perfume: CDG Avignon (and also smells: riding a bus to work)
Avignon, round 2: in vial, this stuff just smells back-brain good to me. On the skin, it opens with a sweet note that I could do without: something that's much more prominent in CDG Jaisalmer that hits the perfume-and-soap thing early. I wish that my nose didn't think that everything smells like perfume and soap! In fairness, it was pretty restrained and smelled like _expensive_ soap, not animal shampoo.
Avignon is supposed to smell like Catholic churches and have a heavy heavy incense note. I haven't smelled that much Catholic church incense - only recently, at a funeral in a huge brick church in St. Paul, did I even recognize what that smell was. What I smell mostly is a cedar-and-pine-planks woodsiness, very big and sunny and solemn, less like a church than like the angled light on the stairwell of an ostentatiously minimalist solar house.
I was wondering while reading perfume blogs how smells could be seasonal - surely something that smells good in December smells good in August - but the smell of this does clash a little with the hay-and-grass happening outside. It seems like a good smell for a chilly, rainy day with mist on the pavement - very clear and bright and spicy-homey.
Incidentally, paying attention to smells is a bit of a penance when you ride a public bus to work. So far I have smelled a lot of motor oil and exhaust and laundry musk and cigarettes and alcoholness and a kind of toesiness that I always thought was a body smell but I think is actually a cologne that I don't like. And of course an overwhelming inside-of-bus dirtiness. The clean cigarette smoke coming in the windows is practically a break. It occurs to me that people may have retreated from smells for the same reason that no one thinks about civic architecture in a Super Target - you get kind of bummed out.
At the bus stop I caught a raisineyness coming off my wrist, but on the bus I just kept smelling incense-and-soapiness.
An hour or two in, I can still smell cedar-y-ness and a nice foresty smell, but unfortunately my nose has definitely started to flatten this all down into Just Soap. Lazy nose! I wish it didn't turn everything into undifferentiated shampoo! When I pay attention I can pick up the resin-y sweetness of the myrrh, and I suspect that actually in this case the soap I am remembering is Kiss My Face Olive Oil and Chamomile, because I suspect I'm smelling chamomile a lot more than I realize. It's also at a volume that I appreciate, now, which is a sillage of "you must actually huff your actual wrist to catch this."
I think Avignon is my most successful try so far, and I wonder if my nose will come along enough for me to one day appreciate these perfumes as something other than "a bunch of other stuff and then SOAP SOAP SOAP." But also, I think I need to make an even harder point of avoiding musk in the next round of samples. It's not even bugging me, at this point - it is, one imagines, probably the musk all cheaper musks wish they could be - but it definitely still has that artificial constructed we-made-something-that-smells! smell to me. #THIS IS PERFUME #YOU ARE NOT ACTUALLY SMELLING A TREE #FYI
Incidentally, I have a daffodil on my desk that someone picked and then dropped outside (jeez!), and it keeps making that white-flower narcissus smell, and I keep being reminded that I think it's a fine smell, as the sex pheremones of a plant! I just can't get my head around smelling it on my person.
Avignon is supposed to smell like Catholic churches and have a heavy heavy incense note. I haven't smelled that much Catholic church incense - only recently, at a funeral in a huge brick church in St. Paul, did I even recognize what that smell was. What I smell mostly is a cedar-and-pine-planks woodsiness, very big and sunny and solemn, less like a church than like the angled light on the stairwell of an ostentatiously minimalist solar house.
I was wondering while reading perfume blogs how smells could be seasonal - surely something that smells good in December smells good in August - but the smell of this does clash a little with the hay-and-grass happening outside. It seems like a good smell for a chilly, rainy day with mist on the pavement - very clear and bright and spicy-homey.
Incidentally, paying attention to smells is a bit of a penance when you ride a public bus to work. So far I have smelled a lot of motor oil and exhaust and laundry musk and cigarettes and alcoholness and a kind of toesiness that I always thought was a body smell but I think is actually a cologne that I don't like. And of course an overwhelming inside-of-bus dirtiness. The clean cigarette smoke coming in the windows is practically a break. It occurs to me that people may have retreated from smells for the same reason that no one thinks about civic architecture in a Super Target - you get kind of bummed out.
At the bus stop I caught a raisineyness coming off my wrist, but on the bus I just kept smelling incense-and-soapiness.
An hour or two in, I can still smell cedar-y-ness and a nice foresty smell, but unfortunately my nose has definitely started to flatten this all down into Just Soap. Lazy nose! I wish it didn't turn everything into undifferentiated shampoo! When I pay attention I can pick up the resin-y sweetness of the myrrh, and I suspect that actually in this case the soap I am remembering is Kiss My Face Olive Oil and Chamomile, because I suspect I'm smelling chamomile a lot more than I realize. It's also at a volume that I appreciate, now, which is a sillage of "you must actually huff your actual wrist to catch this."
I think Avignon is my most successful try so far, and I wonder if my nose will come along enough for me to one day appreciate these perfumes as something other than "a bunch of other stuff and then SOAP SOAP SOAP." But also, I think I need to make an even harder point of avoiding musk in the next round of samples. It's not even bugging me, at this point - it is, one imagines, probably the musk all cheaper musks wish they could be - but it definitely still has that artificial constructed we-made-something-that-smells! smell to me. #THIS IS PERFUME #YOU ARE NOT ACTUALLY SMELLING A TREE #FYI
Incidentally, I have a daffodil on my desk that someone picked and then dropped outside (jeez!), and it keeps making that white-flower narcissus smell, and I keep being reminded that I think it's a fine smell, as the sex pheremones of a plant! I just can't get my head around smelling it on my person.