Dog Perfume, What?

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I have a friend, well-meaning, if somewhat misguided who was taking care of a particularly rank dog. The evidence of the smell itself inspired me to advise said friend on multiple occasions to take his dog to the vet when he proclaimed he had no idea why Sparky smelled so bad.

One day, said friend asked me if they made perfumes for dogs–you know, because they make perfume for everybody and everything else. And, he reasons, everything else is scented and the dog was smelling worse and worse. Sparky, to his credit, gave my friend a big floppy dog smile and wagged his tail at the suggestion that he tried some Eau de Mutt.

Perfumes for pets exist. I didn’t tell my friend this because there are a few things I don’t believe in scenting: New born babies and animals being two of those things. It didn’t surprise me much that pet perfume or fragrances formulated for pets exist out there. What did surprise me was that anyone would spray perfume on their pets to begin with–and often times, these people wouldn’t think twice about squirting Fido with a bottle of Britney Spears Fantasy, never mind a supposed specially formulated pet fragrance.

Now, I’ve never had the urge to spray down my canines or felines with scent whether it was made for them or not. Here’s why: your dogs and cats have a significantly keener sense of smell than you do. My dog could smell coconut oil whenever I moisturized my hands with it. To me, the coconut oil didn’t smell like anything. Imagine how strong perfume smells in the bottle and magnify that by 100x. Imagine that time someone who bathed in fragrance walked by you and it felt like they were ramming their perfume down your throat and that’s why I wouldn’t spray my pet with perfume.

While you might appreciate smelling like your juice of choice, Fido probably wouldn’t like it much on himself. It’ll likely irritate his nose, possibly irritate his skin, annoy him, and who knows what else. Perhaps the adverse effects could be even more serious. Besides, a fruity floral scented dog just sounds silly to me.

So please, keep the perfume off of your pets.

As for what was wrong with Sparky? Turns out he needed some dental work done and a good bath after a trip to the vet. Now he smells like a dog should. No perfume would have solved that.

Scented New Years Resolutions

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I didn’t set any goals with relation to perfume last year, but there were a few things I never got around to in 2012 that I’d like to try and accomplish in 2013 with relation to my New Years Resolutions.

Shalimar

Shalimar

1) Get a hold of a vintage Guerlain Shalimar. I’ve wanted one for the longest time. I especially think the bottle is beautiful and I’ve put it off long enough.

2) Try more Aftelier fragrances. I loved the few I did try, but I haven’t been anywhere near close to  the full range.

3) Try more from the Histoires de Parfums line. I know it’s a gimmick, but I love the gimmick and I liked what I already tried.

4) Revisit Soivohle. It’s been too long since I had anything from this house.

5) Get back into the habit of wearing something every day. I’ve been somewhat slacking this past year, sometimes going days without trying any scent or wearing any scent. I always felt like it was a wasted opportunity on the days I went without.

6) Visit the Guerlain boutique and see what shiny new things they have there.

Those should be easy enough to do. In truth, my News Years Resolutions list is mighty long for 2013 so in addition to the six above, I’ve got quite a lot of work to do. In the mean time, we’ll back to a regular schedule next week.

Anya’s Annual Winter Solstice Giveaway Event

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I received an email from Anya over at Anya’s Garden regarding her Winter Solstice Giveaway Event and thought I’d pass the news along.

Anya is starting a new annual tradition on her blog. She has long been fascinated with this time of year, when, as a child, she noticed the cold, dark days of Wintertime Philadelphia were made tolerable by the festive lights of Hanukkah and Christmas. In her neighborhood, Christmas lights were kept lit in windows until New Years Eve, brightening the dark streets and making the cold more tolerable.

This year, Anya is inaugurating a Winter Solstice Event on her new blog, hosted on her own website. The former blog site didn’t allow her to see the email addresses of people who left comments, and some giveaway prizes went unclaimed when the winners couldn’t be notified. Now, everyone will be notified immediately after their name is randomly chosen.

The celebration of lights will begin on the shortest day of the year, December 21st, and continue through the lengthening days with a giveaway every day until December 31st. Anya will also write about personal, perfumery, mystical and practical events that have shaped her in her art and life. It will be a lovely journey that she hopes to share with you, and with the giveaway gifts, pay it forward to the community of customers and natural perfume lovers who have helped build her businesses.

You can register at the blog to receive updates on posts, or subscribe to the RSS feeds for posts and/or comments by visiting her blog.

Happy Winter Solstice!

The Story of Fragrances

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Here’s a decently-sized video for a Monday morning. It’s a basic guide to fragrance that features some perfumers who talk about how their careers got started and how perfumes approach creating a fragrance. There’s also some mention related to the materials used in perfume, the regulations and restrictions of scent components.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atT51oBrbwg&w=560&h=315]

Love them, hate them, agree with them, disagree with them, or indifferent to them, I personally liked seeing the glimpses into scent labs.

