RandomMess

When I was in college, I lived near a cookie factory. Also smoked a lot of pot. Can you guess what happened?

Ever notice that people stand and sit closer to you when you’re wearing perfume? Lately I have. Odd that it took me so long.

Bad Technology Days: yesterday my Ipod fried. Okay, it was old. Six years! Apparently this is quite unusual. The MP3 equivalent of reaching one’s 100th birthday. I will give it a decent burial and then get a Nano. Um, isn’t that what Mork used to say? NanoNano?

Hey, the new Nano has a little video camera in it! How cool is that!

The imagination reels at the possibilities.

Over the fields and through the woods to the Apple Store I go. Hello, Mikey the Genius!

Bought a bottle of Ineke’s Field Notes from Paris. (This is the perfume equivalent of letting a newish object of one’s affection move in.) I wish I’d known FNP a little better first. We get along fine but there’s not that, y’know, mystery.

Loved and lost: my sample of Le Labo’s Patchouli 24. I’ve even looked under the bed. It’s just gone. But that one sniff was really interesting. Smoky and complex and anything but hippie patch.

Not so interesting: Le Labo Musc 25 Los Angeles. OK it’s a nice musk. But I used to live in Los Angeles and, trust me, it doesn’t smell like pretty musk. What do these two have in common? Only that they’re expensive.

Serge Lutens Fourreau Noir. I was going to break the news that there is dihydromyrcenol in this! (You know, that aftershave aromachemical that’s in every drugstore men’s fragrance.) Perfume Posse beat me to the scoop. But, fergodsake what is the world coming to?

The Futur re-issue from Piguet: a nice green green green opening. I would’ve held this release until spring. Well, in the Northern hemisphere anyway.

Musc Maori from Parfumerie Generale: Why did I order this sample? I truly do not know. It’s chocolate musk. Synaesthesia? Not in this case. Why would one want to wear Nestle’s Quik?

Nicolai Number One (I am going to resist the urge to mention the crude meaning of this phrase in America, oh, damn: I mentioned it! Good thing it doesn’t smell like Yatagan) A really pretty floral; that rarity, a lightish tuberose, greens, maybe a little citrus? Very alluring and a possible FB candidate for spring.

Nicolai Sacrebleu: This one smell a lot like L’Huere Bleu, only without that note that makes me feel ill. A heavy oriental, suitable for wearing to the Opera, as definitely not-American as my first sniff of Bal a’ Versailles all those years ago. A chignon, long gloves, jewels and this.

A Greek perfume pal, whom many of you know as Helg, turned me on to Diptyque’s Opoponax Spray. OMG, the ambery, resinous warmth of this stuff! And it works on clothing. And drapery. On table linens in the cedar chest. Throw pillows. Closets. Oh, and skin. And it’s more reasonably priced than one of those money-to-burn candles. Majorly recommended:

Trust me.

The image is a random bitmap generated by random.org.

Two From the Tropics

When I was six, I moved with my family to Japan.

Like most children of that age -- at least way back then -- I simply accepted this and, in fact, saw it as an adventure. (This became even more adventurous when the plane lost an engine over the Pacific and we had to bunk on Wake Island for a couple of days, but I digress.) When we finally arrived in just-before-statehood Honolulu, at the rickety old wooden terminal with ceiling fans, a smiling Hawaiian girl came up to me and hung a lei around my neck.

In all my short life, I’d never smelled, or felt, anything so delicious. The flowers, just out of refrigeration, were cold and their petals were stiff. I’d never seen anything like them. They were white, and yellow and pink, and surrounded me with a fragrance I never forgot.

I realize now that this was my first perfume experience.

My mother put the lei into the little refrigerator in our hotel room. Each day of our stay there, the petals deteriorated a little more, browning around the edges, ultimately losing the freshness of their fragrance to a note of creeping rot, and when we left for Tokyo, she threw it out. I whined like a baby.

