RamiFictation

Pretty soon, it will be “OlfactaRama’s” fourth birthday. 

When I started, I didn’t think anybody would ever read it. I was a newbie and wrote as one, and made mistakes, and learned some things, and became part of a great community. Nobody can be a newbie for four years, though. So for the last couple, I’ve just been an enthusiast.

When I started the blog, I was obsessed. It seemed as though I just couldn’t learn enough about the subject. I devoted a significant part of each day to reading all the other perfume blogs I could find, and the fora, and the books. My perfume collection grew and grew, as I learned how to buy fragrance the smart way, how to identify a bargain, win an auction, how to do splits and swaps and decants. Ultimately I had to get a new cabinet as the collection outgrew a smaller one, then dresser-top space, then all of the above plus shoe boxes and drawers. That cabinet is full now.

All obsessions end. 

“OlfactaRama” is what I guess I’d call a personal experience blog. That’s why I’ve always written it first-person. It’s not informational — God knows there are several perfume blogs who do that better than I ever could — although there is information in it. It’s not a perfume review site, although I’ve done them. It’s not p.r. or stealth marketing. I’ve never made a cent from it, although I have received a few books and a few handfuls of samples and some truly mind-blowing gifts from readers. It’s not about trends —I could hardly care less. I guess it’s been a way of communicating with the like-minded, and exploring something I love. I’ve made some great pals, too, and plan to keep them.

But I look back at my roughly 275 posts, and even I can see that the level of enthusiasm in them has waned. It’s not because perfumes are less interesting than they used to be (although many are). There are enough niche perfumers and artisans and vintage finds and the occasional interesting mainstream release to keep a perfume reviewer going indefinitely. It’s not because there are more perfume bloggers than ever before (although there are). It’s that I’ve said what I want to say, and I feel like keeping on just for the sake of keeping on would be, well, jumping the shark.

I’m not going to disappear from the perfume blogosphere, though. I’ll be around, commenting and contributing to fora and so on. 

So, to all of you who have read me and commented and entered my drawings and sent me samples and decants and even bottles — thank you so much! I’ll always be astounded by the generosity of the perfume community.

For four years now, I’ve made and kept a weekly deadline. I think not having the pressure of that deadline will free me to keep playing around with my oils and absolutes, trying perfumes that interest me, and especially to keep delving into the general olfactory and sensory world. I’m keeping the domain name, for that reason. The “Rama” part of “OlfactaRama” is a take on “Cinerama” — the early wide-view movie projection system.

 I see from my stats that many readers are subscribers now, so don’t take me off your feeds — I’ll use the name to write about a more general aesthetic: smell, taste, books, art, life. 

Photo by Pat Hall Borow.

The photo is of my empty Un Jardin Sur Le Nil (Hermes; perfumer: Jean-Claude Ellena) bottle. It was the first full bottle I bought online after becoming a fragrance blogger. I finished it a couple of months ago.

 

Too Many Perfume Bloggers? A Response to Responders

There have been quite a few comments about my Friday post "Are There Too Many Perfume Bloggers?" Some have shown up as comments on other blogs, too, particularly FeminineThings.org. I guess there are quite a few annoyed new bloggers out there! Many more than I knew.


I think the question comes down to this: What Is A Blog?


I’ve been online since ’93, and a computer user since the late 70’s. I think back to things like Mainframes, Arapahoe, CERN, Archie/Veronica, Mosaic, Netscape, Mindspring, Earthlink, Real Player, Windows Media Player, Compuserve, Yahoo, and…well, the list goes on and on. But remember bulletin boards? I spent time on those but there was just too much strife on them. Flame wars, they were called. At one time it seemed as though the Internet was populated by a bunch of pissed off basement-boys who had appointed themselves authorities on this, that or the other thing — or everything. Of course, it’s not like that now. It’s an engaging world where we can have interesting dialog with each other. Right?


