Posted by Erin
on
27 November 2009
My guess is that most obsessive perfume samplers have the equivalent of Robin’s purgatory basket. As someone who suffers from chronic indecision, I have a large collection of scents I just can’t decide whether I like or not, separated into a series of elegant “snack-sized” plastic freezer bags. Every couple of months I retrieve all of these baggies and place them on my bed, along with two larger plastic tubs, which house, respectively, fragrances in the current rotation (scents in good standing) and samples that I see every couple of months when I perform this ritual (the tub of no return). I spread the contents of the purgatory bags over my duvet and begin picking through the vials and atomizers, sorting them into piles: judgement rendered, cult favorites that need one more try, scents that have somehow eluded skin-testing. Like Robin, I always end up with a pile of scents that stubbornly resist categorization and tubbing. As my spouse looks on with bafflement and mild disapproval, I return these fragrances to the twilight, limbo land of the snack bag.
The firmer, sterner souls among you probably agree with my husband. With multiple new fragrances being launched every single day, why does anyone bother trying to puzzle out their complicated relationship with one? Well, my problem is that I often prefer the interesting to the simply likable…
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Posted by Erin
on
2 October 2009
I come from a family of what you might call theatre people. In university, my mother starred in a number plays, including a nationally reviewed production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which featured my mother — smoking! cursing! — as Martha as well as a young Martin Short as Nick. After school, she was accepted to train at Canada’s largest classical repertory theatre, but she decided to go to teacher’s college instead. As a drama teacher one of her most enthusiastic students has been my middle brother, who has acted and written for the stage and is now pursuing his doctorate studying Modern American theatre. Since she retired, Mom mounts annual plays or musical revues, often with a cast involving sixty or more residents of her small town. Though my father, youngest brother and I are seldom assigned lines, we are always called upon to prompt, to manage props, spotlights and sound boards, or to play corpses.
It is time to admit that we do not have “presence”. I don’t think any member of my family has ever attempted to sweep majestically into a room… unless the entrance was preparation for a pratfall. (Both of my brothers have a talent for slapstick.) I will never be the woman Angela conjured out of Jean Patou’s Que-sais je?: “elegant, with a difficult background and maybe bipolar tendencies”. There are days I am relieved by this, of course, and especially the bipolar part. Occasionally, however, it would be nice to feel a bit like Greta Garbo, and a little less like somebody from Waiting for Guffman. One of the wonderful things about fragrance is that I can scent myself as if I am the star of my own life…
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Posted by Erin
on
14 August 2009
The first and only time I went to Italy I was sixteen, and on a six-week trip of Europe with a large group of girls who had fundraised for the trip through Girl Guides (Scouts). Using the blitzkrieg method of Old World sightseeing favored by many generations of North American young people, we “did” Italy by spending a day-and-a-half in Venice. It was high summer and with the callousness of youth, I wrote Venice off with a few lines in my travel diary: “It’s like a museum covered in pigeon poop. The canals smell of sewage, and there is a haze hanging over the water. No oilies as of yet.” This last bit was because our uniforms apparently made us look like an enormous gaggle of young stewardesses and so we attracted camps of hopeful, slick fellows most places we went. Despite their absence in Venice, I came away with an impression of the place that might have turned me into the sort of traveler who discouraged Kevin. The recent garbage strike in my hometown of Toronto has made me realize you can catch a city on a bad day (or month) — but even in 1993, years before my perfume obsession began, I was hypersensitive to smells, good and bad. As far as I was concerned, Italy stunk.
It was puzzling, though, that my parents kept returning there. “Table wines are cheaper than Coke,” my father explained, when I asked why they kept going back. (Perhaps this brief, thrift-related response helps clarify that my parents are not of Italian descent and therefore returning to visit the mother country; Scotland is the land of our fathers.) Since my parents are not enthusiastic photographers, I tried to determine the attraction of this region listening to stories of their travels…
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Posted by Erin
on
12 June 2009
There is a story in our family about my first grade parent-teacher interview. The excellent, jolly woman who taught my class reported I was doing well, but confessed to my mother that she experienced considerable anxiety when introducing what she called “controversial topics”. Mom, a teacher herself, did not ask which first grade topics these could possibly be, and she did not encourage the woman to elaborate. She was already familiar with what my brothers later named “the squinty face”. She knew well my favorite phrase: “Now, wait a minute…” (No doubt this was preferable to a tic I developed later: “You mean to tell me…?!”) Most importantly, both my parents had learned to avoid being drawn into discussions on, say, the vagaries of English spelling, the habits and duties of Santa Claus, or the basic road safety rules a young lady of six might be expected to follow. For years, I described myself as a contrarian. Now Christopher Hitchens has tried to make it hip to be a young contrarian, and I’ve decided to start taking popular, rather non-committal stances on current issues. It’s hard to get rid of the squinting, though.
Old habits die hard, then, and in the interests of both truth and disagreeing with people, I have found myself defending Perfumes: The Guide on points of accuracy and style in various online forums. Still, this sentence from Luca Turin’s review of Caldey Island Lavender gives me pause: “Lavender is summer wind made smell, and the best lavender compositions are, in my opinion, the ones from which other elements are absent, and only endlessly blue daylight air remains.” Well, despite having never sampled the Caldey Island Lavender, I must disagree. (I have found that to properly enter into the spirit of arguing, you must be prepared to dispense right away with proper research.) Leaving aside the blue air — surely wind can’t be blue? And air is merely stationary wind? — I fail to see how Guerlain Jicky would fit into his best lavenders category. And any best lavenders category that excludes Jicky cuts no mustard with me. Let us discuss a list of other surpassingly wonderful complex lavenders, just to be difficult…
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Posted by Erin
on
15 May 2009
Perfume fanatics are seldom short on strong opinions. When confronted with a clean, sweet musk or a fruity floral, your average fragrance blog regular will enumerate the many reasons why such a scent could actually be considered an act of evil — and yet I still sense a frustration in between the lines of many comments, as if the writer would like to communicate entirely in caps, an Owen Meany of smell. When this same average commenter is confronted with a new cologne, however, there is an odd tendency to damn with faint praise. Some fragrance freaks seem to consider lighter, fresher, more straight-forward fragrances to be a little too easy. Summer weather sometimes forces us to resort to tonics, you see; as a perfumista, one should not publicly admit to wearing cologne without repeatedly referencing high temperatures or similar trying circumstances. Colognes are admired primarily for their effectiveness, rather than their beauty.
I do not deny a susceptibility to this type of thinking. Even though most of my favorite fragrances sit in the “Fresh” and “Crisp” categories of Michael Edward’s scent classification system, I wince when a counter assistant descends on my spritzing and asks: “So, you’re looking for something fresh?” It scandalizes me that this person does not instantly recognize I am a woman of rare taste and knowledge, a connoisseur not prone to indulge in whatever plebeian Eau de Calone he or she is thinking about selling me…
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