I Missed Your Birthday, Flora

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I’ve been seeing a lot of people ask how long their perfume will be good for before they throw it into the trash. Then I see people telling them that the shelf life of perfume is two years and after that, into the bin it should go. It was a little strange to see such a set date and time for the expiration of something like a fragrance, but maybe that’s because I’m sitting on a big pile of perfume samples with some having vintages going back to the 1920s. And believe me, they still smell pretty good.

So I did some digging–okay, I mostly picked up a box of Gucci Flora and turned it over. There it was; 36M or three years. Not the two year mark I was looking for but close enough. Oddly, I apparently picked up the only box I had with an expiration date on it first. Everything else was lacking in that little symbol that conveyed the message that when my bottle hit three years old, I should promptly huck it into the trash with some varying level of fear and disdain.

Gucci Flora Ad

Chances are, I’ll probably still be using it five or more years down the road if it’s still good.

There are quite a few things I absolutely agree should have expiry dates to warn people before their products go bad. And while I can’t say much against all expiry dates, I do feel like calling into question the practicality of expiry dates on perfume.

In the first place, the expiration dates aren’t very reliable. At least, they haven’t been in my experience. I have a collection of perfume–like anyone else obsessed with fragrances would–most of them are anywhere from two to fifty years old and all of them are doing just fine. I can count the amount of times I had to throw out an old bottle on one hand–two fingers to be exact. Now we all know the dangers of anecdotal evidence, but I just can’t see the point of throwing out perfume because a date had passed because I’ve yet to experience a need to.

Some argue that perfume expiration dates are needlessly scaring people into thinking their perfume is only good to a certain amount of time before they have to throw it away and buy another (probably expensive) bottle. Others argue that the expiration dates can’t be verified because no one knows how long the perfume has been sitting on the shelf. Both good points and points I agree with. On the other hand, people are saying that perfume is a cosmetic and using expired product could harm or irritate your skin. And some people have had perfume expire on or before the expiration date on it.

This isn’t an issue that’s going to be decided on a blog calling itself “That Smell”, but it did make me curious. Mostly about figuring out the exact age of my bottles. And what do you know? There is actually a way!

The Cosmetics Calculator is a neat little tool that can usually give you a date of when your product was made. I’m not sure as to how accurate it is, and I use it as a good to know type of thing. I was also just excited that parsing those lot codes could so easy.

Here’s how you use the calculator: Grab your bottle of perfume, it probably has to be a major brand because only a limited number of brands are supported by that particular calculator. The calculator has a list of brands it supports too. Find the lot code, it’s often either on the box, on the bottle, or on both. Look under the bottle and box for the code it’s often in one of those two places. You’re looking for a four to five character code. Once you find your code, plug the code into the calculator, select the brand of your perfume, and you should be good to go.

Thankfully, Gucci was supported. So I put in my lot number and my perfume was apparently manufactured on April 28, 2009. So it’s been more than three years.

Oh well. I just sprayed myself down with some Gucci Flora about three times just now. And it smells great!

Clearly my “ancient” bottle of Flora did not go bad at the magical three year mark. See, perfume is one of those things that’s hard for me to to justify throwing away simply because it’s old. Maybe I just have a hard time of it because I have a collection of “old” perfume from the 90s that smells awesome and that I wear sometimes. Maybe it’s because I’ve associated people or memories to those old perfume bottles and those old scents and I can’t imagine throwing those away. Or maybe it’s because I’ve never had a perfume that was properly kept suddenly go bad on me yet.

Whatever it is that makes me keep these old scents around, I just don’t think it’s worth working myself up into a frenzy about all the old product I have. After all, I’m currently scented by an (apparently) expired bottle of perfume and I smell just fine. In the meantime, that Cosmetics Calculator is really fun to play with. Apparently, two of my perfumes were manufactured on the same day. Who knew!

Lady Gaga’s Fame Perfume

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Looks like the fabled Lady Gaga perfume is finally on its way. I have to admit, despite being cautious around celebrity releases (mostly because all of them tend to smell similar), I’m a bit interested about Gaga dipping her toe into the perfumed pool. Though a large part of that interest probably has to do with the huge anticipation surrounding this fragrance from her fans. Gaga herself is something of a publicity machine, which just adds to the buzz.

