A Risky Business

Recently, I’ve been looking for a small “bat” bottle of vintage Shalimar perfume. I guess this means I’ve become a collector, as I seem to need it. I have a pretty good vintage perfume collection now. Not having Shalimar is sort of like not having “Blonde on Blonde” in any respectable vinyl collection. But these prices!

So I’ve been going to estate and garage sales. My utter lack of success at these has made me wonder. How often do good perfumes really turn up?

I posted the question on a couple of fragrance forums. I asked readers if they had ever “scored” big at a tag sale, and, if so, how many sales did they attend before that, as a number or as a percentage. Perhaps naively, I expected lots of responses.

The answers -- and there have been few so far -- were enlightening. People listed in detail the perfumes they had found. Other forum members oohed and ahhed over the treasures listed. Some suggested asking the host of the sale. Although there were vague references to going to sales “for years,” no one got specific about how many such sales they’d attended. 

While certainly not a scientific sample, I thought these results were interesting. I began to wonder if people who frequent estate sales regularly just don’t want to admit it. Kind of like playing the lottery: the big winners tend to be the daily ticket-buyers, reflecting simple laws of probability. But you’d be hard-pressed to get anyone to admit that they’d spent the milk money that way.

My own experience with estate sales has been gloomy. Some old lady dies, and leaves behind a house full of stuff. Once the heirs have taken what they want, an estate sale company comes in and picks over what’s left. After pigeonholing the valuable items, or so I’ve heard, they put the bleached bones on sale to the public. Nothing, it seems, is sacred. The first time I saw used lipsticks with price tags on them, I started calling this “the vulture culture.”

The estate-sale proprietors here in the South are unfailingly well-groomed and well-spoken, polite even to the gentlemen coming through asking if there are any guns to be had -- I saw that twice in one day last week. And I know that you can't take it with you. This is where much of the merchandise in flea markets, antique stores and  ebay comes from. In a way, by paying their markups, I’m paying for the privilege of not having to do this myself.

As I wander through these houses, I wonder about the people who lived in them. At some, like one I went to last year, there are few secrets. At others, there are many. Childrens' rooms, in particular, bother me. What happened to the kids? Why was a little girl living with an obviously older -- you can usually tell by the amount of home-health care stuff for sale -- lady? What happened here? At one particularly disturbing house I saw, it looked as though the whole family had simply evaporated. OK, I know I’ve got a too-fertile imagination, but I kept wondering about that one. Was there a car crash? A plane crash? Or was this house kept as a sad shrine to offspring that had grown up and moved on? A hundred houses, a hundred stories.

Maybe I don’t need that Shalimar after all.

And so I put the question out once more: do you go to estate sales? (You don’t have to say how many.) What have you found at them? Do you end up buying stuff other than what you were looking for? (I bought a nifty brand-new western styled leather daypack for twenty bucks at one last week. See, even me. I “scored.” What is this compulsion to brag all about, anyway?)

Maybe this. Maybe we boast about our finds because it makes walking through these spooky houses easier. Makes the experience less horrifying. It diverts attention from what none of us want to think about, namely this: someday, this could be my stuff.

Off the Cuff -- Nuit de Tubereuse

“Reluctantly, Pan lowered his big monkey lids, whereupon Kudra doused him with enough patchouli to stampede a herd of elephants. His eyes flew open like the hatch covers on an exploding ship, and he commenced to sniff at his extremities, as if he were wildly in love with himself. A kind of disorientation seemed to seize him, causing him to walk in circles, repeatedly crossing his own path….” 

And then he speaks:  “ ‘Tis true, thou homers do have a magic of their own, the gods have always known that, known it even better than thee….Sniff sniff.”

These lines come from “Jitterbug Perfume,” by Tom Robbins, published in 1984. (Incidentally, the gods here refer to humans as “homers” as an insult to Homer, who dared hold the comical belief that we might share certain traits with them.) I’m about halfway through the book.

For some reason, I thought I’d read this book before. I remember Robbins as a sort of stoner writer, like George Carlin as a stoner comic or, forgive me, Cheech and Chong (but c'mon, admit it:  they were funny in certain circumstances.) Like Robert Crumb, the cartoonist, whose work is just now beginning to be appreciated properly. Like Big Daddy Ed Roth, whose Kalifornia-kar-kulture Rant Fink icon portended lowbrow art by decades. And, like, you know, and so on from the decades of Vaguely Remember.

But I don’t think I actually read it. Maybe I just hallucina thought that I did.

Anyway, this isn’t a book review, because I haven’t finished the book. (Not that that matters to some book reviewers.) It does to me, because I don’t know how it ends. Fellow fragrance freaks, you may have read it too, back in the day, before you discovered olfactory phantasmagoria but hey, trust me, you haven’t. 

