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.