Any of my Facebook friends could tell you that I love perfume. It will pop up in a status at least 2-3 times a month, depending if I've discovered a new scented gem recently. It's been that way for a long time now, and I am not afraid to let my Freaky-Fragrance-Flag fly!
Some of my earliest memories are of being at my Grandma Rachel's house, playing dress-up with her clothes and clip-on earrings. She always had a bottle of Avon Charisma, along with samples of others. I can't remember how it smelled, not precisely. A quick Internet search will yield a list of notes: top notes of aldehydes, bergamot, coriander, heart notes of carnation, jasmine, rose, ylang-ylang and a base of sandalwood, amber, civet, musk, tonka bean and styrax. If we were to be able to smell this now, the typical reaction would be "Uck! Old-lady perfume!" I certainly would have had that reaction a few years ago, my nose having been trained to love CLEAN! fragrances, fruity-florals, and big gourmands (think cupcakes). We'll come back to Charisma a bit later. For now, step forward to the late nineties.
Green tea perfumes were big. Calvin Klein's One was the big unisex scent, and it was a breath of fresh air after the 80s Poison, Opium and Obsession. If memory serves, Cool Water also debuted during the nineties, but I could be off there. I was sixteen and just getting into makeup when I received a sample of Clinique Happy from somewhere. If you haven't worn it or smelled it, I can tell you it's a bright citrusy-floral fragrance, perfect for spring and summer since it has no "dark" notes to it whatsoever. I still have a bottle today, half-used, and it still reminds me of being a teenager back before the Internet got big. I also loved Tommy Girl, another fruity floral that also had a nice spicy tea note to it. Those were my go-tos for many years.
"But where is the Cat-Piss I was promised, O Great and Powerful Blog-Mistress?" I'm getting to it, Hypothetical Readers. To get there, we have to enter the world of Niche Fragrance. You can only rarely find Niche perfume at department stores, so not many people even know it exists. It's not just expensive perfume, many of the lower-costing niche perfumes are comparable to what you'd pay at the drugstore or department store. Anyway, I discovered it when I was trying to find perfume reviews online for Charisma. I was missing my grandmother and trying to figure out if I could snag a bottle of it somewhere still. Sadly, it's discontinued, but what I did find was reviews of fragrances I had never even heard of, along with links to online stores that I could buy samples of them from. Now we are talking!
Two full bottles I purchased right away were l'Heure Bleue and Mitsouko, both very old-fashioned perfumes by Guerlain. To give you an idea just how old, lHB was first released in 1912, Mitsouko in 1919. Neither one of them smell "old lady" to me in the least. I loved Mitsouko right away: on me it opens up with a nice spicy blast of cinnamon, pepper & some anise (think black licorice) and goes on to luscious ripe peaches. If I had to wear one perfume only for the rest of my life--wait, hold on, that's just crazy talk. Not happening. But I can say that it is an awesome go-anywhere perfume.
l'Heure Bleue was much more difficult. It also opens up with a spicy note, but it is much more medicinal, sometimes reminding me of Vicks. There's orange blossoms, iris, jasmine and vanilla along the way, but the opening just about does me in. It's much better to wear in very cold weather, that way I don't feel suffocated.
Now we come to the Cat Piss--er, Musc Ravageur by Frederic Malle. If you google this one don't blame me for the sticker shock, I didn't price it. This was among the samples I ordered, and it is a dark little piece of animalic notes. The opening is bergamot and cinnamon and I swear they snuck cat piss in it too. The drydown is a lovely growl of dark vanilla, musk and amber, but that opening! I couldn't deal with it when I first tried it, plus the price tag for a full bottle put me off, so I told myself I'd be happy with Vanilla Musk (Yes, that's the drugstore fragrance by Coty that you can get for under $20. See, I can be economical).
The perfume that sent me over the edge, though, was Rien by Etat Libre d'Orange. Think musty old lady perfume with all the florals stripped out and there you have Rien. Spicy, mossy, leathery, it is a cheerfully insane challenge to every bubblegum celebrity fragrance out there. It refuses to play nice. I love it and so does Wook-Wook. Unfortunately, whatever it did to my nose means I now love the expensive Cat Piss perfume as well! Did it hit the reset button or something? I would really rather not pay $250 for a bottle of perfume, no matter how insane I get about it.
Anyway, I need to wrap this one up (that's what he said). It started out as a journey of remembering my grandmother, and while I haven't found a bottle of Charisma at a thrift store yet, I did come across a perfume I swear smells like what I remember it to be. Another vintage, discontinued fragrance, Intimate by Revlon, it opens up with coriander-spiked white florals with a nice mossy-murky drydown. I wear it and remember Grandma Rachel puttering around in the kitchen, playing ragtime piano on her spinet, or walking around her small-town neighborhood.
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