Orange Sanguine by Atelier Cologne
Cartoned orange juice
With impossible shelf life
Strained clean with no pulp
~ The Smelly Vagabond
Monthly Archives: May 2014
Perfume Haiku Series: Shem el-Nessim by Grossmith
Shem el-Nessim by Grossmith
Powdery flowers
Pressed into old book pages
A blast from the past
~ The Smelly Vagabond
Guerlain – Insolence
I remember wearing Insolence (EDT) while driving in my car to pick up some friends to go for supper. Supper, for those unfamiliar with the strange ways of the regular Singaporean, refers to the rather full-sized meal that one eats AFTER already having had dinner (the evening one, I know the meaning of dinner varies from country to country), usually anywhere from 10pm – 2 or 3am. To put this in context, we usually have dinner at around 6-7pm, unlike some countries where dinner starts at 9 and finishes at midnight, which was my experience when I lived in a French friend’s lovely home for a vacation! The size of our supper meals sometimes matches up to the size of our dinner meals, and can be anything ranging from nasi lemak (an extremely lip-smacking rice dish cooked in coconut milk and topped with plenty of other ingredients) to a bowl of steaming mee pok (blanched noodles with minced pork, braised shiitake mushrooms and lots of sauce). In short, supper in Singapore is pure gluttony.
Parfumerie Generale – Felanilla
Vintage Love: Audace by Fabergé
© The Smelly Vagabond
What do you do when the vintage perfume you buy from eBay for the grand total of £2.29 (this includes shipping, mind you!) turns out to be a glorious chypre of the yesteryear? Well, first you do a mini victory dance in your room while waving your fragrant arms wildly in the air, whooping gleefully all the while, then as you start to calm down from the first flush of lust you sit down on your chair, pull out your laptop and start blogging the hell out of the fragrance.
Madonna – Truth or Dare
source: beauty-boks.com
Madonna‘s Truth or Dare attempts to pay homage to the grand dame of all tuberoses, Fracas, but unfortunately falls flatter on its face than Madonna does while singing Like a Prayer:
After a twirl of giggly bubblegum-my, marshmallow-y tuberose more suited for a tween pop star than the 55 years that Madonna really is (as of 2014), Truth or Dare sobers up and attempts to show some grown up flesh by playing peekaboo with some gardenia and jasmine, before collapsing into an all too generic musk within the hour. Unfortunately, Truth or Dare is ultimately thin, angular and reedy, and lacks the voluptuous curves demanded by a white floral fragrance . In short, it describes the singer to a T:
source: popcrunch.com
To be fair to Truth or Dare, Persolaise deemed it to be “not as terrible as as we might have suspected” while The Candy Perfume Boy reported that it smells “much more expensive than it is and is much better than it needed to be”. But I disagree with their implicit assumptions that we ought to hold celebrity scents to a different standard.
Madonna may pray, Give me all your luvin’, but at the end of the day, Truth or Dare leaves me Frozen.
~ The Smelly Vagabond
[P.S. I don’t think I’ve ever inserted so many music videos into one post before!]
Perfume Haiku Series: Dzing! by L’Artisan Parfumeur
Dzing! by L’Artisan Parfumeur
Homeless baby boy
Sitting on cardboard boxes
Pooped in his diapers
~ The Smelly Vagabond
Statistics – Taking Stock of My Perfume Decants
Decants and samples galore!
Looking around at my room, I suddenly gained inspiration for a quick post that I could tap out in the midst of my examinations. Why not take stock of my burgeoning collection of decants and take a look at what I’ve collected since coming to the UK? The majority of the decants were from my own bottles, because it’s too much of a hassle for me to dig through my suitcase every single time I want to wear a perfume. Yep, that’s where I store my bottles because, well, I’ve only got my own room to keep them in! I’ve excluded the decants I made from my own bottles for the purposes of statistical analysis (I use this term very, very lightly), so the figures are of the decants that I’ve either bought, swapped for, or been given by generous members of the fragrance community. I’ve also stipulated rather arbitrarily that decants be at least 4ml in volume, and that large manufactured samples do not count as decants.
Photo Essay: Perfume Places in Rome
I was browsing through my perfume journal when I realised in horror that I’d completely forgotten to do a write up of my holiday in Rome LAST YEAR IN JUNE! Speak of scatter-brained! Well, I’ve got too many notes to type out, and not enough time, so for now I suppose a photo essay will have to suffice. After all, the cliché about a picture speaking a thousand words holds! Well make that a thousand and a few, because I’ve added captions to some of them 😉 Enjoy!
Ann Gerard – Rose Cut
source: fragrantica.com
“People where you live,” the little prince said, “grow five thousand roses in one garden… yet they don’t find what they’re looking for…
They don’t find it,” I answered.
And yet what they’re looking for could be found in a single rose, or a little water…”
Of course,” I answered.
And the little prince added, “But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.”– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince
There have been a spate of rose-dominated fragrance releases recently. These include Vero Profumo’s Rozy, which has been the talk of pretty much the entire blogosphere. I must confess that even at the point of writing this, I have yet to try it… so yes, I am a blogging deviant and you may stone me. But to make up for it, I’m working on a special review of Vero’s Mito Voile d’Extrait, which includes maenads and yes, ‘erotic’ poetry. Yes, yes, it’s been out for ages already, but what can I do – I do write rather slowly and only when inspiration strikes!
Anyway, I decided to review another rosy perfume instead – Ann Gerard’s Rose Cut. I was sent a sample of it sometime back by the lovely folk of Bloom Perfumery (thank you!). Since then, I’ve worn it on and off to determine how I truly feel about it. Now Fragrantica lists Rose Cut as a chypre floral, but I’m going to go out on a limb and state flatly that it ain’t a chypre at all. It’s neither a proper chypre nor a pseudo-chypre nor even vaguely chypre-ish. No. Rose Cut belongs, through and through, to the genus also known as the rose-chouli, to which other notable species include Juliette Has a Gun’s Citizen Queen (more fruity vulgar) and Frédéric Malle’s Portrait of a Lady (more incense, more heft, and less restraint). Does the world need another rose-chouli perfume? In short, my answer is emphatically: ‘Yes.’
The Smelly Vagabond 