Overheard at the Perfume Counter

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I think it’s a given that perfume addicts visit perfume counters a lot. I used to stop by the perfume counter on a weekly basis, and while I was exploring new scents and scents I hadn’t tried yet, I overhear a few things. These things get filed away in the back of my mind, but end up accumulating when they’re heard often enough. Here’s a few common comments:

“What are the coffee beans for?”
I’m not sure who decided to start leaving coffee beans around for people to smell when they were trying on perfumes to “clear” their noses. It works for some, not for others. I have never partaken in the coffee bean sniffing. I personally prefer removing myself from the smell center and take in a few deep breathes of fresh air. Nothing clears the smells out of my nose better than fresh air.

“You should buy the EDP. It’s a higher concentration of oils so it’ll smell better.”
Many EDT and EDPs of the supposedly same fragrance do not smell the same, and I’m not talking about the “strength” of the fragrance either. The differences can be minor or staggering. Try both and decide which works better for you instead of just assuming the EDP is better.

Coffee Beans on Foil

Coffee Beans on Foil by Dino Quinzani

“Don’t put it on your skin because the smell will change. Use the tester strip so you know what it really smells like.”
Odd how many times I heard this one. If you’re looking to buy a perfume to wear, wouldn’t you want to know how the fragrance does on your skin? Perfume sprayed onto paper strips does not fully reflect how that fragrance will behave on you (another reason why I hate paper samples). So if you really want to know if a fragrance is going to work for you, you should try it on yourself and the use the paper strip only to make sure that the smell isn’t disagreeable before you spray yourself with it.

“Perfume is for girls. Cologne is for boys.”
Fragrances do not have a gender and no one is bound to wear a certain “genre” of fragrances because of their gender, age, personality, appearance, etc.

“This perfume starts out okay, then it gets gross. What’s wrong with me?”
Give the fragrance a while to develop on your skin before you buy a bottle. Fragrances change throughout the day, a perfume you might love on initial application might not be so great a few hours in. It happens all the time. There’s nothing wrong with you.

“If your breath smells, try spraying perfume into your mouth.”
Okay, this one isn’t common. I only heard it once, and I can’t even begin to tell you how bad an idea this is. Don’t spray perfume into your mouth, up your nose, into your eyes–in fact, keep perfume out of all your orifices. Not only are you spraying something that you shouldn’t be consuming into your mouth, it also tastes terrible.

“You should shake the bottle before you spray to mix the oils up.”
Please don’t shake your perfume. And please, don’t shake the bottles at the stores. You are not doing them any good. Perfume does not need you to mix it up before you use it.

What things have you commonly heard at the perfume counter? The stranger, the better!

Photo Credit: Dino Quinzani

Products L’Occitane Should Turn Into Perfumes

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I love L’Occitane. I started this whole perfume craziness because I ran out of excuses for owning so many bath-related products and L’Occitane’s products were always some of my favorites. They also sell perfumes, but I’m not too big of a fan of many of those. So it struck me as odd that L’Occitane wouldn’t turn some of these products into full on fragrances.

L’Occitane Aromachologie Repairing Shampoo & Conditioner
A gorgeous blend of florals and herbs that scents my hair for the better part of a day. I love washing my hair every time I get to use this. Unfortunately, I don’t have much of it left and need to order more–and it’s a bit pricey for shampoo. So if L’Occitane ever got around to bottling this scent in a perfume, I’ll probably stock up like mad.

Bonne Mere Milk Soap

I wish my house smelled like this soap all the time.

L’Occitane Almond Milk Concentrate
I know, it essentially just smells like almond extract, but the lotion portion of the mix helps add this fluffy quality to the fragrance. Or maybe it’s just all in my head. Whatever it is, bottle up that fluffy almond smell, L’Occitane!

L’Occitane Bonne Mere Soap Milk
I went a little crazy one year and have about 20 or so of these bars of soaps lying around. At one point, I managed to scent the entire house like Bonne Mere Soap because I’d carefully distribute a bar here and there. I’ve been using them up though, but I still love the smell and wouldn’t mind it in spray form at all.

And just to mix things up a little, I know a lot of people who share the same love of Moroccanoil’s Shampoo and Conditioner’s smell.

Moroccanoil Shampoo & Conditioner
This reminds me of clean amber, florals, and a touch of woods with a little bit of nuttiness. A lot of people describe the scent to be just vanilla, but vanilla alone doesn’t sum up the creamy woodsy, nutty, amber fragrance I get whenever I use this shampoo. If there was a perfume that smelled like this, I’d probably wear it quite often! There’s been a couple of recommendations to try Etro’s Shaal Nur for a Moroccanoil equivalent. I know what’s going in my next decant order.

 

Don’t Worry, They Have a Scent For That

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“Don’t worry, they have a scent for that” has become something like a catchphrase for me. There’s a bit of a game my friends play where they go away and think of the strangest things that someone might want to smell like and come to me telling me they want to smell like it. Then I spent some time researching and getting frustrated. I know it’s just a joke and they don’t really mean for me to find and test these things, but it’s the principle of the thing. A lot of the time I have no answer because their requests are akin to, “I want to smell like that awkward feeling you get when you don’t know whether you should help someone or not then by the time you decide that person already solved their problem”.

It Exists

It Exists.

Sometimes, I get easy requests. This is a post about three of those requests.