Here’s what set me off. Not too long ago, “Pere de Pierre” wrote:  “Alright, I'm not turning 80 anytime soon...but lately, things have been annoying me. The perfume world has been overcome by crap new releases, crap niche brands, crap marketing, and worst of all, crap "bloggers". Fact is, it takes a long time to learn something as complex as the world of fragrance, and now it seems every Sally-come-lately is trying to teach lessons on something they know nothing of. I'd give examples, but I don't want to point fingers (I will say this - iris in perfume isn't "floral"). I'm not saying I'm a professor by any means, and I'm happy to share the Internet, but please do a bit of reading before you teach a lesson...and I'm not talking about The Guide.”


Well, anybody can have a bad day. I ignored this, for awhile. But it stuck around the back of my mind.
I suppose the writer considers himself to be an authority on perfume. So, what makes one an authority on perfume, someone who can "teach a lesson"?


Is it that you’ve smelled a lot of perfume? Is it that you know famous perfumers personally? Is it that your musings have been published on paper somewhere? Or that you live in one of the perfume capitals, Paris or New York? Or that your calls get returned? Or that your opinions have been around the blogosphere longer than somebody else’s? 


To me, an expert on perfume is someone who is a perfumer, who has trained as a perfumer, who works as a perfumer or who used to work as a perfumer. The rest of us, however enthusiastic we may be, however much perfume we may have smelled, however seriously our writings are taken by the fragrance industry, are enthusiasts. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. After all, I’m one. 


Ratings came to my party when a fellow blogger, Avery Gilbert, began keeping track of how the perfume blogs were doing on the Alexa scale a couple of years ago. Who was up, who was down. I began to wonder how pervasive these scales were, so I did what I always do: took a seminar.  The facilitator of this one, a local media figure and blogger, was telling the attendants that we must optimize our SEO’s, otherwise why bother to write? She sounded like a carnival barker. Step right up! Only an idiot wouldn’t optimize! I thought, well, she’s a columnist, a single mother with a child to raise, who has tasted a little bit of fame and wants more and assumes that we all want book and movie deals and backstage passes and free stuff and that's why we're blogging.


If that’s you, it's probably best to try to optimize your own SEO’s, rather than complain about the competition. Take a workshop on SEO, it's complicated. Or find somebody to help you — you could barter something, uh…how about perfume? We have all those half-used bottles sitting around….


I originally came to this teeny corner of the internet because I was researching particular scents. Most of the blogs back then were of the informational type, and that was fine — I was looking for information. I think that anyone can tell pretty quickly who the authorities are. But there are now many other perfume blogs that delve into the emotional, the intellectual, the life-enhancing aspects of fragrance; these are the ones recently called “Sally-come-lately” — meaning that the writers aren’t authorities and therefore have no business writing about perfume.


Self-appointed authorities set my b.s. detector off, just as they did way back in the internet’s Paleolithic — 1993 or so. If your blog is, to you, a voice of authority, it’s really better not to call yourself that: wait for somebody else to do it. (Hey, that's just nice manners, y'all.) If you just love fragrance and want to write about how it affects you…go ahead. And never forget: question authority!


There’s room for everybody.




The image is a publicity still from the film "Young Frankstein." 

Are There Too Many Perfume Bloggers?

So, are there?

I've seen veiled and not-so-veiled references to this from other perfume bloggers in recent months. I've given the issue some thought. 

When I started “Olfactarama” a few years ago, it was because I wanted to have a blog that delved into something that interested me. Perfume fit the bill. I had always had a small collection, grew up in a perfume-loving household, and thought I knew a few things about it. As my searches for information on particular scents began to uncover blogs like Perfume Shrine, I realized that I knew almost nothing! So that became my character: the Perfume Newbie.

I became obsessed. For a couple of years, I spent much of my spare time reading about, writing about and collecting perfumes, especially the vintage classics. The threatening specter of reformulation, combined with the existence of online discounters selling “older” (read: original) stock upped my buying considerably; suddenly, discounted bottles were much more desirable than the new ones. (I bought quite a few, and am glad now that I did!) I swapped, too, and acquired many decants, haunted estate sales, went to Sniffapalooza, and generally followed a trajectory familiar to perfume bloggers; reading all the blogs, trolling the fora, commenting, getting to know my fellow perfume-obsessed. A benefit of all this was realizing that my blog was being read. That had not been my original intent, but c’mon: who doesn’t want readers? You can only shout into a void for so long...

