Perfume: A Weekend in NYC

As always, perfume was a big part of this past weekend’s NY trip. Mom and I are both big fragrance hobbyists/I’m trying to turn it into a career.  And the shops in NYC are so excellent- so here’s the lowdown on what we got up to (and the samples I carried off!)

Perfumes for Grandes Dames

I’ve been wanting to do a post on my so-conceived ‘parfums des grandes dames’ for a little while now and then I saw this review of Une Fleur de Cassie on Now Smell This and I figured it was time.  Time to create a moment.  The urge may have originally been born out of this post on Perfume Posse, which is frankly from more than a month ago, but it needed time to marinate.

So thinking about fragrances for adult women.  And obviously take this with a grain of salt, given that I’m only recently legally able to drink.    I don’t much think about my preferred fragrances in terms of ages or ‘maturity levels’ so much as feelings and smells that appeal to me. But if I were consciously thinking about it, and what makes a perfume ‘womanly’, well, there are definitely things to be said.

The vast majority of mainstream fragrance releases these days seem to be fruity florals or tooth-achingly sweet gourmands, and those are both genres that I can enjoy, but this obsession with the innocent and saccharine is a bit worrisome.  Perfumes shouldn’t need to be clean or barely there.  And women shouldn’t need to be quiet or youthful to be ‘tolerated’.

In the simplest terms, there is a lot more to the archetypal ‘woman’ than the part of her that is a ‘girl’.  Being a woman is about ambition, power, sex, beauty, motherhood, exploration, and so many more things.
And in that way that people have, that idea also has a scent, in my mind. Or a type of scent with a lot of variation. Because there are many types of women.

The common denominator: All are full, luscious, and complicated.  All of them are somewhat ‘tricky’. They’re dignified even to the point of being standoffish. They’re proud. Just like you should be! 🙂

A Fragrant Wishlist

It’s a quiet evening and the school week is winding down for me (bless no-class Fridays)- I’m here in my room with the heat on and a cat, listening to ASMR and playing on Pinterest.  I’m wearing pajama bottoms, a giant T shirt some guy in Boston gave me when I got caught in the rain a few summers ago, and a leather jacket (because the heat is not enough).
Perfume: Botrytis by Ginestet, a delicious sweet autumn apple wine.

And then I started thinking about perfume and decided to do a list of the fragrances I have tried and sampled and want more of, whether that’s another sample or a healthy-sized decant.  And then I went on Facebook Fragrance Friends and discovered (GASP) that my fragrance wish list document is missing.  Let me just say that this document was the pinnacle of my perfume evolution. It’s been mutating since I first got interested in collecting- as I bought and loved or tried and discarded.  Horror of horrors, it had disappeared without a trace.
Thankfully, I had backed up perfumes that had captured my interest on Fragrantica. Whew. Crisis averted.

Decants and Minis (Part Two)

Day Two of my armory of decants, during which we roll out the big guns.  Well, not exactly… I don’t have many cannons, but I do have ‘bigger guns’ than the tiny ladylike pearl-handled revolvers handled yesterday.  No disrespect to Chanel and Dior; sometimes a dainty pearl-handled revolver is just the thing one needs to complete the mood.
Well, that was a tangent. And a tangent that shouldn’t be read as an assertion of the feminine nature of yesterday’s fragrances. Men can carry off dainty pearl-handled revolvers just as well. Handsomely.

And the latter two scents discussed in Part One are more in line with today’s offerings, which include my Amouages, among other things.