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Mar. 22nd, 2005 04:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cleolindaHaving one of those days--not one of those days, just one of those days where everything is sort of... placidly off-kilter? Like, I burned my waffles and I couldn't work this morning because we had violent thunderstorms and my head hurts and my jaw aches, but... eh. I'm not real torn up about it. I'ma go make some hot chocolate and read more of The Scarlet Letter for tomorrow, and maybe Braveheart will go better after dinner.
A conversation elsewhere wandered off into perfumes--well, essential oil blends, rather; I for one can't wear commercial perfumes because they give me massive headaches--and I was recommended this site, and now I want to buy EVERYTHING. Which, you know, given that I don't have a lot of spare cash lying around is kind of a bad thing. But you can get six little sample vials, so I'm going to pick out some of their Shakespearean "Illyria" blends. It's driving me crazy, though, because I can't summon an olfactory image of what these blends smell like, so I can't choose. (You guyyyyyys! Can't you make up scratch-and-sniff samplers? Jeeeeeez.) I just know that I like light scents, flowers and fruit, particularly citrus fruit, but that my favorite scent is a tiny bottle of either apple or cherry blossom Hello Kitty perfume that I've had for twenty years. Shut up. I also wear jasmine or tangerine oil sometimes. That, and I read Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, and that first perfume that Grenouille re-mixes for the guy in Paris, when he's an apprentice? I think it was called "Amor et Psyche"? I can't remember exactly how it was described, but I remember thinking, "Damn, that perfume was, like, made for me." Except that it was fictional. Woe.
Wait, I found it (severely pared down):
Anyway.
(P.S. "OisÃn" benefits Neil Gaiman's Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. That's just... weird. Like, a "randomly running into someone you know... on vacation in Tokyo" kind of weird.)
ETA: Okay, I was on the Wanderlust (cities) page, and I noticed this blend:
R'LYEH. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn. The sunken city of the Great God Cthulhu. A hellishly dark aquatic scent, evocative of fathomless oceanic deeps, the mysteries of madness buried under crushing black waters, and the brooding eternal evil that lies beneath the waves.
It's... they... I have to buy this.
ETA 2: Have decided on Neo-Tokyo, Tamora, Titania, Persephone, Siren, and Jezebel for my first sample set. (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dark_geisha's reviews were a big help.) The awful thing is that I know I'll be buying a new set each month at this rate (Katharina! Vinland! Brisingamen! Endymion! Succubus! Florence! The Hanging Gardens! New Orleans! Glasgow! Kurukulla! Kitsune-Tsuki! Bordello! Kyoto! ARRRRGHHHHH PRETTY SMELLS).
A conversation elsewhere wandered off into perfumes--well, essential oil blends, rather; I for one can't wear commercial perfumes because they give me massive headaches--and I was recommended this site, and now I want to buy EVERYTHING. Which, you know, given that I don't have a lot of spare cash lying around is kind of a bad thing. But you can get six little sample vials, so I'm going to pick out some of their Shakespearean "Illyria" blends. It's driving me crazy, though, because I can't summon an olfactory image of what these blends smell like, so I can't choose. (You guyyyyyys! Can't you make up scratch-and-sniff samplers? Jeeeeeez.) I just know that I like light scents, flowers and fruit, particularly citrus fruit, but that my favorite scent is a tiny bottle of either apple or cherry blossom Hello Kitty perfume that I've had for twenty years. Shut up. I also wear jasmine or tangerine oil sometimes. That, and I read Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, and that first perfume that Grenouille re-mixes for the guy in Paris, when he's an apprentice? I think it was called "Amor et Psyche"? I can't remember exactly how it was described, but I remember thinking, "Damn, that perfume was, like, made for me." Except that it was fictional. Woe.
Wait, I found it (severely pared down):
The perfume was disgustingly good. It was fresh, but not frenetic. It was floral, without being unctuous. It possessed depth, a splendid, abiding, voluptuous, rich brown depth--and yet was not in the least excessive or bombastic. "It has a cheerful character, it's charming, it's like a melody, puts you in a good mood at once!"And that's why I love this book, because it's about chasing something that the English language is spectacularly deficient at expressing: the sense of smell. I mean, think about it: you can say something "smells like" an existing object, but most of the adjectives we use for scent are stolen from other senses--touch, taste, sight. Amor et Psyche is "not frenetic," it's not "unctuous," it has "depth," it's not "bombastic"--but none of these words actually describe smell. They describe motion, texture, sound--we just borrow words like these as metaphors for what smell is like. And just the way that Grenouille chases the perfect perfume, so do writers attempt to pin down scent with words at all.
"It's not very good, this Amor and Psyche, it's bad, there's too much bergamot and too much rosemary and not enough attar of roses."
"What else?"
"Orange blossom, lime, clove, musk, jasmine, alcohol, and something that I don't know the name of, there, you see, right there!" [Grenouille points to a bottle of storax.]
Anyway.
(P.S. "OisÃn" benefits Neil Gaiman's Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. That's just... weird. Like, a "randomly running into someone you know... on vacation in Tokyo" kind of weird.)
