. Filter once more. Bottle.

1st American edition of the Larousse Gastronomique

Lacoste - Touch of Pink

Something.

Dsquared2 - SheWOOD

Dull.

Robert Piguet - Fracas

Holding a tuberose in front of myself. Projecting something other than me, not me at all.

Prada

Whorish maneater.
I LOVE IT.
Patchouli, smoke, and rosepetals stained and bruised.

Etat Libre d'Orange - Encens et Bubblegum

Hot, closet-fresh, Pink Pearl school erasers.

squeal!

Just got my packet of Etat Libre d'Orange samples from Luckyscent. They didn't include the one with the GIGANTIC SPURTING COCK on it though. Pity.
Did anyone else order?

Sarah Jessica Parker - Covet

Chocolate soap.

Hugo Boss - Hugo Element

Maybe it's because I swabbed down my boy's arm with the tester wipe, but it smells intravenous and cleansing.

Coty - L'Origan (vintage)

Unlocking a trousseau found in a crumbling French farmhouse. Thick, syrupy violet and clove, buttoned-up boots, musk, VERY sweet - yet a cinnamon-like note saves it from the jamjars . . .
This is the scent that I think wafted from the sets of Melies movies (in between the plaster, paste, and varnish) with their dozens of lady extras, hourglass-shaped Pierrettes in daring body stockings, large cruppers, the smell of a cafe-concert dressing room after a performance.

Estee Lauder - Amber Ylang Ylang (Private Collection)

Marzipan, marchepane, massepain, pastry cream, hundreds-and-thousands, dragees, sugared almonds, princess torte, husks, rusks, vanilla specks, egg glaze, boiling, bakeries, confectioners sugar, icing sugar, frosted flowers, a million wedding cakes at once, patisseries, butter-flaky crusts, cream cream sugared almond cream cream cream cream cream warm fresh milk.

Lancome - Sikkim (vintage)

On first spray, this is the driest and fiercest of chypres - it literally felt like alien metal hooks clawing into my nostrils and dragging down. I kept touching my upper lip gingerly for traces of blood. The drydown is no less brisk and unyielding - bloody tears on a field of luminous white flowers.

Lancome - Magie (vintage)

Lovely aldehydic floral that sheens and shines with the soft furred glow of peacock feathers. More well-heeled sister to Coty's L'Origan. Like pearls next to skin.

Lilly Pulitzer - Squeeze

Noxious orange thing that makes me think of Flintstones Push-Up Pops and Celine Dion c. "Unison," simultaneously.

Lavanila - Vanilla Blossom

Golden-syrupy, purportedly "healthy" substance that thickens, stifles, and clings like ivy to mucous membrances, resulting in severe catarrh.
I think this lessened my immune system's resistance to infection.

EDIT: Had to wash off, because my throat was constricting.

Shu Uemura - Fleur de Source

Salty, astringent, as bracing as being flagellated in a Finnish sauna with birch branches, then mauled thoroughly with pine-tar soap. Squeaky-clean to make your skin redden and eyes water. After the thalassotherapic hallucinations of the first three minutes, a citrus and herbal wash-over.
Shu Uemura output is genuinely, genuinely strange. Give them your money.

Yves Saint Laurent - Y (vintage parfum)

Woman in a lizard's skin.
Tight, hard Banditry, which unfurls to a soft and slight peach juiciness. A bit beige pantsuited, inoffensive.

Harajuku Lovers - Music

Boy: "It's worthless, just generic little-kid perfume. It's the bare minimum of effort that you can get away with in order to have a sellable product. It's just enough so it can be put on a shelf without being called water. There's no artistry, no smell, nothing."
Me: scented pantyliners.

