unsolicited perfume review

[msmsgirl]

I was talking to this really stylish, fashion-y girl who works at AVON (coolest corporate job ever!), a friend of a friend, at a bar the other night, about jewelry (I loved hers) and perfume (she works in the perfume department). I told her my favorite scents were mostly Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab oils and the like (like hippy-witchy-gypsy occult

Comments

[vintagehandbag]

I like Givenchy's Irresistible line. I have the Sensual one -- it's got hits of amber and patchouli and stuff. I love patchouli mixed with other things.

[msmsgirl]

ooh, I saw those today and thought about trying them, I have to try the Sensual one.

[vintagehandbag]

I mean, I admit their names are stupid, but they really do smell good. There's some floral notes in there, but the overall effect is pretty intense.

[d_aulnoy]

"Gender identity" is an interesting way of putting it. With me, there are smells I Do Not Like, because I associate them with certain things ... and there are the smells I love that I cannot wear because they go wonky on me (Pomegranate Noir, I am looking at *you*). Psychologically unsurprisingly, there is a distinct overlap between the two ....

One of these days, I need to have a perfume party. I have loads of samples and bottles people have given me as gifts that could stand to be rehomed, and, hey - maybe people would discover new scents that they would never imagine as working on them ....

[msmsgirl]

It's funny, it really does feel like a Gender Identity issue - not for all scents I don't like, because there are some that are 'smells I just do not like', like overt patchouli. But for these "clean" soapy/aldehyde/white musk-y scents, I have this visceral reaction, like, "that perfume is for Another Girl, not me, why am I wearing someone else's perfume?? give me my perfume back!!" They somehow don't smell like MY life/body/aesthetic/values/affect/sexuality/worldview would smell!

I have a CRATE of BPAL imps and loads of other little stuff besides, we could probably have a perfume party for several people with just the 2 of our shit! I would *totally* come to a perfume party. How are Thursday nights for you these next couple of months??

[d_aulnoy]

See, that's what I find so fascinating about the identity moniker for it. I don't disapprove of people being girly, per se ... but scents I classify as girly? No way, Jose. It just doesn't fit the "me" in my head, anymore than a hot pink dress would. I may like Aqualina's "Pink Sugar," but there's something about it - name, odor, classification of wearers - that makes me leery of buying my own bottle. BPAL's Chimera, which is similar but more complex, on the other hand? I don't have any of those hangups about.

Thursday nights are actually sort of perfect for me, socializing-wise: I am totally down with this!

[msmsgirl]

yeah, it really is a feeling of gender identity i guess?! For me it's not that this category of scents is too girly or too not-girly, it's that they feel girly in precisely the wrong way, a totally *different* valence of "femme" or "feminine" than the one I identify with. I'm trying to put my finger on it: "clean" scents feel simultaneously too youthful/diminutive and too mature/grownup. It's got something to do with convention, respectability, norms of "professionalism," the place of the sexual in one's personality (whether it's cordoned off from daily life and only let out on the weekends, or kind of right out there up front), and probably aesthetic connotations of American-ness too -- all of which I guess adds up to an aesthetic of bourgeois/affluent/socially-acceptable femininity that precisely makes me go "NO." [This is a bit sketch to say, but the immediate mental image I got from the Narciso Rodriguez perfumes was of the girls who go to the clubs in Chelsea on the weekends in the sequined shirts with no sides and no back