At the time I started, there were five or so “Majors” — Now Smell This, Perfume Shrine, Bois de Jasmin, Grain de Musc and Perfume Posse come to mind. After I had enough entries to assure their authors that I planned to be around for awhile, I wrote to some of them and asked to be placed on their blogrolls. For the most part I felt welcomed into this new world, particularly by Elena of Perfume Shrine. No one, back then, seemed to be complaining about too many perfume blogs. Everyone was lovely to me. Brian, of “I Smell Therefore I Am,” discovered me in a way — he wrote about one of my early pieces on his blog. We became real-life friends. We still are.

But things are different now, it seems.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the ratings game has come to the world of perfume blogging, and “too many blogs” means this: for every one of these upstarts, I could be losing a reader, or readers, and my rankings might suffer, and my unique page views might go down and then the industry won’t take me seriously and I won’t get samples and books to review. Insiders might not return my calls or emails.  I might not feel important.

I’m of an age where being important isn’t, well, all that important to me. It used to be. Being Important, when I was in my 30’s and 40’s, was the most Important thing in the world. No longer, and what a relief.

So I welcome new bloggers. I feel that, at the least, I owe that to the perfume blogosphere; to treat the newbies as I was treated when I was one. Clearly, some are angling for industry jobs, book deals or are blogging as writing samples. Many of my commenters have blogs of their own with easily clickable links. So what? Chances are they’re younger than I am and still wanting to climb that ladder. No matter; that’s life. Maybe they don’t know as much about perfume as I now do, thanks to other perfume bloggers. Hey, everyone was a noob once. I still am, in my way. I’ll always be. Perfume is a complicated subject, which is why I chose to write about it in the first place. It is still the joy of discovery that makes me want to write about it. 

I think there’s room for all of us.

What say you? 

The crowd illustration is from a free-images site, freedigitalphotos.net.

Infatuation and Perfume

“Olfactarama” is three years old this week. Writing it has taught me a lot about infatuation.

I know that infatuation is, essentially, huge amounts of neurotransmitters being released in the brain in response to, well, something, another person usually. It’s one of the most powerful forces that exists. Millions of songs and poems, books and essays, have been written because of it and millions more will be. It’s that strange combo of joy, longing, lightheadedness and giddiness, those qualities often called “love.” But if the object of one’s infatuation withdraws, then it’s misery. The mind struggles to regain that high. Sometimes the result is obsession, with all its humiliation and destructiveness; sometimes merely a roller-coaster ride through Hell. 

(Ok, so maybe I’m not exactly what you’d call a romantic.)

I get infatuated with subjects. I get this extreme need to learn everything about whatever the subject is. It’s actually my best quality -- my favorite one anyway; I’ve learned lots of stuff this way. It’s a little sad when it leaves me, but I’ll retain what I learned (I hope). With the big subjects -- like perfume -- there is always more to know.

At the moment, I’m turning more towards the essences and molecules that build fragrances. (I know, I know, the pros use patented bases I couldn’t get if I tried, etc.) I want to understand perfumery in depth, how certain essences form accords while others duke it out in the bottle forever, why some things are fleeting and so on. I’m making things in the process, but I doubt they’ll see much light of day, except, perhaps, on my own skin and that of my more tolerant friends. It is the process that is fascinates me now.

Initially, I thought that if I could get familiar with the essences enough to nail the damned “notes” that it would help me become a better evaluator, a better critic, better blogger. This fascination with process has really come out of left field, as that say, and I’m truly surprised. But I guess the ability to surprise one’s self is one of the things that keeps us vital and alive.

Infatuations tend to last two or so years at the most, and that’s true, for this one, too. I’m no longer swapping madly and waiting impatiently for the mailman and the UPS truck or spending too much on Our Favorite Online Auction Site or ripping packages open when I’m barely through the door. I kind of miss that high. But my thoughts and explorations of fragrance now are more relaxed, and I don’t mind taking my time.  

I guess my infatuation has deepened into true love.