This memory came back to me when I smelled Manoumalia (Les Nez) recently, and again when I tried Amaranthine (Penhaglion) last week.

Interesting how, as the cold gray winter descends over North America, the perfume blogs and forums are all alight with tropical florals. We go from pining, in late summer, for the heavy ambers and musks of fall, and then out of nowhere comes this. Amaranthine, which seems poised to reinvigorate the staid old house of Penhaglion, was done by Bertrand Duchaufour. I believe it is his first for them. Manoumalia, the very definition of a “niche” fragrance, was made by Sandrine Videault, who lives and works on the Pacific island of New Caledonia.

Of the two, the Manoumalia is the more interesting to me. Tropical flowers are all about taking care of business -- the business of reproduction -- quick. This is the evolutionary reason for their strong and heavy fragrances. Manoumalia opens heavier than most perfumes end; sweet, almost like chocolate, but not too sweet. Videault, who was one of Roudniska’s last students, knows what she’s doing. More olfactionary artist than commercial perfumer, she designed this scent as a sort of tribute to the Wallisian tribes that populate her area, using a common shrub flower, fragrea berteriana, along with tiare and ylang-ylang, but then took it darker with sandalwood dust, vetiver, and an amber. (Most Hawaii leis feature frangipani, also the name of Ormond Jayne’s tropical scent, which I wrote about a few posts ago; it’s gorgeous, too.)

Amaranthine, which clearly is a commercial scent (although a very fine one) comes in quite a bit lighter and a lot greener. Looking at the notes, I see green tea, cardamom, freesia and banana leaf. There’s your tropics. I love not-quite-ripe bananas, with their nearly green skin. Smelling the two side-by-side, the Amaranthine has the “throw” and longevity which marks the use of at least some synthetics; while I don’t know this for sure, I’d bet that Manmoulia is composed primarily of natural essences.

Does this make Manmoulia better? Some would say so; not me, though, because I think they’re both amazing. My scent-eating skin loves the mixture of synthetic and natural best, as the synthetics work to “set” the scent, thereby making it last more than an hour or so, which is the fate of most naturals on me -- not that I’ve tried them all. Far from it. But even now, as I write with one on one hand and one on the other, the Manmoulia is nearly gone, after an hour, while the Amaranthine is still going. (On blotters, however, the Manmoulia is still almost as strong as the Amaranthine.)

So we’re all different. Different skin. Big news? No.

I haven’t been back to Hawaii since I was a child. It seems to be such a Resort Vacation Destination now. I know that there are back roads and undiscovered places and so on, but to get there, you have to do the packed-like-sardines/tin can/bus/hideous American airport thing, and I think I’d rather remember it like it was. New Caledonia, now, that’s another story. It’s been on my list for years. The one Pacific island I’m dying to see, and now there’s this beautiful scent from there, too...and, one day, I will.

Thanks to Perfume Shrine and Now Smell This for information on these scents.

Manoumalia’s notes include Fragrea Berteriana, ylang-ylang, tiare, sandalwood dust, vetiver and amber accord.

Amaranthine’s notes include green tea, white freesia, banana leaf, coriander, cardamom absolute, rose, orange blossom, ylang-ylang, egyptian jasmine absolute, carnation, tonka absolute, musk, sandalwood and condensed milk.

Vintage Hawaiian shirt fabric image copyright Ron Chapple Studios. Used under license from Dreamstime.com.

Homebrewed

Here’s a scenario for you: it’s years hence. Fragrance as we once knew it is harder and harder to find. Supplies of the banned substances have dried up -- why produce, say, real jasmine if you’re not allowed to sell it? Some of the niche companies have survived by quietly hooking up with the big boys. Others are gone, or working under the radar. Watered-down “vintage” perfumes are sparking insane bidding wars on the auction sites. Oh, you can still get the good stuff, but it’s gone underground, as have the materials used to make it. You have to know somebody, and be prepared to pay big bucks.