Photo by Bidgee

I don’t know if her fragrance will smell any different than the other celebrity scents we’ve all experienced. I’m skeptical the more I hear people speculating about it because it’s all blown out of proportion.

Unfortunately, the ingredients list and the road that leads to where the fragrance is now doesn’t hint that this will knock anybody’s socks off. See, the fragrance was developed by Coty (and Haus Laboratories, though you have to wonder how much work a fictional company actually did). Whatever beautiful things I can say about Chypre de Coty are diluted by the celebrity fragrances Coty has developed as of late.

So the notes in Lady Gaga’s perfume are as follows:

Tears of belladonna, crushed heart of tiger orchidea, a black veil of incense, pulverized apricot and the combinative essences of saffron and honey drops.

Let’s just strip the notes list above of all flowery language and get to the business side of things, eh? Which leaves us with belladonna, orchid, incense, apricot, saffron, honey.

Honestly, aside from the belladonna and incense, the fragrance is gearing up to smell pretty generic. But, incense can be a powerful thing that can lend a surprising amount of complexity to a scent–if done right. Belladonna, if such a thing will even be present in the actual perfume, is a little worrisome. I haven’t smelled belladonna, but from what I gathered, people don’t particularly like how it smells. It’s also poisonous.

There’s also been a lot of buzz about the nature of belladonna in a fragrance and how safe it will be. If this stuff is formulated anything like pretty much every other perfume out there, the “belladonna” will likely be synthetic, or is actually some concept you’re supposed to imagine or smell as opposed to actual belladonna. My money’s on the latter.

Still, it’s a bit early yet to judge Fame based upon its list of notes. Who knows? It might turn out to be a huge success. It might smell like something Paris Hilton’s name should be on. We’ll see. Fame is set to hit store shelves in September.

Perfumes For a Rainy Day

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With Debby off the coast of Florida, we’ve been getting some consistent rain here. Most of it is light, the winds aren’t intense where I am and the sky stays a soupy, grey color no matter what day of the week it is. I find it fascinating, the differences between my new home and my old one. I had never seen clouds fly so fast or so low before.

I watched the light drizzle misting the backyard the other day and got the strong urge to put on some Samsaraby Guerlain. It felt like an appropriate departure. Something dry and spicy and woodsy to take away the damp. My husband informed me later that day that we should be expecting weather like this for the rest of the week.

Maybe I’m a little strange (I seem to say that a lot, don’t I?), but I actually like the rain. Not thunderstorms and lightning, but a light drizzle that just mists everything. It reminds me of highrise apartments, a old place with a lot of character and a perfectly good window that you can sit beside and take in the smell and feel of light rain. That kind of mood calls for a bit of Un Lys by Serge Lutens like a little delicate floral would belong in a little delicate rain and fragrance the water.

Finally, today, sitting unscented in front of the computer with the rain dripping off the roof and onto the grass. I had a strange hankering for Chypre de Coty. I have yet to procure a vintage bottle and still only have a very small, but very precious sample of its vintage formulation. I took a sniff, did not wear any, and was reminded of the moment that I wrote that first Chypre de Coty review and distinctly remember that it was raining back then too. Odd how moments and moods bring out the scents.

What about you? What fragrances do you get the urge to wear or experience on rainy days?

Brand Awareness and Fragrances

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When it comes to fragrances, there’s a bit of bias when it comes to price point and branding. Fragrance branding is a very sensitive thing. Though perfume lovers will all agree that it’s not about the brand, it’s about the smell itself, we can’t help but be a little bit swayed by branding and marketing.

One of the things I learned as a graphic artist is the compelling strength of good branding. For a very succinct example of branding power and price points I’ll take a page from graphic designer, David Airey who asks us to investigate people’s perceptions of an item’s value.

He told us to think of Aston Martin and Skoda, two car companies.

