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.