Perfume 101: 517 posts

Creative chaos, orderly arrangements, or everything in between, we embrace all forms of building our perfume wardrobes. Today, Lauren offers her thoughts on perfume collecting and the power of scent.

If you haven’t heard of Marie Kondo by now, you haven’t been reading much on the internet.  Marie is a best-selling author from Japan, an organizational expert and consultant who helps clients tidy up their homes.  She advocates de-cluttering to an extreme, advising readers and clients alike to get rid of any object that does not “spark joy.”  No over-thinking, re-sorting, or feeling guilty.  Either an object sparks joy for you or it does not; and if it does not, it doesn’t deserve a place in your home.

As a neat freak, I devoured the book and relished applying her process to my entire collection of earthly belongings.

Except my perfume collection.

It sits on a rickety platform stand in my bedroom, 3 small shelves completely covered bottles, boxes, and vials with which I have never considered parting.  It’s unstable and easy to knock, several bottles often falling in subsequent domino-style if I don’t replace a piece perfectly, or if a puppy lollops by a table leg with a bit too much enthusiasm.  My modest collection houses antique finds from my grandmother’s house (modern-day regulatory nightmares); Chanel print marketing from the 80s; a bottle of Anais Anais from 1993; mass and niche bottles I’ve purchased for myself in the last 20 years.  As a fragrance evaluator and self-proclaimed perfume-o-phile, how could this collection not spark joy?

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When most fashion magazines have spreads of Easter egg colored couture, my most glamorous look features faded black jeans and a Zara puffy jacket, a dreadful thing that sheds copious amount of feathers. Then there are my layered outfits, and I don’t mean tastefully put together layers of chiffon and cashmere suggested by Vogue. In the Ukrainian countryside, where spring is still tentative and the heating costs astronomical, we layer by putting on as many pieces of clothing as possible while still retaining the ability to lower our arms. I even sleep in a layered ensemble that includes tights, pajamas and a red sweater made by Miu Miu many years ago, but I betcha Miuccia Prada wouldn’t recognize it as one of her own now. Occasionally, I even do vintage by combining my grandfather’s track suit bottoms with my great-grandmother’s boucle jacket, a hideous look but perfect for whitewashing the cherry trees.

While I love dressing up (and indeed overdressing; I wouldn’t think twice about wearing a turquoise Betsey Johnson dress to the most staid of occasions), I relish the chance to dress purely for comfort. I enjoy dispensing with concerns of well-selected outfits and I stop worrying about my state of elegance according to any sort of fashion standard. In my grandmother’s village, my standard is the garden, or rather my ability to work in it without getting cold, wet or overheated. If the roses can be pruned and the apple trees whitewashed in comfort, the rest doesn’t matter.

What I don’t set aside is a glamorous perfume. Fashion designer Jean Patou called his fragrances “invisible couture”, and as the most intimate of adornments, scent is the most powerful. A few drops can create the ambiance you seek, make you travel in time, or even in my case, give an instant dose of glamour.  Why on earth should I care about not looking exactly like a cover girl when I’m trailing Mitsouko behind me? Plus, nothing is more perfect for collecting last year’s leaves than this autumnal golden peach chypre.

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This spring will be the 10th for Bois de Jasmin. When I created it in 2005, the blog was meant to be an online repository for my perfume musings, and that others wanted to read them remains a pleasant surprise. These days Bois de Jasmin garners around half a million monthly views, and it has evolved to include topics such as art, food, science, literature, dance, economics, and politics. This eclectic approach reflects my conviction that fragrance doesn’t exist in a cultural vacuum. Far from being an unnecessary frivolity, a “trivial feminine” pursuit, it’s an integral part of our environment, and the whole subject of scents and the way we connect to it mirrors other trends in our society. Perfume lovers today are lucky because we’re in a moment of unprecedented interest in fragrance, and we will see more manifestations of this fascination in new books, blogs, products, research, and discussions.

Another reason for Bois de Jasmin’s varied content is the diverse nature of our community. The conversations here are made possible by all of you. I love receiving your comments and letters, hearing your suggestions, giving you my own, and sharing my discoveries, whether they may be a perfume gem, a great book, a skincare tip or an interesting recipe. So a big thank you to all of my readers, visitors, and commenters. Of course, a special thank you to my co-authors. Andy, Elisa, and Patricia, you’re my muses and friends.

This past year has been a period of intense reflection for me, as I was trying to make sense of some traumatic events, and I realized that Bois de Jasmin had an older distant sibling. I was going through my family archive, and among the sepia photographs with their sharp serrated edges, stacks of my great-grandmother’s letters, and copies of various documents, I found a bulging notebook, so thick that the leaves risked splitting from the faux leather blue cover. It has been years since I’ve flipped through it, but I recognized it right away.

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Patricia mentions 10 lilac fragrances to brighten up these cold spring days.

Throw open the windows of your dwelling and breathe in the fresh air, roll down the car windows, take a walk around the block, read a nature poem by Mary Oliver, and move the orientals and ambers you’ve been living in to the back of the closet. Spring is finally here! And spring always makes me think of flowers, my favorite of which is the heavily scented lilac. Lilacs, a member of the olive family were first introduced to Europe at the end of the 16^th century by the Ottomans and came to the American colonies in the 18^th century. Since the blooming season is but a short few weeks in late spring, I’ve been on a quest to find the perfect, most realistic lilac fragrance to wear during the long 50 weeks without them. There are a number of lilac fragrances of varying price points to choose from, but whether all of them transport me to a lilac garden is another question. Below are my 10 mini-reviews:

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While perfume is a personal pleasure, its sillage means that our fragrance choices are sometimes influenced by the preferences of others–our family, friends, school or office colleagues. What if your perfume selection has to take into account your horse’s tastes? Patricia reports.

Layering two different perfumes is a fun way to play with fragrance and create a new scented experience. I find it interesting, and in principle, I should have accumulated an array of favorite combinations, but I confess that I haven’t made much foray into it. You see, my universal layer most days is not another perfume, but the smell of my horse. I’m an avid rider and go to the barn as often as I can manage to spend time with my boy. And although I love the smell of horses, the forty-minute ride home in an enclosed car can get a little ripe with a mixture of pungent horse sweat, the fecal smell of manure, sour urine notes, and the dry green of hay bales. And that is where perfume comes in.

Without really thinking about it, I’ve collected many horse-friendly scents over the years. Chanel Cristalle is not only lovely on its own, but blends beautifully with barnyard smells and seems to be appreciated by equine noses as well. Other favorites are L’Artisan Parfumeur Séville à l’aube (the slightly dirty quality of white flowers works well with the rich animalic background of the horse barn) and I wore it on the car trip home from the barn for months on end when it was first released in 2012.

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