Or you can go down to the perfume counter and get the screechy synthetic pinkish water with some celebrity’s picture on the box. Meanwhile, a supermodel is slithering around in the back seat of a limo in the advertising. Wear this, she purrs: you’ll look like me, smell like me, be like me, have my life.

Yeah. Right.

It’s this dim future that makes me want to hoard. I’m resisting the impulse with mixed success. I mean, c’mon, the collection I have is quite enough, thanks, to last me the rest of my life and, by perfumista standards, it’s a small one (collection, not life). But I still think...what if. What if I can't get any more of it.

So when I saw an interesting post on Perfume Shrine about making’s one own scents -- not trying to be perfumers, we know we’re not, no need to get the knickers in a wad fellas -- I thought “sounds interesting.” Because you can walk into any well-stocked natural food store and find a fine array of oils, designed for aromatherapy, and I’m sure it has occurred to you: what if I bought some of that, and some of that, and put them together? What if I added a drop or two of a favorite scent to that, and used it to scent my hair, or bath or pillow? I bet you’ve been doing it already.

Before I got into this, I owned a little cache of essential oils, and used them in a room diffuser. Upon becoming a blogger, I got an olfactionary to help me identify “notes” in commercial perfumes, so I wouldn’t show my ignorance in quite so obvious a way. Right away I had a brand-new chemistry set to replace the one I had in second grade (which contained stuff to make gunpowder, fergodsake, and guess what I’m still here; how did we ever survive our helicopter-parent-less childhoods)?

The general gist of this event, which was birthed by the new and somewhat rad ‘fume blog Under The Cupola, is that maybe we can do a decent job cooking up some homebrew. Let’s try some and do one of those name-drawings where everybody gets the name of a complete stranger and sends them a gift of same. I mean, we have a pretty good idea of what this is all about, right? None of us is expecting to make the Next Big Thing, but we could make something nice, something we would give ourselves (and probably have).

My own previous experiments turned out decently. A classic floral, a green floral, a spice souk, a dirty, leathery musk. (They don’t have much longevity, but I’m working on that.) Carried my cache of essential oils up to my studio and began, with the vials and the droppers, to concoct some more. It’s kind of fun. I’m working on a dirty floral, a violet rose and a chypre base. Some lucky recipient will get a largish vial of the best of my efforts, come December, and I’ll get one from somebody else.

We know this territory, maybe better than we think. Can’t stop what passes for progress, but we might have a little fun making something decent, and sharing it with a like-minded new pal.

For details on how to enter the fray, go here and/or here.

If you haven’t read Mandy Aftel’s classic book “Essence & Alchemy -- A Natural History of Perfume,” well, why not?! (Actually, I just recently got around to it myself, which is such a shame.) It’s a perfect guide to concocting, and a wonderful read too. It’s out in paperback, reasonably priced, and the ISBN is 10:1-58685-702-9.

Photo composite by Olfacta from photo used under license from Dreamstime.com.

America's Most Olfactory City

When driving to New Orleans, you begin to smell the base note many miles away. It’s the smell of Swamp. A millennium's worth of muck. Eons of decay.

Does this photo make you recoil? Chances are you won’t like New Orleans.

I used to say that this city wasn’t really part of America, and I still say that. Certainly it wasn’t treated as part of America -- CleanAmerica -- after Katrina, which the Gulf Coast people simply call “The Storm,” as if there hadn’t been and will never be another one like it. It was as though the Powers of the time simply cut the city loose, hoping it would drift out into the Gulf, with its polyglot population, its aura of decadence, its social problems, its reputation as a place one goes to do things one doesn’t do at home; hoping that it would simply sink from their view. But it didn’t. It’s not the same -- will never be -- but it’s still here.

I’ve always loved the place. I’ve been there many times. But it’s not for everyone. If you like tidy, cleaned-up, charming historic districts, try Charleston. Because New Orleans isn’t tidy in any way.