The first, Aston Martin, has a brand identity appealing to luxury, charm and the sophisticated man and woman. Aston Martin even goes so far as to reel in James Bond, a character who leads a dangerous, exciting, upper class and often glamorous life.

On the other side, the Skoda, a reliable, economical car with good mileage and reliability. Surely we aren’t going to be conjuring up images of James Bond, hopping into his Skoda and calculating his mileage while he does his taxes and picks up milk after a quiet day at the office.

So if you were given the choice between an Aston Martin or a Skoda (assuming you knew them by brand and money wasn’t an issue), which would you chose? I would venture that most of you would pick the Aston Martin.

This picture makes me feel ridiculous!

And this is where things go back to perfume. Like it or not, branding has touched all of us for better or for worse. How many of us know fragrances by their brand? How many of us would pick a brand we never heard of over a brand we have? Or how many of us would pick a brand we know we like over a brand we’ve heard of but haven’t tried before?

And if we were each given a choice between a Chanel perfume or a Victoria’s Secret perfume, which would we chose? I bet the majority of us would take the Chanel fragrance for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons might just be the brand. After all, Chanel is about sophistication, luxury and high end fashion. When people think of Victoria’s Secret, they often think of underwear.

This is by no means a steadfast rule that applies to everyone, but it is a good idea to be aware of how companies and their approaches to marketing and branding themselves affects our perceptions of who they are and the quality of their product.

Just for fun, can you imagine if a company like Clive Christian (Oh, ye of the thousand dollar perfumes) stripped away their ultra luxurious exterior and started marketing affordable, fun, deodorant sprays to teenagers? You would see Clive Christian stands in drugstores with big pictures of cartoonish fruits hocking scents like “Radical Raspberry” or “Super Sweet Strawberry”. Maybe I’m getting a bit too giddy thinking about Clive Christian, taking a few steps away from the diamond-encrusted podium they’ve been standing on.

How about the bizarre scenario of the Axe Body Spray company all of a sudden deciding to put out a perfume based upon the classic chypre structure and marketed toward successful and distinctive men and women in their 40s and 50s? It’d be pretty strange, right? This is because people generally know of Clive Christian as that company that sells the most expensive perfume in the world and Axe Body Spray as that company that makes and sells those deodorant things that invade the hallways of high schools all over North America.

This preference for brands and perceptions of brands based on marketing isn’t our fault for being easily swayed or whatever. It is just how marketing works. And while there are a lot of fragrance marketing materials that turn off consumers (Marc Jacobs, I’m looking at you) or seem downright outrageous (Still looking at you, Marc Jacobs), the fact is branding sways us a bit more than most of us realize. We don’t have to be worried about this, but it wouldn’t hurt to be just a bit aware of how our perceptions are being changed and transformed every day.

Hodge Podge of Smells

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Ever walk by a Bath and Body Works or Victoria’s Secret and get slammed with that hodge podge of smells coming from within? And don’t get me wrong, this happens in the perfume section in Neiman Marcus as much as it happens in a Yankee Candle. A lot of people find it offensive. Be it offensive in its overwhelming qualities or offensive in its mish-mash of aromas that combine to form some mutant scent.

Luce’s Eau de Cologne

Perhaps I’m crazy, then, to admit that I actually kind of like that smell. I think of it as a challenge and I kind of like it. I wouldn’t like to stand about and smell it all day, but as a passing fancy and curiosity, I can’t say it’s offensive–most of the time.

See, when one of those hodge podge scents hits me, my brain always tries to pick out the dominant smells then categorize them and analyze what might come together to make this mixture. For example, at the moment, the Bath and Body Works at the mall by my house smells predominantly of faux cupcake, aqua, and a heavy dose of coconut and pineapple. This makes sense as a few of their featured fragrances for summer are heavily tilted toward vanilla and scents of the “cupcake” or “funnel cake” quality. Summer is also dominated by thoughts of the beach for many people which explains the aqua, and of course coconut and pineapple are derived from thoughts of escaping to the tropics to soak in the summer sun.

