roses

Perfume Chat Room, November 3
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Perfume Chat Room, November 3

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 3, and I’m on my way to New England for a family christening! Our niece had her first baby this year, the first grandchild of this generation. The baby is my older sister’s first grandchild. I made her a bonnet from silk and lace from my sister’s wedding dress; I’m quite pleased with how it turned out, given that it’s my first real sewing project in many years.

I’m excited — I took part this week in a NST splitmeet for the first time! I’ve received my 5 ml of Jacques Fath’s L’Iris de Fath eau de parfum from the NST splitmeet; haven’t worn it yet because I’ve been so busy this week and want to give it my full attention. Some of you may remember how I swooned when I got to sample the extrait de parfum when it was first released, at the boutique Jovoy Paris, in London. I am so, so tempted to buy the eau de parfum but I’m trying to behave myself and not rush into an expensive blind buy. Splitmeet to the rescue!

Portia and I will be posting a new “Notes on Notes” on Monday, so please drop by and share your own thoughts!

Perfume Chat Room, October 27
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Perfume Chat Room, October 27

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.

I apologize for not posting last Friday! I was helping one of our daughters pack and move all day Thursday and Friday, and it just got away from me. Earlier this week, I posted Portia Turbo’s and my latest “Counterpoint“, which I hope you’ll read if you haven’t yet. This month’s Counterpoint fragrance is Diorella. You might also like a past post I wrote about Meet Me On The Corner, Sarah McCartney’s Diorella-inspired fragrance for 4160 Tuesdays.

The roses I grow are having another flush of bloom, now that the weather has improved, and they are so fragrant! I’ve been especially noticing the fragrance of “Winchester Cathedral”, a beautiful pure white with a lemony rose scent, a lot like Jo Loves’ White Rose and Lemon Leaves, and “Princess Alexandra of Kent”, whose fragrance really does smell like perfume. Both are English Roses by the late hybridizer David Austin, who spent his life bringing strong fragrance back into modern roses by crossing them with heirloom roses. Winchester Cathedral has performed admirably all year, starting this spring, but Princess Alexandra has been the proverbial late bloomer. I’ve had her for a few years now, and never got much from her in the way of bloom, but I think I’ve finally figured out what soil amendments she wants in her pot, so she’s doing much better. I have high hopes for her next spring!

White English Rose, "Winchester Cathedral"
Winchester Cathedral rose

I’m excited — I took part this week in a NST splitmeet for the first time! I’ve requested 5 ml of Jacques Fath’s L’Iris de Fath eau de parfum from a kind NSTer. Some of you may remember how I swooned when I got to sample the extrait de parfum when it was first released, at the boutique Jovoy Paris, in London. I am so, so tempted to buy the eau de parfum but I’m trying to behave myself and not rush into an expensive blind buy. Splitmeet to the rescue!

Do you often take part in splitmeets? What has been your favorite “split”?

Perfume Chat Room, September 29
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Perfume Chat Room, September 29

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, September 29, and I can’t believe September is almost over! Thankfully, we’re about to enter the season of what is usually the best weather here: October. Unfortunately, the warm, dry weather has also brought with it an explosion of ragweed pollen over the last week, though it seems to be diminishing. A week ago, I couldn’t stop sneezing and needing to blow my nose. Not a happy situation for someone who loves fragrance!

Child sneezing, with yellow flowers
Sneezing!

So I’ve been commando, scentwise, for several days. The good news is that it wasn’t COVID, although my dear spouse had it last week, and I got the updated vaccine this week with my flu shot. The bad news is that I haven’t done much in my garden this week in spite of better weather, because I’ve mostly stayed inside to avoid the pollen. This has, however, provided the impetus for me to start using my sewing machine again. I have a very nice Husqvarna Viking Lily machine, one of the last models actually made in Sweden, that I haven’t used since our third child was a toddler (that’s a long time, lol!). But I got it cleaned and serviced this spring, and now that I’m fully retired, I’m getting back into sewing. Just in time, since my older sister’s daughter had the first grandchild in our family this spring! I’ll be traveling back to New England for the baby’s christening in November, so I have an opportunity to try making a small gift for her while getting reacquainted with my Lily.

The one scent I did wear earlier this week, to a neighborhood event, was the Chanel No.5 Eau Première I got on my last trip to Europe with my husband. It is just beautiful, and I’m so happy to have it! I can still smell traces of it on the top I wore.

I think I mentioned that I got a few samples of other fragrances when I went to pick up the Jo Malone Ginger Biscuit for our older daughter’s Christmas gift: the new Dioriviera, Tom Ford’s new Myrrh Mystère, and a couple of Aerin’s Rose de Grasse Premier fragrances. Of the latter, the Rose de Grasse Parfum is really lovely — a strong, beautiful, classic rose with great sillage. I didn’t much care for Myrrh Mystère, but then again, it’s not really my type of fragrance and I think some will love it.

Have you tried anything new lately?

