hortus conclusus

I am getting ready for another round of academic interviews for professorships and have been plotting my fragrance strategy, and I figured other people would be interested in my quandary: what does a woman wear to an important job interview? She needs to feel empowered, subtly womanly, and happy, but she should obviously wear nothing that could put people off (so out goes one of my favorites, Samsara , which isn’t everyone’s), but what other criteria should she use to judge which fragrance would be best? Here is a list of criteria I came up with, but I’d be thrilled to get your input! the scent should be classic—nothing too unusual, exotic, or oddball, i.e. Chanel’s Cuir de Russie , not Thierry Mugler’s Angel.  the scent should skew masculine. Consider wearing a classic men’s cologne, like Guerlain Vetiver , Geo F. Trumper’s Royal Fern, or Caron Pour Homme. Although it is wrong that we still live in a sexist world, you might as well play the game an...

At first sniff this smells God-awful. Like some super heady synthetic sludge. Synthetic and overpowering, not nice at all. It has a sweet play-doh-y feeling and a slight woodiness--but the woodiness seems very synthetic and not very deep to me. I can say that it does smell very foreign, and very alien, and that's not just the ad copy influencing me. The question is, is it a good kind of foreignness, or is it just wrong? As those awful and scary topnotes dry down, the jasmine, the best aspect of this fragrance, comes to the front. The Jasmine and vanilla combine to create a sweet accord which to my nose lacks depth. I keep wanting the woods to come out more to play. The first two hours after the loss of that awful synthetic ugh are this lovely jasmine powder scent, which is very appealing. I begin to like it more the longer I wear it. It is like the smell of jasmine soap in the shower when it picks up the unwashed human body smell and becomes sort of tangy and vanilla-y. Ali...