Giorgio Armani has launched La Femme Bleue, a new limited edition perfume for women. The name comes from Armani’s spring/summer 2011 fashion and beauty collections, and the scent joins the Armani Privé collection…
5 Perfumes for: Nerds
In a recent post at Perfume Posse, Musette described her adolescent self as “Geek before Geek was cool”. During a week when I watched The Social Network and contemplated buying a Gregory Brothers / Auto-Tune the News t-shirt, her description was just another sign that we have lived to see the day my mother was always promising me would come: nerds have inherited the earth. We’ve come a long way since the 1980s and nerdom has evolved: gone are the high pants and the pocket protectors (as well as most of the pens), nerds of every gender and race are acknowledged, and globalization and the internet have opened up new, niche fields of nerd inquiry. No longer restricted to math, science, computing and Star Trek conventions, nerds are becoming foodies and bespectacled mixologists, pop musicians, graphic novelists and film bloggers, beekeepers, adventure travelers, market watchers, reality television competitors and whistle-blowing website activists. Nerds have money. They own the best home theatre equipment and make the coolest Halloween costumes. They know the only coffee place in town with a Clover. And, increasingly, some of them are smelling really good.
Perfume is a great hobby for geeks and systems wonks. It can involve hours and days and weeks of research into a secretive, trend-driven and detail-oriented industry. You end up collecting bottles and vials, ordering or swapping rarities through the mail and building storage units or furniture to organize your collection. You exhibit a lot of mavenish behavior, like checking currency conversion websites multiple times a day. Almost every perfumista of long-standing I know keeps a spreadsheet or electronic notepad full of data on sample testing count, fragrance notes, prices, perfumer names or vintage scent markers…
Armani Prive La Collection des Mille et une Nuits ~ new fragrances
Giorgio Armani has launched a new trio in the Armani Privé range: La Collection des Mille et une Nuits. Ambre Orient, Rose d’Arabie and Oud Royal were all given an exclusive preview last year at individual department stores before their official launch this year. As the collection’s name implies, the new fragrances were inspired by the tales from One Thousand and One Nights…
5 Perfumes: to Smell Now
With age and experience comes the temptation of despairing prophecy. The landscape of perfumery is so ephemeral that is hard for even the most optimistic fragrance follower to not sometimes feel like Cassandra, plagued by futile visions of flaming, fallen monuments of smell. In truth, the internet has made possible the niche scent industry and new marvels are being created every month. Meanwhile, auction and fragrance decanting sites have ensured that, unlike the Library at Alexandria or the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the lost are not necessarily gone forever. There has never been a better or easier time to be a perfume lover. But the abundance and range of fragrances available to us, as well as the wealth of online information about those fragrances, has created an age of anxiety. What should we smell now, we wonder, before it’s gone?
For at least the past year, I have been campaigning for the best perfume boutique in my area to start stocking the Heeley fragrances. When the owners thought the samples I brought to the store last autumn were merely nice, I warned them: Heeleys are sneaky…
5 perfumes for: Drama
I come from a family of what you might call theatre people. In university, my mother starred in a number plays, including a nationally reviewed production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which featured my mother — smoking! cursing! — as Martha as well as a young Martin Short as Nick. After school, she was accepted to train at Canada’s largest classical repertory theatre, but she decided to go to teacher’s college instead. As a drama teacher one of her most enthusiastic students has been my middle brother, who has acted and written for the stage and is now pursuing his doctorate studying Modern American theatre. Since she retired, Mom mounts annual plays or musical revues, often with a cast involving sixty or more residents of her small town. Though my father, youngest brother and I are seldom assigned lines, we are always called upon to prompt, to manage props, spotlights and sound boards, or to play corpses.
It is time to admit that we do not have “presence”. I don’t think any member of my family has ever attempted to sweep majestically into a room… unless the entrance was preparation for a pratfall. (Both of my brothers have a talent for slapstick.) I will never be the woman Angela conjured out of Jean Patou’s Que-sais je?: “elegant, with a difficult background and maybe bipolar tendencies”. There are days I am relieved by this, of course, and especially the bipolar part. Occasionally, however, it would be nice to feel a bit like Greta Garbo, and a little less like somebody from Waiting for Guffman. One of the wonderful things about fragrance is that I can scent myself as if I am the star of my own life…