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. 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 March 27, the first official week of spring in this hemisphere, and COVID-19 continues to dominate news and thoughts everywhere. So far, my family and I remain unscathed, but it’s hitting closer to home — a friend of mine from work (in a different office) is quarantined at home, presumed positive for COVID-19, but not sick enough to get tested or go to hospital. My sister knows three elderly people in her small town in New England who died of it recently; two were a couple who lived around the corner from her.
In the meantime, it has been a welcome distraction to read others’ blogs and Facebook posts about how they are using fragrance to cheer themselves up and stay connected with others. I’m still working fulltime, though remotely, so I can’t take part as actively as I might like, but I really do enjoy and appreciated the photos, comments, and mini-reviews others are sharing. And it seems as if a lot of fragrance collections are being reorganized!
How are you all doing? Tried any new fragrances lately? Keep calm and carry on!
Serenity Now Scents and Sensibilities 
I am doing nothing but sampling. A good friend sent me an early birthday present of many things, including 100 samples. This week was an Hiram Green week ending with Slowdive today.
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Ooh, that sounds great! What do you think of Slowdive? It wasn’t really for me, though I certainly sensed its high quality.
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I enjoyed it but don’t feel I need it. A good friend of mine loves it so I put the large sample to the side for her.
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Slowdive didn’t work for me either (honey in perfumes really does).
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*rarely*
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I had holidays this week, but couldn’t go anywhere. So we took some walks, cooked a lot and today it was warm enough to enjoy the sun on the balcony and knit. And I took a walk with a friend today! Maybe we will work in our allotment garden tomorrow to prepare it for the season
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I’m doing a lot of gardening too! Planning to grow vegs and fruit this year, to reduce store trips. Usually I just grow herbs and flowers in my containers.
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Hope your friend will be ok. It’s all increasingly depressing, and hitting closer to home as you’ve said. I’ve also been working from home full time but work has slowed due to pausing while figuring out how to adapt things to a virtual format.
I tried a sample of Touche Finale by Jovoy and was pleasantly surprised by the clean cosmetic feel, especially as I’m not usually into powdery scents. Maybe I appreciated it more after trying Conquérante by Berry, a very galbanum green, metallic fragrance which blew my mind at the opening but dried down to a masculine soap on me. Contrasts can be eye-/nose-opening!
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Ooh, the green one sounds like something I should try! I love galbanum. Not sure about that dry down, though.
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🙂 I was going to write exactly the same comment!
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I took a break from fragrance with all the recent changes due to COVID-19; partly because I was stressed and partly because I was adjusting to the new routine of working from home. I feel more settled and adjusted now, and look forward to resuming sampling and wearing perfume. When I have worn perfume lately, it’s been Jeffrey Dame’s creations, Eutopie No 4, Chanel Coromandel, and Santa Maria Novella Melograno all very comforting to me.
Thank you for keeping the perfume chat going OH, and sharing the happy photo of the daffodils. They are blooming in my neighborhood as well and are such a hopeful sign of spring.
Stay safe and well!
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I’m with you, I’ve been distracted away from perfume lately, though enjoying different essential oils in a diffuser. But now that I feel more settled, and it’s really spring, I’m ready to get back into my spring scents! And thanks for chiming in here, too.
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Let’s enjoy the pleasure of perfume now that we are more settled with our new routines!
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I have been doing lots of diffusing myself. Right now enjoying a eucalyptus lemon blend that I bought from Vitacost ….Now Essentials brand. The oils are supposed to be anti germ. The scent of eucalyptus I love. And I too am doing lots of video conferencing. I just learned how to do this, and many other technological things that were never part of my job. It’s anxiety provoking but at the same time exillerating to be learning something completely foreign. .. uncharted territory for me.
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I love that you are wearing Eutopie and Melograno.
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I love them both very much and am so thankful to you for sharing with me! Through all of the chaos and change, it is even more evident that perfume remains a true comfort and pleasure. You are doing amazing Brigitte, with adapting to work from home and learning the necessary new technology! xx
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I cannot thank you enough for your friendship and support ❤️
It’s times like this that I realize how wonderful this community is.
