m's sooty tracks
update, you silly goose
"i don't know, the wounds are too fresh to tell."
ripping pages from the spine, day by day
serial boxes / eat drink and be merry
hide and peek
if you'd like to trade shoes
it's a roll of the dice
homesafe
19 she found talking in her sleep.
and i promise you, i promise you don't want to
know further than this.
[ 19 lost? ]
| Wednesday, February 23rd, 2033 (20330223) | | 11:51 pm |
| | Sunday, November 7th, 2032 (20321107) | | 10:48 am |
| | Sunday, August 17th, 2031 (20310817) | | 5:30 pm |
| | Thursday, December 22nd, 2016 (20161222) | | 1:43 pm |
weave me disgust into fame
and watch how fast they run to the flame | | Tuesday, December 20th, 2016 (20161220) | | 3:22 pm |
holy shit even my filters like "humans only" work now, whut | | Thursday, September 11th, 2014 (20140911) | | 2:39 pm |
fume: serge lutens' la myrrhe
opening smells eerily just like the powdery thick dark green latex dental dams i spent hours breathing through as a little kid from a non-fluridated-water-supply-country adopted into the US, stuck in a dentist's chair for what felt like half my youth (he even wrote academic papers about my progress!). it's not a terrible evocation or anything, but not one i'd seek out either. huh. | | Wednesday, August 27th, 2014 (20140827) | | 1:35 pm |
fume: dior's eau sauvage
i wasn't expecting much because this class of perfume, the kind that's bright, light, and citrusy for daytime in the summer, tends to underwhelm me (and i downright disliked a lot of the similar citrusy stuff from hermes). but it smells GREAT--that pine-y rosemary mixed in with the citrus and (very present and bracing, yay) lavender really gives it that added something that makes it special. only problem is, like most of these sorts of perfumes, it doesn't last long at all. but if it wasn't for the longevity issue, i'd be all over this for summer especially given it fulfills a niche in an area that's sorely barren for me because i don't like most summery scents.
still waiting for a few samples of some of the supposedly more unusual or true-to-life woody or aromatic aquatics and greens (stuff like sel marin, figuier, l'homme de coeur, kenzo pour homme), to see if i can find something i like for summer besides steely iris stuff. if that works out pretty soon i'll have a definitive list of my favorite perfumes, broken down for any occasion.
i've also determined given i live in a perfume shop wasteland when it comes to walk-ins, reformulation is just a shitty shady thing marketing-wise (nordstrom's and all of those places pretty much lied to my face in email about the whole 2013 edp version of mitsouko which really turned me the hell off), and gray market online retailers have been a total bust for me, i'm just going to have to resign myself to giving up the glamor of bottle designs of my more obscure absolute favorites and just buy the biggest size decants from sampling spots i trust that label different versions honestly (mainly the perfumed court and surrender to chance). so i'll have some little spray bottle decants that all look alike, which is kind of a bummer, but at least they'll actually smell like they're supposed to, having been stored and cared for properly. grumble grumble. | | Thursday, August 14th, 2014 (20140814) | | 12:28 am |
it was insolence, the edp, that's what it was that smelled like purple dimetapp to me. (also, i tried midnight poison before bed the other night and was very "eugh"...i'm not having much luck so far with non-niche, designer stuff, alas...the summery hermes stuff i've sampled so far hasn't been awful but at best unremarkable. and i've never liked any of the chanels i've tried, though i hear good things about the exclusifs line. and i'm still holding out hope for dior's dune.)
also, tonight i sampled nasomatto's hindu grass and the opening is intensely like novacaine or going to the dentist's or numbing agents to me, whoa. | | Monday, August 11th, 2014 (20140811) | | 6:53 pm |
fume: guerlain's mitsouko
hasty, hopping in while trying to make dinner and after 48 hours of not enough sleep. but i have to say something here to myself about this!
damn, where do i start with this one. so shalimar blew me away early on in this most recent bout of fragrance sampling. and i totally fall for the guerlain hype in general, finding the old bottles and nearly 150 year all-in-the-family pedigree and historical context for their most famous stuff glamorous indeed, in a world with little of that left in the mainstream. of course, i'm late to the party and the family sold the thing to moet henessy louis vuitton or whatever, and much reformulation and the cheesy contemporary touches like flankers and whatnot has occurred in the last 10 or so years, alas. supposedly LVMH got wise to the whole "buying a revered name, gutting it in hopes noone will notice because it's just perfume, profit!" not working in this case, and some better faith re-reformulation has been going on in the last 2 years. i ramble about this in the most facile way just to give background to how dizzying falling for guerlain in general as a historical concept only to be disappointed the more i learned in these breathless last couple months has been. and the "guerlain-ade" or whatever 'fumers call it, that "a ha!" recognizable foundation in so many of their major works, didn't seem to be working for me--it's not that it isn't lovely, because it is in an old fashioned way, but it just wasn't for me. vol de nuit was just so overwhelmingly old fashioned POWDER and l'heure bleue has that vaguely toilet-and-toilet-cleaner thing real florals so often have to me...so by the time i got around to this i wasn't expecting to fall in love. i figured it'd be like the others aside from shalimar (which i love but is hard to wear in everyday life), where i'd admire them, recognize them as "lovely", while immediately sensing i am not.