We only had one night and day, this time. Not long. Just long enough to walk a bit, ten blocks here, four there; dinner uptown, one night at my favorite slightly-tattered, musty old hotel -- once a hospital during the Civil War, now reputed to be haunted -- on Chartres Street.

Truth be told, many of the smells of New Orleans aren’t nice.

Old cities, old sewers; it hangs in the air, sweetish and sour, the odor of humanity. It’s always there. You smell it as soon as you get out of the car. There’s garbage, too; piles of it, waiting for the plow, and manure from the horses that pull buggies filled with tourists around the Vieux Carre.

We walked ten blocks or so down Chartres, to a place I had heard had good muffaletas (Italian bread soaked with “olive salad,” or marinated green olives, onions, peppers and garlic, then filled with sliced Italian deli meats -- salami, ham -- and provolone cheese. They’re essential here.) It was around noon. We were famished, and that walk was filled with the steamy smell of seafood boil -- spices, like white pepper, cayenne and thyme, added to cooking water -- and crabs simmering in it. That scent poured out of the restaurants and stands as the city got ready for its (long) lunch break. I could smell shrimp and oysters frying, too. That seafood smell mixes with the swamp and river and the sewers and the garbage, and it is that which is, for me, the quintessential smell of the old Quarter.

Since I began exploring the olfactory world through perfumery, odors that used to bother me don’t any more. Human body odor, for example. There’s lots of that in the Vieux Carre -- street performers, many of them shockingly young, who clearly don’t get to bathe enough, and hawkers, and frat boys on Bourbon Street benders. It’s the smell of living. Lots of that here.

For me, the first extra-spicy Bloody Mary and the first cup of gumbo makes me feel at home. Gumbo is New Orleans in a bowl. I’ve heard that many places almost never start it from scratch. They just keep adding to the pot, which never has a chance to get cold. There’s the dark roux, a paste of flour and oil which must be cooked only to a specific point, or it’ll “break” -- separate. Then comes the “trinity” of Creole cooking, onion, celery and green pepper simmered only until limp. Then stock, all kinds, seafood, chicken, fish; okra, to thicken it, and sometimes the cayenne-hot Andouille sausage. Then, the cook adds whatever makes it his, or hers -- spices, crawfish, shrimp, chicken, oysters, sausage, you name it, and it simmers for hours. The resulting brew is thick and dark as mud. And then it is finished with file powder, made from ground sassafras leaves, added only at the last moment, and only to the individual bowl, as direct heat makes it “ropy.” I smelled the file this time like I never have before. A little pine, a little citrus, a little camphor. A perfume.

There are two perfumeries in the Vieux Carre, both old and historic. (I can’t think of any place on earth where perfumes would have been more necessary than here.) They are Hove and Bourbon French, and, since it was Sunday, both were closed. I’d planned to visit them on Monday, but a storm was blowing in from the Gulf, the schools were closing, and we decided we’d better get out.

Next time.

Not to worry. There will be many next times. And the perfumeries, like New Orleans, will still be there.

Photo copyright Denidini. Used under license from Dreamstime.com

Samples: Trick or Treat!

Like many of you, I've been amassing samples lately. Swaps, freebies, kind 'fumebuds...you know. And it's not as though I haven't wanted to try them. I mean, I have tried some of them. At night, before going to sleep...and in the morning I'm thinking, now what did that one smell like?

It's just that Olfacta has been distracted lately. Taking a course that actually requires outside reading and work. Not that anybody else actually does much, but hey, I always was the kid in school that showed up each September with a spanking new notebook and a handful of sharpened pencils. Anyway it's almost over, so.

If you do a lot of swapping, then you know that it's Basic Swap Etiquette to throw in a couple of "extras." Add that to the free-with-purchase handful you get from the niche sellers and you're talking about a very fine candy haul. So, I did a customized trick or treat. I put them all in a bag and picked five at random (no peeking, honest) and am having myself one fine little Halloween party.

