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wordplayIt's the weekend before my birthday and although I think we've mostly sorted out birthday pressies for me (Wii Fit eee!), I've been thinking about this a bit and the other two big candidates were a swift/ball winder contraption and the obligatory bottle of fragrance, because my favorite is running low. That last one is not easy for me, though - I have a complicated relationship with perfumes!
For the last several years I've been wearing mostly Kate Spade's perfume, which is a white flowers fragrance, mostly gardenia. When we left Texas, we left behind four enormous, heavily blooming gardenia bushes which constituted our front hedges, and after drydown this perfume leaves behind on my skin just the hint of those flowers, and I've loved it for an all-season fragrance since they introduced it. It's just gorgeous.
So, of course, they've discontinued it.
Before that I was wearing a few different things from Annick Goutal, mostly Eau du Sud and Eau d'Hadrien, but both seem way too heavy now. I've gone through incredibly brief flirtations with Pink Sugar (SO SWEET, but occasionally just the right thing) and Lush's Karma (which smells, to me, almost exactly like this occult shop in New Orleans that I used to visit years ago) and I am a veteran of Angel, back when it was brand new and ground-breaking and before everybody else was wearing it, and that was such a strongly marked winter fragrance for me, anyway - way too heavy on the base notes for me to wear it year-round.
And of course there's BPAL - I hit on Hell's Belle pretty early on and continue to go straight there if I'm in the mood for a fragrance oil instead of something I can spray, despite ongoing flirtations with Embalming Fluid and Machu Picchu. And I quickly ran through the Demeter fragrances, which are fun and cheap and have goofy things like "Grass" and "Tootsie Roll" and "Gin & Tonic", although "Sex on the Beach" (the cocktail) was probably the one of those I wore longest.
If you know your perfumes, you're looking at this list and thinking "wtf?" because, seriously, this is all over the place. It trends toward sweet gourmandes and white flowers but there's a lot of spice and citrus and wood in here, too. Yeah, I don't know. I like a lot of things, and it's irritating because I always wanted to be one of those women with a signature fragrance, so that my kids could pick up something of mine years after I had gone and know that yes, that was their mom's, because it smells just like her. But there is SO MUCH in the world, and how am I supposed to love just one thing?
I've been sniffing around Jo Malone's line but have never committed, in large part because I was already in long-standing relationships with other scents, but now that my beloved is leaving me, I think it might be time to start nosing around there a bit more seriously. And that's appealing because she's been around for a while, and also because the fragrance combining thing is totally fun. Anybody wear her?
Dude. And that was just ME. At some point I will make the post of doom on MEN'S fragrances and that could seriously go on for days. I don't shop for fragrance for myself that often - I pick something I love and then Marc just keeps buying me bottles until I tell him to stop - but every year I go around looking for something perfect for Marc and god, it is a mess out there, isn't it?
****
Do You Want To Play A Game?
On a completely different note: there's a great article in this month's Wired about the 25th anniversary of the movie "War Games". Definitely recommend for children of the 80s and people who are interested in taking a minute to think back on all of the technical and cultural change of the last 25 years.
****
Also also also! (I'm just going to keep editing this entry all day until it fills up your entire page.)
In two weeks I will be in Texas for the beginning of our summer vacation. As sad as it is, I'm not particularly looking forward to the family parts of it, but I will get to eat here, which has the best sausage ON THE PLANET (what can I say, I'm a fan of loose pack and god, now that sounds vaguely dirty) and is one of my all-time favorite places to get less-hungry. God, I miss barbecue. (And![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jlh, remember when we got rained on here? ♥)
For the last several years I've been wearing mostly Kate Spade's perfume, which is a white flowers fragrance, mostly gardenia. When we left Texas, we left behind four enormous, heavily blooming gardenia bushes which constituted our front hedges, and after drydown this perfume leaves behind on my skin just the hint of those flowers, and I've loved it for an all-season fragrance since they introduced it. It's just gorgeous.
