hortus conclusus

This post marks the first in a series of meditations on celebrity perfumes. I am a bit strapped for spending money at the moment, but feeling the perfume ache. My solution: find the cheap gems and write and think about them for awhile! Celebrity perfumes are justifiably poo-pooed my many perfume lovers for the obvious reasons; they are crassly commercial, often built by a committee, and are part of an assembly line of products meant to help the top 1% of artists and famous-for-being-famous people (and their handlers) reach even higher levels of wealth.  All this is true. But sometimes, someone on the celebrity team thinks to retain a great perfume artist, and even better, let her do her work. Then the rare but wonderful happens--the world is blessed with a cheap, beautiful, high-concept (because attached to the ineffable but fundamental qualities of some celebrity) fragrance.  SO now for the first celeb offering on my shelf: My Life for Mary J Blige. Gorgeous, steamy gardenia....

I really like J-lo’s Deseo . I know we are supposed to scorn celebrity fragrances until they convince us otherwise with some exceptional quality or other, but I have liked this fragrance from the get-go. You know how a pineapple’s acidity makes your tongue tingle in that weird way that only pineapples can accomplish? Well, Deseo makes that same thing happen in my mouth when  I smell it—isn’t that strange? It is pineapple on me, but not in a bonne belle type of way. It is pineapple in a difficult, acidic, slightly green, sour sort of way. I really love the composition, actually—lots of painful pineapple sitting atop a lovely chypre structure, with a little green coconut thrown in to make consumers realize (if they haven’t already, the dullards) that it is ‘tropical.’ I don’t think of this as a ‘fruity floral’ at all in fact—more of a sour chypre. And then, there’s the bottle. I LOOVVEE this bottle. At first, I thought: tacky. Then I thought: hey, it’s kinda cool how it is desi...

Damn that Mariah Carey and her saccharine juvenilia, now complete with tooth-rot, Laurent le Guernec AND repulsive references to engagement. Behold the latest atrocity: link to NYT article on Mariah’s new perfume line Credits: Brown Sugar pic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons