A Lovely Fragrance In The Air

Right on schedule, our Carolina Jessamine is in glorious bloom along our fence. The vine covers both sides of the fence; the neighbors enjoy seeing it as much as we do from our sun room/office windows.

Not only is it a beautiful hardy vine, it also has a lovely scent as well.

It is vaguely like the scent of daffodils. It is a nice mimic, seeing as how the blossoms look distinctively like daffodils!

Not only does the Carolina Jessamine bloom on our fence, all our forests are sporting pine trees with curious yellow blossoms; the vine has entwined within the pine tree branches. Carolina jessamine is rampant in our area, and it grows freely. No effort is needed to get this plant to thrive.

This morning I was doing my usual blog hopping, and stopped by Dressaday. Erin has made Friday her day to post various links to other blogs of interest. Erin, if you don't know, is a dress and sewing enthusiast, who also happens to be the editor of the New Oxford English Dictionary The girl can write and has a wacky sense of humor, along with an adventurous spirit.

I merrily clicked through today's links...taking the time to view the link about the person who has made a dress crocheted out of Ono cards, and the link about people who dress in only one color (I have been tempted myself....) and the link to sewing pattern light switch plates.

I mean really, is not this kind of rollicking through blogland just the best???

Then I hit her link to a perfume critic's blog entitled Invisible Magnet.

Whoa.

Even Erin was like whoa...she usually doesn't wear scents, but this site may have flipped her to the scented side.

Within the link there was this paragraph:

"And when I was in Paris as a wee sir I noticed that the women there laid their Amarige on THICK. That complicated mix of flowers, fruit and spice hung in the air everywhere and added to my experience of the city."

A little click went off in my head.

I have had that exact same experience.

Being somewhere and having a perfume become part of the experience forever in my mind.

Recently Laura had helped me clean out my bathroom vanity (this cleaning out process just goes on and on and on...) and we found a cluster of samples sized bottle of Givenchy perfumes.

I had not really liked any of them, and had handed them over to her.

(An aside: Laura has difficulty finding perfumes that smell good on her. I have known other red haired women with the same complaint, and when given the opportunity to talk with a representative of a major perfume company, I learned that it is not just an assumption, but rather a chemical fact. Red heads are physically different in many way; one of which is the body chemistry and skin structure. Their skin absorbs the perfume, whereas non-red heads skin hold the perfume on the surface, suspended by the fragrance fixative. The solution, the representative suggested, was to buy the perfume in lotion form, layer on the lotion to seal the skin, then add the perfume.

Or search and search for a perfume that just some how does work with red headed chemistry.

Seriously, it is so strange how awful perfume can smell on Laura, as the fixative part of the perfume winds up being the remaining scent, and it is a very unpleasant odor. We spend a lot of time sampling perfumes to find ones that will work on her.)

I wondered if I had a sample of the Amarige.

I did.

I tried it on, and ummmm...happy love!

Interestingly it was the only Givenchy sample that I had kept in my regular collection of fragrances.

Reading Invisible Magnet made me want to take another look at my perfume collection.
(Please note that I must have been a little loopy on fragrance when I labeled these binds...that should be p-e-rfume, not p-u-rfume. Memory device for the future: there is no P-U in perfume.
It smells nice!)

Wearing perfume is such a tricky thing these days. Everyone seems to want to dab some on to go to church, but actually that is kind of rude: you never know if the scent will bother someone nearby. Supposedly wearing it to work is iffy too...you mustn't bother co-workers with your choice of fragrance.

In fact, in consideration of others, it seems to be most thoughtful to skip wearing any fragrance at all, except in your own home.

Now I have loved dabbing on perfume behind my ears, and on my wrists ever since I was old enough to have received a set of "Tinkerbell" toilet water and lotion as a little girl.

Anyone else out there remember "Tinkerbell" toilet water?
And how confusing it was to have something that smelled so nice be called toilet water?

I just loved taking a bath and dabbing on the little fragrant droplets. Later I got a perfume making kit. I was immediately smitten by the violet scented lavender colored fluid. I think the others were gardenia, rose, and maybe honeysuckle. A tiny, tiny plastic funnel was used to pour the fragrances into the empty little postage stamp sized bottles.

Now that was my idea of fun. I could do that all day!

Later as a young teen I started wearing "Straw Hat" by Faberge. The idea of having a "signature" fragrance had caught my attention, and I had decided Straw Hat would be mine. Later I flirted with Yardley's April Violets (Yardley products being part of the groovy English trendy/Twiggy/Beatles/All things British movement), and also got into Dior's Doirissimo, a lovely young Lily of the Valley based fragrance.

In college I experimented with the "natural" fragrances.
Would you believe I was silly enough to wear a perfume that smelled exactly like fresh mowed grass? No wonder the boys ran; it must have triggered memories of having to do yard work back home!

Aside from a few Avon perfume adventures, as a married lady I didn't bother much with wearing perfume for many years. Scented candles were the new in thing, and blue jeans and flannel shirts didn't make me feel perfume wearing worthy.

I never recalled Bernie ever reacting to any Avon perfume I sampled, save to occasionally remark that the latest Avon perfume sample "smelled like Avon."

Sigh.

Then....one day when we were first in New Orleans, we visited Yvonne La Fleur's millinery shop. We walked in, and there was a cloud of fragrance in the place that Bernie just fell head over heels in love with.

