Perfumes tested this week.

I had this week off (back to work tomorrow - sad face), and I didn't do much of anything besides reading books and messing about on the internet, so I got quite a bit of perfume testing done. As I said last week, I am working through my untested perfume oils alphabetically, and I'm up to D now. Still a way to go!

My 5 favourite perfumes in 2009.

I am more a fan of perfume oils than commercial fragrances, so this was a good year for me, because I discovered Wiggle Perfume, The Garden Bath, and Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. There wasn't a huge amount that grabbed my attention in the commercial perfume world - it was pretty saturated with one cheap, tinny celebrity fragrance after another. I hate those things, and it kind of irks me that perfumiers would agree to get involved. I mean, they have to earn a living like everyone else, but it's just so trashy. When Spongebob Squarepants has his own fragrance, it's well and truly time for the trend to die. So with commercial perfumes, I mostly stuck to my old favourites this year (Miller Harris Fleur Oriental, Lolita Lempicka, etc.). I did get a few decants from The Perfumed Court and found a couple of new loves that way, but mostly, I was all about the oils.

5. Chanel Coco Mademoiselle. I was given a sample vial of this earlier in the year when I bought some foundation, and I fell in love with it immediately, which surprised me because I'm not generally a fan of Chanel perfumes (too cloying). The website refers to it as an oriental, but to me it's more of a floral with a bit of vanilla in there somewhere. It's very classy and lasts on me for hours.

4. Miller Harris Noix de Tubéreuse. I really, really, really want a full bottle of this (I only have a 5ml decant), but it's not within my budget at the moment, sadly. This is a heady floral that lasts FOREVER. Gorgeous.

3. Wiggle Little 5. This was the first Wiggle perfume I tried and I could not stop sniffing myself. It's a floral oriental that would be perfect for a night out when you're all frocked up and sexified. Of course, I don't frock up and get sexified these days, so I just wear it around the house or at work. And sniff myself constantly.

2. The Garden Bath Southern Magnolia. (I can't link to the specific perfume, as Donna is on holiday and has taken down her wares for now.) I love Wiggle Mostly Magnolia, and that almost made it into my top 5, but in the end it was pipped at the post by The Garden Bath. Southern Magnolia seems to be more of "one note" than Mostly Magnolia (which, as the name suggests, is not entirely magnolia). I don't know if Southern Magnolia has any other notes in it, but the only thing I pick up is the pure, delicious scent of magnolia. It has great staying power on me too. I now want to get the scrub and lotion in the same fragrance so I can layer myself with it. Mmmmm. (I said magnolia a lot there, didn't I? There's not really any other way to describe it, though.)

1. Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Jazz Funeral. Wow. This perfume is like nothing I have ever smelled before. I described it to the best of my limited ability here, and there's not much more I can add, really. It's so unusual and intriguing, and whenever I wear it, I just sit there sniffing myself every few minutes. I just love it to death. Ha! Death! Get it? Get it?

Smells and junk

So after going a bit crazy buying loads of fragrance samples online, I haven't been able to test all that many of them properly until now. First there was the stupid heatwave - perfume always goes weird and distorted on me when it's really hot. Then I was sick for a week and couldn't smell a damn thing. It's only in the last couple of days I've been able to get a whiff of anything I've put on my wrist.

I have been curious to try some Jo Malone fragrances for a while now, because the ones I had heard about had scents I love - vanilla, nutmeg (I often stand in my kitchen sniffing whole nutmeg from the jar on my shelf), black vetyver (okay, I don't know what that is, but doesn't it sound mysterious and slinky?). I have to say I'm glad I bought samples from The Perfumed Court before shelling out for a full bottle. They have absolutely no staying power. Within an hour, they were gone. As for the fragrances themselves, they're quite nice, but nothing POW!. I tried Vanilla and Anise (doesn't smell like vanilla, very faint trace of anise, just your bog-standard nice-but-not-startling perfume, really), Nutmeg and Ginger (both scents quite faint and only detectable for about ten minutes), and Black Vetyver Cafe (meh).