and it seemed that way at first. i still get a vaguely blue-toilet-i-can-tell-should-be-flowers-and-probably-is-for-normal-folk thing at the top, and some powder, but neither aspect comes close to being at the dealbreaker levels of vol de nuit and l'heure bleue. also, especially with vol de nuit i felt like maybe i could've gotten over the powder if there'd been something else there to love, but i couldn't find anything else. here, the opening has those things i don't care for but muted, and furthermore, as it goes on the changes are astonishing, yet never brash or cinematic "notice me". the whole thing stays subdued, subtle throughout, yet uncannily emotionally powerful. i was surprised and pleased, hours after putting it on and noticing the way it would silently shift over and over every time i sniffed my elbow, saying to Robert "this perfume is making me sad but i like it!", to find other reviewers online describing it as melancholy, a rainy-blue-day-mood-type thing, introverted but poignant, and--maybe my favorite--"if someone asked me what a perfume meant to smell like ghosts would be, it'd be this". yes! it's not anything like amouage opus vii (so green and brash at first then quietly, after everyone's left the party, stunning), but the powerful way they both can make one feel intensely but the emotion itself is a private, subdued sadness sort of thing, is remarkable. opus vii is a top 3 perfume for me, and of my top 3 it's the most unusual in that it can do that, alter my mood in a way that seems negative but isn't, that feels true, honest. mitsouko has the same shocking-but-quiet power too, but without the bandit-like bold posturing brassiness--it isn't confident at all (not insecure either though--more like it's too wrapped feeling what it feels to even be aware of the outside world or how it comes across to it), it's just depth and blue memory, wallowing and a faint sort of invisibility song. it's for feelings you get once in a while alone that most of the time you have to push aside to get around in the modern universe. but deep down, they're still there hanging out alone, even if 99% of the time forgotten or ignored. it's the feeling of having something beautiful then life-alteringly sad happen to you, and going about your life because you have to, but more subdued forever in a subtle, not-noticeable-to-the-naked-eye way, a little dented, part of you meanwhile permanently stuck in a quiet place alone feeling everything that past life did to you, over and over in the forest clearing that's the inner chambers of the heart/head (in this regard, it reminds me a little of why that pj harvey song "silence" kills me sometimes). no one can tell except you what you've been through and remember. contrary to the gloss of motivational posters, it makes you a little fainter, softer, slighter. but immovable.
i LOVE it. i haven't been this obsessed or haunted by a perfume since...well, maybe ever. opus vii is much more contemporary and the mood itself isn't exactly the same one. but they both create a moody atmsophere for me like no other perfumes have, and they just so happen to be moods i know so fuggin' well. they are like long lost kin, and i feel most like myself when i smell them. now to do the running around hassle of figuring out which exact formulation i sampled, and how/if i can order more. | | 2:03 pm |
i wonder what julie doucet and lynda barry would say
otherwise, they included so many of the biggies i'm impressed.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/kristenradtke/draw-naked
"Comics has been the perfect medium for capturing discomfort that is very real but isn’t visible to others."
"I wanted to depict my bipolar moods in a visceral way — for myself and for the reader — so I drew myself loopy, stark, realistic, cartoony, abstracted, in ink, pencil, polished, sketchy… Embodying and externalizing my feelings in the self-portraits, when I really nailed them, was truly cathartic."
"I want to see women’s bodies portrayed in a non-gratuitous, nonobjectified, honest way… I think it’s important to see women in comics who are not commodities or sex objects, but complex humans with their own desires, hungers, lust, and love."
"What bothers me about women’s bodies I see in many comics is that they seem so removed from the woman herself. Their primary function is to be on display for the reader… This is bad not just from a ‘that’s sexist’ standpoint, but from a storytelling one as well."
"We need women’s bodies in our stories, having sex and getting our periods and eating food and doing whatever bodies do, so that the things our bodies do are normalized and present — so that boys don’t grow up thinking women are gross or whores or pigs or any other horrible epithet."
