TWRT 11.28.09

This week's random thoughts ~

Lush only sells their Snowcake soap during the holidays, so I bought 12 bars. Snowcake smells like almondy goodness. I long for it all year.

I am still full from Thanksgiving. There are leftovers aplenty. Make them go away.

You know, I am a really huge fan of Beauty Habit. They've had a 20% off sale all this month. Luckyscent never has discounts (aside from free shipping which I must give them credit for). But with Beauty Habit I've received 20% off plus free shipping. I love them. There's only a day or two left of this sale - should I order Strange Invisible Perfumes Fire and Cream unsniffed?

I've settled on SPF 30 on my face. Does anyone have an SPF cream for the face they truly love? I'm using Aveeno Ultra Calming Daily Moisturizer (fragrance free SPF 30 for sensitive skin). It's ok but it does the usual thing I hate which is make my skin all shiny. My skin leans toward oily and I've never found an SPF which doesn't make me seem greasy. Is there anything out there - that is also fragrance free, non-comedogenic and the like? Suggestions are immensely appreciated.

I placed A LOT of orders this week with all the wonderful sales. Next week will be so amazing with all the boxes showing up. I can't wait. Amazon had special magazine subscription deals for $5 bucks so I bought a few as holiday gifts. Discover and Popular Science for myself but I can be geeky.

Beverage of the week: Agua de Jamaica, a Mexican juice drink which I believe to be sweetened Hibiscus iced tea. The first time I drank it I was on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, we were inland, not at the tourist traps, but touring the "real" Mexico. (If you do this rent a 4x4 truck and learn some Spanish), and Agua de Jamaica seemed to be the local favorite drink. I was pleasantly surprised to find it here in New Mexico and tasting just the same.

Are you watching Parks and Recreation with Amy Poehler? Sorry I'm bringing this up again. The sitcom is so darn funny and I still live in fear of it being canceled. It's my #1 comedy/sitcom now, with The Office and 30 Rock trailing behind it.

If you live near Trader Joe's and haven't tried their Peach Salsa you simply must. It might sound terrible but it is so good. I've converted everyone I know to Peach Salsa Fiends. Even those who only took a bite because I was forcing them with an eager face. Most are astonished at how good it is.

I hope LT and TS never review my beloved Teo Cabanel Alahine. I'm at the point where Alahine parfum extrait is my #1 HG of all time. If they were to give it a bad review, even though I'm not supposed to care because this is an entirely personal choice, I'd be crushed and would feel obliged to write to them to tell them they're simply wrong. I would have to tell them their subjective personal opinions are just wrong. (!) Perhaps they didn't wear it on skin - only tested it paper? Alahine is exquisite, there is no doubt.

I'm not mentioning my love of Laurie Erickson of Sonoma Scent Studio this week because I'm not a stalker. I'm not.

I admit to being upset/angry with Serena of Ava Luxe. I loved several of her fragrances. I know she moved on to create jewelry and no longer eau de parfums and this is her life, her livelihood, her choice; but she's deprived me of some of my favorite fragrances. So I'm upset and sad.

Doesn't it drive you crazy when you're reading reviews on basenotes or MUA and you just know they're not reviewing the correct fragrance? For instance, you can tell a reviewer is describing YSL NU edt instead of edp and hope their low opinion on the edt doesn't sway anyone interested in the edp because it's so much better? I also maintain the perhaps unpopular opinion that you can't review a fragrance based solely on a 1 ml dab-on sample vial.

I can't wait to get my NM driver's license because my NJ license picture was the worst pic I've ever taken.

I didn't wear fragrance for Thanksgiving. With all the cooking and guests it didn't seem right. I received a sample of Laura Mercier Pistachio moisturizer from Nordstroms and used that instead. Doesn't it figure that everyone told me I smelled amazing? It was a delectable scent - utterly gourmand and it lasted for hours - amazing longevity actually - for a lotion.

Have a fragrant weekend everyone!

Lorenzo Villoresi: Teint de Neige

Abigail and I agree on a lot of things, and are often right on the same page on any given number of subjects, but every once in a while we part ways when it comes to a particular fragrance. A while back, after buying a bottle of Teint de Neige, she observed that it smelled of baby powder; nothing more, nothing less. Hearing that, I might have passed on Teint de Neige altogether. Who wants to smell like baby powder? And in fact, when I ran across some of Villoresi's fragrances in Milan, I smelled everything but Teint de Neige the first few times I visited the shop in question.

