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Perfume Chat Room, February 21

Welcome to the weekly Perfume Chat Room, perfumistas! I envision this chat room as a weekly drop-in spot online, where readers may ask questions, suggest fragrances, tell others their SOTD, comment on new releases or old favorites, and respond to each other. The perennial theme is fragrance, but we can interpret that broadly — I’ve been known to write on this blog about biryani, one of my favorite dishes to eat and one I am still learning to make! (If you have a great recipe for it, please share!).

This is meant to be a kind space, so please try not to give or take offense, and let’s all agree to disagree when opinions differ. In fragrance as in life, your mileage may vary! YMMV.

Today is February 21, and tonight I will have the privilege of hearing the great American poet Nikki Giovanni speak, and read some of her poems. I’m so excited! In her honor, here is a quote from one of her poems, “How Do You Write A Poem”:

And why would someone need

a poem to say when I come

home if you’re not there

I search the air

for your scent

What a lovely phrase, “I search the air for your scent.” Do you have any favorite poems that mention perfume or fragrance? Any favorite perfumes or fragrances that remind you of poetry? What fragrance would you wear to a poetry reading? Or, tell us anything that’s on your mind about fragrance, broadly defined! Happy Friday!

Portrait of American poet Nikki Giovanni

Poet Nikki Giovanni

Featured image: Nikki Giovanni, from https://www.nikki-giovanni.com/.

23 thoughts on “Perfume Chat Room, February 21”

  2. Portrait of a Lady over Rose Flash oil. Now, poetry for me is hit and miss. I can recall sitting in my Poetry and Prose class at school and whispering to my friend that it was all a pile of cr@p and what did we need it for anyway, because we’d never use it in later life😃 Having said that I absolutely love the one by Jenny Joseph, When I Am Old. The line from your chosen poem could be very sad when taken out of context. I immediately pictured someone yearning for a lost love either through bereavement or a love affair that has ended. Now I’ll read the whole thing and see what the real story is.

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  3. Nikki Giovanni was wonderful! She has the most marvelous face. I found the perfect fragrance to wear: Commodity’s Book (discontinued, like all the Commodity scents). I wore Penhaligon’s Ostara in the morning to align with NST’s Friday Community Project; this week, it was to wear a fragrance from one of several houses whose names start with P. I love Ostara, it really smells like daffodils to me. Our temps dipped just below freezing last night, but that hasn’t bothered the daffodils one bit.

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  4. I should explain why Book was exactly right — the reading was a benefit dinner for a library of rare manuscripts, and the dinner was held in the actual reading room of a university! So the long reading tables were converted into dining tables for the evening, and we were surrounded by books on shelves and in display cases. My idea of heaven!

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  7. I’m so delighted — my February order from 4160 Tuesdays arrived yesterday, with the two sale items I had bought: 100 ml of “Fluffy Lemon Tops”, a variation of “Clouds”; and 50 ml of “Darkest Centrepiece”, an accidental creation when a batch of Centrepiece had a mod of The Darkest Bloom added to it. I already knew I would love Fluffy Lemon Tops because it had come in my January Joy Box; and I took a flier on Darkest Centrepiece because I loved the ingredient list. Have any of you tried any 4160 Tuesdays fragrances? I must say, I now have quite a collection, which began when I won a bottle of White Queen on the blog CaFleureBon. As regular readers may recall, I was able to visit the studio in London last May, which was great fun.

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