Perfume Chat Room, August 4
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Perfume Chat Room, August 4

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, August 4, and now we’re getting lots of rain that doesn’t relieve the humidity. I continue to harvest eggplants and adapt my new favorite recipe for eggplant parmesan: Delish’s Skillet Eggplant Parmesan. Last night, I used the same tomato sauce that includes truffle, porcini, and cream, but topped the whole thing with goat cheese instead of mozzarella (which was still in the inner layers). The crowd went wild! I think that version’s a real keeper.

I have more time to cook and garden now, because this past Monday was my last day in my workplace! I’m finishing up a couple of projects and will help transition my successor later this month, but I’m basically retired now. There was a nice gathering for me with colleagues on Monday afternoon, and people said nice things. TBH, I’m not sad to close that chapter. As much as I’ve enjoyed many aspects of my work over almost two decades, it just kept getting more and more stressful, and that was affecting my health more and more. Farewell to all that!

I’ve discovered Trader Joe’s bouquets of “garden roses”, which have a lovely, old-fashioned form like the English Roses I love, but no fragrance! Such a shame, as they’re very pretty and so far have lasted well in a vase.

Luckily, the roses I grow in my own garden are very fragrant, and I’m taking better care of them now, which rewards me with more blooms and fragrance. I have quite a few other flowers blooming, but many of them, like coneflowers, have little or no scent. I love them because they support pollinators and birds, and they now come in all kinds of wonderful colors.

Do you have a favorite scented flower that is NOT a rose?

Perfume Chat Room, July 28
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Perfume Chat Room, July 28

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, July 28, and it’s still hot! I am consoled by the fact that my garden is now providing generous amounts of tomatoes and eggplants, as well as a second flush of rose blossoms. Also, I’ve found a new favorite recipe for eggplant parmesan: Delish’s Skillet Eggplant Parmesan. Honestly, it’s way better than normal eggplant parmesan because it’s not as bready. Normally I don’t think my husband and son would touch eggplant with the proverbial ten-foot pole, but they devour this. My second attempt was even better than my first, because I used a tomato sauce that includes truffle, porcini, and cream. Heaven!

As for the tomatoes, we are now happily in tomato sandwich season and I plan to eat that for lunch every day. Even if my own plants don’t deliver daily, our local farmer’s market sells plenty! The New York Times recently ran an article on tomato sandwiches that set off a furor in the comments, because its headline implied that tomato sandwiches are particular to the South: The Sandwich Southerners Wait for All Year. Folks from New Jersey, which is justly famous for its excellent tomatoes, were particularly incensed.

Given the current bounty of my garden, I thought it would be fun to identify fragrances with notes of both tomato or tomato leaf, and rose. And of course, what popped up but a longtime favorite: Gardener’s Glove, by St. Clair Scents! Also La Feuille, by Miller Harris. Another fave of mine, Un Jardin Sur le Nil, famously combines a tomato note with florals and other notes, but not rose.

Do you have any favorite scents with tomato or tomato leaf notes? Or a favorite tomato sandwich recipe?

Perfume Chat Room, June 16
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Perfume Chat Room, June 16

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, June 16, and we have a three-day weekend because of Juneteenth being celebrated on Monday as a holiday. Juneteenth, if you didn’t know, is a historically important date because June 19 was the date in 1865 on which the last remaining enslaved people in the United States were finally assured that the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued effective January 1, 1863, and they had been declared free by President Abraham Lincoln. Major General Gordon Granger, the Union officer in control of Galveston, Texas, issued an order confirming their emancipation on June 19, 1865. The date was long celebrated informally among African-American communities in Texas, then the custom spread during the Great Migration of the 20th century. It was made a federal holiday by President Biden in 2021. By the way, if you don’t know much about the Great Migration, I highly recommend the prize-winning book “The Warmth of Other Suns”, by historian and journalist Isabel Wilkerson.

I will be celebrating by spending the weekend continuing to weed, plant, and otherwise tidy my garden. My precious roses are blooming again, and one of them has decided to blossom in the middle of my Annabelle hydrangea. I love flowers! I’ve been wearing a new-to-me fragrance a lot lately; it is Miller Harris’ Coeur de Jardin, a chypre floral with several fruity notes in the opening. Very pretty! I would call it more “chypre lite” than fully chypre. Today, however, I was back in Bitter Peach by Tom Ford. What are you wearing or smelling these days?

Perfume Chat Room, March 31
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Perfume Chat Room, March 31

Welcome to the Friday 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, March 31 — is your March “going out like a lion”? I think our weather lion has already left the building, though I risk jinxing us by saying so. We had low temps of 40 degrees F earlier this week, and tomorrow it’s supposed to approach 80 degrees. My plants are so confused. I still have daffodils coming up, but my lilies of the valley and roses are also now starting to bloom. One David Austin rose in particular is so fragrant as well as beautiful! It’s called “Fighting Temeraire”, after a famous painting, and it has a strong fruity rose fragrance that carries. This is one of the reasons I love David Austin’s English Rose hybrids — not only are they beautiful, in many colors, but they were bred and selected to be highly fragrant.