I'd never read the Chandler Burr review, which awarded the fragrance five out of five stars, but I'd heard a lot about Villoresi on the perfume blogs. I liked what I smelled, but not enough to buy anything. A few days before leaving Italy, I finally asked to test Teint de Neige, figuring I should at least be familiar with it, and I was surprised how much I liked it. I liked it so much that, after spending a day with the sample I'd been given, I returned to buy my own full bottle. Teint de Neige (color of snow) does smell like baby powder, which is why I initially dismissed it. Gradually, I realized it smelled like a lot of other things to me too: almonds, rose, jasmine, musk, orange blossom, vanilla.

In some ways, Teint reminds me of Hypnotic Poison. The two share a strange, lactonic-floral undertone. It also reminds me of make-up, the aroma of cosmetics, a smell I really like for various reasons, most of them having to do with nostalgia, evoking memories of my childhood fascination at how much time my grandmothers and mother spent putting on their faces. Teint smells vintage somehow, and formal, and something about it brings to mind the powdered wigs, cakes, sets, and fashions from the film Marie Antoinette. Like that film, Teint de Neige is very specific, maybe even exhaustive, in style. It's a very focused fragrance, and this might preclude many people from enjoying its more subtle attractions.

As Burr says, Teint de Neige has great longevity and diffusion. Many of Villoresi's fragrances seem to, and the discussions and reviews about them often point out their strength of character. They are frequently slammed by Luca Turin, who seems to have decided, if not decreed, that their maker has no talent. Aside from Mona di Orio, there are few perfumers to whom Turin and Sanchez are more thoroughly unkind. Villoresi is dimissed as a talentless hack, while Orio is regarded as a sort of impostor, pretending to have studied with the great Michel Roudnitska. Both Burr and Turin are dismissive of various perfumes. It isn't often they dismiss an entire line. Even rarer that they dismiss a perfumer him or herself. Even the worst seem to produce something of interest now and then. I forget how much influence these kinds of reviews can have, and how insidiously they affect the attitude toward a brand or a specific fragrance. I was surprised, too, when I smelled di Orio and realized how much I like her work.

Fortunately, people seem to swear by Villoresi, and, according to Burr, Teint is Villoresi's biggest seller. The shop where I bought my bottle stocked it more than any other, in two sizes, whereas every other Villoresi but Patchouli came in only 3.4 ounce bottles. I bought 1.7 ounces because Teint is strong and requires very little. To me, it works better faintly, as if a hazy but persistent memory.

Bvlgari Black

Bvlgari Black, created by Annick Menardo launched in 1998.

Maybe I’m too far along in my perfume addiction, but I’ve never thought of Black as weird or edgy – I’d call it interesting. I’ve also never thought of it as among the top 10 best perfumes of all time. Sure there are hints of smoky rubber but they seem low key and soft. Black is mostly a fragrance about vanilla. It starts off smelling like celery salt. Then it morphs into smoky celery salt and rubber. Then when it finally settles down it becomes prominently a soft woody, celeriac vanilla. I really love Bvlgari Black particularly the celery salt bits. Overall it’s a cozy comfort scent for me. I put Bvlgari Black in the same category as People of the Labyrinth’s Luctor et Emergo. They’re both hard to define and seem in a category all their own, they both have cult-like followings and they’re both comfort scents. I’ve never figured out what’s so ‘black’ about Bvlgari Black. I know there’s black tea among the notes but I don’t detect it at all. If I where to give a color label to Black I’d say it’s Pale Green.

I’ve been wearing Black a lot since I read Perfumes: The Guide by Turin & Sanchez. I was somewhat shocked by the high marks it received and very shocked that it placed in the top 10 perfumes of all time. Of course, being a scholar in the field of olfactory science, means Turin knows much more than me when it comes to perfume. Turin is knowledgeable of all the elaborate details of perfume making. He knows how difficult certain notes are to create and he knows more about the history and structure of perfume than I ever will. But Bvlgari Black just isn’t that amazing for me. I do love it, just like I love POTL Luctor et Emergo, but I wouldn’t place POTL in the top 10 either.

I need to subtract points from Black because it lacks longevity and has virtually zero sillage. When I wear Black I need to douse myself in it, (I mean douse, like 10 sprays) in order to smell it for about 3 hours. The first hour is the most interesting. I like Black the best before it dries down to a comfy vanilla. I fail to understand what Turin is raving about in his review of Black. To me, Black seems like an interesting starting point. I suppose it is groundbreaking in its structure and its ability to morph through an unusual assortment of notes and yet still smell pleasing and beautiful. Perhaps Menardo or another perfumer could build upon this idea but make it more daring and also add some longevity and sillage this time.

Black is an interesting fragrance and it smells really good. I do think that more people ought to try it because it’s a worthy fragrance for those that want something unusual yet not too odd. Black is easy to wear and unlike POTL it can be had for cheap.

Longevity: Poor
Sillage: Soft

Newsflash: Perfume, The Guide is openly opinionated.