I also bought some Miller Harris perfumes. I've already talked about Vetiver Bourbon, which turned out to be a men's fragrance (how on earth did I miss that?). From the half-dozen or so I received, I have so far had a proper run at the following:

L'Air de Rien: This is a very earthy, musky scent. And I mean musky in its true sweaty-people-having-just-done-the-sexuals-in-a-hot-room sense, not that froofy Body Shop White Musk. It's kind of dirty, to be honest. I still don't really know whether I like it or not, but I certainly find it interesting. It's not for the faint-hearted, that's for sure. If you turn up to work wearing this, people will stare suspiciously at you as though you've just rocked in from the night before, stilettoes in hand and all panda-eyes. Best used when you want to give the impression that you put out without bothering about dinner.

Noix de Tubéreuse: This is so, so pretty. There's not really much more I can say about it. It smells exactly like you'd expect it to by the name - floral and green. I really like it, and I'd probably buy a full bottle of it if I could afford to lash out $170AUD+ on a fragrance at the moment. It's got great staying power, too.

A few weeks ago I received about a dozen or so samples from Wiggle Perfume, and had a little bit of a squeal about Little 5, as well as eventually getting around to mentioning some others. Since then I've dabbled with a few more, and I'm surprised by how many I like. I bought that many samples because I expected to like maybe two or three. There are probably about two thirds I'd happily buy in bigger sizes.

Mostly Magnolia: I don't have a huge interest in ever going to America - mostly because I don't have a huge interest in travel - but if I ever did go there, the first place I'd want to go is Savannah, Georgia, thanks to reading Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil years ago. I have this (possibly completely wrong) image of beautiful old houses, green gardens overflowing with flowers and vines, people sitting on their verandahs drinking mint juleps, and a scent in the air of magnolia. If I had a garden, I'd have a magnolia tree - I just love that smell so much, and it is most heavenly after the rain. That's what this fragrance makes me think of. It's lush and gorgeous, and perfect for the Summer. 

Theda: I tried this because although I don't like old-timey silent movies, I love old-timey silent movie actresses. They always look so shifty and dirty, in a good way. I wore this a few weeks ago and really liked it, though I couldn't put my finger on any particular note. It was just a really nice fragrance that I kept sniffing through the day. I have since worn it a second time, and I like it even more, though I still can't detect any particular notes. It could be the cold I am still not quite over, or it could just be that I know about as much about perfume as I know about wine - not much at all, but I knows what I likes. And I likes this a lot. It's on my list of future full-size purchases.

Maggie: When I Googled for reviews of Wiggle Perfumes before I bought my first lot of samples, this was the one that was mentioned favourably most often. And it's also the one that got the most oohs and aahs and "Oooh, that's lovely!"s when I wore it to work. It seems to be a universally-liked fragrance. It's mostly floral (a gentle rose), but with a distinct note of lemon and a lighter, harder-to-catch note of sugar. I would not have thought lemon and roses would be particularly good together, but it works beautifully.

Zooey: I tried this one out last night. The first thing Noodle Arms said was, "Smells like pencil shavings", and then tried to get me to bite into a Jelly Belly Beanboozled Bean to prove her point (I'm not falling for that one - I know she's trying to slip that vomit-flavoured one in there!). My first impression was one of those car air freshener things. We then looked it up and found it has notes of chypre and pine, so we were both right. At first, I didn't think I liked this at all, but as it wore down, it became more interesting. It's not really me - I'm not that big on the woody family, but it's a pleasant fragrance, and could probably be worn by either men or women.

Having been so pleased with my first lot of samples from Wiggle, I ordered 9 more, and three 5ml sizes of the first few I liked - Mostly Magnolia, Little 5, and Du Bois. They took just over a week to get to me, which I had not expected at all, given that I ordered the week of Thanksgiving. So not only does this lady make some really lovely perfumes, her customer service is just superb. Thumbs up!