“I want to smell like bacon.”
I want to know if people say they want to smell like bacon because they read Perfumes: The Guide by Turin and Sanchez. Or if they picked it up elsewhere. Whatever the reason, I get asked what smells like bacon a lot. I get asked so often, that I’ve begun to wonder if my choice for bacon perfume is really the best choice. Fargginay Bacōn, smells just like bacon. Probably a really obvious choice for perfumistas, but for everyone else, finding out that a bacon perfume does exist surprises, pleases and bewilders them.

“I want to smell like a balloon animal at the carnival.”
My friend had thought he was being rather smart with this one. Afterall, who in their right mind would want to smell like rubber and sugar? Too bad I had already experienced this one and he can go out and get himself a bottle of Gucci Rush and bathe in the stuff for that sweet rubbery smell.

“I want to smell like the garage.”
I get a lot of smart comments from men who say perfume isn’t for them unless it smells like motor oil, gasoline, or the garage. Thankfully they don’t have to look very hard. Classic Fahrenheit by Dior smells of gasoline and reminds me quite a bit of being in the garage. Though word has it that the reformulated version is weaksauce.

So there, three things I get told people want to smell like. And three rebuttals. I don’t have a suggestion for everything though, and I’m still stumped every time someone tells me they want to smell like “old socks stuffed in a box and left in the attic”.

Adding Niche to a YouTube Fragrance Collection

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One of my guilty indulgences at lunch time during a work day is watching YouTube videos of perfume collections. There are thousands out there, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say all of them are starting to blend together. I prefer the videos where the person gives me a reason as to why they own a particular perfume. A few life stories are intermingled among the collections. A clear description of the fragrances they own. And of course, if one has a massive collection of niche fragrances, my ears often perk up.

John William Godward - The New Perfume 1914

John William Godward – The New Perfume 1914

There’s something about knowing what someone’s fragrance collection looks like that helps me form an idea of what other scents they would like and what kind of similarities in fragrance choices I have in common with them. YouTube features a large population of young women who fit into my demographic or younger. They often have big collections of perfumes. And from what I’ve seen, I can draw a few conclusions:
1) Most of them love sweet, candy-like, floral perfumes.
2) “Smells good”, “smells fruity”, “sweet and happy” are words often used to describe their collections.
3) I see the same four or five fragrances in everyone’s collection.

So it’s hard to see how someone with a big collection of mainstream fragrances can get a decent recommendation these days when they have most of what they want and so do most people they go to for perfume advice. So for all those folks who already have Miss Dior Cherie, Coco Mademoiselle, Marc Jacobs Daisy, Britney Spears Fantasy, and Viva la Juicy here are some niche, harder-to-find, more unique recommendations for your collections:

Aroma M Geisha Pink
Sampled during one of my sweet tooth phases, Geisha Pink smells like sugared flowers and fluffy, puffy vanilla pastries. It screams “girly” and if you’re looking for an alternative to the sugar rush of Viva la Juicy or Vera Wang Princess, Geisha Pink has you covered. It’s priced at $55 for a roll-on of perfume oil.

Annick Goutal Eau de Charlotte
Eau de Charlotte is a beautiful full-bodied berry scent that will make you think you’re wading through gourmet jam. It’s a more natural interpretation of blackberries with a wonderful base of vanilla and cocoa. Perfume for the person who wants something fruity and sweet but hates the apple jolly rancher smell of DKNY’s Be Delicious. Eau de Charlotte is $128 for 100ml.

Calypso Christiane Celle Bellini
Bellini is my answer to a spring, summer light fruity floral. It’s got the basic building blocks of a mainstream fruity floral but does things in a much more delicate manner and with a flare of understated sophistication. Bellini is a good alternative to most fruity floral Bath and Body Works or Victoria’s Secret scents. At $60 for 100ml, it’s not too bad.

Il Profumo Musc Bleu
Musc Bleu might scare some way because they’re tempted to say, “Musk? Ew, I hate musky fragrances”. But don’t judge the musk before you try it. Musc Bleu is actually the opposite of what one would consider, “musky” in that it’s a bright, clean, and soft perfume with a nice light dry down and it might just change your mind about the word, “musk”. Musc Bleu is $110 for 50ml or $165 for 100ml.

Penahaligons Amaranthine
Looking to smell a little tropical without resorting to lathering yourself in coconut? Amaranthine is a lush tropical perfume with a rather prominent banana leaf top note and a very complex composition. Possibly too complex if all you’re looking for is an easy tropical, but if you want to sample something with a lot of personality and challenge your nose then give this a try. Amaranthine is available for $135 for 100ml.

Going niche for me has been something of an adventure. I still have a collection of fairly mainstream fragrances and a lot of mainstream offerings are fabulous, but the niche market has been rather nice to me too and it wouldn’t hurt to start investigating the niche side of things–especially when you already have most of what you want from big perfume houses with big perfume marketing budgets.

Some Fragrance Collection Videos I Enjoyed:
Deathscythe77 – Parfums Noir II
BaptismbyFragrance – Niche Perfume Part1
KatiePuckrikSmells – Collection Part 2