ETA: Okay, I was on the Wanderlust (cities) page, and I noticed this blend:
R'LYEH. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn. The sunken city of the Great God Cthulhu. A hellishly dark aquatic scent, evocative of fathomless oceanic deeps, the mysteries of madness buried under crushing black waters, and the brooding eternal evil that lies beneath the waves.
It's... they... I have to buy this.
ETA 2: Have decided on Neo-Tokyo, Tamora, Titania, Persephone, Siren, and Jezebel for my first sample set. (
dark_geisha's reviews were a big help.) The awful thing is that I know I'll be buying a new set each month at this rate (Katharina! Vinland! Brisingamen! Endymion! Succubus! Florence! The Hanging Gardens! New Orleans! Glasgow! Kurukulla! Kitsune-Tsuki! Bordello! Kyoto! ARRRRGHHHHH PRETTY SMELLS).
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Date: 2005-03-22 10:40 pm (UTC)I also thought lickable television would when I was a kid, like the lickable wallpaper in Willy Wonka.
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Date: 2005-03-22 10:41 pm (UTC)Hell, I'd just be happy to pay for a scratch-and-sniff catalogue of all their blends that they could *mail* to me.
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Date: 2005-03-22 10:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 10:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2005-03-22 10:44 pm (UTC)Are you too sensitive to body washes from B&BWorks or just perfume?
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Date: 2005-03-22 10:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2005-03-22 10:45 pm (UTC)Dang it. You've just given me something new to spend money I don't have on.
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Date: 2005-03-22 10:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2005-03-22 10:46 pm (UTC)I like that passage in Post Captain by Patrick O'Brian where Stephen Maturin muses on smell and how the lack of descriptive words for it is the reason smells with a personal significance (I'm so sorry for these inadvertent double-entendres) affect us strongly every time we experience them.
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Date: 2005-03-23 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 10:47 pm (UTC)You may want to try the Mad Tea Party oils actually. Cheshire Cat for sure is a very citrusy scent, and I found both The Unicorn and The Dormouse to be lovely, light scents. If you don't want to wait, you can buy imps off people in the forums (http://www.bpal.org). People there would also be more than helpful to recommend scents for you :-P
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Date: 2005-03-22 10:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2005-03-22 10:49 pm (UTC)And now I want to sniff things. Drat.
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Date: 2005-03-22 10:51 pm (UTC)I haven't read Perfume in ages. I should dig it out.
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Date: 2005-03-22 10:53 pm (UTC)I want like everything on that site now.
Poo. Time to break into the money saved up for a car payment. =D
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Date: 2005-03-22 10:53 pm (UTC)I have not yet succumbed to the allure of their nifty sounding names. I'm sure I will some day. *grin*
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Date: 2005-03-22 11:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2005-03-22 11:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 11:20 pm (UTC)*blinks at R'lyeh* Yeah, I gotta know what that smells like too...
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Date: 2005-03-22 11:22 pm (UTC)Holy cow. My husband loves the Call of Cthulhu RPG to the point that the night before our wedding, he and the groomsmen did not have the traditional strip-club bachelor party, but instead stayed up playing investigators going insane due to excessive Mythos exposure. I'm not sure I want to smell like dark aquatic evil, but...
So you must have seen this (http://www.logicalcreativity.com/jon/plush/01.html), right?
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Date: 2005-03-22 11:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 11:23 pm (UTC)My latest favorite from them is Jolly Roger and Baron Samedi mixed together. Voodoo pirates...it's perfect for me!
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Date: 2005-03-22 11:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 11:35 pm (UTC)-another new BPAL junkie
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Date: 2005-03-22 11:45 pm (UTC)The person who comes up with that will be rich for the rest of their days.
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Date: 2005-03-22 11:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 11:45 pm (UTC)Can't wait for Jolly Roger and Zombi.
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Date: 2005-03-23 12:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-23 12:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-23 12:20 am (UTC)Damn, if only I had been aware of this blend back when I was in first year, I might have been able to scare my ex into never approaching me in the first place. Damn!
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Date: 2005-03-23 12:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2005-03-23 12:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-23 12:58 am (UTC)Same here, including other people's perfume in my unfortunate case; I've always wondered what the common chemical is that triggers that reaction, because I'd love to go around stomping on perfume companies until they found a way to do without it. (Formaldehyde, maybe? Some sort of aldehyde, anyway, I think...) Bugs the hell out of me because everyone's so sure I'm imagining it.
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Date: 2005-03-23 01:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-23 01:03 am (UTC)I wore too much of it the first time, though, and it made my nose run like CRAZY.
That site would really be taxing my wallet if I hadn't already blown my "mad money" for next week or so.
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Date: 2005-03-23 01:10 am (UTC)Aromatherapy gone horribly
rightwrong. :)no subject
Date: 2005-03-23 01:17 am (UTC)(This is going to sound weird, but my personal Grenouille was Ewan McGregor. I think it's because he can look so plain and unassuming.)
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Date: 2005-03-23 01:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-23 03:41 am (UTC)