Remember, though, how you'd trade the Halloween candy? For example, a peanut butter cup for your brother's miniature bar of chocolate? If I could trade one of the five, which one would it be? So here goes: my random candy.

Parfums Del Rae Amoureuse: This reminds me of Stargazer lilies, a flower I often see at Christmas, with its creamy white petals, red dots, orange stamens and heavy, hammy fragrance. Amoureuse opens a little sharp with tangerine -- a difficult note for me -- but drifts into an unusual floral mix. It's notable for the skill with which perfumer Michael Roudnitska used the divas, jasmine and tuberose, but somehow kept them from knocking the rest of the cast off the stage. The meaty note I detect must be from the ginger lily and, especially, the honey. I'd call this a honey fragrance. And, honey, it ain't shy. Not an office scent, but who cares?

Juliette Has a Gun Citizen Queen: I'm playing corporate wife at the company's holiday party. The boss's (third) wife approaches. "Ummm, you smell good," she says. "Is that Chanel?"

"No, it's Juliette Has a Gun."

Um, forget it.

The point is that unless this sample is mislabled, I don't get the brand's danger-gal imagery here, because this is appropriate for a Queen of the noble variety, or any variety. It's a lovely floral, a "modern chypre" (a term which usually reminds me only of what we've lost) with rose, and amber, a little musk, a little powder, some aldehydes, a little violet. Ok, it is not a background scent but, applied sparingly, it could be worn anywhere, by anyone. Perfumer: Romano Ricci.

Parfums de Nicolai Cologne Solange: A most serviceable, if not unique, summertime cologne, with the usual suspects: neroli, sandalwood, grapefruit, lemon verbena, Sicilian bergamot. On me, the neroli predominates, which makes it a little sweeter than, say, 4711. What's not to like? And it's relatively inexpensive. The perfumer is Patricia de Nicolai.

Miller Harris L'Air de Rien: Have you ever bought a vintage sweater and realized that, once you've worn it for a few hours, it's exuding the scent of somebody else's B.O.? Not rank old sweat, just someone else's...essence? Not necessarily bad, but not yours? The "official" notes don't tell this story (French oakmoss, Tunisian neroli, sweet musk, amber, vanilla). C'mon, MH! This is a sweet and dirty lowdown musk. It's really captivating, if you like that kind of thing, but be warned. Perfumer: Lyn Harris.

Ormonde Jayne Frangipani: OMG. This is a cool lei around your neck on a hot Hawaiian day, made of linden flowers, white frangipani, a few orchids...it's a green-tinged, just-this-side-of-plum tropical floral, but there is nothing cloying or heavy here. Other "notes" include magnolia, lime, rose, tuberose, water lily, amber, musk and cedar. Mixed with consummate skill. The perfumer is Linda Pilkington of Ormonde Jayne.

Of all of these, I suppose I'd be most likely to trade the Cologne Solange, because, nice as it is, it's not a standout. But for someone who doesn't already have five or ten citrus-based summer scents, this just might be The One.

Full disclosure: The Ormonde Jayne Frangipani sample was part of a set I got courtesy of Ormonde Jayne after "Olfactarama" appeared on Fragrantica.

"Horror Girl" photo copyright Konstantin Sutyagin, used under license from Dreamstime.com.

Hold Your Noses!

Every so often, as I bemoan living in a red state filled with wingnuts and Jesus freaks, something happens that lifts my mood, makes me smile, quashes the “How did this happen?!” blues, and, once again, I’m filled with joy. Saturday’s Little Five Points Parade was such a moment for me.

Little Five Points is Atlanta’s bohemian neighborhood. Close to downtown, it’s filled with head shops, vintage clothing ships, offbeat clothing shops, bars, clubs, funky restaurants, derelicts, panhandlers and self-defined millennial hippies. So far, the area has done a pretty good job of resisting the gentrification that moves into such places like a rash. So far.

