Coquelicot co-co-ri-co

* Coquelicot bonbons by Barnier! These fabulous sweets are flavoured with raspberry and . . . tonka bean. The tonka bean adds a vanillic depth, body, and syrup-creaminess, making it not just another sweet for children . . . the flat scarlet tablets, imprinted with poppies, are darling too.
* free (!) cannoli filled with ricotta, chocolate, and fresh cream, in a still-warm pizzelle, a charming end to a delicious salumi lunch.
* Christmas present to myself: a set of vintage D'Orsay eaux de toilette, Intoxication, Divine, and Le Dandy; L'Heure Bleue vintage eau de cologne, in the classic round bottle design; and a mystery! Rosée de Provence by Christianny, a company located in Grasse. Online it is listed as "Rose de Provence" but my label definitely says Rosée. The perfume inside is rich, dark orange, and since Christianny was apparently an essential oil producer, I'm looking forward to all the beauty!

Merry Christmas to everyone!!! Looking forward to carols and midnight mass (and the incense of midnight mass!) tonight!

running out of closet space

I need a walk-in humidor/perfume cellar. Things are getting out of hand.
Especially when I now have a beautiful Le Galion box set!!! 8 out of ten perfumes (missing Lily of the Valley/Muguet and probably Tubereuse): La Violette, Brumes, Bourrasque, Galion d'Or, Sortilege, La Rose, Snob, and Gardenia. All extrait, all full, all mine! I also spied another set, that I waffled on because all I wanted out of it was Miss Balmain.
Purchased: some Amouage thing for $11, that I can't identify for the life of me.

these aren't my words.

The smell of big hotels and deckchairs,when people are having aperitifs:a mixed scent of amber,cigarette smoke,wax polish;and those meats cooking in wine.

from Alix's Journal by Alix Cleo Roubaud.

little sniffs, upgrading, low lighting, a lament

Scores of today:

Mystere eau de parfum - Rochas
Madame Rochas
Femme - Rochas, the "new" version with the black cap. Unfortunately at another store when I bought -
Amour Amour - Jean Patou (sweet spiralled bottle with gold cap)
- I stumbled into the old version of Femme (lacy cylinder with gold cap), shrugged my shoulders and went, "Too bad! I already purchased you today!" But now I want to relive those few minutes and put
everything in its proper place.
From a previous jaunt: Eau de cologne fraiche - Christian Dior, so beautiful in its houndstooth bottle.

How many of you believe in upgrading your perfume collection? Is one bottle of simple eau de cologne enough? Or must you rush out and scream, "Vintage! Eau de parfum! Parfum! Original, more more!" I myself believe I should exercise moderation because I make a fool's wage, but am I too cautious? Should I splurge, have doubles, triples? No. I don't want that answer. One is enough. (Except on the subject of Shu Uemura, an obsession felt solely by me. Uemura addicts: out of the closet! I don't want to hear about eyelashes! Let's talk about his other areas of expertise!)

* * *
I have started work at a . . . scent-free office. Yes, it is horrific to me. I work cheek by jowl with other typists, two of whom claim to have asthma, one equipped with a fan (and turns it on in November) and who scowls at her neighbour's hand lotion. It is saddening - at my previous workplaces I loved sailing in on a cloud of Le Dix or Safran Troublant, smelling my wrists whenever I got bored or discouraged, perfume being my perk-up, my endless friend, my comfort during drudge or annoying customers or fatigue from shopkeep standing. Now I apply faintly, with a meek hand, perfume that I know won't last long or can be mistaken for shower-freshness - Lann-Ael or Heeley's Menthe Fraiche respectively. That above-phrase isn't a slight to them - I'm so happy that they exist and at least give me an hour of illicit joy. It breaks my heart that I have to be away from my darlings for five days out of the week. I love my scents, I only feel half-there without them. I miss scanning my collection in the morning and choosing who will be my friend for the day, who will complete the mood I want to be in, who can change me, lift me, elate me. Yesterday I gorged myself on Fendi's Theorema and today on Arpege - oh, the cursed work week! I miss you, my perfumes, I can't believe bureaucracy is denying me your pleasures!

