A Holiday Surprise

Review by Tom A very generous blogger sent me three very interesting samples, and I am breaking into the Caron reviews to strike while the iron is hot. Human Existence From Thierry Mugler"s "olfactory interpretation" of the book Perfume, Colombina described this one by writing "it could be a Demeter kind of scent for Body Odors" and "It puts the previously skankiest perfumes like CB Musk and MKK to absolute and utter shame". Well, that just about says it all. The first few minutes of this is the literal interpretation of sweat. Old sweat. Not romanticised, sweetened or made like your lovers post-coital embrace like MKK. Not that wierdly feral, berry like, ridden hard gay-porn accord of CB I Hate Perfume. This is the sour sweat of desperation and failure. Perhaps even insanity. This is the smell of the crazy homeless person you cross the street to avoid. This may be the way that most people smelled back in the day before indoor plumbing, but it's not the way I'd like to smell. As it dries, it becomes less human and a little more animal, something more like civet. It becomes more wearable,but that's like saying that being strangled is a bit more personal than being shot. You're still dead. But you know what? After about a half hour, I kind of started to like it. Orgie Also from the Coffret my wonderful benefactress sent me a smidge of this one- a strange skin scent with some of the odd sourness of HE (is it cumin?), toned down with something creamy that I can't quite pick out. On me it fades very quickly to almost nothing: a very light musk. I tried adding a bit of Human Existence to it but that didn't help. The Orgie promptly killed off most of the HE, making it quite wearable, but the HE eventually slashed its way back. Rich Hippie Psychedelic A polar opposite of the darkness of Human Existence, Psychedelic, as Colombina wrote, is one happy scent: on me it's extremely linear. It smells to me like Orange Marmalade. One of the really expensive ones from England, bursting with orange peel and spices and that bright fizzy smell if home-made vanilla extract(vanilla pods that have been soaked for months in really good vodka) We get very few of the drab, depressing overcast days in Southern California that I remember from my youth in the northeast: if you live there you know the ones: late March when you are convinced that spring is never going to come. This scent would be a happy antidote to those grim days. I can't imagine not grinning ear-to-ear putting this on. And for those of you who were wondering, Yes I did layer Human Existence with both CB Musk and MKK. Both of them kind of stomped all over HE, MKK let a bit of it through but it just made MKK smell a little, elderly? CB Musk was not letting stop it's little sex party: it rolled right over it. HE was relegated to a distant corner, brooding. Phew! I was scared for a moment there! The still from Perfume is from perfumemovie.com. The image of the Orange Marmalade with Champagne jar is from fortnumandmason.com.