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, March 14, and Spring has sprung here at home.
The air is full of lovely spring smells, from the daffodils everywhere to the early pink magnolias, and one of my favorite scents, hyacinth. Now Smell This had the community project this week of wearing a hyacinth scent. My favorite hyacinth fragrance is Jo Malone’s Blue Hyacinth. It smells exactly like the real thing! Another of my perennial favorites, Chanel No. 19, has a strong hyacinth note.
I bought several pots of hyacinths for a spring luncheon I hosted this week, and they still smell wonderful. Some of their predecessors, planted outside after they faded, have come back beautifully in my garden. I’m enjoying the fragrance indoors, where on pot of bulbs can fill an entire room with scent.
I plan to go on a binge of green scents starting this weekend. I have plenty from which to choose, lol. I know not everyone shares my affection for the green scents — if you do, do you have a favorite? Please share in the comments! And happy Spring!
Welcome to the June installment of Notes on Notes, a collaboration with Portia of Australian Perfume Junkies! Each month, we choose a fragrance note and each of us writes a blog post about it based on our personal experiences. This month, the note is citrus (encompassing any and all citrus notes), since it suits the summer months so well.
Most of the familiar citruses are “hesperidic” fruits. According to Wikipedia, “Carl Linnaeus gave the name Hesperideæ to an order containing the genusCitrus, in allusion to the golden apples of the Hesperides.” These include oranges, lemons, grapefruit, limes, and (importantly for fragrance) bergamots. All offer essential oils from their bitter rinds which have been used often in the creation of fragrances, with synthetic versions available as substitutes.
In fragrance, the perfumer I most associate with brilliant use of citrus notes is Jean-Claude Ellena. He likes their bitterness; and a citrus has often been the featured opener for many of his fragrances, including the Jardin series he launched at Hermès. I’ve written before about my love for Un Jardin Sur Le Nil, which opens with a marvelous grapefruit accord. Miller Harris’ discontinued Tangerine Vert is another terrific citrus scent; in that post, I also covered another sadly discontinued fragrance, from Maison Martin Margiela, Replica Filter Glow. It was a dry oil fragrance meant to be directly layered with a complementary scent and said to prolong it. You could also wear it on its own, with its notes of neroli, grapefruit blossom, bergamot, and rose absolute. I think it would enhance any citrus-forward fragrance.
Much as I love the other citrus notes, in perfume my favorite may be bergamot. I was raised on Earl Grey tea, whose distinctive aroma and flavor come from the infusion of bergamot essential oil into the tea, so I associate happy memories of teatime with that scent. (Earl Grey tea brings back childhood memories so strongly that I always drink it with milk and sugar, unlike most of the other teas and coffees I enjoy). I love the fresh zing it brings to a fragrance’s opening, and its green astringency, which partners so well with the green scents I love, like Chanel’s Cristalle and No. 19. Bergamot seems to enhance galbanum, and vice versa.
My two newest citrus-based fragrances were both bought on recent vacation trips (perfume tourism strikes again!): Carthusia’s A’mmare, which I bought in Milan last summer, and Lili Bermuda’s Bermudiana, purchased just last month in Bermuda. Both open with a detectable burst of bergamot, combined with aromatic herbs. A’mmare pairs it with rosemary (and salt); Bermudiana with basil and aldehydes. The fragrances are separated by six decades — Bermudiana was launched in 1962, and A’mmare in 2021.
A’mmare
Bermudiana has a strong heart note of galbanum, one of my favorites. A’mmare‘s heart notes are an aquatic accord and mint. Both fragrances pair so well with bergamot; both are very summery without being too beachy (i.e., they don’t smell to me like sunscreen). I love their combination of bergamot with different green herbs. They feel like summer colognes but last much longer.
Do you have any favorite citrus notes? Are there any you really dislike? I actually can’t think of any I dislike …
Okay, I didn’t choose an unknown scent today for Advent. I confess. I knew I was going to have a tough day at work (I’ve been back for less than a week) and some difficult conversations, so I pulled out my fragrance armor: Chanel No. 19, the green witch herself. If you want to read my thoughts on it, please click on the link and it will take you to a “Scent Semantics” post from September, when I wrote about No. 19 at some length.