This was the best parade I’ve been to yet. Atlanta stalwarts The Abomnidable Feed and Seed Marching Band, leading off a twisted conga line of zombies and aging majorettes still twirling like it’s 1965! Floats full of horror-movie beauty Queens (girls too), pelting the crowd with Tootsie Rolls! Rock and roll and bluegrass bands on flatbed trucks driven by zombie aliens! And a whole troupe full of dancing, air-guitar playing, gender-bending Angus Youngs! (See photo - those of you who aren’t familiar with such things should know that Angus Young is the elder of AC/DC, still rocking in his schoolboy uniform.)

So we’re about half-way through the parade and suddenly I become aware of the foulest -- stench -- a smell hell itself could hardly produce -- you know sometimes you’ll be walking down the street in an old section of an old city on a hot day and will step over a sewer grate and there’s this...miasma? The Swamp Gas of Hades? It was like that. Only worse.

All around me people were holding their noses, eyes tearing up, choking. I see this white van coming down the street, and on the side, it says “Marty The Plumber.”

I’m thinking, oh, no. They wouldn’t.

Well, they would. The van passes us. It’s a stealth olfactory attack. People are reeling from the awful stench. Both of the van’s back doors are open, and inside is...a toilet. Not just any toilet, though. An unspeakable toilet, filled with facsimiles (I hope) of what you’d expect to find in an unspeakable toilet, overflowing, on the floor, everywhere, topped with a grinning death’s head spewing noxious vapor.

This was more than a float. It was an installation. It was Olfactory Art.

How did they do it? How did they produce that stench, in such quantity, with such strength, and such authenticity? Is Marty a chemist? Or is he simply so intimately familiar with such things that he can recreate them from common industrial gases?

People gripe about what plumbers cost. I never do. I figure that we can’t pay them enough. But to celebrate it...to mount a rolling tribute to sewer gases...oh, I was so impressed.

(I also felt sorry for the float that was behind the van -- rather a long distance behind -- but maybe the gas masks helped.)

Turns out that Marty the Plumber is one of the parade’s sponsors. Next time my plumbing backs up, I’ll know who to call.

Marty, we salute you!

I didn’t have my camera, and haven’t been able to find a photo of Marty the Plumber’s van. My guess is that no one could handle being close enough to it to take one.

Above photo of the Angus Youngs by Jamie Gumbrect for ajc.com. For more of Gumbrect’s great Little 5 Points Parade photos, go here.

Falling in Love: Scents and Treats for Fall

I’ve had the honor of being asked to participate by Perfume Shrine in a group blog about autumn; autumn scents, autumn treats. My favorite season is a sensory delight, so here are some impressions. (There are links to the other contributors posts at the end of this one.)

Autumn has left the building, and I really miss it. But they say there is no inspiration like longing, so here goes.

Here in North Georgia, we usually have beautiful falls. Our hardwood trees -- maples, hickories, dogwoods -- burn like torches in orange, red and gold. Our sky is deep cornflower blue. The air is still warm, except for the frosty mornings when dew crystallizes the grass, and it crunches underfoot. Soon, someone will have their first fire in the fireplace, and the smell of wood smoke will perfume the neighborhood and...well, dream on.

It started raining about five weeks ago and, essentially, it hasn’t stopped. Parts of Atlanta flooded. Little creeks became rivers, and roads washed out. The streets are full of pits and potholes. It hasn’t gotten cold, just soggy, and everything is covered with mildew; green stones, green tree trunks, green fences, green sidewalks.

Our beautiful autumn leaves? Going green to brown and falling off. Our warm dry sunshine? Hah. There’s so much water in the ground that, for the first time I can remember, we’re having a humid fall. Some say this is nature’s way of equalizing after years of drought; the lakes are full and the farmers’ livelihoods are saved for one more year. I guess I shouldn’t complain.