L'Artisan Parfumeur - Coeur de Vetiver Sacre

The top notes are a bit dicey - at once warm, mulled spicy, and sour, like oversteeped tea, President's Choice Memories of Asja, and unripe persimmon pucker. Smells like something chewed over. The slender stick-like figure of vetiver emerges cautiously - but it is enmeshed in fruit skin and tea steam. Transparent, wavering. Christmas tea, monk's blend. The drydown is pretty, vanilla tea.
It smells exactly like the notes say. There are no surprises. If you read closely and calibrate your assumptions accordingly, you will be pleased.

current obsessions

* bread spread thickly with creamy-sweet Isigny butter, so much that I can't see the bread! I am eating it nonstop, breakfast, dinner . . . in the morning, when asked what I wanted for supper, I answered "I have all I need here," gesturing to my plate stacked with bread and butter. I probably put two or three tablespoons on each slice.
* carob seed honey, the most delectable one I have ever tried. I'm a honey freak, with almond-, lavender-, and orange-blossom coming in near the top, but now carob seed is the reigning queen. It has the darkest flavour, nearly fermented and alcoholic, like port or rum, with hints of coffee, dark treacle, and chocolate. It tastes celebratory! When paired with the aforementioned Isigny butter on bread, my mouth approaches a sort of delirium I don't know how to deal with. I offered some to my husband and he declined, saying he would try later on. Adding, canvassing my beastly devouring ways, halfway through a log of butter purchased last night, " . . . if there's any left."
* Leone Miste Digestive pastilles. I probably should not be eating these like normal candy, seeing as the words "lozenges," "herbal," and "digestive" appear on the label. These are amazing, so bitter they send you into a fugue state for a few moments, and taste like every single antiquated Italian liqueur in Gabriele d'Annunzio's cupboard. The flavours read like a poem: Fernet, peppermint Fernet, gentian, peppermint gentian, cloves, myrrh mint, "ugly but good," camomile, citron mint, citron sage, rhubarb, arquebuse (???), and alpine herbs.
* This song, in memory of Ari Up:

Hilde Soliani - Freschiiissimo

Lime-ginger brown sugar cookie.
My husband (the gourmand addict) liked it.

Balenciaga - Cialenga (vintage)

Intimidating seven-foot tall she-wolf chypre. But threatening not for the usual chypre reasons - this is not necessarily angular, sharply-cheekboned, crystalline, or frigid. On the other hand it is moss (Gustave Adolphe Mossa more like it) and softness run amok. Smother Love. Nutmeg and clove overrun a fragile lily heart, like spiders wrapping their still-kicking prey in silk. Some perfumes are opulent and majestic yet transparent, like Guerlain's Parure - Cialenga is opulent but bludgeoningly heavy. If it were a mode of murder it would be rolling someone up in a gigantic Persian rug and leaving them there until their ribs cracked under the weight. It is the smell of a philanderer plying you with alcohol. In fact, I can think of no occasion to wear this save for seduction and swindling. If this is your signature scent, I am afraid and hope never to meet you. If you know someone who loves this, one day you will wake up pantsless and with no valuables in a semi-congealed pool of Astroglide.

Hermes - Eau de Gentiane Blanche (eau de cologne)

Cubanelles - lime-and-sandstone - bleached white bones in the desert - scrubby, stunted leaves struggling to grow out of chalk - the gnawing feeling when your bottle of water is empty - so thirsty your gums are sticking together - lunar paleness -

Auroratone

Here is a footnote to the last entry.

Christian Dior - Miss Dior (vintage eau de cologne)

I'm kind of nodding my head in a trance. One of the most radiant perfumes in existence, that brings to mind star-names and constellations (Cassiopeia). Do other life-forms exist? I just stared at the little houndstooth bottle today in rapt, silent meditation, feeling simultaneously humbled and exalted, sniffing my wrist, overcome. "It is a leather chypre with a dusty, earthy, herbal tone, cumin and ground seeds, nightblooms, indolic jasmine." But those words don't tell you that Miss Dior goes on and on and on, it is the colour green ricocheting off all ends of the universe, that it is its own invented spectrum of green, it is if all movement was refracted in olivine hues, that it is a John Whitney film, visual music, an Auroratone of oscillating scent, and that it is COSMIC in its reach, beyond arrondissements/cities/suburbs/pastures/caves into comets and cloudbursts.