So I’m thinking about a different kind of delving, of elements, experiments, associations; a calmer, more stretched-out way of thinking about fragrance and smell, this perfect springboard into the exploration of the senses, of memory; sense memory, too. It makes sense now.

I know that many of you are writers and forum participants too. Where are you in your own trajectory?

(The photo is taken from an old Bal a Versailles ad, the classic perfume that was the subject of my first post. Because Bal is one of those that seems to be an olfactory chameleon -- some say leather, some amber, some Oriental, some floral -- I think the multiple mirrors are perfect.)

Grab Bag

 Remember the film “Moscow on the Hudson,” about a Soviet-era musician who defects to the US and moves to Manhattan? (Hint: played by Robin Williams.) A fair amount of treacle, but one truly great scene: he goes to an American supermarket to buy coffee. Directed to the coffee aisle, he stands, astonished, staring at the hundreds of brands and roasts and cans and bags. Unable to choose, he has a sort of fit, muttering “Coffee, I only wanted coffee!”

I used to feel like this when trying to choose a new shampoo, for example. Fifty, a hundred, two hundred kinds, when all I wanted was clean hair.

Now, it’s samples, and decants and even bottles. I had gotten so backlogged with samples, from swaps and "gotta try this" purchases and so on, that I began to avoid them. After all, it’s nine a.m., and I just want to smell good. But I also need to experiment, contrast and compare, and, well, keep up (and have something to write about). What to do, what to do. 

Here’s what: I put them all in a gift bag. Here’s the new routine: reach in and retrieve a sample -- no putting back, now, I am bound by honor to try it, whatever it is. Pour the entire vial’s contents into the palm of my hand. Apply to the usual places. Wear until gone. Take occasional notes. Rate on the following scale:

5 stars: Help me somebody!

4 stars: A near-swoon

3 stars: Special 

2 stars: A decent everyday wear

1 star: I wouldn’t pay for it

0 stars: celebrity skin

This method, while not exactly “blind,” -- the samples are labeled -- is a great way to try things I might otherwise avoid. And, while I don’t expect to ever really reach the bottom of the grab bag, I’ll at least make progress, and we’re all about progress, are we not?

So here’s the first batch, exactly in the order retrieved, and my impressions.

Serge Lutens Vanille: a nice boozy caramel vanilla. Very foody. Made me hungry. A vanilla milkshake with brandied caramel in the bottom. Lasted about 4 or 5 hours. 3 stars

Fracas: Applied a 1/2 ml vial to my wrists and chest this morning.  So far it's been about seven hours and it's still going strong. I wore it to the grocery store a little while ago. Sometimes you can tell people are smelling you, you know? I think I was cutting a fairly wide swath down that aisle. But in a good way. And the checker was nicer than usual.

Tuberose/rubber/heat. It speaks in a high voice, although I was expecting a low growl.  Just Not Me. 2.5 stars.

Back to Black by Kilian: A combination of pipe tobacco, cherry syrup (maybe cherry pipe tobacco?) and vanilla. After 2 or 3 hours only vanilla; after six it's a generic heliotrope/vanilla with a slight Play-Doh note. I don't know what all the fuss was about. 2 stars.

Nuit Noire by Mona di Orio: This has the most compelling final drydown but it is unidentifiable as any particular flower or vanilla. I think it must be the civet. Truly delicious and sexy. Opening: 1.5 stars (too fecal) Drydown: 4 stars.

Ambre Extreme by L'Artisan:  At first I thought the vial was mislabeled. It opened with lots of vanilla. Then the amber kicked in -- or was that just my expectation? Time will tell...3/4 hours later: yes, it’s tree resins. Opoponax/labdanum and/or synthetics, + vanilla. 6:30 pm:  can still smell it. But it’s beginning to fade an hour later. Still a very nice amber. 3 stars.

Habanita by Molinard (modern formula): I put this on by mistake on a very cold night (I thought it was My Sin.) I’d written negatively about the vintage formula last year, saying it was all choking powder. But this smelled fantastic. One spray on a sweater lasted all through the evening. It is a dark scent for dark nights, a tobacco-based oriental, very out of time, and it made me feel even more a femme fatale than the My Sin does (and incidentally, the two layer well.) Winter only. 4 stars.

