By special request: a perfume obsession post
Clancy asked me if I’d do a Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab post along the lines of this one from New Kid on the Hallway. BPAL, for those of you who’ve never heard of it, make some of the strangest and most fabulous perfume oils out there, and they have the best names for them, too (many of them incredibly literary: you’ve got to love perfumes called "Parlement of Foules" or "Ode on Melancholy" or "Ozymandias," or the series named after Shakespearean characters). It’s entirely possible to get addicted to trying new ones and trading samples with fellow addicts.
So, in the spirit of end-of-term frivolity, here’s a very partial list of my own favorites and not-favorites. The links go to the reviews of each scent posted in the BPAL forums.
The favorites:
Anne Bonny: Sandalwood, patchouli, and incense. Very piratical.
Catherine: I love orange blossom, and while I would never have thought to pair it with rosemary, it absolutely works.
Les Infortunes de la Vertu: Another orange blossom one, very elegant and haute-couture.
Loup-Garou: Juniper, eucalyptus, and galangal. A new favorite.
Luperci: Forest floor meets polished wood with beeswax. This may be my all-time favorite.
Morocco: Spicy and light and perfect in every way.
The Pool of Tears: Flowers and salt water.
Saint-Germain: Lavender, oakmoss, amber, and carnation. Like a traditional cologne but better.
White Rabbit: Like a cup of tea with milk and honey. The most soothing scent ever.
The not-favorites:
Incantation: Bitter and smoky, like scorched earth.
Nosferatu: Dirt and red wine. I don’t think I want to smell like a vampire.
Sacred Whore of Babylon: I think it was the gardenia, but something in it went disastrously wrong on me.
Twenty-One: Very clever, but rather too realistically like a mixed drink.
Fellow BPAL fans, care to weigh in?
I don’t know if I have the vocabulary to describe what I like about women’s perfumes. I guess I’d say I like spicy, and don’t much care for the florals, especially not rose and jasmine.
I have vague memories of reading Tom Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume as a teenager and his characterization of a men’s scent that combined notes of tobacco, leather, woodsmoke, and gun grease as Nazism in a bottle. At that age, I liked the spiciness of Drakkar, but it didn’t take me long before I couldn’t stand the cloying underlying sweetness. Pierre Cardin has a nice strong cinnamon-spicy base note with a bit of musk underneath and a clean lemon accent, and it’s usually what I wear on the rare occasions when I wear a scent. But the special occasion first-date big-deal thing to wear for me is Truefitt & Hill’s (veddy veddy English) Trafalgar aftershave and cologne, which I didn’t know how to adequately describe until a recent friend sniffed my neck and told me, approvingly, “Nice. Like a gin and tonic.”
Clancy asks what scents you like for yourself. I might ask: what scents are appealing on other people?
On other people, I tend to like whatever I associate most with that person. I have one friend who sometimes wears Shalimar; it’s lovely on her but too sweet on me. Another friend used to wear 4711 cologne water, which I like because it reminds me of her. And I started liking patchouli because someone I had a crush on wore it all the time. It’s really more the associations than any particular note, I think.