If we were moving up to a more department store level, walking by a Chanel counter in the 90s used to hit me with No.5. It almost always smelled of No.5 back then and always reminded me of sophisticated ladies, black dresses, and–for some reason–peacocks. These days the Chanel counter tends to smell a bit more like Chanel Chance or Coco Mademoiselle and often is a mixture of the two. They don’t play too well together, but they can be a fun challenge to dissect out of the hodge podge aroma that frequently floats out of the perfume department. Chanel counters these days remind me of modern fashionistas, the colors pink and light green, freshness, and metropolitan lifestyles.

Then there’s the hegemony of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab scents that wafts out of my holding box containing the numerous samples of BPAL I’ve collected over the years. There’s over a hundred vials in there which makes separating the scents rather difficult. Instead of being able to dissect it all, I interpret it as a representation of the all the scents I like because I tend to keep the samples I enjoy and trade the ones that I don’t. As a result, my BPAL samples box smells of spice, cotton, aqua, white florals and a touch of soft woods.

But maybe I’m just strange to like this kind of thing. A lot of people hate the mixture of smells as they say it gives them headaches, scent blinds them, or just stinks of synthetic fakeness. After all, how many pieces of media out there make fun of the perfume department smell? I’m reminded, in particular, of the episode of Spongebob Squarepants (don’t judge me) where Spongebob and Patrick had to escape through the “dreaded perfume section” of a department store.

Get Dad Something Besides Acqua Di Gio

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Father’s Day is around the corner and I got a Dillard’s flier telling me to celebrate my dad with some fragrances. And while I wish my father shared the same love of aromas as me, he’d rather be out in the full force of nature hiking, climbing mountains, or camping. I’ve never even seen him even attempt to smell a bottle of perfume as he probably prefers mountain air over anything else. So I don’t think celebrating my dad by buying him a bottle of Acqua Di Gio will go over well for me.

Heart Mountain by Glenlarson

Heart Mountain

But, that’s my father. For some, their dads are at least a little interested in fragrances and while I understand some of the suggested selections in Dillard’s flier I have to add three of my own suggestions that won’t be too hard to find in a pinch.

Guerlain Homme Intense
I love Guerlain Homme, and when the Intense version came out I gave it a try and also liked it for its fresh initial impression and smooth interpretation of floral, woodsy rum. Great longevity and projection with a nice sophisticated masculine style.

Hermes Terre D’Hermes
Beautiful impression of spicy oranges and woods that were beautifully blended. Terre D’Hermes remains one of the nicest fragrances marketed towards men that I’ve smelled.

Chanel Egoiste
Unlike its harsher, younger brother Platinum Egoiste, Egoiste is a warm spicy woodsy fragrance that’s blended nicely to make a strong, masculine scent that will last forever–or at least a really, really long time.

Happy Father’s Day to all present and soon-to-be dads out there.

Photocredit: Heart Mountain by Glenlarson

Layout Change

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I had been back and forth about this one a lot and finally decided That Smell should start working with a new layout so the blog can keep growing without getting too cumbersome. There’s going to be some color changes and shifting around in the next week but nothing major. I hope you find the new layout easy to use and–with a little styling–easier on the eyes.

Paper Samples

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I remember when I was much younger, how my mother would like to hover around the fragrance counter and look over the new releases. And I’d marvel whenever the sales associate would just hand over some cute little glass vials filled with fragrance. Later on, my mother would let me try some and I’d find myself puzzling over how pretty and delicate those little sample vials are.

Paper Samples

Paper Samples

These days, you’d be hard pressed to find sample vials at some stores as fragrance houses seem to have gotten stingier with their sample stock. I also remembered the very rare occasion when a sample vial would get deposited in the mailbox. This had, in fact, only happened on two occasions and then nothing since.

Part of me thinks the reason sample vials don’t show up in mailboxes anymore is because of the cost. But another part of me knows that some people just don’t like the idea of finding a little glass tube in their mailbox filled with a fragrance that might be too strong or that they just don’t like.

