Vierges et Toreros

You have to love a perfume, for one thing, called 'Virgins and Toreros', although I am baffled by Etat Libre d'Orange's decision to title it in French, which makes no sense at all.


V&T starts off with a mad flamenco stomp of serious white flowers, followed by a mad flamenco stomp of rawhide. We are not kidding around with the leather on this one. We are not talking about nice glove leather, or subtle suede, or gentleman's tack, or that soft musky smell that sometimes gets called 'leather' in perfume. We're talking that stiff, unfinished orangey stuff that smells to high heaven of LEATHER. The overall impact is sexy, up-in-your-face, and is basically the scent equivalent of the sound of mariachi brass.

Then the Play-Doh gets involved. Within ten minutes, surfacing slowly from the rough leather, this salty, doughy, incredibly familiar smell. Stomping and twirling like a matador in the suit of lights made entirely from Play-Doh. Ole.

Fracas

The deeper I delve into perfume blogs, the more names I start to see over and over again. Fracas is one of them, mostly connected to phrases like 'skankahol' and 'femme fatale'.

I didn't try Fracas for a bit, because I didn't initially expect to be interested in white florals, and the whole overtly sexy genre wasn't all that interesting at first. But then I saw the bottle at Sephora, and it was so lovely--all black, with that beautiful label--and a character in a Jennifer Weiner novel was wearing it--and I spritzed a little on a sample paper.

My first reaction was 'for God's sake don't let it get on my skin!' I'm not sure why. It didn't smell bad. It just smelled INTENSE. I sniffed at it briefly, and then went away for a while.

Then I did some more reading, and I decided I should find out what it smelled like on me. With this in mind, I went back to Sephora, spritzed both wrists, full strength, and then took BART home. I apologize profusely to the other commuters.

Fracas is a celebration of white florals run amok. It is not polite, although it is sweet. It is swooningly intense. And there is a peculiar sour-butter note, which I don't mind, especially since it seems to punch up the sexiness past the simple sugariness that some white florals seem to have. It's flower sex combined with people sex, if that makes any sense.

It's crazy stuff. I don't know if it's ME, but it's pretty cool.