Tabac Blond-History Comes Full Circle

Tabac Blond, by Caron, is kind of a legend. Created in 1919, it was developed at a time when French women were beginning to take up smoking, and was meant to be a complement to that. It has a reputation for being edgy, chic, and sophisticated.

The first impression is of a sort of standard Caron, sweet and vanilla-floral. With the sweetness, though, comes the tobacco--cigarette tobacco, so fresh and photorealistic that there's almost an impression of a cigarette forming out of the ether.

It's a fascinating thing to smell, but the problem is that history has moved on. Where fashionable young ladies in Paris after the war took up smoking, American women of my generation largely do not smoke, and smoking has a declasse reputation that has overridden it's previous glamorous one. Cigarettes are the last thing I want to smell like.

Tann Rokka Signature

OK, it used to be called Kisu. Whatever.

Signature is based on 'ancient Japanese bathing rituals', according to its literature. I have no insight on ancient Japanese bathing rituals, although it summons up an image of very elderly Japanese ladies, blissfully up to their necks in hot tubs. And the juice really does smell rather like that. If I had to identify this smell it would be cedar planks that have been washed down repeatedly in soapy scalding hot water. It's the smell of a hot-tub with nice incense burning in the changing room.

People refer to this having 'aquatic notes', but I don't smell the water, just the effect of the water on the wood. This is a beautiful cedar, and I love my cedar. It's simple, domestic, and wears soft but persistent on the skin.

The opening is a bit wacky. Lots of people on Basenotes ID it as Lysol. It's a bit cleanserish, but I think it's more like Simple Green or something--and at any rate it goes quickly, at least on my opening-note-eating skin.

This stuff is really nice--a lovely scent without being overly perfumey. It seems homey, suited to all seasons, and pleasant and easy to wear.

Parfum Sacre

I'm wearing Parfum Sacre by Caron today, and grooving on it. This is another of my developing taste developments--when I first dabbed P.S. on, attracted by its reputed incense note, all I got was a sort of sweet ambery vanilla. I didn't think much of it then.

I can smell the incense now, and the pepper. I love this stuff, it's lingering and clear without being intense. Sweet, but strong. It wafts nicely off my skin.

Yum.

In Which I Sail on a Sea of Molten Woods, and Don't Like It Much

Hmmmph. I loved Bois des Iles, and I loved Feminite du Bois, and I really liked Secret Obsession, and so I was developing an idea that I liked woods, in general. Subsequent to this, I decided to try more woods, and I developed a deep interest in trying 10 Corso Como. To round out the sandalwood experience, I also ordered up a sample of Bois de Santal, by Keiko Mecheri, whose Ume I appreciate.

I think it's cedar that I like, or maybe I just need different sandalwoods. Perhaps I should have remembered my unfortunate experience with Esteee Lauder's molten-wood experience, Sensuous, which left me with the unnerving experience of having my arm smell like furniture varnish.

10 Corso Como is a decided disappointment. I really liked the idea of liking it--it comes with lots of accessories, like lotion and bath oil and solid perfume, and it's all in neat little retro deco packaging--like, how cute is that bottle? But it doesn't smell smoky or incensey as advertised, it smells like raw wood, and develops an unpleasantly screechy sulphurous note when the geranium topnotes wear off. I just don't yike it. Now, I did have a problem with Feminite du Bois until I got used to it--this could just be a matter of educating my nose--but I don't think so. I think I just don't like this stuff very much.

Today I am wearing the Mecheri Bois de Santal slathered on, and I can hardly smell it. There's a faint sandalwood whiff--bland and sulphurous--and that's about it. The flowers and musk advertised hardly appeared.

Hmmm. Starting to think the sandalwood is a dead end.

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.

Chanel No. 22

I have some new samples. And one of them is a mililiter of Chanel No. 22.

But first, an interlude.

Some years ago, I was living in London, attending rabbinic school for a year (long story), and I made friends with a woman who'd made a lot of money as an antiques dealer and was living now in a beautiful apartment in Mayfair--very chichi.

She invited me over to her 'flat' for a New Year's Eve get together. Beautiful place, occupied by two happy cats who were collaborating to destroy a bazillion-dollar couch together, nice food. At some point in the evening I went to the bathroom.

Her whole countertop was taken up by GIANT bottles of Chanel perfumes. The big, big classic splash bottles. And they all had numbers.

I was fascinated. I knew about Chanel No. 5, because it's incredibly famous. I hadn't realized that there were other numbers. I also hadn't realized that you could get perfume in bottles that big. I examined them (without touching), for several minutes, and then forgot all about them.

Twelve years later...

I dab the left wrist with Chanel No. 22, and go sort of swoony. It starts off somewhat powdery, and a little floral--I can smell the lilac in the first moments--and is full of incense--and is awfully familiar from somewhere. I've been sniffing and sniffing, and cannot track the smell-memory down. I suspect it dates back to childhood, and I sniffed this, or something similar, somewhere, probably on an older female relative.

The powderiness subsides as the drydown proceeds, and the incensiness progresses. About five hours into the process, I now have a smooth, lovely, white incense with just a touch of powder and a touch of floral.

This is really really good smelling, one of those things where you dab and then you keep smelling and smelling and smelling. I think I want a bottleful.

Zeste de Rose

It's spring now--alternately warm and rainy--so I stepped out in Rosine's Zeste de Rose yesterday. It's perfect for a cool and sunny spring day. There's something old-fashioned about it, and yet not at all cloying. Cool. Sweet. Rosy.