So, of course, they've discontinued it.
Before that I was wearing a few different things from Annick Goutal, mostly Eau du Sud and Eau d'Hadrien, but both seem way too heavy now. I've gone through incredibly brief flirtations with Pink Sugar (SO SWEET, but occasionally just the right thing) and Lush's Karma (which smells, to me, almost exactly like this occult shop in New Orleans that I used to visit years ago) and I am a veteran of Angel, back when it was brand new and ground-breaking and before everybody else was wearing it, and that was such a strongly marked winter fragrance for me, anyway - way too heavy on the base notes for me to wear it year-round.
And of course there's BPAL - I hit on Hell's Belle pretty early on and continue to go straight there if I'm in the mood for a fragrance oil instead of something I can spray, despite ongoing flirtations with Embalming Fluid and Machu Picchu. And I quickly ran through the Demeter fragrances, which are fun and cheap and have goofy things like "Grass" and "Tootsie Roll" and "Gin & Tonic", although "Sex on the Beach" (the cocktail) was probably the one of those I wore longest.
If you know your perfumes, you're looking at this list and thinking "wtf?" because, seriously, this is all over the place. It trends toward sweet gourmandes and white flowers but there's a lot of spice and citrus and wood in here, too. Yeah, I don't know. I like a lot of things, and it's irritating because I always wanted to be one of those women with a signature fragrance, so that my kids could pick up something of mine years after I had gone and know that yes, that was their mom's, because it smells just like her. But there is SO MUCH in the world, and how am I supposed to love just one thing?
I've been sniffing around Jo Malone's line but have never committed, in large part because I was already in long-standing relationships with other scents, but now that my beloved is leaving me, I think it might be time to start nosing around there a bit more seriously. And that's appealing because she's been around for a while, and also because the fragrance combining thing is totally fun. Anybody wear her?
Dude. And that was just ME. At some point I will make the post of doom on MEN'S fragrances and that could seriously go on for days. I don't shop for fragrance for myself that often - I pick something I love and then Marc just keeps buying me bottles until I tell him to stop - but every year I go around looking for something perfect for Marc and god, it is a mess out there, isn't it?
****
Do You Want To Play A Game?
On a completely different note: there's a great article in this month's Wired about the 25th anniversary of the movie "War Games". Definitely recommend for children of the 80s and people who are interested in taking a minute to think back on all of the technical and cultural change of the last 25 years.
****
Also also also! (I'm just going to keep editing this entry all day until it fills up your entire page.)
In two weeks I will be in Texas for the beginning of our summer vacation. As sad as it is, I'm not particularly looking forward to the family parts of it, but I will get to eat here, which has the best sausage ON THE PLANET (what can I say, I'm a fan of loose pack and god, now that sounds vaguely dirty) and is one of my all-time favorite places to get less-hungry. God, I miss barbecue. (And
jlh, remember when we got rained on here? ♥)![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2008-07-20 03:59 pm (UTC)I'm really feeling at loose ends with perfume and unsure about what to do next. I miss having a spray. And the BPAL scents I like don't seem to last on me.
no subject
on 2008-07-20 04:22 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-07-20 04:57 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-07-20 06:42 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-07-20 08:00 pm (UTC)Also, I think perfume is just lost on me. I wear scented lotion, mostly from Bath & Body Works or the Body Shop (although right now I'm wearing Johnson & Johnson's oatmeal and vanilla, which, yes, is intended for babies) and while I love reading about perfume (people write about it so beautifully!) it just doesn't... it seems like a hassle, and I feel like all perfume smells weird and cloying on me.
no subject
on 2008-07-20 09:40 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-07-23 08:49 pm (UTC)I love War Games; at some point I'm going to look to see whether the article is up on Wired's web site. :-)
no subject
on 2008-07-26 04:35 am (UTC)I didn't have much patience for movies when I was young, but I loved WarGames. :-)