L'Occitane - Peony

Green-pink.

The Different Company - Sel de Vetiver

I accidentally spilled the entire contents of the sample vial on the carpet, and I'm cross, for this was one of my go-to scents for everyday use - a solid, rooty, dirt-caked vetiver with a meaty black-licorice aspect, lightly dredged in salt. It made me hungry. It wore lightly, being classy and spare enough for work, but distinctive enough for my pleasure.
Yes, bottleworthy.

Jean Couturier - Coriandre (vintage)

Unbelievably sexy green floral with an oiled dark emerald sheen, like the pelt of a nocturnal animal. As it progresses it takes multiple twists and turns: first aldehydic and sparkling as jade-green aurora borealis and meteor showers, then duskier, now smoky and civet-rich, then lastly angular and elegant, a sweet, silken chypre. All stages very beautiful, sensual.
This basically has the same effect that Chanel's Cuir de Russie has on me - it makes me want to be fucked on the hood of an expensive (European sports)car.
OUI CENTERFOLD BY JEANLOUP SIEFF, 1978.
Coriandre makes me feel like Emmanuelle Arsan, en route to unspeakable erotic adventures!
Everyone should own this perfume, vintage if you can.
Forget orientals, forget Opium, forget try-too-hard tuberose - chypres have real powers of seduction -

small-haul

Miss Dior EdC - Christian Dior
Calandre (mini? perhaps a parfum? This had 15 ml, far too big for a mini) - Paco Rabanne
Coriandre mini - Jean Couturier
Givenchy III EdT mini - Givenchy
Arpege mini - Lanvin
Emeraude parfum de toilette - Coty

But why, why, why, did I find Fracas PARFUM in the store where the owner was a psycho witch? (said in a rambling, shrill, crystal-meth addict voice) "Don't open the bottle! One time a customer came in and opened one, and I got a terrible headache! Oh, don't open it! These perfumes are not meant for use on the skin! You don't want to put them on! DON'T OPEN IT! These have TURNED RANCID, THE LIGHT TURNED THEM! My sister-in-law . . ." I had to walk out at this point.

Strange Invisible - Musc Botanique

This smells exactly like L'Invisible, with a mild green note in place of the mild lemon note.

Etat Libre d'Orange - Charogne

This perfume has always vaguely repelled me, on previous wearings being exceedingly heady, persistent, and pestilent. Today, it resembles a stupendous (I want to use the word "arsequaking" - there, I did it, it's typed!) avalanche of sweets (chocolate syrup, bubblegum, marshmallow fluff, vanilla glaze) overrunning a small village whose main industry was tanning hides. Or a Wonkalicious Mount Etna burying inhabitants in Magic Shell. Wow, I have no taste or tact.
Worn leather boots, lilies drifting in and out.
An interesting variation on the sweet/inedible, best represented by my (true love, only one) Borneo 1834 by Serge Lutens.

Coty - ? (vintage)

Toasted coconut, gardenia, tuberose, a skin-warm lei quietly wilting for 2 hours, waxy lipstick, and vanilla, all smelling as golden & burnished as a polished coco-de-mer. I know nothing about ? and it is perplexing to posit it in my vintage collection - while my other antique beauties are apple-cheeked (L'Origan), haughty (Parure), ladylike (Le Dix) or crisp (Sikkim), ? falls into the hitherto-unknown category of "Germaine Cellier slumming it and scenting a line of edible body creams." There is a fattiness that tastes of vanilla, blocks of coconut cream and mascarpone. In fact, a perfect image of ? might be skimming off a vat of gardenia-infused colostrum.

PS ? is indeed its name. It is search-engine resistant. ? de Coty, I curse thee! If you know anything about this fragrance, please share!

Monyette Paris

Very heady suntan-oil slick with a greenhouse-authentic orchid heart, tuberous and floury, with a hint of unprocessed cacao pods. "The raw and the cooked." Sunshine and botany all in one.

Hermes - Kelly Caleche

Getting ready to go to work.