Patchouli 25 by Le Labo: It’s true! Smoke and leather and a little, tiny bit of patch. Put on around 10:25 a, about 1 1/2 mls. 2:45 - smokiness only. 5:30: ash. (How do they do that?) Ends with a vague vanillic smokiness. I think this is a man’s scent. A real good one, but not for me. 2.5 stars.

New York by Parfums de Nicolai:  Amber and orange, and opens with a wonderful citrusy blast, reminding me of the old “L’Eau de Hadrien.” Which then turns toward orange. Longevity only medium so far on skin though. Very pretty and powdery in drydown. This was a swap; I’m wondering how old the bottle was, as it’s rumored that the PdN’s have been reformulated. This formula: 3.5 stars.

Parfum Sacre by Caron: Pleasant. Just pleasant, rosy but mostly powdery with only a tiny bit of the bitterness at the very beginning. Short-lived too. This was an old 1 ml sample from a swap. I wonder what the vintage would be like. 1 star.

L’Aimant Cologne by Coty (vintage): This is one for spraying all over yourself. A pretty light aldehydic floral followed by a gentle powderiness. I think this would be perfect in warm spring weather or for the gym. Can be pumped up nicely by using the perfume with it. 2.5 stars.

Cartier Les Heures du Parfum XIII La Treizieme:  New sample. Opens with black tea, Lapsang Souchong, very pungent and smoky. I used to call this “barbecue tea.”  Later: tea. Later: tea. Later: (after some perspiring): tea. I like tea, but not enough to go around smelling like a chest full of it. 3 stars for special-ness, 1 for the possibility of actual wearing.

Parfums de Rosine La Rose: Sample, about a year old. Sprayed whole thing on.  At first I thought this would be a rose soliflore but it’s not -- not rose anyway. Opens with a bergamot or citrus and maybe aldehydes, and then begins screaming “Violet! Violet! Violet!” I think this is a perfume for a well-off well-coiffed French grandmother. Maybe a violet cologne from the era of Napoleon smelled like this. Reminds me of the elderly French woman in the 2^nd class train compartment with us in southern France who said riding backward made her ill, and insisted on switching sides with us every time the train changed direction.

Hours later: still screaming, except now there’s some choking too, from all the powder. Tried to wash it off with witch hazel but only got part of it. 0.5 stars.

Five hours later: it’s still here, aaarrrraguuuhhhh! 

Much later: finally the violet is beginning to recede, but much too late. 0 stars.

...and there you have it, a dozen opinions; nothing more, nothing less.

Illustration © Georgios Kollidas|Dreamstime.com

The Journey

What led you here?

For me, it was the daily trip to the drugstore with my mother. After a life of travel to and living in exotic places like Panama and Japan, she found herself moored in a smallish Southern town, home to my father’s aerospace corporation, a great place to raise bored, suburban kids. I realize now that she, too, was going a little nuts. We always had something we had to pick up at the drugstore, though, and so she dragged me there with her nearly every day. While she read labels and chatted with the pharmacist, I’d wander over to the perfume section. I’d drench myself with the drugstore scents of the day: Heaven Sent, Mugnet des Bois, Wind Song, Intimate. I’d compare them, wondering how they were made. It was a habit I never lost. Later, in college, I’d stop at the neighborhood pharmacy as I walked home, and do the same. Then it was free-standing perfume stores, so rare now. At one of them, I discovered Jean-Louis Scherrer and Joy. Then, as I began to travel around Europe, I found my first true-love perfume, Bal a Versailles, in a duty-free shop in Andorra. (I wrote my first entry to this blog about that experience.)

So much of what we are is based on the random. If I hadn’t gone to see a particular band on a particular night, I wouldn’t have met my husband. If Tom Petty hadn’t released “Southern Accents” at a time when I was exhausted with L.A., I might have never returned home to Georgia. If my next-door neighbor hadn’t worked the perfume counter at Saks in Beverly Hills, she might not have brought me all those samples, and I might never have known what the really good stuff smells like.