Stars of “Wicked” production in Boston; image from the Lowell Sun
I’m something of a “goody two-shoes” so one might think I would identify more with the character on the left. But as we learn from “Wicked”, Glinda the Good isn’t as good as she appeared; and Elphaba isn’t as bad as she appeared. But Elphaba puts up a formidable facade, and that’s what I needed today. I think I emerged unscathed.
And you know, I always remember what a long-ago boss told me (TBH, I didn’t like him much, but he did occasionally have some good insights). He had been an airline executive in his earlier career, and he said more than once, “It’s been a good day at the office when no plane has crashed.” He’s right. No planes crashed, or were at risk, in my job today. Onward to the holidays!
Two of my three kids are home for the holidays, yay! One is still in college, so he’ll be with us well into January. The other is fully independent, but arrived today and will stay at least through Boxing Day. The third, another fully independent young adult, will arrive on Thursday. It’s really great to have them home, even just for a short while; they make us laugh. We will go to a friend and neighbor’s house on Thursday evening for an informal holiday party in their backyard, which will really put me in the holiday spirit. I’ll get back on track with the Guerlain samples tomorrow!
Meanwhile, I am mulling over what scent(s) I want to wear on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day. I do have Caron’s Nuit de Noel, always a good option. I really like the gingerbread accord and spices in ELDO’s Like This. I also have a set of small sizes of Jo Malone’s special Christmas scents, like Orange Bitters and White Moss & Snowdrop. Fille en Aiguilles would be suitable, as well as Nuit Étoilèes, if I want evergreen vibes. Any suggestions for those three occasions? What will you wear?
The word for this month’s Scent Semantics posts is “misanthrope.” If you haven’t read one of these posts before, “Scent Semantics” brings together a group of us fragrance bloggers in a collaborative project called “Scent Semantics“, the brainchild of Portia Turbo over at A Bottled Rose. On the first Monday of each month, we all take a word — the same word — as inspiration for a post that has some relationship to a fragrance, broadly interpreted. There are six participating blogs: Serenity Now Scents and Sensibilities (here), The Plum Girl, The Alembicated Genie, Eau La La, Undina’s Looking Glass, and A Bottled Rose. I hope you’ll all check out the Scent Semantics posts on each blog!
One definition of “misanthrope” is “someone who dislikes and avoids other people.” Now, I am not normally a misanthrope myself, although I am definitely an introvert (and if you’ve never seen author Susan Cain’s TED talk on the subject, click on that link — it’s a treat!). However, I think we’ve all become a bit misanthropic during the last two and a half years of a global pandemic — we were forced to avoid other people starting in March of 2020, then we disliked many people because of their varied responses to the pandemic. Layer on top of that the American elections of 2020 and their aftermath, so full of rage, and I think it’s safe to say that many of us, misanthropic by nature or not, have been slowly emerging from a phase of misanthropy.
My semantically matched fragrance this month is vintage Chanel No. 19 eau de toilette. I’ve been wearing it almost daily for the past week as my green armor at work, due to the difficulties I’ve encountered leading up to a long overdue personal leave (which started this weekend, yay!). No. 19 always makes me feel that I can be tougher than I actually am; it stiffens my backbone. Some might say that it helps me set and keep healthy boundaries, lol!
Why? I think it’s because of the hefty dose of galbanum that heralds its arrival: a bitter, green opening chord that announces, as the Chanel website says, a “daring, distinctive, uncompromising composition.” Perfect for setting boundaries! The other top notes reinforce the lack of compromise: astringent bergamot, assertive hyacinth, aromatic neroli. All have a distinctive tinge of green supporting the star of the show, the galbanum, which Fragrantica sums up as an “intense and persistent bitter green .” Indeed. If galbanum were a person, it would be Bette Davis playing Margo Channing in “All About Eve”:
“All About Eve”, 20th Century Fox.
