Perfume reviews

Diorella by Dior: A lady I met on the boards sent me a sample of vintage Diorella and Jesus, how gorgeous is that?

Some perfume uses indoles from musk or jasmine, those slightly overripe, almost fecal-like or dirty-skin-like notes that add depth and roundness. It's like how you add fish sauce to thai dishes. Try smelling fish sauce on its own sometime. It's pretty nasty. But try to make pad thai without it sometime. It's just not right. Indoles are used like this in perfume.

But Diorella doesn't utilize that typical dirty jasmine. Instead, it has this overripe, warm melon skin scent to it. Just slightly sweet, musky and fleshy. It's got that ripe-girl thing going on, but Diorella isn't trying to hide that behind spice or greenery, Diorella is ALL about the unwashed girl. I feel sort of self-conscious, like if I wore this out, people would be like "wtfff, she smells like a sweaty quickie in a dirty bed! Awkward!" Which is a pretty evocative scent but uh, I don't know if I can WEAR that. Anyway. Your grandma probably wore this. Hahaha, compared to our overly saccharine or polite fruity-florals of today, our grandma's were some serious skanks. How great is that?

Classic Zen by Shiseido: I was in Nordstroms the other day, skulking around, yearning for another sample of Chanel 22 (incense? YES PLEASE) when I passed the tiny Shiseido counter and noticed a long, floral-patterned black bottle behind register. It was the only one amongst the new, cubist bottles of modern (2007?) Zen. I was like "HEY, Shiseido lady!" And she was like "Mnnnn, can I help you?" with that 'I-am-stooping-pretty-low-to-talk-to-you,

Plebe' tone (oh Nordstrom's SAs, why so snobby?). So I made her shuffle the bottles around and pull out the black one.

So Shiseido discontinued its old Zen years ago, but I guess not very long after, people were still asking for it so they reformulated (I'm sure the new formulation is a bit watered down) their famous Zen recipe and put it out in limited distribution as "Classic: Zen", not to be mistaken with their MODERN, cube-bottled Zen (which is a completely different perfume all together) nor with their late 90s/early 2000s release of Zen: White...which I don't know anything about other than the bottle was white and looked like an alien space craft. (Dear perfume houses: reusing the same name over and over makes for a lot of confusion).

Anyway, Classic Zen! I asked to smell it and the lady made a face and said "It um...smells like something else on the skin." In the bottle it's all murky-depth, resinous and perfumey. So I asked her how much it was and was expecting like, a $60 price tag, or even $80. She checked and it was 30 dollars. THIRTY DOLLARS. I made a shocked face and was like "GIVE IT TO ME SLOWLY, OR I MAY NIP YOUR FINGERTIPS."

Anyway, Zen. What a great scent. You should all buy it because it's cheap as hell. But it's a very soft, balsamic scent with an odd, light sweetness and an interesting note that I think of as...when you're baking with bitter chocolate and afterward smell your hands and they're still softly, fragrantly chocolatey? That's what Zen smells like to me. Not a big powdery cocoa mess or overly sweet or even overly chocolatey, but like that. It's surprisingly modern and wearable for a scent that a 97-year-old woman friend of mine admitted to wearing when she was younger and "on the prowl".

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...

Introduction

Hi, my name is Weston and this is my first post on this blog.

Here's a list about me! I tried to write these all out in paragraphs, but it was snoozy.


I think...
-the 'olfactory arts' should be accessible to everyone
-perfume isn't always about identity-making, it's often about 'smelling nice'
-it's ok to laugh at perfume fanaticism. It's a little funny


On this blog you'll find...
-amateur, slightly bumbling perfume reviews with unrealistic comparisons and contrasts

And that's it for my introductory post. We'll see what happens from here.

-Weston