I have a gift for you, and it’s something that will last all day:
I can bring home the bacon. Fry it up in a pan. And never never let him forget he’s a man, ’cause I’m a woman. Enjoli.
Didn’t like that one? Try this:
…But I’m gonna’ have an Aviance night. Tonight. Gonna’ have an Aviance night.
That was a good one. But here’s what we came for:
I can’t seem to forget you. Your Wind Song stays on my, Wind Song stays on my, Wind Song stays on my-y mind.
Now those are some solid gold ear worms…
Once I took a drawing class. It turned out that I couldn't draw worth beans, but it permanently changed the way I saw visual art. Thanks to the class, I understood that every stroke of the paintbrush, every smear of charcoal is a choice. I saw that a painting is more than an image and maybe a story, but rather a series of choices of color, technique, perspective, and subject that an artist makes to achieve a certain end. Thinking about why the artist made those choices makes art so much richer for me.
Similarly, it's nice to know something about how a perfume is made and the stories around it. I like reading perfume reviews and then smelling the perfume to see if I can pick out the different notes. I like knowing that Edmond Roudnitska labored over creating the smell of lily of the valley for Diorissimo and even planted them in his yard so he could compare, and that Jean Claude Ellena has chosen to limit the palette he works with when he creates a fragrance. I like thinking about fragrance trends…
A few weeks ago I wrote about “cashmere sweater” scents — fragrances that are cozy and uncomplicated and warm their wearer like cashmere. A few days later, thanks to Robin, a sample of Estée Lauder Private Collection Amber Ylang Ylang appeared in my mailbox. If I've ever smelled a cashmere sweater scent, this is it.
Amber Ylang Ylang is as close to a pale gold cashmere sweater as you can get in smell. It's a simple cardigan with a jewel neck and small, mother of pearl buttons, and it hugs the body. It's silkily warm, well made, and goes with just about anything in the closet. For some people, the functional simplicity of a cardigan like this is enough. But for others, it lacks panache…
Prince Matchabelli Sexiest Musk sounds less like the name of a perfume than it sounds like a challenge. I mean, calling something the very “sexiest” and at the same time enclosing a coupon offering a dollar off the price of its body spray, regularly sold for $3.79, is just plain agitating for street testing.
Last night, I took Sexiest Musk to a dinner party. I put dabs of it, Jovan Musk for Women, Coty Vanilla Musk, Strange Invisible Perfumes Musc Botanique and Parfumerie Générale Musc Maori on my arms and asked the guests to tell which, in their opinion, was the sexiest musk…
Sometimes it's tempting to compare perfume to music. For instance, Chanel No. 22 smells like singing aldehydes and white flowers with a whispering contralto of sandalwood, vetiver, and incense. Guerlain L'Heure Bleue smells melodic and moody like a Fauré tone poem. Balenciaga named a whole series of its perfumes after forms of music and rhythm: Prélude, Quadrille, and Rumba. And let's not even get started on Valentino Rock 'n Rose. Amouage counted on the natural sympathy between scent and music when it named its latest fragrance “Lyric”.
Amouage describes Lyric Woman (there's also a Lyric Man) as a fragrance in a “lyric-spinto” voice. A lyric-spinto soprano sings with the lightness of a lyric soprano, but with a slightly darker timbre…