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I’m still mooching around the house. I set myself a task to do every day, some little household task or other that gets overlooked in the general run of things. Today was starting to remove the wall tiles in the kitchen. Now, this will take a few days but this particular task has been on the long finger for almost two years. As soon as I can hit the tile shops I’ll be there. We are in lockdown until at least Easter Sunday. They will review it again then. I can’t wait to go back to work🙂 I am wearing whatever I like, perfume wise. I have been walking lots as the weather has been lovely. I think I’d crack up if I couldn’t get some exercise every day.
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Walking is helping me too. I’m an introvert, so I’m fine being home, but I have lots of Zoom meetings which take their toll!
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I’m trying to avoid the news as much as possible, too. I’m not an overly anxious person by nature so I don’t avoid it for that reason only, I’m just sick to the back teeth of hearing about it now. It’s a tough situation on everybody just now, some more than others, but we have to keep pushing on and looking forward.
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I agree. I only look at solid news too, there’s so much junk on social media. I highly recommend the News Literacy Project for guidance!
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I’m self-isolating when I’m not working (rather productive day today, getting a lot of job tasks done). Then in the evening I started on the household chores. I found I had spilled oat drink in the kitchen, Must have been from a carton I had forgotten to empty. Let me tell you, these milk subsitutes can smell like sour milk when too old, so I used quite some time scrubbing. And I found a spider indoors, hate those, even if we don’t have any dangerous spiders here.
Thanks for the lovely picture at the start of the post! I should get hold of a pot of the miniature dafffodils, or some tulips. SOTD was Ostara, spring in a bottle and too intense for the office! I’m putting on some Theorema before bed. I won the bottle over on BdJ in a fundriser for MSF years ago and Theorema has grown on me and also reminds me how generous perfume people are in general.
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Theorema is beautiful. Another one they discontinued despite it having many fans. Wish I’d bought a big bottle of it as backup.
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I’m glad you like daffodils and Ostara, two of my favorite things! I have two backups of Ostara. Can’t believe they discontinued it so quickly. I planted dozens more daffodils this fall, and they came up beautifully this spring.
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I think I will sample today. I have been doing a “not suitable for work” project so I can enjoy some rarely reached for perfumes. But I have a backlog of samples that were given to me so today I think I will use every available surface to test.
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How is “remote high school” going? My son seems to be doing fine. The teachers are doing a great job!
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Not suitable for work, lol! Which are your unsuitables?
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P.S. The row of daffodils in the featured image is in my garden, where my son dug up a whole row of liriope that I finally decided should be replaced. I’ve interspersed the daffodils with short hellebores in back, and short daylilies in front, for more seasons of interest. We’ll see how they all do!
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The daffodils are a beautiful addition to your garden, showing themselves for an early spring greeting. MMKinPA, I like your idea of a “not suitable for work” perfume project. I think I’ll do that, wear some big projection perfumes this week, the ones I could never wear to the office while working from home.
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Love it!
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It sounds to me as if we have a community project: “Unsuitable for Work”! Which perfumes are you wearing now, if you are working remotely, that you felt you couldn’t wear in an office? And why are they “unsuitable”? h/t MMKinPA for this!
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I love this!!!
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I’ll go first: Vintage Mitsouko EDT, which I love when I’m in the mood. “Unsuitable” for office because 1) chypre; 2) oakmoss; 3) my daughter said to me, when I first tried it near her, “Never wear that again, Mom”! lol
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I am still up, at a silly hour given I have to work again Monday morning. We changed into summertime putting our watches one hour forward between Saturday and Sunday.Going to bed soon wearing Orange Sanguine. Tomorrow I may wear one of my unsuitable for work fragrances, SL Tubéreuse Criminelle or Tauer Une Rose Chyprée.
We know by now that restrictions here will be in force until April 13 included, or longer, so I finally got around to finding some of the more intense seated workouts online and did a 40 minutes session today. I still need to find something which can get my pulse up more, but it is a start. You should think I had plenty of time for exercise, but the line between work and time off gets blurred, so it is harder than usual to set aside time.
