Friday Links: 4/1

I’m weirdly exhausted by life/final exams/the sporadically broken heating system in this  house. But I have a backlog of links and they’re all exciting so there’s no putting them off any longer.

And because it’s a new month, the picture above is my new desktop background. Set to tile, as per usual. People swimming in a sea of stars.

What else? 19 days. So close yet so far.

• Reviews of Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs. I’m still pumped because I like Wes Anderson (and dogs), but it sounds like there are some pretty ishy us vs them components.  Won’t be seeing it in the theater. Here’s a review from MovieBob and here is a deeper plunge into the problematic nature of the Japanese setting, the estrangement from the Japanese human characters created by the language barrier,  cultural tourism, and the white savior complex.
• The movies that influenced Call Me By Your Name. Be right back, adding ALL OF THEM to my list. (Except A Room With A View- I honestly didn’t love that).
• Other things I’m adding to my film list? These twisted fairy tales (from female directors).
• A trailer for The House With a Clock in it’s Walls– speaking of twisted fairy tales. Cate Blanchett! Luscious steam-punk-y visuals! Jack Black doing his character actor thing! Creepy! Childlike! I’m kind of tentatively intrigued. Post-Jumanji, is Jack Black due for a resurgence?
• A discussion of Saoirse Ronan’s costumes for the film Brooklyn, and the deeper meaning behind them. So interesting (and a great film, if you haven’t yet seen it).

Let’s talk about perfume:

• Five fabulous orange blossom scents, courtesy of Angela at Now Smell This. Of these, the Serge Lutens is my favorite, but I would add Rubj by Vero Profumo to the list if I could. (And on the more gourmand side, Hansa Yellow by DSH and Unknown Pleasures by Kerosene).
• Carlos Benaim (love) and Frederic Malle on their new lavender-focused fragrance, Music For a While.
• Hermes releases a new cologne. Unfortunately I missed the Saut Hermes (a jumping tournament at the Grand Palais), but here’s a photo.
• If you’re feeling science-y (I always am) here’s a study that shows evidence of significant interactions between perfumes and individual body odor.  The takeaway: “The odor mixture of an individual’s body odor and their preferred perfume was perceived as more pleasant than a blend of the same body odor with a randomly-allocated perfume, even when there was no difference in pleasantness between the perfumes. This indicates […] that people choose perfumes that interact well with their own odor. Our results provide an explanation for the highly individual nature of perfume choice.” So cool.

Fashion and celebrity people:

• Lena Waithe is amazing and I love her style and attitude.
• Bill Cunningham’s secret memoir. When can I read it?
• I know I’m late, but in honor of spring (and Easter) some floral looks from Moschino’s S/S 2018 RTW collection: 1 and 2.

Relationships?

• The maternal grandparent advantage. Rings true for my family (although that also has something to do with geographic proximity). And congratulations Mom and Dad, you are likely to be more involved with my future children than my future parents in law!
• Your friendship Myers-Briggs. As an INFJ, apparently I’m a bandaid and I’ll take it.
• For work relationships. I’m living vicariously through the drama of this twitter thread.
• In old age, shoplifting to find community. Heartbreaking.

Books and other tidbits

• I saw this adorable kid’s maze book at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. It reminds me of an immense Sesame Street board book I once had. But rather more portable.
• Mari Andrew’s book is out! Love her illustrations and down to earth wisdom.
• Another reason to go home for the summer? Archery tag.
• A French waiter in Canada says firing for rudeness is discrimination against his culture. He’s not wrong.
• If you’re not a fan of the lack of privacy re: data and personal info online, console yourself with the fact that if you ever disappear in a national park, amateurs can keep looking for you for decades. But it’s actually a very interesting, well-written article.

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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! 🙂

NST’s Lazy Weekend Poll: Easter

I’m back at Yale, thanks to Megabus.  The air here is hot but we just had one of those fat-dropped summer rains.  This is definitely one of my favorite times of year- if not my favorite holiday (we’re not religious).

But I think the goddess Ostara sounds cool. It amuses me how Christian holidays are always placed over preexisting pagan ones.

I considered not doing a post today at all, because I’m tired and I’m mentally prepping myself for the school week and for lots of ballroom practice ahead of our Spring Show on Friday. And also because my easy option- answering the NST weekend poll– is perfume-based, and I feel guilty writing about perfume two days in a row. Because it’s very much a niche interest of mine. But I at last have decided that a post is better than no post, and if I want to write it I should, rather than worrying about imaginary anonymous displeased people.

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.