"I look forward to the time when honest depictions of women’s bodies are a normal thing to look at, instead of some kind of statement."
"It’s challenging to be any kind of female in this world, and it’s challenging to be any kind of cartoonist… Women need to create comics or our realities will be erased, ignored, or distorted."
"You are asking a middle-aged female if an industry, which traditionally supports and advances the ethos of primarily young white males, has presented challenges to her in the almost 40 years she’s been producing comics. Where do I start?"
"There are so few opportunities to see non-heterosexual and female-centered depictions of sex… As a gay person, I know firsthand the despair that comes from believing you’re the only one, of not being able to imagine having a sex life — because you haven’t seen it." | | Sunday, August 10th, 2014 (20140810) | | 12:15 am |
| | Saturday, August 9th, 2014 (20140809) | | 12:21 pm |
fume: yves saint laurent's m7
infamous m7 ad campaign, you alright!
definitely an "only late at night privately before bedtime in the middle of a cold dark winter" deal, so no full bottle status for me...but i think it gets at the kind of oud i like. it's not the kind that smells dirty to me but dry and smoky. it's surprisingly sweet, tobacco-y, woody, heavy, and resinous, not unlike tobacco vanille in heft and longevity and "everybody around you better be on board with this!" presence. it's not that it projects that far so much as IF you're close enough to smell it, you will REALLY smell it...once sniffed, it's strong. it's like a masculine dessert perfume, dark and heavy but sweet with hints of my favorite herbs (rosemary, a little oregano, yep). it's going on my list of "buy samples of these again come winter for evening-at-home enrichment", of the "sipping brandy for pleasure after dinner" kind. little experiences. | | Friday, August 8th, 2014 (20140808) | | 11:57 am |
| | Wednesday, August 6th, 2014 (20140806) | | 4:04 pm |
fume: serge lutens' sarrasins
serge lutens sarrasins on the other hand...immediately at the top it smelled eerily like a portajohn, right down to the chemical blue aspect layered over sweet waste product, plus the nearby flowers and river/pond in the background as portajohns tend to be in nature spots like hiking trails, parks, etc. i couldn't get past that. i can vaguely see how one might, but i've always for whatever reason been super sensitive to the "flowers kind of smell like sweet shit and that's nauseating" indolic thing. ah well. as a plus, the pumped up purple hue of the juice won't be staining anything of mine.
i sampled something else a couple nights ago that smelled to me just like the grape dimetapp my mom was constantly spooning in me as a kid. i think it was lutens too...hm. will have to go look and edit this. | | 3:40 pm |
fume: yves saint laurent's rive gauche
or, sometimes marketing works
wearing rive gauche today! great example of how perfume is more than the explicit sensory experience in the moment merely insta-personal and devoid of background, that it can have a history and story, evocation of things far beyond smell or romantic notions of a single person and their individuality. i knew on the face of it it wouldn't be for me--i don't like powdery aldehydes, lemon, or roses in perfume--but i also have heard enough about how it was, as these things go, iconic, "revolutionary", encapsulating a wave of women going to work after the social and political upheavals of the '60s (you know i like the name, though what it conjures seems more like the stimulus, the proto-era whereas the perfume is the eventual result...the finished product is not of the name but after it), that whole "brush off the old world's romanticized baroque ornamentation and softened edges; soon you'll be able to wear pants even!" thing. right down to the ad campaign and wonderful packaging (its smart, practical, but very zingy case instantly makes me think of a certain '70s tennis wear piping primary blues and greens aesthetic; my mom had a simple bright blue with white trim vinyl hand bag from then that later i inherited to play with and this perfume's look and smell transports me to sniffing at the bottom of it as a kid in the mid '80s) and indeed the bright-powdery (it's not a musty dusky rosy type of powder AT ALL), "fresh"-but-dated (dated in the particular way things people think of as modern from decades ago are), comfortingly nostalgic but yeah, not romantic smell. and yet it's definitely "feminine" somehow, just for sure a certain kind of feminine that one doesn't usually associate with perfume's general old fashioned sweeping melodrama marketing copy. it's feminine the way Candace Bergen wearing a white oxford shirt and khaki trousers and a sweater wrapped around her shoulders might be (i doubt i'm explaining well). a lot of fans a bit older than i am talk fondly of how this is the smell of their mom, an office working or career woman (!), from back then. reassuring and competent, busy, no-nonsense but still maternal. proof perfume can work magic in layered, context-significant, complex ways.