L'Occitane - Honey and Lemon Shimmering Eau de Toilette

I am turning into a large sack of barley sugar, I am turning into a large suck of sucre d'orge!

Thierry Mugler - Womanity

Filmy milky-fig and hairspray pink thing that encourages no goodwill towards my gender.

Strange Invisible - L'Invisible

All the SI (not Situationist International! Imagine if there was SI scent! Sandpaper bottles!) perfumes I have smelled are resolutely funky upon application. They have a musty, stained, nicotined dankness that feels oppressive in opposition to their composition - in this case, lemon and blood orange. L'Invisible also possesses a peculiar quality of smelling dense yet faded at the same time, like digging up a 1960s chenille bedspread from an attic. Despite having poured on half the sample vial, it still felt like it was slipping away from reach with every second (not good for $135).
Dirty indolic lemons, or blighted lemons - drying lemons in a damp basement and having mildew attack it.

Etat Libre d'Orange - Je Suis Un Homme

Forget the sleazy packaging and smell (better yet, smell it on a handsome fellow): Je Suis Un Homme is the most beautiful and crisp woody citrus. A delectable soda-fizz opening, crackling lemon and bergamot, gives way to a modern, clean, and very elegant base of patchouli and clove. Smelling this on others is like wearing pink-tinted Lolita heart-shaped glasses, everyone becomes handsome - boys in suits, boys in sweaters, boys who like Ben Sherman shirts . . .

F. Millot - Insolent (vintage)

This smells like Mitsouko and Fracas jammed together. Peach chypre at the beginning, milky tuberose at the end. This is not as good as it sounds. I wanted it to be Celine and Julie Go Boating but it's really Tango and Cash.*

*This sentence will be tweaked. It could later involve Kid 'n' Play, Crippled Masters, or Shampoo.

Comme des Garcons - Zagorsk (Series 3: Incense)

ZAGORSK = ZAM-BUK!

Caron - Pois de Senteur (vintage eau de cologne)

Since I live in the city and not Sissinghurst, I often lose sense of what plants actually smell like. This sad situation was rectified by a wonderful trip to British Columbia with my fellow, where I made up for my lost hours - crawling around the herb garden at Van Dusen on all fours, bruising rose, orange and coconut geranium with my fingers, shrieking at lemon verbena and all kinds of mints and thymes, and generally embarrassing the company by acting like a lovesick truffle pig. Victoria's Butchart Gardens brought delights too, in spite of the extreme heat (I am cooked - I should have taken a hint from the pretty girls in sundresses and bonnets, while I tramped about in filthy Converses and ugly jeans) - the rose garden introduced me to the beautiful sweet pea, which was interlaced on trellises with pinks and climbing eglantines. The sweet peas shamed the roses a thousandfold - the (overrated) Lancome and Paris preened with boring tea-fumes while the sweet peas unfurled a honeyed orange blossom scent, that I dove my face into repeatedly. Pois de Senteur, after an hour-long wait (in which it prissily powders its nose, fiddles with its beauty-patches, and colours in a cupids-bow) radiates a sweet-pea scent in microcosm, buried under a greenhouse's worth of roses and jasmine. It's heavier and more powdery than I would expect - or want, quite honestly. Guerlain's perfect rose-and-jasmine Ode is more suitable for such grande dame moments, so that leaves Pois de Senteur wandering in purgatory - if only it could get a good jar of cold cream to wipe off the carmine and rice-powder from its face! If someone can recommend a lovely sweet pea soliflore, please do!

L'Occitane - Verbena Summer Secret

At first a pleasant light citrus with a hint of anise, but now it smells like I jammed my wrist up my armpit. Or someone's armpit. Faintly sulphurous after twenty minutes. It smells like ineffective deodorant.
I don't know, it feels like attending a costume ball and seeing that the prettiest girl has spinach in her teeth. Or large sweat patches on a Balenciaga gown.
It's not . . . horrible, it just has whiffs of ill hygiene that ebb and flow every ten minutes or so.

