Perfume Excursion

I sniffed Miss Balmain for the first time today. I get that charred-wood/stiff leather out of it. It's a little bit of a mindfuck that Miss Balmain is a feminine, when masculines like Narciso Rodriguez for Him are built on the same kind of burnt woods. But Miss Balmain has a rutty-animalic undertone to it. Very dry, butch, intense. The pink juice in the little beribboned bottle make for some cognitive dissonance.

Then I went and had the Estee Lauder woman at Nordstroms spray several cards for me...Knowing, Estee, Aliage, Private Collection, Spellbound...And then I fumbled them all up and was like "Uhhhh?"

Knowing was very lovely, soft, somewhat sweetly floral. I can't remember Aliage. Spellbound was a bit thick and unpleasant to me...I always think of that kind of unpleasantness as 'cheap jasmine-smell', but I don't really know. I'm probably making that up. Private Collection struck me as bitter, and I already have enough bitter perfumes to last me my whole snobby life. So I took the Estee. Estee might be better as a linen spray, because it smells very lovely out of the bottle, but a little bit intensely soapy on the skin. It's like trying to rush a shower and then finding Ivory Soap scum leftover on your elbow where you didn't quite rinse it off. If you're washing your elbows in the shower. I don't think I ever actually meticulously get at my elbows.

But I like the Estee the best.

Then I went and fiddled with a mini Cabochard. I'll have to sample it soon.

Also, the little perfume shop in the mall had one bottle of Vivienne Westwood's Boudoir that I've been eying for weeks, and then some lady came in and asked for it. She was probably in her mid-60s, had a look to her like she could have been a truck driver with a handle like Ramblin' Rose. Pretty red hair and a leather coat. I liked her right away, especially because she came right in, said "I want the Boudoir." There's a woman who knows her stuff. And wants to smell like post-coital bed sheets.

SIGH. They still have the giftbox of YSL's Nu...