hortus conclusus

Before I start, a quick reminder that my book and fragrance drawing and giveaway is still in full swing. don’t forget to enter your name here if you are interested!   First, a brief reminder that my book and perfume sample giveaway draw is still open . Every year, at the medieval conference in Kalamazoo, I a ttend a very civilized dinner at the home of a professor emeritus. He and his wife have spent over 50 years perfecting this home, and I think I can say it is one of the best curated, most beautiful homes I have ever had the pleasure to see. Unfortunately, this professor’s wife died suddenly a few years back, and every year since, I have feared  that these polite, delicious dinners, filled with wonderful food and urbane conversation, will come to an end. SO this yea r, I documented my favorite parts of the house by taking snapshots. This is not in any way a fragrance post, but it certainly has a lot to do with the art of living an aesthetically full life. ...

I overpurchased, I think! At left, see the boxes of perfume straight out of the box with foam peanut residue still clinging to them. “But there was a sale ”, I say in my defense---“20 percent off at Parfum1.com—with a free gift!” I know it’s no excuse for buying 9 bottles, but, oh well, I did it. And it DID only cost 110 bucks—not so heinous, right? right? right?, she asks herself in the echo chamber of her own resounding guilt…. Ah well, what’s done is done, I guess, and now I get to enjoy the spoils. It is not as cool as Carol at WAFT’s serendipitous find , but still a pleasant group of frags for enjoyment and leisurely review. I am looking forward to comparing my new balmain vent vert in the early 90s formulation against my vintage parfum….I’ll let you know how that goes in a few days.   I have to show you the size of the box this all came in. I mean, you know you have a problem when your fragrance purchases come in a box of this size, that weighs (gulp…)   seve...

Before I dig into this post, a quick reminder that my book and fragrance drawing and giveaway is still in full swing. don’t forget to enter your name here if you are interested! This review is probably about 5 years behind the times. Remember when cucumber notes were all the rage, in dish soaps, detergents, shampoos, and perfumes? It was a puzzling phenomenon then and I still don't understand it now. I remember one time I was cleaning up the kitchen and I reached for what looked like an ordinary, slightly old cucumber sitting on the counter, and, as I picked it up, I discovered to my great disgust that it was not solid at all. It had liquefied entirely inside—it was like those fairy tales where the heroine reaches for a perfect fruit from a magic tree, takes one bite, and discovers that it is crawling with maggots. It was disgusting, and the most disgusting part about it was that it smelled almost exactly like the standard-issue cucumber note that was all the rage at the ti...

Many authors use pe rfume as a novelistic shorthand for memories awakened in complete recall. A character smells something and it awakens deep memories, or takes him back in time. In Daphne du Maurier’s neo-gothic romance Rebecca , this motif takes a sinister turn. A youung girl marries a widower with an obscure, tragic past and moves to his ancestral estate . She soon discovers that the place is haunted by the presence of the memory of the previous wife, Rebecca.  This ‘haunting’ is mostly expressed through smell and fragrance. Azaleas, overpowering, overfeminine, unnaturally-abundant blooms which choke the manor of Manderley, become a symbol of the dead wife’s overpowering femininity. Rebecca even wore a perfume which smelled of azaleas. The hapless new wife discovers traces of perfume on Rebecca’s clothes, which have turned musty with age, she experiences the oppression of the obscure yet present past in the form  a choking fog that blights the landscape a...

SO, I was bumming around in Barnes and Noble last night waiting for my husband’s history class to come back from a 4-day tour of Civil War battlefields so we could get in the car and drive back home to be together for the first time in a little under two weeks, and I came upon an article in the June issue of Allure that irritated me a little—ok, a lot! (that was way too long a sentence, I know) In this brief article, the journalist writes [and I respond in parentheses] : At what point did we start wanting our perfume to conjure a poisonously scheming man-eater or an underwear-clad model? [ um, what? Haven’t perfumes always had something to do with sex, or at least with ‘allure’?] Apparently, perfumers have been asking themselves the same questions, [have they now…?] because this summer heralds the return of the pure floral scent [has it ever been away?]. “ These florals smell like nature, like a natural flower,” explains perfumer Frédéric Malle [in the first sentence that actua...

All you Shalimar purists out there may want to avoid this post. I mean it, step away NOW! I am doing something to one of the first and best orientals that you may find unconscionable, so if the idea of tampering with the magnificence that is Shalimar makes you break out in hives, stop now before it’s too late. You see, (and this is embarrassing for me to admit this) I have been layering Shalimar with…well, let me start over at the beginning. You know how I like to buy fragrances wh ile I’m on a trip , so  I can associate the memories of the trip with a fragrance and then use it to recall the memories in greater detail? Well, when I went to the medieval conference in Kalamazoo, I took a little day trip to Ulta to search for a nice oriental to wear to the big dance on Saturday night. Nothing really struck me after a long sniff session, so I bought some banana boat sunscreen and headed back in my car to campus. But I was hungry, and saw a Walgreens, and pulled in, inte...