Issey Miyake - A Scent

Fills me with the same feeling as facing impenetrable Excel formulae.

wheeeeeeeeee

wheeeeee
Oh Nordstrom Rack and your delightful 75% off sales! Do you know how long I have searched for these? Taken off the market sometime in 2009, they too might be mouldering at a Rack near you! I carefully peeled off the sale sticker and they actually went from 30-50-75%! The Fleur de Rose is more evanescent than I remember, but the Fleur de Source still smells wonderfully-weirdly like a public swimming pool. I wanted more bottles of my favourite Fleur de Terre, but some lame-oids (a lameoid. Singular) decided to RIP OPEN THE PACKAGING IN FRONT OF ME AND SPRAY IT ON AND MAKE A FACE AND LEAVE THE CELLOPHANE CRUMPLED AND BOX HALF-OPEN. Ugh! For some reason I can purchase half-empty antique bottles but I cannot bring myself to buy something that is supposed to be new, but mauled. Well, if I ever change my viewpoint, I have my secret stash sitting . . . and maybe it will be down 90% next time.

Berdoues - Tabac

Whomping tobacco-vanilla-musk thing that I can feel throbbing in my gut. It opened with a tremendous aw(e inspiring)ful roasted green, vegetal note that was like rainforests (bulbous trunks, palm sap) being burnt down and slashed open with machetes (beetle husks). I feel kind of ill. I nearly wrote "kill" instead of "ill." That's true too. This shit probably causes tumours in lab rats. I probably have 72 IFRA-restricted materials on my wrist. Is there such a thing as a slapping machine? It would be a 1930s sham weight-loss contraption consisting of wire egg beaters and rubber mallets attached to wide elastic bands that would buffet your body. Smelling this feels physically exhausting. It's like a mutant Queen Kong Habanita if she were into financial humiliation and screaming at you to give up your bank card while threatening to singe you with cheap fags. Oh god, I'm so tired. How am I supposed to live life (make dinner? go to the marche? live life?) while I have this fucking reverse IV-drip on my arm? I want to cry.
Orientals: I can't do them.
This possibly smells like the scene in Hisayasu Sato's Naked Blood where the girl starts to tempura-fry her own limbs, but I'm too busy dry-heaving to make sure.

Carven - Ma Griffe (vintage)

Judging from the name, Ma Griffe should be a roaring, clawed monstrix emanating force-fields of toxicity from a single spray of She-Ra platinum arm-cuffs. Instead it is nice, a tad prim, along the lines of Y.

On a semi-related note, my chypres of choice are Parure by Guerlain and Balmain's Jolie Madame. More to come about them soon!

recent acquisitions

Eau de Rochas - Rochas
Tabac - Berdoues. I've never really encountered a fragrance with "Tabac" in the name, so I'm very excited. Certainly smells strange in the bottle!
Styx - Coty
? - Coty.

Yes, the bottle indeed has a question mark on it and I can find no record of it, either. Is it really called Mystere? Quoi? Qui? Quand? Point d'interrogation? ???? INDEED. If you know anything about the elusive "? DE COTY" please let me know!

Sinfonia di Note - Saveur d'Artichaut

Pleasant mild green, soapier than most, verging on Irish Spring territory. What I was actually wishing for was the savour of Cynar, my favorite spirit of all time - cola-coloured artichoke liqueur with a bittersweet chinotto taste, I only get to have it once a year. It has the flavour of old Italy, I imagine it streaming from goblets in Florentine palazzos, while dulcet d'Annunzio-esque lines are declaimed. But I am getting carried away, this does NOT smell like Cynar nor picturesque ruins nor Venetian belladonna braids being undone before bed, Saveur d'Artichaut smells like squeaky-clean SOAP, well-scrubbed like an Ingalls sister.

EDIT: Now it smells like artichokes being sweated in a pan.

Escada - Marine Groove

Malibu Musk.

Aroma M - Geisha Marron

If something has the word "marron" in its name, it should conjure up images of chestnuts, smoke, THE COLOUR BROWN, nuts, hell, any kind of nut, I'd even take peanuts and soynuts and hemp seeds, anything earthy and dirty and remotely nature-related.
So why do I smell like Clairol and hand sanitizer?
I need a little dancing GIF of an angry face.
Maybe they mean "marrant," like HA HA HA HEE HEE HEE THIS DOESN'T SMELL LIKE CHESTNUTS WE'RE TAKING YOUR MONEY HO HO HO.