Schiaparelli - Shocking

Supposedly you're to get into perfume because of your mother. Everyone in the world has a swan-necked, well-heeled, triple-pearl-stranded mother who spent Saturday evenings in front of a vanity bedecked with mysterious pots of cold cream, Cherries In the Snow, and vials of Quadrille or Je Reviens or Chanel No. 5. Sons and daughters get delicate careful-not-to-smudge kisses from rouged lips and nuzzles in pale powdered necks and shoulders, bedazzled by glamourous aspirations . . .
That's a hunk of horseshit story, and I nearly threw up in my mouth writing that. (I think that rotten cliche is oneupmanship for snobs as to who wore the most rarified juice, etc etc)
My mother hated, HATES perfume.
She recoils.
Yes, she she had bottles of Magie Noire, Volupte, Anais Anais, and Youth Dew, but these were ill-judged gifts and resigned to a bottom drawer along with hideous orange-and-fuchsia doilies stitched in the late stages of her pregnancies.
My mother relied on powder, always faintly scented, and potpourri for her drawers.
No perfume, ever.
The only exception - and this was for practical purposes - was Limacol, an astringent Guyanese lotion roaring of artificial lemons and citruses that haven't been invented yet, all magnified to 50,000 kHz through a blaze of rubbing alcohol. Think of it as the West Indian 4711, splashed on liberally in the sweltering Jamaican heat.
In the summer we used it all - Mum, Dad, and I - and smelled like the humming of an army of shortwave radios.
Shocking, in its vintage eau de cologne concentration, has that medical, utilitarian shrillness, if it were coddled with talc and preserved in a chest-of-drawers, due to the bergamot and tarragon in its top notes. An hour later rich honey and rock-sugar civet develop.
It is a dead ringer for my mother, and I'm cackling about how if I offered her my wrist, she would turn her head and grumble (like she does for every perfume), even though it is her scent-doppelganger.

Serge Lutens - Ambre Sultan

This smells like cunt, really.

A+++++++++

Harajuku Lovers - Lil' Angel

Like one of those day-glo Taiwanese jelly-cups (pineapple-flavour) that pose a choking hazard to small children.

Seven Skies - Lalita

Enjoyable orange-sandalwood, autumnal, shines like copper cooking pans. Sister to Satellite's Padparadscha. Earthy.

Tom Ford - Neroli Portofino (Private Blend)

A rude, squelching hesperidic, as if La Tomatina were held with 5041 metric tonnes of bruised oranges.

Guerlain - Jardins de Bagatelle EdP

Makes me eagerly want to wash out my privy parts from a Delft Blue ewer and basin whilst attired in a filmy lacy shift.
There's something cold and Vermeer about it, yet with a winedrop, eggwhite GLUEINESS that seeps and murks all over the chequerboard tiles. A sickly sample? This puce-tinted mollycoddle is at home OL-style, being an amanuensis, or scrubbing floors with drawers slit open.

Jean Paul Gaultier - Ma Dame

Glistening gelatinous blob of lilac waxy emulsion. Slightly greasy.
Oh wait, I just described hair gel.

Bulgari - Omnia Green Jade

Jasper-cold nonentity with copper-flue pistils piping up every so often. Thoughtless, loveless, and pallid.

Seven Skies - Free Love

Malibu Barbie.

I had a lot of rude things to say, but I've calmed down now. It all involved bloodsucking twats and douching and envy and anger and undeserved luxury and choking on Poilane bread and $250 creations and flying to Paris and settling for Jem and the Holograms and pink plastic dream houses and Debbie Gibson and frantic misspelling but it was all very Courtney-Love-y and besides, I've calmed down now.

Aquolina - Pink Sugar

Straight-up cotton candy and Lip Smackers that I feel a bit embarrassed to wear, like being caught kissing a Camp Rock pillow.

OR

I'm hot, you're cold
You go around like you know
Who I am, but you don't
You got me on my toes
I'm slipping into the lava
And I'm trying to keep from going under
Baby who turn the temperature hotter
Cause I'm burnin' up, burnin' up
For you baby

(sung while taping up Jonas Brothers posters in yr. room)

Robert Piguet - Baghari

This warm, peach-skinned, down-filled joy radiates feathery, pearled sensuality. A reissue (reformulation?) of the powdery women's fragrance from the 50s, this has all the class and charm of the decade, without the embalmed, aldehydc whoomph! of other period pieces. Dry like bitter orange soda and Gran Gala, yet veiled and sweet, this is so expertly blended that I can't tell exact notes, I just hum and sing in a saffron-coloured cloud of aurum and copper shot-silk. A beauty.

EDIT APRIL 29, 2010 - Now in possession of a vintage bottle. Purrs like a kitten, silk and sway, soft hips and shoulders.