hortus conclusus

Well, here we are at the last Tauer review (at least for now, until Andy releases his new fragrances) and I feel a little melancholy to have completed this project! It has been a blast exploring this exotic and fragrant world with you. But since we are at our last review, I chose to try something a little different. I am going to review Lonestar Memories through the lens of my own memories of my artist/cowboy uncle, whose face immediately came to mind the first moment I smelled this sagey, western fragrance. My uncle Bruce started out as a talented artist making his living painting watercolors and creating pots, table tops and other useful and decorative items o ut of fiberglass. Then in the late 1980’s he designed and directed the building of Transisco tours’ "The 49er Express", a dining/tourist train which ran in northern California and Nevada. He and my aunt Roxanne were the owners of Dr. Hoys, a line of body products  that he developed, manufactured and sold for man...

To wash that t errible 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 Les Parfums de Rosine 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...

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.