David Austin English Rose "Fighting Temeraire"; image from www.gardentags.com
David Austin English Rose “Fighting Temeraire”; image from http://www.gardentags.com

Yes, this rose’s blossoms really are that big! Speaking of fragrance and spring, Portia and I will resume our collaboration on Monday, now that we’ve both returned home from travels, with “Notes On Notes” (first Monday of each month) and “Counterpoint” (third Monday of each month). I’ll give you a hint: the note we’ve chosen for April appears in many green fragrances. Please join us!

I just got in the mail a sample of Parfums Dusita’s new fragrance; she’s running another contest to name it, on the Eau My Soul Facebook page. Are any of you taking part? I haven’t even sniffed it yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

Perfume Chat Room, May 13
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Perfume Chat Room, May 13

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, May 13, and my nose is full of the fragrance of rose gardens. Plus many other choice blossoms and plants such as wisteria, osmanthus, even eucalyptus. What a wonderful month May is, for garden flowers and fragrance! I have many new photos of flowers, mostly roses, which I’ll share soon on my Instagram account once I’ve tidied them up a bit.

We’ve had a sad loss since my post last Friday — a close friend of my son’s from high school died last weekend after two months of surgery and intensive care following an abdominal injury. My son and his friends have handled this pretty well, though they are very sad. They have really rallied around the bereaved family and supported them as well as each other. I’m very proud of the maturity my son has shown, but I still have concerns about how he and his friends will feel the impact of this grief. However, they all have great families and overlapping communities to help them. Most of them will be home for the summer, having returned from college, and they will be a comfort to each other as well as to the family of their friend.

I’m glad the semester is over at the university where I work, and the summer will be much quieter, so I can focus on my son, and his sisters who have been remarkable in how they have come forward to support him. I spend much of the academic year tending to the needs of other people’s young adult children, aka my students; I’ll be glad to put that aside for a while and tend to my own.

Will your summer be busy or quiet?

Bouquet of garden roses by David Austin, including Teasing Georgia, Lady of Shalott, Carding Mill, Olivia Rose Austin, Munstead Wood.
An assortment of David Austin’s English Roses, including the dark crimson “Munstead Wood.”
Perfume Chat Room, May 6
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Perfume Chat Room, May 6

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, May 6, and my roses continue to flourish and bloom! I’ve added more photos to my Instagram account, if you’d like to see some of them up close. Most are “English Roses” by the late David Austin, an amazing hybridizer of roses who brought back the old-fashioned shapes and strong fragrance of older roses, but combined those with the range of colors and repeat-blooming habit of modern ones. One of the fascinating aspects of his roses is that many of them smell slightly different. All their scents are clearly “rose”, but some are more spicy, or fruity, or lemony. As you can tell, I love them.

Some of my English Roses

If you haven’t yet read this month’s “Scent Semantics” posts by the six participating bloggers, the word for May (chosen by Portia) is “brilliance.” You’ll find all the links here: Scent Semantics.

May is full of various celebrations: May Day, Star Wars Day, Cinco de Mayo, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day. I’ve just learned that in the Netherlands, May 5 is celebrated as Liberation Day, marking the end of Nazi occupation. May is the month of the annual RHS Chelsea Flower Show, which I’ve been able to visit twice and hope to visit again, maybe next year.

Chelsea Pensioner, at RHS Chelsea Flower Show

This year, Eid al Fitr (the end of Ramadan) was celebrated in the US in May; the dates change every year. Do you celebrate anything in particular in May?

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Perfume Chat Room, April 29

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, April 29, and Monday is another “Scent Semantics” posting day! The word of the month, chosen by Portia, is a secret until then, so check back next week!

My roses are in full bloom this week and wow, do they smell gorgeous. I’ve posted some photos on my Instagram account.

Thanks to a timely post on Eau My Soul, I bought a very discounted bottle of Shalimar Philtre de Parfum from Costco, which sometimes has great deals on high-end fragrances. I’m very happy with my blind buy, which wasn’t completely blind because I had read that it was reminiscent of Shalimar Eau de Cologne, which I enjoy very much. Indeed it is, though not identical. For one thing, Philtre is an eau de parfum, and it definitely lasts longer. Below is the review of Shalimar Eau de Cologne I posted on Fragrantica some years ago, and I stand by it:

Happy happy happy! I have tried Shalimar EDP several times in department stores, and just didn’t like it. I recognized its quality and its legendary status but it was too heavy, too sweet, too strong, too old-fashioned. Every single time. Then I found Shalimar Eau de Cologne on sale for 24.99 at CVS, read the reviews here on my smartphone and thought, what the hell — let’s do this. So I did. I love it! This version is just yummy without being sweet. I get the vanilla, I get the smoke, I get the cedar, I get the leather. Shalimar EDC is luscious but light. Classic but not stuffy. I am just so pleased with this.

I would say that Philtre has more citrus, and less smoke and leather. It lasts all day (12+ hours) on my skin. I think the tolu balsam base note is a great touch; it adds depth and warmth.

At risk of setting off a torrent of verbiage, do you have a favorite version of Shalimar?