hortus conclusus

To wash that terrible Givenchy ( Ange ou Demon le Secret) from my nose, I scrubbed myself down, had some coffee, took a deep breath, then applied one of my favorite roses, the lovely, understated Ecume de rose , a salty, fresh rose with a certain herbaceous quality to it. Something about the way this interacts with my skin creates that tangy salty smell--or is it a feeling-- that you get when you smell the skin of somebody who has been exercising outsid e in the cold. it is briny, a bit metallic, tickles the nose ever so slightly, and is very real, and it makes all sorts of memories come flooding in. The vetiver (one of my favorite notes) at the base gives this a woody, rooty, musky slant, and really does summon images of a rose bush growing on some rock overlooking some wild oceanscape. Really quite lovely. In some ways this reminds me of a beautiful day I spent with my sister last year. She lives near Seattle, and the day before I had to leave we went to a public rose ...

Ok, this one is a scrubber, but I am going to bear the disaster on my wrists to get it down on paper, er, in my file. This is a plastic yogurt container filled with baby perfume and bubblegum, maybe some tea, and some accord of faux fruits, all heated up into a microwave until it explodes into a carcinogenic superfund site. There's no secret here--just candy-forward atrocity. Whatever synthetic wood base that is that's lurking at the bottom doesn't do enough work to save it. No intriguing angels or demons here either, unless we count the noonday demon, who is certainly going to creep up on me if I contemplate this any longer. It makes me melancholy to think of all the gorgeous creations that could have come into creation in place of this run-of-the-mill girly thing. If this is 'the secret', kill me now.

This is a revelation. The second I smelled this, I knew I had to have a bottle, immediately (and I bought one, immediately, on Ebay--Pure Parfum, original formulation). Vent Vert accomplishes over a long span of time what CB I hate Perfumes Black March only accomplishes for the briefest of moments--capturing the early green growing things/wet overturned dirt scent of earliest spring. This is classic yet entirely original, masculine, and delicate. I think this is a supergreen, but the earthiness of the vetiver and the galbanum brown it intensely as well. I have never experienced a better earth fragrance for women. This is a little miracle of perfumery, and it is certainly a deep tragedy that it was reformulated with so little care! What are these people thinking? Obviously I am going to have to stock up on the older bottles so I can keep this around me.