(no subject)

[cleolinda]

Having 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):

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!"

"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.]

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.

Anyway.

(P.S. "Oisín" 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).

Comments

[morganwolf.livejournal.com]

Lawks, it all sounds so GOOD. They should definitely sell little scratch-n'-sniff sheets. This is one of those things-- like, I've always wanted to produce my own makeup, and clothes, and jewelry, and stuff like that based on the characters from literature and mythology and such that I've always loved. And just the other day I was thinking, I wish I knew how to blend perfume, because I'd spend half my time coming up with stuff you could wear that smelled like the forest on a rainy day, or my garden when it's snowing, or a scent that was the equivalent of looking at a sunrise.

Dang it. You've just given me something new to spend money I don't have on.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

I've always wanted to blend my own scents, too. I would love to make perfumes for book or movie characters, weirdly enough.

[morganwolf.livejournal.com]

Okay, good, then I'm not the only one.

My mom gave me a perfume-blending kit when I was younger that I played with all the time, making all these really stinky smells and forcing Mommy to try them. She was pretty brutal in her reviews.

The whole perfume-making thing is a lot harder than you'd think. I guess I just don't have the nose for it, but it's nice to imagine the perfect components of a scent for, say, Eowyn, Delirium, or Artemis.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think it would be really fun to hook up with someone who *does* know how to blend, and just contribute the ideas. Like, "I think Eowyn should smell like wildflowers, rain, and a little bit of leather." Or something.

[morganwolf.livejournal.com]

Haha, yeah! Oh, the scents I could create with a talented accomplice! Being a quasi-SCAdian, I could probably find someone... somewhere... who knows how to do it. You can find people who know how to do *everything* in the SCA.

*runs off to look*