i didn't think i'd say this but i would like some, perhaps a modest decant, to have around less as a personal fashion statement projecting outward than as a ticket anytime i want to an inward journey of a certain era and industrial-modern-now-lost feeling, of safety and optimism, when you were little in the '70s and '80s and liked going downtown hand in hand with your mother, gawking at huge government buildings towering over you, being excited about the space program and thinking TV ad campaigns were charming, not annoying...that sense of curiosity/wonder and trust you still had in institutions, business, world commerce, the workplace, social movements, whatever. before disillusionment with that model of modernity. it's an optimistic smell, that's it. optimistic we could just cut the bullshit of pre-'68-and-'69 traditions out and by '71 that would be that, the world would be new and great, brimming with possibility and newfound capability. | | Wednesday, July 30th, 2014 (20140730) | | 7:40 pm |
killing time at the mall after lunch, learning that holy shit, miss dior is not for me. i have never been so repulsed by a perfume. it reminded me a little of those powdery european fruit candies, once the top note of apple pie gone bad dissipated. eek. | | Wednesday, July 23rd, 2014 (20140723) | | 6:04 pm |
sampled interlude man yesterday, now wondering if i'm ever going to not smell like it ever again. :b it is as powerful as all the warnings said, and i'm such a subtaster/smeller/sense person in general that even monsters like shalimar, le baiser du dragon, epic man, and tobacco vanille didn't faze me--this is the first perfume i've put on where i'm like "even though i like it will i ever be free of it?!"
meanwhile, still madly smitten with l'air du desert marocain to the point i found myself googling tauer interviews on youtube. discovered he is like a tidier, cuter alton brown with a swiss accent. adorable. so now my crush has even more vectors.
kinda bad timing with perfume mail--got samples i've been dying to try for months now of a lot of the great weirder notorious classics (stuff like bandit, rochas femme, black, knowing, insolence edp, habit rouge, knize ten, kouros) a day AFTER trying l'air. and i still am excited to try them, but i'm also like "how the hell am i ever going to wean myself off l'air long enough to sample anything else?" part of me truly can't fathom ever wanting to smell like anything else ever again. read a woman on the fragrantica boards describing her similar fate before me, and how she wound up buying 6 bottles all at once and has had no regrets and will reorder soon. gah. | | Tuesday, July 22nd, 2014 (20140722) | | 11:08 am |
holy smokes, no matter what else happens today is going to be a great day because i have finally tried l'air du desert marocain and it is everything i could have dreamed of and more. i have never huffed at my elbow like a maniac over and over before, but there's no way to show any restraint with this one. i have found 3, maybe 4 "could definitely see wanting a full size bottle and calling it Mine" signature-possible perfumes so far, but of course there's always something fiddly about each one preventing me from pulling the trigger--too rich literally and figuratively (amouages), too bizarrely impossible to obtain (fumerie turque, alas), too seasonal and i didn't plan ahead wisely (comme des garcons 2). but this. i think i may just stop everything and order a bottle of this posthaste.
it reminds me of our road trip through the southwest, there's a clarity and vast blue skied clean-yet-dusty/sandy (almost sagebrush) BIG SPACE quality to it yes, but also those warm sweet spices i tend to gravitate toward. but the combo of the dry dustiness and big open sky sort of feel with those spices sets it apart which is no small feat considering as much as i lean towards warm spicy oriental perfumes i recognize the same-y tired "does there really need to be thousands of these" thing. and also keeps it from being strictly a late night winter bedroom thing, which is the other problem with them for me now given i live in memphis (but just can't bring myself to do grapefuit, nope). it's the frame i'm used to, that anything i'd consider really "Mine" would have to at least quote, but yeah, put into a huge open blue sky, the sort of summer heat that makes the air have a sparkly sound to it, the aural equivalent of seeing stars when you smash your eyelids closed. ohhhh.
EDIT/update: done! fastest nose to bottle to clicking "confirm order" ever i reckon. makes getting 2 falling through not at all sad anymore, but weirdly ideal. | | Saturday, July 19th, 2014 (20140719) | | 4:57 pm |
ubar
gosh darn it but do i love me some amouage. i didn't think there was a white floral on earth i could love but you did it--not sweet, almost bitterly green at times, and admittedly initially with a hint of mosquito repellent, but worth it for that big, beefy/meaty fresh dewy rose and animal skankified jasmine. so big, so powerful, and not a whit prissy. warm too, not a cold fragrance, and not at all musty/dusty. floral perfume for a girl with an honest tan and uncombed, knotty sea-wet hair in the heat wave of summer. love love. |
[ 19 lost? ]
she's going up to the top floor,
to see all the cars wash up on the shore
livejournal, smothered in hugs
|