So, I’m going to remember past autumns. And cross my fingers. The sun will come out tomorrow.

Here are some things to love about autumn, and a few of the fragrances that remind me of them.

Burn piles -- oh wait. Those have been banned for years here. Too smoky or something. Take a deep sniff of CB I Hate Perfume’s “Burning Leaves.” Ahhh...now I remember.

Amber perfumes; Serge Luten’s Ambre Sultan; thyme and maple. I wonder how maple syrup would taste infused with thyme.

Ginger gold apples. An early variety of Golden Delicious, available only for a few weeks in September. Sweetness, and the slightest hint of ginger. These make the perfect apple pie.

Oh, and Cezanne's paintings of apples, too.

The porch pumpkin. Right about now you buy a pumpkin, put it out on the porch, and carve your jack-o-lantern from it when Halloween comes.

Cooking with butter, knowing you’ll work off the calories in the yard.

Braising and roasting instead of steaming and grilling.

Roasted vegetables with garlic.

Returning to extrait after the colognes and EDT's of summer. Vintage Bal a Versailles, worn on the first cool night.

Nutmeg. Grating it over vegetables.

Indian corn, affixed to the front door, from September until Christmas season, when it’s replaced with a wreath.

Candied and caramel apples at the county fair.

More fair food: sweet fried dough with powdered sugar ("funnel cakes").

The dusty smell of the furnace, the first time you turn it on.

Crispness: crisp air, crisp fruit, cold cider, crisp leaves on the ground.

The smell of dirt as you prepare garden beds for winter.

Putting on my leather jacket for the first time.

A wool scarf, scented with a heavy winter perfume. (Amouge’s Lyric for Women comes to mind.)

Regional autumn: my region anyway, the American South.

The Day -- the first day you realize that the humidity is gone; go home and break out the early fall fragrances; Nuits de Hadrien (Annick Goutal), vintage Woodhue, Vol de Nuit EDT, sprayed generously on clothing.

Mountain festivals with lots of fiddle music. I can’t help it. I love fiddle music. Listen to John Anderson’s song “Seminole Wind” for some of the best.

Sorghum syrup, made from boiling grasslike mountain cane. This was the sweetener for the Appalachian poor, for whom sugar and even honey were out of reach. Mitsouko reminds me of it, in some ways.

Livestock barns at county fairs. That warm animal smell. L'air de Rien (MPG) or Rien, from Etat Libre d’Orange: unsweetened animalics.

Fried apple pie, sold at apple farms. These are a sort of empanada, like a samosa or turnover but with apple-pie filling. Ambre Narguile.

Apple butter, sold in home-canned jars at apple farms. All about cinnamon. Serge Lutens Rousse, pure cinnamon, but it’s in many other amber perfumes.

The resinous smell of pine needles as you walk on them. Parfum d’Empire’s Wazamba, CDG’s Zgorsk. As kids we would scrape pine sap from the trees and roll it into balls -- the stickiest substance on earth, impossible to wash off, but such a wonderful smell.

The rattle of falling nuts and acorns as you walk in the woods; abundance, and survival, for the squirrels and chipmunks.

The perfect gold of hickory leaves and dark brown bark against a blue blue sky.

Big bags of South Georgia pecans for baking, local-grown and reasonable.

Maker's Mark Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey, neat: it’s own perfume.

Piles of hickory nut shells on our stone patio, where the squirrels come to crack them.

The Southern Thanksgiving: corn-bread dressing (never called "stuffing") full of celery, onion, pecans and thyme.

My sweet-potato Thanksgiving casserole with a praline crust (pecans, brown sugar and butter).

Bright red hot peppers, still on the plants.

Mexican hot chocolate with cinnamon and a little heat (and maybe a little brandy, too): Dawn Spencer Hurwitz’s Chocolate Pimient.