If you’re not familiar with the movie, it is about a star actress who is turning forty, fears for her career, and is manipulated and ultimately upstaged by a much younger woman. Fittingly, No. 19 was the last Chanel fragrance created while Coco Chanel herself was still alive, in her 80s, though I don’t know that anyone ever succeeded in either manipulating or upstaging her. Master perfumer Henri Robert put the finishing touches on the formula in 1970, Chanel died in early 1971, and No. 19 was released the same year.
The blog “Olfactoria’s Travels” has a wonderful review of No. 19, referring to it as a “magic cloak”. The reviewer takes a more benevolent view of No. 19 than Tania Sanchez did in the guide to perfumes she co-wrote with Luca Turin, where she compared it to the wire mother monkey in a famous experiment about nurturing or the lack thereof. Blogger and author Neil Chapman, of “The Black Narcissus”, is famously a devotee of No. 19, scarfing up vintage bottles of it in all formats from second-hand stores in Japan, where he lives. You can read all about it in his amazing book, “Perfume: In Search of Your Signature Scent”, available in the UK and the US, and elsewhere in other languages, which I highly recommend!
Luckily for me, since I adore green fragrances, on my skin the greenery lasts and lasts, joined in the heart phase by some of my favorite floral notes: iris, orris root, rose, lily-of-the-valley, narcissus, jasmine and ylang-ylang. The green astringency of the opening notes is carried forward by the lily-of-the-valley and narcissus, while orris root adds earthiness, iris adds powder, and jasmine and ylang-ylang add airiness, sexiness and warmth. My sense of No. 19 as “armor” is aided by my vintage spray, a refillable, silvery, aluminum canister that has protected its contents for many years.
No. 19 has had many “faces”, my favorite being English model and iconoclast Jean Shrimpton. And guess what? Based on her own words, she may actually have been a misanthrope, having walked away from her superstar modeling career and life of celebrity in her 30s, becoming what she herself described as a recluse running a hotel in Cornwall. Although the photo of her below is not an ad for Chanel, to me it captures the spirit of No. 19‘s opening — inscrutable, distant, mingling shades of green, white, and earthy brown with the unexpected intrusion of purple:
Jean Shrimpton; image by Patrick Lichfield for Vogue, 1970.
As No. 19 dries down, to my nose the galbanum never leaves, though it recedes into the distance as the oakmoss enters the glade. Because I have the vintage EDT, the base includes oakmoss, leather, musk, sandalwood, and cedar. It is a true chypre, a genre I love. It reminds me of the Jackie Kennedy Onassis of the 1970s: elegant and even haughty upon first appearance, with a warmth that reveals itself over time to the patient; breaking free from the fashion conventions she mastered so skillfully and embodied in the 1950s and 1960s, and far from the cold “wire mother” of Tania Sanchez’ imagining while retaining an aura that commands respect.
I’m choosing to adopt Laura Bailey‘s interpretation of No. 19, which she described in Vogue at the height of pandemic lockdowns in 2020, as the scent of new beginnings and dreams of future adventure:
No 19, the ‘unexpected’ Chanel, the ‘outspoken’ Chanel, created at the height of the first wave of feminism in 1971, and named for Coco Chanel’s birthday – 19 August – is, for me, the fragrance of freedom, of optimism, of strength. (And of vintage campaign stars Ali MacGraw, Jean Shrimpton and Christie Brinkley.) The heady cocktail of rose-iris-vetiver-jasmine-lily-of-the-valley remains shockingly modern and original, bolder than any sweet fairy-tale fantasy.
If you had to relate a fragrance to the word “misanthrope”, which would you choose?
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 19, and here comes the rain again! Luckily the guys who come once a month to help with my yard and garden came yesterday and pulled up tons of weeds that grew like a jungle during the rainy weeks when we were in New Hampshire. I’ll be doing more of that this weekend, weather permitting!
In honor of Coco Chanel’s birthday, Now Smell This has a community project to wear a Chanel fragrance. So of course, I’m wearing Chanel No. 19, which was named for her birthdate (August 19). Double NST community points for me! And it is VERY green, which I love. No. 19 is one of my perennial (pun intended) fragrance loves. I have it in the vintage eau de toilette formulation, and it’s just wonderful.