  Well, my love is away, and we have been apart for over a week now, and two days to go. I am lonely but not too; after the conference and the very pleasant but busy visit with my brother and sister-in-law in Detroit, I am happy to have some time alone. Alone that is, but not alone. I have Guerlain’s princess Nahema , a blowsy dark friend who floats around me, whispering in my ear. I have a glass of wine. and I have the moon. And I have my poems, one of which reflects my sentiments tonight exactly. Moon, Flowers, Man I raise my cup and invite The moon to come down from the Sky. I hope she will accept Me. I raise my cup and ask The branches, heavy with flowers, To drink with me. I wish them Long life and promise never To pick them. In company With the moon and the flowers, I get drunk, and none of us Ever worries about good Or bad. How many people Can comprehend our joy? I Have wine and moon and...

I have odd religious beliefs. Although I am certainly agnostic bordering on atheistic when it comes to God, I do find myself believing in /paying close attention to other ‘supernatural’ occurrences. For example, I am a strong believer in luck, bad luck, the evil eye, ghosts (under certain circumstances), and fate. How I reconcile this belief with my lack of faith in the afterlife or in a higher divine power is unknown to me… : ) that’s just the way I’ve always been. Sometimes I think I would have made a good animist—I totally think the world is filled with different life-forces that inhabit it and exert their influence over us humans… I am getting all mystical right now because I think FATE, for some odd reason, decided the winner of this draw for samples of rosy fragrances. Here’s what happened. I typed out all entrants’ names, and then cut each out on a little strip. At this point, one fell out of my hands—Fox and Squirrel. I wondered if that meant that I should consider the win...

One of my favorite of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales is the tragic story of the nightingale and the rose , one of a large number of accounts which emphasize the bloodiness of the red rose, and explore the notion of ‘painting’ a white rose red (another famous exploration of this concept can be found in Alice in Wonderland , also an exploration of pointlessness of human endeavor, where the Red Queen’s servants are charged with the difficult task of painting all white roses in the garden red). Read the whole story (I recommend it highly) here As I have been composing posts for my rose week giveaway drawing , i have realized that it is interesting how the vast history of the rose contains so many aspects of human existence—sex (i.e. bed of roses), eroticism (i.e. la roman de la rose), exoticism (China, Moroccan, Damask roses) death (i.e. the killer rose brambles and thorns surrounding Sleeping beauty’s castle), aesthetic death (The Rose and the nightingale), sacrifice (Christ’s ...

As I have been preparing rose-related posts in honor of my Rose decant giveaway ,  I keep meaning to review the great quantity of fruity roses that I have in my sample collection, but something keeps stopping me. I guess I just can’t get enthusiastic enough about them—or disgusted enough with them, to write anything at all. So I thought I would write about something that inspires me, and has done the same for many others, since its creation in 1930— Joy by Jean Patou. I’m talking about the EDT in this case, since I think it is more rosy than the super-jasmine edp. I don’t think you can find a classic floral more sublime than this very often. The top-quality bulgarian rose and jasmine sit on top of a sparkling—but not overwhelming—aldehyde cocktail, which is much more delicate and less pronounced than other classic aldehyde-riddled fragrances like Chanel no. 5 .  It is a rich floral accord, neither jasmine nor rose, but like the best of both blended into  a superflowe...

This is not a fragrance-related post; I just really love this dress. Since Alexander McQueen’s death, all these retrospective pics keep popping up, and this one just really stuck with me. I don’t even know how one could make this lace, but I dig it like crazy.  The hair, not so much, but I get it, I do…. Credits: Pic of Drew Barrymore in McQueen from fabsugar.com

As I have been thinking about posts related to roses in honor of my rose decant giveaway (to enter, click here ) I have been brainstorming about folklore and legend, various fragrances, and food, but it never occurred to me until last night that something I use every day is a rosy experience bar none. I use Weleda’s Wild rose oil , a mixture of ‘good’ (non-mineral) oils and rose oils and fragrance. It smells like roses, is made of  roses, and does wonders for my skin. I use it, and its lavender counterpart, to layer fragrances—the rose oil for floral scents, and the lavender for fougeres and the like. They keep the fragrance on my skin longer, I think (I have VERY dry skin that holds fragrance for about a millisecond) and amplify the qualities of the scent in a very delicate way for a few hours, although the natural essential oils in Weleda products burn off pretty quickly, letting the fragrance shine alone.  All in all, it is one of my more effective strategies for prolo...