I actually had no idea as to what I would write today. I’ve been busy, distracted, and so on, all the usual excuses. So here we are, having just arrived in real time. All of this rambling is occasioned by my sampling, over the weekend, L’Artisan’s “Nuit de Tubereuse.” 

It turned cartwheels on my wrist. I actually think that Pan probably would have liked Amaranthigh, uh, Amaranthine, better, because it’s so much more direct in terms of its massage message, but y’know, Nuit de Tubereuse is purty damned good. I’m not going to rattle off notes here, as you will easily find those in any of the ten to a hundred or so fragrance reviews that either have come out or will, except to say that I love that spice that sneaks in pretty quick, and that the tuberose is sweet but not too sweet, darkish and earthy but not, um, mushroom-y, and yet it’s not all SHRILL like most, and let’s face it, there are some real horror-movie tuberose re-creations out there.

(I’m actually growing tuberose. Trying to anyway. Let’s just say that if the rose is, say, Her Serene Highness Princess Grace, then tuberose is Princess Stephanie before she calmed down. I will let you know how it goes.)

Here’s the other thing. It seems to me that L’Artisan has done this just right. In all my (two) years blogging about perfumes, this launch has been the best, has taken this world, we who are led by our noses , who know what Pan was talking about, seriously.  We have responded in kind -- but the product has the goods. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell, with Those Who Are Not So Easily Fooled. 

So here’s what I’m going to do, between attempting to photograph some paintings, trying to keep my cat from eating that roll of blue ribbon -- most assuredly the only blue ribbon this particular cat will ever see -- sharpening my pencils, painting the stair railing and, oh, yeah, coddling my tuberose plants. I’m going to generously scent one of those little strips of watercolor paper I use for testing fragrance (yeah, yeah, I do it on skin at the same time, too, okay?) with "Nuit de Tubereuse."  And use it as a bookmark in my tattered old copy of “Jitterbug Perfume.”

Oh, alright already! Notes for “Nuit de Tubereuse” include tuberose, cardamom, pepper, clove, citrus, tuberose, orange blossom, ylang-ylang, rose, mango, angelica, gorse, sandalwood, palisander, musks, benzoin and styrax.

Penhaligon’s Amaranthine, also composed by Bernard Duchaufour, include green tea, white freesia, banana tree leaf, coriander, cardamom, rose, carnation, clove, orange blossom, ylang ylang, Egyptian jasmine absolute, musk, vanilla, sandalwood, condensed milk and tonka bean.


Disclosure time: I bought samples of "Nuit de Tubereuse," and had some "Amaranthine" from a bottle split I did awhile back.

“Jitterbug Perfume,” by Tom Robbins, is available in paperback or hardcover, in all the usual places.

Bal a' Versailles -- A Look Back

This week and next, I'm going to be busy with relatives and/or away. Hence two reprints from the early days of Olfactarama, which you might have not read. Hope you like them!

Don't forget: the drawing for four samples of Liz Zorn's Soivohle fragrances ends Monday, May 17th, midnight US Eastern Daylight time. Leave a comment to enter.

Below is my very first post, about Bal a' Versailles.

"In 1978, I visited Andorra with my parents. Andorra was, and I’m sure still is, one great big duty-free shop. I remembered something I had read in a fashion mag, or maybe God-forbid, Cosmo, about a certain perfume. It was the pinnacle, they said. The best. So of course I wanted it. I found it in one of those big-box duty-frees and brought it home, a tiny round bottle enclosed in a brocade pouch.

It became my signature night scent for many years. I was just past college then, and no one I knew had ever worn perfumes like this. So, I thought, it distinguished me as worldly and complex; uptown, different in every way that mattered from the patchouli-wearing sprouts-eating no-makeup post-hippie girls I knew at school.

It would bitch-slap you silly with that first flat note, that definitely-not-American slam. And then it would quickly bloom into florals, jasmine and rose. But it wouldn’t leave you comfortable there. Under all those sweet and pretty flowers flowed the heavy, musky, unmistakable note of...what was that, anyway? I didn’t know the words then. Civet, musk, ambergris – and, in the Seventies, they were all real.

It smelled so foreign! I wore it whenever I went out, not sure of what might happen (as in anything can.) Of course, I reserved my ladylike Chanel No. 5 for work. But when the sun sank, out came the little bottle I'd bought in Andorra.

I've been through a number of them since then. Even now, when it feels like it's going to be an interesting night, I wear it. Sometimes, I wear it to sleep, too.

The expert Luca Turin has called it “circular,” I've read, explaining that it settles, then rolls back and forth between the sweet and dirty, the florals and the civet, what they call "skank" now. Another perfume writer called it “comforting.” In a way it is.

I guess I could call myself a semi-perfumista now, with many bottles and even more samples, some niche, some corporate, all recommended. But the Bal is still special. It makes me feel more...well, let's just say more. And there's a bottle of the vintage, coming in the mail."