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 1 — Happy April Fools’ Day! I couldn’t think of an appropriate April Fools post for a fragrance blog, though my personal Facebook feed is blowing up with silly posts from friends. Also, “rabbit rabbit” for good luck this month, and don’t miss the April Scent Semantics posts from six bloggers next Monday! I got to choose the word for April, which is fun for me. But it’s a secret until Monday, so please check back!
This week, I had to attend a neighborhood meeting to discuss a proposal for designating our neighborhood as an official historic district, which would protect us from encroaching development, roadways, and demolitions of old houses. It has become a flashpoint of controversy, and a number of homeowners who don’t want additional restrictions on what they can do to their houses — if the houses were built before the 1960s — have become very angry, threatening to sue the neighborhood volunteers who lead our civic association. I didn’t want to go to the meeting, but went to support the beleaguered volunteers and to voice support for the historic designation. Whew! Glad the meeting is over, though the controversy continues! And yes, I wore Chanel No. 19 which is my fragrance armor.
Liv Tyler as Arwen, in The Fellowship of the Ring movie; New Line Cinema.
Victoria at “Bois de Jasmin” has written very knowledgeably (as always) about Chanel No. 19. She discussed its reformulations, adding this historical insight:
A side note on galbanum, fragrance and politics. When Chanel No 19 was created in 1971, it was formulated with a superb grade of Iranian galbanum oil, which was sourced especially for it. However, when the Iranian Revolution broke out in 1979, the oil became unavailable. No 19 had to be reformulated, which was accomplished with much difficulty, because the original galbanum oil was of a particularly fine, rare caliber.
History. Always fascinating, sometimes enraging.
Do you have any thoughts on what fragrance to wear for April Fools’ Day? Or for “rabbit rabbit”? Or any fragrance-related history? Do share!
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, March 18, and I’ve been wearing green fragrances all week! This makes me very happy, as I love and own many green fragrances.
Truly, this has been a week for the “wearin’ o’ the green“! Today I’ll be wearing Papillon’s Dryad; earlier this week, I wore Cristalle, Chamade, Silences, and of course Chanel No. 19. Other options I could have chosen (and I may wear some this weekend, just to keep it going) are Envy, Decou-Vert, Vent Vert, Manifesto, Azurée, Aromatics Elixir, one of the Tom Ford Vert series, Le Jardin de Monsieur McGregor, too many others to list.
Yes, I am wallowing in green this week. Do you like green fragrances? Any particular favorites?
The inimitable Portia has come up with a new game for us perfumistas, to take place on six different blogs, every month! The chosen day for “Scent Semantics” is the first Monday of each month. The bloggers will take turns choosing a single word, then write a fragrant reflection on it. That could be a memory, of a scent the word evokes or something else, an actual name of a scent or note, a favorite work of art, whatever comes to mind. And readers can play in the comments, or just comment on the post!
Portia chose the first word: “brave.” I have a fragrance I like to wear to feel brave, on days when I want a little confidence boost. It is Chanel No. 19. I hadn’t really thought of it that way until I started reading more about fragrance a few years ago, and learned that many people find it challenging, elegant but remote and even, one might say, a bit bitchy.
I feel it helps me straighten my shoulders and stiffen my backbone. This is just a conceit, of course, but No. 19 is undoubtedly cool, elegant, a bit unapproachable. I wear it when I anticipate conflict of some kind, especially at work. It reminds me to stay cool, and use my intellect instead of my emotions while I navigate whatever the conflict is. The version I have is the vintage eau de toilette, which means that the galbanum and oakmoss are full-force presences. I love both of them, there is just something about their bitter greenness that appeals to me (I also love bitter greens and vegetables, like arugula, artichokes, Brussels sprouts, etc., and we know that the senses of taste and smell are closely linked). Bergamot is another astringent note, one that I also associate with the color green.
Among No. 19’s floral notes are also some of my favorite flowers, which I think my subconscious must find comforting as well as empowering: hyacinth, iris, rose, lily of the valley, narcissus. Perfumes aside, those are flowers I grow myself, and grew up with, since my parents were avid gardeners. The heart of No. 19 is not bitter, or particularly green although the galbanum continues to make itself felt, but the most prominent flower notes are cool ones, like iris, orris root, lily of the valley, and narcissus. This is the stage when I think many perfume lovers find No. 19 lovely but remote — a bit standoffish.