Dana - Tabu eau de cologne

I've had previous bad encounters with Tabu (staining my arm ochre, a rash) but today it smells fantastic - it began with a POP! like root beer and ended up the most comfortable, well-worn powdery vanillic oriental. I have a fraught relationship with orientals - from Coromandel to Shalimar, they invariably turn to an asphyxiating, brownish cloud of cigarette fumes on me (does benzoin not work with my chemistry? I dare not try Opium). But Tabu feels like slipping on a faded cotton t-shirt - it's wearable, doesn't growl, and ironically, makes me feel fresher, cleaner, and happier than most purported FRESH! CLEAN! SHEER! things that smell like smashed lightbulbs. And it's a cheapo-bargain to boot! Yeah, everyone's happy.

fotos

Hello! Do you like glamorous and artistic photographs of old perfume bottles, shot with a true photographer's eye? Beautiful bottles set against blue damask backdrops, antique china plates with happy weavers' daughters on them, and crystal vases of lilacs? Or hairdresser dummies draped with pearls or ladies' gloves or 50s costume jewelry brooches or Tiffany lamps or hydrangea sprays?
Well, that's too bad. Welcome to the shoddy world of prpp, where I can't be arsed to vacuum, move said vacuum tubes and plugs, or find a clean board to set objects upon. Yeah!



L-R: L'Origan by Coty; another beautiful deco-ey design for L'Origan; Paris by Coty; Parure by Guerlain; Bellodgia by Caron; Cabochard by Gres.



L-R: Shocking by Schiaparelli; Audace by Rochas; Magie by Lancome; Sikkim by Lancome; Baghari by Robert Piguet; Vivara by Emilio Pucci; Jolie Madame by Balmain.



Back row: Les Pois de Senteur by Caron. Front row L-R: Rive Gauche by Yves Saint Laurent; Le Dix by Balenciaga; Cialenga by Balenciaga; Madame by Carven; Ma Griffe by Carven; Antilope by Weil.



L-R: Veritable Eau de Cologne Imperiale Extra-Dry by Guerlain; Dioressence; Dior-Dior; Diorissimo, all by Christian Dior.

That's all.

Guerlain - Veritable Eau de Cologne Imperiale Extra-Dry

The extra-dry is right. Unsweetened lime tonic. This makes me thirsty.

mmmm, the sweet smell of poverty

Guerlain - Ode eau de cologne
Guerlain - Veritable Eau de Cologne Imperiale
Caron - Les Pois de Senteur eau de cologne
Balenciaga - Cialenga
Carven - Ma Griffe

Today got TEN STARS.

Le Labo - Patchouli 24

Punishing one-note smoky tea that depressed my normally vibrant libido and appetite for food.

Christian Dior - Dior-Dior (vintage parfum)

1. Your face in coils and coils of warm dark hair when silk becomes grease and jasmine oil cloaks balls of sebum.
2. There's a Swedish movie, Night Games, a son hides up his mother's (Ingrid Thulin) crinoline and steals her filmy underthings - later he is seen in bed sucking away at them, impassioned and frustrated - this smells like ugly desire, and hating yourself for wanting something so badly -
THIS IS ALL ANIMAL ON ME, noticing pores sweat hair on someone you admire -
Occasionally there are wisps of lily of the valley and jasmine but then the lovely woman laughs and hikes up her skirt . . . (an acrid, thick, curd-like odour)
Sometimes it's appalling.
Other times lulling and heartbreaking, like being struck by the softness of the nape of the neck.
Visual equivalent - the Helga paintings
Book equivalent - Madame Edwarda

Czech & Speake - Oxford and Cambridge

Possibly the most boring perfume in the world, the waffle-weave of fragrance.

L'Occitane - Jasmine (Notre Flore)

Fresh blankets in a well-furnished hotel. Candle-like, more atmospheric than skin-scent.

Weil - Antilope (vintage parfum)

What the well-dressed mori girl is wearing this spring. Fawn-coloured sleep in a sun-soft haystack.

Czech & Speake - Dark Rose

Rapidly wilting bouquet of roses left behind in a Quaker farmers' church somewhere in Elora, Ontario.