Phew. That went on longer than I had intended, and I only touched on a few of the ones I wanted to talk about, so I guess there will be another post along these lines in the next few days. I have four weeks off (woo hoo!), so plenty of time to do some testing and playing and reviewing and writing. I just got a warm 88 palette from Coastal Scents this week also, so I'll be talking about that when I've had a proper crack at it.

Miller Harris Vetiver Bourbon

After a couple of days of relief from the Stinking Adelaide Heat, I decided to test one of the squabillion fragrance samples I have at the moment. I started with Miller Harris Vetiver Bourbon. My initial thought was that it smelled like a men's fragrance. My second thought was that it was kind of "eh", and it didn't have much staying power. I was a bit surprised about that, because my absolute favourite perfume - Miller Harris Fleur Oriental - is a kick-in-the-arse fragrance that would knock over anyone within two feet of me when I'm wearing it. And it lasts and lasts and lasts. Makeup BFF J reckoned she could smell apples, and I could kind of get where that was coming from. To me it mostly smelled a bit Not Quite Right, and I wondered if it had been damaged from sitting in my letterbox for hours on a hot day. But after reading up on it, it would seem that NQR note is deliberate.

All in all, I was unimpressed. And then I looked it up on the internets and discovered that I am an idiot, because it is a men's fragrance. D'oh.

If you want to pick up men, it helps to smell like food.

Being a lover of all that is shiny and new (whee!), a compulsive shopper and a chronic impulse buyer, it's not often that I repurchase beauty products. There is always something newer and more exciting to get my hands on. However, there are a few things I go back to over and over, even if I occasionally put them aside to play with something different. One of those things is Body Shop Brazil Nut Body Butter.



I have been buying this ever since it's been available in Australia - 15 years? Something like that. It smells like really good quality vanilla ice cream, and in the olden days, when I was out and about on the prowl, I was constantly being sniffed by men and told that I smelled great (looking back, that sounds a bit creepy). It's divine, and the scent lasts quite a while considering it's a body cream. On a more practical note, it's a really nourishing, moisturising cream that is great for using on dry patches like elbows and knees, or to smoothen (is that a word? It is now) your shins after shaving. It takes ages to sink in though, so you have to stand around naked for a while before you can get dressed. The Body Shop should use that as a selling point - "Guys? Want to get your girlfriend naked more often? Body butter!"

I spent the 90s walking around smelling like delicious food. There was a perfume oil available from Klein's Perfumery (my favourite shop ever) called Fairy Floss. It smelled like - well, fairy floss. Actually, it was more of a generic lolly smell, but it was sweet and lovely and lots of people complimented me on it. (Is it weird that one of my favourite things in life is being told I smell nice?)

They also had the Demeter range of one-note fragrances, and my particular favourite of those was Sticky Toffee Pudding. I bought some of these from Adore a few months ago, while on a misty nostalgia trip about my lost youth, and I was disappointed in them. BETTER IN YOUR MEMORIES. I bought Brownie, Vanilla Cake Batter and Fairy Floss. They all had a bit of a chemical smell that I don't remember them having years ago (though I was a constant haze of wine and cocktails back then, so it might just be my foggy memory), and the Brownie one in particular smelled awful on me. I gave it to a friend - hopefully it was nicer for her. The Vanilla Cake Batter didn't smell like either vanilla or cake batter, and the Fairy Floss wasn't a patch on the little vial of oil I'd had from Klein's. Luckily, I am no longer in the market to be sniffed by random men.



These days I generally stick to proper "grown up" fragrances. My all time favourite (also bought from Klein's, who sadly no longer stock it) is Fleur Oriental by Miller Harris. It's a heady oriental scent that probably knocks people out if I sit next to them on the bus, but I SMELL PRETTY SO I DON'T CARE. And I'm super excited now, because I just discovered while Googling for a link to this fragrance that they are going to be available to buy in Australia again!

Everything's coming up Milhouse!

Ooh, here's a bit of interesting trivia for you relating to picking up men and smells and whatnot. I read somewhere a couple of years ago that there was a poll done to find which scent men found most attractive on a woman, and the winner by a landslide was Ysatis by Givenchy. So now you know.