Bags of pine bark mulch to spread over garden beds to warm them in winter.

For other autumn treats take a look at these:

The Non-Blonde

Under The Cupola

Mais que perfume

Ayala Smelly Blog

Savvy Thinker

Notes from the Ledge

Ars Aromatica

Mossy Loomings

I smell therefore I am

Tea Sympathy and Perfume

Perfume Shrine

photo by Olfacta; all rights reserved.

Notes (Not)

There are quite a few fragrance bloggers out there. Many -- well, most -- of them can rattle off “notes” like the rest of the world would make a grocery list. One delicate and refined sniff and...yes, there it is...helional!

I am lousy at this.

It’s not because I haven’t tried. I have. I even have one of those kits which contains a hundred little vials of aromachemicals and natural essences and so forth. The vials are labeled, and alphabetized, and grouped by name in a ceramic chest designed for spices. I was very excited when I got this kit. Finally, I would be one of the Refined Ones, who can tell natural orris root butter from cheap snythetic “iris,” and can also sniff out real ambergris -- not that I ever have; well, maybe I have.

In my brain anyway, this appears to be a retrieval error. It’s not that I don’t know what I’m sniffing. It’s one of those tip-of-the-tongue things. Wait...don’t tell me...damn it, I know what this is, just give me a minute! (Sniffing through the left nostril helps, some. This is, after all, the more verbal side of the brain, the one that likes to go around sticking labels on everything.) Often, I’ll get it after what feels like a century but is probably more like 3 or 4 seconds. Sometimes, though, it takes much more time and sometimes I just can’t get it at all.

This causes me great consternation, because, after all, I’ve been writing this blog for nearly a year and a half and I’m supposed to know what I’m doing.

So, brought to you from the land of cognitive dissonance: (insert sound of trumpets blaring): Maybe it doesn’t matter.

A well-known smell scientist once left me a comment, the gist of which was that olfactary research now is more about the whole picture, the Gestalt if you will, of fragrance, than its deconstruction into “notes.” Well, that was a relief. (Of course, if you’re about to buy perfume, and you want to know more than that stingy little spritz onto a paper strip can tell you -- will it remain a pleasant floral or morph into an elevator-clearing monster? -- then you probably will want to have some idea of its composition; musk, civet, ambergris and tuberose is probably not going to be an office scent. )

You see the same “notes” listed over and over again in the databases. After all, there are only so many fixatives, so many citruses, and so on. It interests me that you can have two perfumes, side by side, with the same notes, and they won’t smell exactly the same. Similar, but not the same. This brings me to the artistry of perfumery. And its comparison to pigment. Ultramarine blue is ultramarine blue, right? Well, no.

It depends on where it was mined, or how it was synthesized; it depends upon the medium in which the pigment is suspended -- polymer resin is very different from oil, and the refractive properties of types of oil vary too. There are “shades” of the blue (rather like flankers in perfume; “red” shade and “green” shade, neither of which is needed -- save your money, painters)! It depends on the whiteness or other color of the background, the ratio of pigment to medium, the brand and dozens of other things. Finally, formulas are proprietary. The manufacturers aren’t going to tell you everything.

Same with fragrance, really.

Now, after all this time of study, I can say, oh, yeah, that’s a musk. This one’s an herbal leather and this one’s a floral leather. Here’s a fougere, a rose soliflore, an old-fashioned civet monster and here’s a jasmine-based floral. And then of course there’s patchouli, which I’m pretty sure I could detect in a lake.

But if someone handed me a scent strip and said “tell me what the first ten ingredients are” I couldn’t do it. Maybe in another, oh, five years or so. It took that long to learn -- really learn -- color.

Many of the memory issues associated with the aging brain are retrieval difficulties. The information is there, but surfaces only with difficulty. It may be that, for me anyway, chasing after “notes” is a waste. But, truth is, I’d rather imagine than deconstruct.

How about you?