About the author: By profession Vanessa Musson is a freelance market researcher, specializing in industrial products. Her work involves a lot of overseas travel, to places as varied as chemical plants and wind farms, oil fields and cotton fields, stately homes and sewers. In her free time Vanessa writes the blog Bonkers about Perfume, which combines lighthearted perfume reviews with zany travelogues and the occasional post on beauty products for that unfortunate crossover condition of “problem mature skin”.
I am a relative newcomer to perfume: for most of my life I was largely indifferent to scent, occasionally succumbing to the heavy sell tactics of sales assistants at airport duty frees, and politely wearing whatever anyone might think to give me as a gift. Not very often, mind, for when I was struck down out of the blue by “sudden onset perfume mania” in 2008, I had just one rancid bottle of Estée Lauder Intuition to my name, barely touched in the seven years I had owned it.
But all that changed, and within weeks I went from zero to raging “fumehead”, and I’ve never looked back. 18 months on, I decided to start a blog. For the previous eight years I had written a humorous column for a business magazine, based on my misadventures on overseas work trips. Its sudden closure prompted me to seek out another creative writing outlet, and my newfound interest in fragrance provided the perfect vehicle. Bonkers about Perfume was born. And now another two years or more have passed, and here you have it: 5 things you might wish to consider if you are thinking of starting a perfume blog of your own…
Do you have anything new to add to the conversation?
A while back, there was a post on Grain de Musc about the recent proliferation of perfume blogs. Denyse used the colourful phrase: “metastasising like crazy”, which troubled me at the time, though I don’t think the analogy between newbie bloggers and rampant tumours was meant to be taken too literally…
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Posted by Alyssa
on
17 January 2012
Surely the fact that peak citrus season falls smack in the middle of winter is a sign the cosmos is not entirely without mercy. Just when we’ve thrown away our holiday trappings, the supermarkets brim with flashes of color. Even the humblest corner bodega has good oranges right now. My amazing local grocery store is having its annual citrus festival, and the produce section is crammed with so many exotic varieties that I brought my camera with me on my last shopping trip.
The fruit was piled high in fragrant chaos — pale chartreuse pomelos the size of melons nestled alongside orange-red kishu tangerines no bigger than a kiss. White, pink, red and yellow grapefruits kept company with a dozen different varieties of oranges, including sour Seville oranges begging to be roasted with duck, and blood oranges with their deep maroon flesh and Cara Cara oranges that are supposed to taste of raspberries but tasted, to me, exactly like a sweet-sour Pixie Stick. Not only were there kumquats (and I ask you, is there a more adorable fruit than the kumquat?) there were limequats and mandarinquats (which I keep wanting to call manquats, though I can see why they didn’t). There were real live bergamots, round as cue balls, and wrinkled, deflated yuzus, both of them smelling — when I dragged a nail across their peels — twice as heavenly as all the teas and candies and perfumes that feature them…
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Posted by Robin
on
9 January 2012
The Maryland organic farmer is suffering from an infestation of stink bugs—crop-consuming pests emitting the odor of cilantro mixed with burned rubber and dirty socks. They began destroying his fields of peppers and tomatoes in 2010. Now, they've invaded his Adamstown home, where Mr. Biggins crushes them by hand and has trained his English Shepherd, Coadee, to eat them.
— Got stink bugs? Read more at Out of Odor: Offensive-Smelling Bugs Put U.S. Farmers on the Defensive at the Wall Street Journal.
Posted by Robin
on
28 December 2011
We are having problems with the user log ins this morning. Several users have logged in with their own user name and password, and the system has shown them as someone else.
Hopefully it will get fixed soon!
I'm closing comments on the contest until we get it sorted out, and I'll leave it open for an extra day at the end.
Update: the problem should be fixed, sorry about that!
Posted by Robin
on
3 October 2011
I have broken the widget-thingie on the right column that lets you log into your reader account so that you can comment. Depending on what browser you are using, you might or might not see it. Sorry. I am working on it. When it's fixed, this post will disappear. Meantime, you should still be able to log in from the comments section of each article.
Update: and I'm also seeing pop up ads on this site that should not be here. Apologies, I will get everything fixed as soon as I can.
Another update: well, this day is gone, but things are sort of mostly fixed. There is a login widget again, although it doesn't look right and I probably won't get it to look right until next week. And the pop up ads, so far as I know, are taken care of. It's too late to start the Monday Mail, so that will appear on Tuesday, and Angela's post that should have appeared today will now be on Thursday. That means the Damage poll is tomorrow, see you then!