I tried it on...his heart pounded....and in a flash he bought me the perfume, lotion, powder, bath gel, soap...and was asking if there anything else in the fragrance available?

I love it...he loves it... and one whiff of Yvonne La Fleur is all it takes to make the man darn near swoon.

Powerful stuff, that. He never fails to comment happily whenever I am wearing YLF.



Prior to YLF I had decided that I needed another "signature" perfume to wear everyday.
Jeff was consulted on this; he is a total men's cologne connoisseur, and at the time, his girlfriend was big into perfume as well.
He had opinions on every perfume...clearly this girl had influenced him big time.

I don't remember exactly how it all went down, but Bernie and Jeff decided that Chanel's Allure was THE perfume for me.

Oddly, I have no feelings for it one way or the other. It smells slightly powdery to me, with no particular association to any other scent. I spritz it on lightly before heading to work and from time to time people ask me what fragrance I am wearing, and say that it smells very expensive and elegant.

Well...it is a Chanel product, so I guess it lives up to it's hype. It seems to work with everything from jeans to suits. And it comes in everything too: Powder (a must have in this humid climate) soap, lotion, bubble bath, deodorant, freshener...love it all!

After I got settled into those two fragrances, I wanted a fragrance for the hotter than you-know-what days. Ralph Laurent "Romance" was just the ticket a few summers back.
I still love it...and Bernie can not smell it at all, regardless of how much I spray on.
How weird it that?
It is a pretty soft scent.

Then there was the memory scent of a place.
A visit to Hawaii...and all the tropical scents of ginger and such in the air.
It was the Pikake scent that did me though.
One whiff and I felt I was Hawaii.
I bought one small bottle while I was there visiting Laura; she later gave me a serious sized bottle of the stuff the following Christmas, along with the lotion.

All I have to do is slip into one of my Hawaiian printed cotton shifts and touch on Pikake, and I'm back on vacation again.

The search for a cooling scent is always an adventure. I loved this perfume's scent of lemon verbena, and lemon. It is a light splash, and I feel as refreshed as if I had sipped an ice cold glass of freshly squeezed lemonade out on the porch next to the verbena when I wear it.

My two always ready with a critique fabulous children assure me I smell exactly like Lemon Pledge when I wear it.
Whatever....

A trip to the original Neiman Marcus in downtown Dallas gave me an opportunity to sample the newly released Prada perfume that I for some reason had read about in a magazine.

I LOVED IT!!!

Asked for it for Christmas from Jeff, and he was happy to give me two bottles; one a tiny travel sized bottle and the other with a cap that could be changed out to the atomizer.

Ohhh...an atomizer. How chic!
OF COURSE I wanted to have it on my counter top with the atomizer in place!

(What I didn't know was that the atomizer allows the perfume to evaporate in a blink of an eye.)
I still have the travel sized bottle. And I still think it is one fabulous perfume.

Yes, here are the two little sample perfumes that started this whole long, long blog.
I touched some on, and wandered into the office let Bernie take a sniff.
(He got home safe and sound last night after a long and bumpy flight on a very crowded plane. He is SO glad he made it out...thanks for your prayers!)

The Bernie says: I like it! I like it alot.
He then went on to give it a critique (Jeff has influenced him I think.) Perfect for day time, rich, floral, sensual, not really a night time perfume, very womanly etc etc.

Well now. How about that. And to think this sample was almost over looked.

I will be curious to get a review from traveling Laura when she returns though.
When we shopped for perfumes down in Harwin a week ago, she was quick to dismiss many perfumes as smelling "old lady."

Seeing as I am rapidly approaching "Old Lady" status, I am not really pleased to hear that smelling like an old lady is something to be avoided. I am not really sure what "old lady" smells like exactly, except that quite a few of the fragrances that I liked were deemed to have that particular scent.

Perhaps the more interesting question is: Does it appeal to older men, or younger men?
Because frankly I am just not interested in attracting oversexed teenage boys, or even young men in general.

While several of my friends have hitched up with younger men, I frankly just don't see the advantage of having a boy toy when instead I can be with an interesting man.

Invisible Magnet had a bit to say about perfume that smells like food. I tend to agree, but I did give into the Bath and Body Shop's Brown Sugar and Fig scent a few autumns ago. It just smells like autumn to me. Makes my mind travel to the land of crisp fall weather and pumpkins and colored leaves...
It also somehow makes me want to bake something, like pies and cakes.

But if I want to get the same autumn buzz on a more sophisticated level, Chanel delivers via "Coco", a scent I got on a trip to Toronto Canada a few years back.
I have to confess, the exchange rate then was spectacular. I had been on my own in the Toronto underground six mile long shopping tunnel, and I hadn't found anything else to buy on that day.
Call it an impulse buy...

Another spring and summer fragrance: Cherry Blossom, sprayed on cold from being chilled in the refrigerator. Cherry koolaid, cherry Popsicles, cherry lifesavers...it all comes blasting back.

(I should have worn some today, in honor of George Washington's birthday and the silly cherry tree story. Google blew George's birthday off too...)

Wow, I'm afraid I have written a marathon post. If you are reading this, you are amazing!
Thank you!

Now I want to know: What is your signature fragrance? Do you have a fragrance that brings back memories of travel? What fragrances have you worn at different times of your life?
Please leave a chatty comment if you would like.
I seriously want to know.

And in case you are wondering...

This is how those bins are stored under my sink.