Nanadebary - Pink

Opening a box containing pink lucite heels, fresh from Frederick's of Hollywood.

Fendi - Asja

This smells like it costs $950/ml.

Issey Miyake - Le Feu d'Issey

(I found this last night in a truly abhorrent strip mall. The washroom was garlanded with clumps of shit. Was the potential contamination worth it? Yes. Because . . .)

mossy rock
vitamin powder
condensed milk, sliding off durian waffles
hot sauna stone
minute comet particles, gleaming rock
Roswell autopsy
peeling a metallic skin off fruit the colour of pyrite
jackfruit
melting tropical fruit parfait
salt-lick for deer
sweat
sponge
tennis shoe sole
T.O.U.C.H.I.N.G. by Paul Sharits - violently crimson tongue scissored between silvery blades
wet globules and gobbets
soft & lapping, apricot skin
"rote sonne"
decaying soursop in the sun, covered with flies
meteorites
the texture of wadded-up nylon
zinc for sunscreen, cobalt Adam-Ant streaks across the nose
yeast, fresh bread
caverns
stalactites
mercury
deconstruction of lipstick - mica, fish scales, cochineal
coagulated vanilla-milk skin
rubber
magma
red vinyl
the insides of a piano
Kiki Smith gem insides
cold stethoscope against chest
latex sap
chalk
fake snow

REVELATION: If a perfume could be a film this would be Progessive Slidings of Pleasure. It smells of the colour red, mannequins, salt, wax, the sea.

question

How can you date Guerlain perfumes accurately?
When did they discontinue the crazy op-art black-and-white packaging, introduce the slender gold-and-(fill in blank colour rectangle) boxes, then finally to gold?
What about the dark blue boxes with little fountains?
And the light-brown-and-ivory "wooden" boxes?
Can anyone help?
Thank you.

FOUND!

OMG DIOR-DIOR PARFUM!!!! I want to bite off my own arm at my good luck!!!
Madame de Carven edt
Vivara parfum by Emilio Pucci (vintage, well, everything here is)
Baghari parfum by Robert Piguet (arghhhhhhh!!!!!!)
Jolie Madame by Balmain

AND YESTERDAY
I broke down and bought Chanel's Bois des Iles, a humongoid bottle that I stared at for 1/2 hour.

I am poor, will have no food, no heat, and will take cool-lukewarm showers for the next month.

L'essence de Mastenbroek - Eau de Polder

Spacious, red-clovered teletransport in a bottle that feels (bare-footed) of rolling azure sky, sweet hay, and meadows. Barns, crimson paint.

Heeley - Menthe Fraiche

Phosphorescent mint that glows and waves like coral and ciliae under black light. Tea and mint.

Dior - Diorissimo

Incomparable freshness and beauty, celadon green stems you can snap your teeth into, balanced with the fragility and massed fairyland glow of thousands of tiny bells. Graceful, warm, and smiling.
This is the most enchanting muguet, period.

Guerlain - L'Heure Bleue (vintage)

(cackling to myself while caressing the bottle: yeah, motherfuckers!) But really . . .

I THINK THIS BOTTLE IS BEYOND REVIEW. Like with other beautiful but probably horrendously preserved vintages, it fills my mouth with a cotton-ball, tangible inhalation of musky silk and powder, moth scales, and cobwebs. Difficult to discern a distinctive "perfume," for all I can taste is mahogany must (comparable to my poor dear bottle of also orange-rust L'Origan). Heavy clove, carnation, and violets.
Forty minutes later, waverings of hazelnut, light milky sugar, like seeing a filmy petticoat underneath swishes of a suffocating evening gown. Violets lining a parasol, unglazed porcelain.

Hilde Soliani - Saaliiisssiimo

A playful and engaging exploration of licorice - from the salty and mouthwatering POW! POW! topnote punch-in-the-face of Dutch dubbel zoute, sootblack and puckering - the pinkly pastel confectionery sugar'd Allsort, taken up with silver tongs - the cheap blast of unwanted Halloween Good 'n' Plentys - to the gentle ruffling of twigs and celadon shoots, as serene and soft as a waterbird's belly. Wonderful wonderful wonderful.