My other frustration stems from the fact that department stores have gotten incredibly stingy with their samples over the years. A decade ago, if I expressed some interest in a fragrance I got a sample. These days, it’s only a few stores that will provide samples for me. And those samples work! I’ve purchased a number of full sized bottles because a sample charmed me into it. But it seems that practice is a bit rare these days, as fragrance counters hold onto their vials and the only time I ever really get offered a sample is if I buy something–and even then, it’s up to luck and the mood of the sales associate.

So in the stead of glass vials filled with scent, the fragrance companies have come up with a somewhat frustrating method of delivering their samples–at least by mail and print. For the longest time they’ve been wedging scent between sheets of paper, gluing them together, and wedging those pieces of paper inside of magazines and sales flyers.

I have to say, I vastly prefer the vials you can still get at some stores over this paper card business. There’s a luxury to the glass vials that you just don’t get out of a paper card. The vials are also much more effective at containing a fragrance as opposed to some paper. And needless to say, you can try the scent on yourself if you’ve got a vial of the stuff. I’d hate to think of people rubbing these scent cards on their wrists and getting a faint and skewed impression of a fragrance.

At the moment, I’ve got three scent cards plucked out of a Dillard’s sales flyer; J’Adore, Estee Lauder’s Beautiful, and Donna Karan’s Cashere Mist. I’ve reviewed or have it in my queue to review all three of these fragrances so I keep them around simply because they smell nice and they were free and someone else would have thrown them out anyway. I can’t say they’re filling me with the desire to go buy any of them as they’re all giving out an absurd amount of scent despite none of them having been opened yet and in a month or less they won’t smell like they should anymore.

It seems like a less effective practice to me. And the fragrance industry, despite periodically being annoyed about counterfeits, grey markets, and other products of “lesser value” are sure not conveying the same amount of luxury and prestige they could be projecting if they brought the glass vials back. I don’t necessarily want the vials to show up in my mailbox or wedged in some magazine. I just want those little vials to be a bit more plentiful at a department store.

My Favorite Smell

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I’ve hinted a couple of times in this blog that I recently moved. Up until November of last year, I lived in Canada where the winters ensured anything that would flower or pollinate would be hibernating for six to eight months out of the year. The rest of the year, I’d be bundled up in multiple layers and waiting at a platform to take me downtown where I worked. This made it very difficult to smell things like flower and nature. However, before Canada, I lived in Vietnam. If there ever was a place where I could smell nature–all the goods and bads of it–it was 1980s Vietnam.

I was very young when I left for Canada so there wasn’t much time to develop a concrete visual memory of the place. What they say about scent being a vehicle for memories is absolutely true. Where I can’t remember an accurate image of the little farm in Vietnam, I can remember how things smelled.

One of my favorite smells to this day is wood smoke and rain. The farmhouse I lived in had a wood burning stove and every day that stove would come on crackling with fire before the myriad of food smells envelop the kitchen from my grandmother’s cooking. Sometimes it would be raining when the stove was on, mixing the smell of wood smoke and water to form this beautiful warm smell. I suppose I grew to love this smell because it’s comforting and nostalgic and reminds me of a time when things I didn’t understand could have magical explanations. Like when it rains then that means the sky is crying.

About a year ago and a very long time since I’d last smelled wood smoke and rain, there was a series of wildfires smoldering in Western Canada. I was on my way to work, and there had been a bit of early morning rain that had begun to roll out. That was when that same smell hit me and sent me back to that smoky little kitchen on that farm with the soft rain hitting the tin roof.

This blog had been going on for a little while at the time I had rediscovered wood smoke and rain and I was searching for something I could call, “my favorite scent”. Well, I found it a long time ago–I just didn’t know it yet. Then I rediscovered it one morning on a rainy day in Canada. Now if only someone could bottle that stuff!

Expanding My Horizons

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With my pile of samples and pages of  review notes running out–along with the dwindling funds in my wallet–I’m going to start taking this blog on a more personal journey and posting a mixture of entries in addition to fragrance reviews. I’ll always be smelling and writing about it in review form, of course, just from now on you’ll be getting a bit more personal experiences from me–most will be perfume related, and some not.