Now Smell This has posted an excerpt from an interview with Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez which was published in the Guardian. The interview interests and irks me in equal measure, for various reasons. The pull quote reads:

But if the title lacks poetic fun, the book most certainly does not. Although the language occasionally dips into the kind of hyperbolic floweriness one perhaps must expect from enthusiastic connoisseurs, on the whole it is written with pleasing plainness and, most of all, a sense of humour. Guerlain's Mouchoir de Monsieur is lauded with an adulatory four-star review and readers are advised that "if you can wear it without thinking of Rupert Everett playing Beau Brummell, do so by all means", while something called Montana Mood Sexy is dismissed with one star and a curt "not tonight".

I'll be the first to tell you that I disagree with Turin and Sanchez on various reviews. Last night, for instance, I picked up a bottle of Spellbound, thinking, "Nice, cloves and flowers, mmm, oh yes, here we go," whereas they find it a stink bomb with a merciless range of detonation only instinct and God can protect you from. Abigail and I both, I believe, would gladly tape ourselves shut, as Turin suggests, in a room with Amarige, though unlike him we wouldn't hesitate to tape others in with us. I'm not sold on Beyond Paradise, which the authors rate spectacularly. I don't see the sunset from a Concorde window, nor receive inner calm from its sillage. But I don't agree with Abigail all the time either, nor she with me, and reading Perfume: The Guide is hardly about consensus.

The other day I compared Sanchez and Turin to Pauline Kael. Kael, of course, was famously opinionated. Her Spellbound was Woody Allen. Others, including me, loved his work in the late seventies and eighties. I remember being shocked, when I discovered Kael's writing and sought out her New Yorker archive in the school library, that she didn't love Manhattan, was left cold by Stardust Memories, was hostile to Interiors and Broadway Danny Rose. I was petulant for about twenty minutes, then I got over it. Andrew Sarris and others might have loved Allen's movies, but they wrote like a college course on biophysics. I wanted someone who shared my irrational obsession with film--and wasn't too above it to fess up.

Reading the above quote from an otherwise favorable paragraph and a friendly interview overall, I bristle at what I take to be a typically lazy British priggishness. Call me picky. The whole project of the Guide, it seems to me, is to create new territory for the very concept of such a book. Any best of list is highly personal, and to the extent it seeks to conceal that subjectivity, a sham. Here's a book which, like Kael's criticism, collapses the format, exposing that inevitable bias with candor and wit. The bias is embraced, and rather than speak to you as an authority garbed in a velvet smoking jacket, with a dry air of superiority and a bogus assertion of the definitive, it speaks to you as a fan, with enthusiasm, passion, and drive. It wrings its hands and gets right in the room with you. Doing so, it engages you in a dialog. The sensibility of Sanchez and Turin is refreshingly interactive rather than smugly self-enclosed. They strip the critical format of its silly supposed-to's, challenging you to meet their strong opinions with opinions of your own. They ask you to think and converse, rather than receive and regurgitate. And they aren't afraid to make enemies by taking on the big boys.

Of course the title lacks poetic fun. Um...duh. In quotes. In light of the book's project, which is at least in part about parodying the concept of a definitive guide, it exists on a higher level of word play than the writer of the Guardian piece is apparently able to apprehend. I call it a Bible in a similar spirit of good humor. It doesn't try to conceal its lack of journalistic objectivity. To the contrary, Turin and Sanchez laugh at the notion such a thing exists, as well as open up the debate about who makes or what constitutes a canon. Can journalistic objectivity be counted on to tell you what you should own or smell? Hardly, at a time when taste is clearly marketed and formulations change, unannounced, from day to day.

Yes, to be sure, Turin and Sanchez insist that the nose recognizes a good smell, and instinctively suffers from a foul one, and every nose essentially "knows" the difference. They make no apologies about their snobbery. Snobbery is part of the project. Yours as well as theirs. But if their book is a guide to anything, it's a guide to their passions and engagement, and like Kael they hope to be disagreed with, if only to keep evolving the discourse. They would likely scoff at my attraction to Spellbound, but doing so makes me define my position more articulately. Knowing what they like, and how personal their tastes are, encourages you to get to know yourself as well. As John Waters recently said about the state of modern movie-going, and I paraphrase: People leave a blockbuster these days and it doesn't occur to them to really detail for themselves just how bad it was and why, and how different their reaction is from what they've been told it will be or is supposed to be.

The "language occasionally dips into the kind of hyperbolic floweriness one perhaps must expect from enthusiastic connoisseurs"? She makes that sound like a bad thing, as if yet another newspaper article's objective report on the doings of one of its advertisers would be preferable.

I'm just saying.