You really do have a lot of flowers blooming, here it is too early for most flowers. Ostara is one of few perfumes I associate with a colour, yellow of course.It really is like spring in a bottle.
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Our pollen count is through the roof!
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Ahahaha
I have had that happen with my middle one as well.
Today I am testing CDG Copper. It’s an odd one so probably qualifies as NSFW. To me it smells like a rooty iris with a metallic tinge.
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I work full time (and sometimes it seems even longer), and during the day I test several perfumes. Then in the evening before going out for a walk I choose perfume to wear. Out of all perfumes I wore this week, Tauer’s LDDM and PHI were those that I enjoyed the most.
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I recently tried a cheapie that I bought a few months ago: Halston Woman Amber. I quite like it! Love the bottle, it’s a gold tone version of the classic Halston bottle designed by Elsa Peretti.
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I’ll bet Halston Woman Amber was beautiful! I remember the Halston bottle well.
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Eiderantler
Love it!
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What is it like? I’ve read about it and it sounds so interesting.
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My nose hones in on the lavender at first. But then it develops into what I would describe as the smell of the ocean….cold and briny like the Northeast Atlantic of my childhood and young adult life. Drydown is still somewhat oceanic but there’s a balsamic sweetness in the background. I love it and would consider a full bottle were I not on a no buy. In actuality, these are such strange times that I don’t want to introduce any new perfumes that I might associate with it….so even if I had the financial means I am not sure that I would be buying anything new right now.
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Yesterday I wore Baccarat Rouge as my “unsuitable for work” fragrance. I really enjoy this perfume and the projection is amazing. I don’t wear it often mostly because it is my sister’s signature scent and I feel like an imposter wearing it. However, she is staying with me this weekend on her travels back to her home in Canada from winter in Arizona. She and I were both in a cloud of Baccarat Rouge! Not office appropriate. Today I will wear Lanvin Arpege as my “not suitable for work” perfume.
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I was inspired by Ingeborg and the daffodils in my garden to make my SOTD Ostara! I just love it. To me, it smells just like daffodils, the yellow kind. Did a lot of gardening this weekend; it’s great to get out of the house when home has become my office! My poor garden is so confused by the weather. Here are just some of the things that are in bloom right now, all together: hellebores, daffodils, hyacinths, lots of little bulbs, wild wisteria, pansies and violas, sweet alyssum, a couple of English roses, dianthus, violets, azaleas, summer snowflakes, lilies of the valley, starflowers, clematis Armandii, two Lady Banks’ roses, woodland phlox, dogwoods, deutzia, heuchera, redbuds, trillium. And our lot is 1/3 of an acre — not tiny, but not as huge as it sounds!
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The House of Oud What About Pop
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Very unproductive day today, so tomorrow is going to be very busy (there is a deadline to meet on Wednesday for part of what I’m working on). Wearing Guerlain AA Mandarine Basilic to energize myself and will make hummus this evening to get a healthy dose of protein, it tastes so good on crispbread or with various carrots.
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Great choice for energizing fragrance! I eat hummus on carrots too, the ones that are cut like chips. For a long time it was one of the few ways I could get my son to eat carrots, and now I’m hooked.
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Orange Sanguine today. We know today that pubs and bars will not be allowed to open right over Easter, but the authorities are looking into how and when they can open kindergartens and primary schools again. Some of my coworkers really struggle with the home school arrangement, they find they get very little work done themselves, and we still have deadlines for reports and such. Lovely weather again here in Oslo, spring is here despite everything.
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Glad to hear you have spring! Yes, I can’t imagine trying to work from home with really little children in the house. My oldest daughter was working as a daytime nanny for a couple with a toddler in that situation, after she lost her theater job. Unfortunately they just replaced her with a sitter who was willing to move in with them and “shelter in place” in their home, which she didn’t want to do, although their toddler adored her and she him. Weird times.
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