If I hadn’t been looking for a new bottle of Jean-Louis Scherrer, which I could no longer find at the mass-market perfume outlets, I might not have found the online discounters, and, if I hadn’t poked around on their sites for details, might not have found Basenotes, and Perfume Shrine, and Perfume Posse, and MUA, and, well, you know…so here I am.

And so on.

One of my first discoveries in this tiny back-alley of the blogosphere was the “Steps to Becoming a Perfumista” at Now Smell This (link below). Here is the list’s bare bones, and where I think I am on it:

1. Strong Interest: been here since, oh, about age 12 or so)

2. Beginning Perfume Mania: familiar to most of you I’m sure: the obsessive reading and cross-linking, discovery of sample and decant sellers, wearing out the numbers on the credit cards; also you run out of shelf space. I lived here for a few months.

3. Full-blown Perfume Mania: I used to read the newspaper in the morning, but now I’m on the perfume forums; also have discovered swapping, and can speak this arcane language of accords, not fluently, but well enough to be understood (although I still can’t speak French worth a damn and mangle the names beyond belief!) and, um, well, I started a blog; and, best of all, a bunch of blog-pals who speak this odd tongue too;

4. Connoisseurship: Not here yet. When you get here, does it mean that you’ve arrived? At what? A destination of a kind? Not sure I ever want to; this long, strange trip is so much fun!

How is your journey going?

Where are you on the list?


The David Hockney photo collage “PearBlossom Highway" is from the Getty Museum’s site.

The “Steps to Becoming a Perfumista” posted by Angela on October 19 of 2007, can be found at http://nowsmellthis.blogharbor.com/blog/archives/2007/10/19/3301227.html

Fiddling While Rome Burns?

Do you feel guilty?

Maybe it’s my imagination, but it seems that the traffic on the perfume blogs and discussion forums has lessened in the last couple of weeks or so. It’s been a little difficult for me, to go on deconstructing scents while the wet sand is sliding out from under my feet, as the wave we’ve all been riding returns to the sea.

Something tells me I’m not the only one.

I work as a consumer counselor. I take calls from people who need advice on how to deal with crooked car dealerships or non-existent customer service – at least that’s what I used to do. A year or so ago, the foreclosure calls started. Now, it's people who’ve just retired, thought they’d be comfortable and are terrified. It’s tough and demanding work, but it feels good to help; still, there’s not much good advice I can give them right now.

So I come home and spritz up. Like some people would have a drink. (Well, yeah, okay, sometimes I do that too.) Try not to watch the endless bad-news drumbeat. (The 24-hour news channels are having a ball right now, as this is a ratings wet dream -- hey, media boys and girls, why don’t you take a little societal responsibility for a freaking change and stop scaring everybody to death – but who am I kidding?)Don’t touch that remote!)

I love perfume, and always have. This world, this gorgeous olfactory phantasmagoria, is where I live half the time. Of course, back in the day I didn’t know my cassie from my cinnamon, just that something smelled good or it didn’t. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to afford this passion, at least since I found out about decants and swaps, anyway. I haven’t added it all up yet – somebody over at Basenotes once wrote, “never, never, never add it all up, nev-ah!” and I think that’s pretty good advice. If I’m swanning around trailing clouds of Carnal Flower, it’s because I have an 8 ml decant. I’m like a bee that goes from flower to flower, joyfully promiscuous.

But now I’m having trouble writing about it. Somehow it’s the writing, not the wearing, that seems frivolous. Like more serious matters are afoot. There’s a bit of Marie Antoinette in the going on about the various tuberoses and/or has Serge lost it when things feel like they do right now.

I’m still a relative newbie at this, although I’ve learned a lot. After 9-1-1, we all got real serious (but wasn’t it amazing, how quickly we got over that?) “Go shopping,” our Fearless Leader said, and we did. I don’t believe there was much of a blogosphere yet then, certainly not a perfume blogging universe all those (7) years ago – please correct me if I’m wrong.

I’ll keep on doing this, because I love to do this, but sometimes my prose might seem a little forced, because it’s not coming real easy to me right now.

I know a few of you other bloggers out there read this. How is the current crisis affecting you? And what about perfume fans, how about you?

Is it just me?