The base notes are stern, dominated by oakmoss, vetiver, and leather. Minor players are cedar, musk, and sandalwood — all warmer notes than the dominant ones. Taken together, No. 19 gives me a quick burst of energy at the start, with bergamot’s brightness and galbanum’s assertiveness, then comes a heart phase that is more cerebral than ebullient, finishing with the formal base of its chypre structure. If that won’t stiffen a woman’s resolve and backbone, I don’t know what will! All of these impressions align with the presentation of my vintage EDT; I have the tall, refillable spray canister, with its square but rounded edges, its sleek columnar shape, its brushed silvery metal casing. If I had to pick a female incarnation of this fragrance, it would be another fashion diva, sometimes compared to Chanel: Diane von Furstenberg as she was in the 1970s, building a fashion empire on a simple wrap dress.
Diane von Furstenberg, 1974
What fragrance or fragrant memory might you associate with the word brave?
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 16, and WordPress tells me it is the 6th anniversary of when I registered with them! This blog’s anniversary comes a bit later. I remember that summer so well. I spent it also working remotely, because I had fallen and broken my shoulder while on a June visit to London and couldn’t leave the house. In fact, I couldn’t sleep in my own bed because of the sling I was in and the pain it caused to move too much. I slept in a “medical lift chair” in our dining room! But after the initial week or two, I was able to work online, and one of my colleagues would come over to my house two days a week.
That was the summer I learned how to blog on WordPress and discovered some of my favorite fragrance blogs and bloggers. Some of you are regular visitors here now, and I appreciate that! I had already gone down the perfume rabbit hole in 2014, when I read Chandler Burr’s “The Perfect Scent” and then Turin and Sanchez’ “Perfumes: The A-Z Guide.” Starting my own blog in 2015 was a welcome distraction from my broken shoulder and some very nasty goings-on at work. It was a bright spot in an otherwise challenging year. The name “Serenity Now” originated in my attempts to stay mindful and calm that summer.
Speaking of work, I had my first full day back at my office this past Wednesday. Boy, it was weird to be back other than for a mail pick-up. It was great to see many of my colleagues in person instead of onscreen, though, as most of them are very nice. It’s going to take a while for my introverted self to adjust to being back among groups of people. My SOTD was Pure Grace Summer Moments, a very pleasant flanker of the original Pure Grace that I actually prefer to its predecessor. Yesterday I worked from home again, because I had to teach an online workshop and it’s easier to do that from here (and tbh, I needed to decompress a bit). I felt very contrary, so I wore Chanel No. 19. What a truly great fragrance that is! I know not everyone likes it, let alone loves it as I do, but there’s no denying its greatness.
What does your daily life look like these days? Working? Working from home still? If you’ve returned to an in-person workplace outside the home, how is that going? Have you changed any of your scents or scent-wearing habits?
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 6, and we are having a LONG election week here in the US. I’ve been pretty immersed in volunteer activities, so fragrance has been a welcome distraction when I take a break from those. On the other hand, while I spent Election Day itself taking a day off work to visit polling places as a non-partisan volunteer, to make sure voters were being helped to exercise their rights (because unfortunately, we make that quite hard in the USA), I wore Chanel No. 19, which is my “armor” scent. Luckily, no armor was needed — so many people voted early or by mail this year that the polling places were very calm and orderly. And I smelled great!
When I was not doing volunteer work, I gravitated to comfort scents like a new favorite, L’Ambre des Merveilles, or Anne Klein II. I also used Dawn Spencer Hurwitz’ Smudge Nebula, which she describes as an “energy-clearing sprtiz.” I love it, and you can currently get it at a reduced price from her website, including in a roll-on oil format.
Do you find yourself using more “armor” or comfort scents lately? Have you tried any “eaux de protection” like Smudge Nebula?
Voters in long line, Fall 2020; image from abcnews.go.com
Serenity Now Scents and Sensibilities 