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 Friday, November 19, and my thoughts have turned to Thanksgiving! It is one of my favorite holidays, because I love to cook and I love feeding my family. All our kids will be here. My husband and I both got our vaccine boosters within the last week, and now that we’re over the side effects (mostly a 24-hour period of sleeping and chills), we’re looking forward to a family gathering. It will be just the five of us, unless one of the kids brings home a friend. We haven’t traveled for Thanksgiving since our oldest child was born in November; all of our family live a plane flight away, and with two fulltime jobs and limited time off, it was always going to be too stressful and challenging to drag children through airports on the busiest travel days of the year here in the US.
After last year’s plumbing disaster and this year’s restoration of our house, we finally have a functioning dining room again! I’m excited to be able to celebrate the holidays properly once more. AND the new garden helpers I’ve hired have cleared out the massively overgrown summer vegetable garden, so I can now plant the cool season and winter vegetables in my raised beds. So those are my plans for the next week: cooking, gardening, enjoying my family. Oh, and a couple of days of work next week, but it should be very quiet as most students and faculty will take those days off.
Fragrance-wise, I haven’t been very adventurous lately, though I did succumb to a purchase of a dramatically reduced bottle of Aura. I quite like it, and I do love that green bottle. I would call it a strong like, not a love. I know many people are huge fans of Mugler fragrances — do you have any favorites?
Serenity Now Scents and Sensibilities 
The new Alien Goddess is quite yummy – I’m not normally into jasmine or vanilla type perfumes but I liked it. Happy Thanksgiving week!
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Nose Prose, how does Goddess compare to Alien Essence? Essence was the only iteration of Alien I enjoyed. Jasmine/vanilla sounds in the same vein.
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Hi Alityke, I haven’t smelled Alien Essence, nor most of the other flankers of Angel or Alien. I only happened to smell Alien Goddess recently and thought it was quite nice, a creamy rather than luminous jasmine. Will try to smell Essence next time I get a chance.
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Have a lovely gathering in your put-back-together house with your family. We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving here (one less day of stressful cooking for me). I’ve tried Mugler Aura and it’s really very nice but I wasn’t tempted to purchase. What I did purchase this week is a different Mugler – Alien Essence Absolue, and I’m soo looking forward to its arrival early next week.
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My SOTD ended up being Nina Ricci’s Luna, to go with NST’s community project, which was to wear something appropriate for a partial lunar eclipse of the Beaver Moon! It’s nice, but a bit too sweet for my taste. That bottle, though! So cute, especially the mini I have. I’m also surprised by how strong Luna is. I put the tiniest dab on each wrist, and it is quite noticeable some time later. Consider yourselves warned!
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Hey OH,
YAY for having a home ready for Thanksgiving guests. Fingers crossed it’s everything good and loads of fun. That’s next weekend, yeah?
Mugler fan here but I’ve still not bought Aura. it’s on the list of things to buy off a Sale Doc on FB, if it ever comes up. I wear the minty AMen and a couple of versions of Womanity. I think there’s a gout de Alien here too.
Portia xx
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My scented love affair waxes & wanes. So maybe I synched unknowingly with NST despite being unscented.
This waxing & waning of wishing to be scented seems to be part of my HSP & INTJ personality type. Too much sensory input becomes overwhelming & brings on the brain fog.
This week I’ve spent a few days pottering about baking bread. A batch of wholemeal & pumpkin seeded sourdough loaves as well as a bake of 6 enriched bread buns & 6 fruited iced buns.
The wonderful scent of baking bread was what I wore on those days, it seeps into my clothes & hair. Nothing smells as good when that mood is upon me.
Enjoy your family Thanksgiving. Will you be wearing the Aura on the day? Somehow it smells of sugary cabbage to me & that sweet brassica would fit with the sweet & savoury theme running through a traditional Thanksgiving dinner
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That’s so funny, I am also an INTJ! The baking sounds wonderful. I like to bake very easy things like Bundt cakes, but my older daughter is a really good baker. I don’t think I’ll wear Aura on Thanksgiving, I might go with Bengale Rouge.
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Another INTJ here! Introverts rule the world, I always say. LOL I will really be immersed in cooking Monday and Tuesday. Looking forward to all the wonderful smells and tastes. I’ve been immersing myself in selling many of my fashion dolls on eBay and some perfumes, too. All collections must be kept at manageable levels, at least for me they have to.
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Have you read Susan Cain’s book “Quiet”? It was such an eye-opener for me.
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Yes, I read it and loved it. I understood for the first time why parties make me feel so exhausted.
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Bengale Rouge comes roaring out of the spray doesn’t it?
I’m still reeling in the aftermath of my Le Lion & watch strap encounter so Bengale Rouge is currently on my “wait to try again” pile of samples.
No one ever spotted that I was a natural introvert, including me. It came out in a leadership course when we all had to do the full Myers-Briggs assessment.
I am terrible at cakes but find the process of bread making meditative
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Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, everyone! I’ll be wearing Lutens Eau de Gigembre on Thursday, it goes so well with the spices in pumpkin pie!! And on Friday it will be Frapin “If,” another spicy beauty.
The twins and their parents are coming down. I think my son and his wife are nuts for wanting to drive 5 hours with two 9 week old babies but they have confirmed a number of times that they want to use this as a test to see how hard it is to travel with the babies. They have a big van so they can pretty much stop anywhere and set up a diaper changing station in the back of the van. We shall see how it goes! I didn’t go anywhere with my son until he was 8 months old and we did ok with a short airplane trip. They are traveling on Thanksgiving day so hopefully not much traffic. I am going to have all the cooking done beforehand so I can just hold the babies! I’ve missed them so much since we’ve been home.
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Have a wonderful visit with them! And Eau de Gingembre is perfect with all those cozy spices. Think of the lovely scent memories you’ll instill in the babies!
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Sorry for being late (again 🙂 ): as it often happens, a week before holidays got nightmarish at work: I left my house 2 times in a week – once for an evening walk and once to pick up a gift for my friend’s birthday we’re going to this Saturday. The rest of the time I mostly worked and slept in between. But now I have 5 days! Yay!
It’s great that you can celebrate holidays the way you like. And it’s good that you had your boosters (we’ll try to schedule ours in the beginning of December).
Enjoy your time with all the children!
We have 3 parties to attend this week. I hope, I won’t overeat too badly. For two out of 3 I need to cook something – so, it’s a shopping day tomorrow (let’s hope I can buy everything I need). I haven’t decided yet what to wear to those parties, I’ll do it tomorrow.
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