perfume
DATURA NOIR — SERGE LUTENS
Datura Noir is angelic, but it is not the angelic of Precious Moments ( Christian kitsch /pos ), nor is it the angelic of Thierry Mugler's Angel ( fairyfloss and funfairs ).
Instead, Datura Noir is a major 7 chord ( "Don't you know this chord's about love?" — Ah P. ), or a melody that leans into the leading tone, evincing longing.
It's a snow angel with tree-branch stigmata: a form composed entirely of absence. Someone was here, stretching their wings a moment.
Datura Noir is Gabriel, holding in trembling hand the golden horn he must blow. It is a hesitation before the painful message he is sent to deliver:
that to reach out to perfection, to ingratiate onself to divinity, there will have to be a great loss. Maybe even the loss of all things.
When I realized my sample of Datura Noir had run out, I took a sharp breath in, startled, and began to tear up.
It was as if I had lost a longcherished souvenir from childhood.
A part of you was in here, the empty glass vial suggests. And now that part of you is gone.
But it wasn't gone. Or it was, but incompletely, as it tends to happen. After that, every once in a while, I would get these ghostsmells. I'm going about my daily life, reading the history of Acadia, when out of the corner of my eye the otherworldly aroma rises gently into my awareness. Like a cool tide lapping at my feet, it startles me awake, and like waking from a dream, I cannot return. The scent has completely dispersed, just as it enters my awareness. And there I am, completely pulled out of whatever I was doing, staring into the empty space of rooms, trying to hold on to the lingering impression it has left on me.
The fragrance opens in a way that is literally intoxicating: in me it genuinely induces a mild delirium: I can't stop smiling ( my joy feels larger than my body ), and occasionally I will even break out in laughter. As the fragrance cycles through its notes, there is a sense of motion: a fall from heaven to earth, but a heavenly earth nonetheless, with a milky, creamy finish.
DATURA BLANCHE — KEIKO MECHERI
Datura Blanche is a more pleasant and agreeable scent. It is probably closer to a Compliment Getter perfume. And besides that, it might even just be better, if I took the average of how much I enjoy each fragrance's phases in vacuo. But in situ? While I love Datura Blanche — it's my second favorite of hundreds I've tried — but the truth is, it's lacking in contradiction. The perfume house describes it with the sentence fragment "The perfect alchemy of a dream." Perfect is right, and that's exactly the problem. I can bear the more difficult drydown of DN-SL because, in conversation with its opening and middle, it communicates something beautiful, even meaningful to me. And also. Maybe on some level I want to undergo some kind of sacrifice.
~AND WHY WHAT I JUST SAID DOESN'T MATTER, ACTUALLY~
Okay so DB-KM isn't a masterpiece. But as I see it, that's to its credit! I mean, I don't really want to wear a masterpiece every single day. That can weigh a little heavy. Sometimes you want the simple, pleasant veil. Like a persona, a pleasantveil is protective. Well, this is my personal favorite pleasantveil, and I love it.
VANILLE — OUTREMER
This is far and away my favorite vanilla perfume. It was recommended to me by a friend of mine, and without knowing any more than her brief impression of it, I hit up my local Anthropologie and purchased a bottle for 20 dollars, my first and only "blind buy." I was amazed. What makes it great is probably not so much the vanilla note (which is a not uncommon cottoncandyish one like in Ariana Grande - Cloud) but how it combines with bready, bakery notes, so that in the end it's remniscent of cupcakes and pastries.
It's such a warm and cozy scent. I love to wear it under a big, comfy sweater; in fact, my favorite way to experience Vanille is — after a light evening out, folding and putting my sweater away — waiting a couple nights to put the sweater back on and experience a dialed down, more homey form of the fragrance: the impression of leftover baked goods sitting on your kitchen countertop. Yes, I did say a couple days later, so... at least to my nose it has a lot of staying power (there has to be a perfumey word for that I'm forgetting), but it ages it's always soft and pretty, never oppressive or overwhelming, so I have exactly zero complaints on that front
Okay, I briefly touched on how it's a cottoncandyish vanilla, right? I always thought of Cotton Candy as not only unrelated to, but in some sense the opposite of, vanilla, probably because growing up my main experience with them were as Thrifty's Ice Cream flavors. To my littlekid mind, amid the palette of Rite Aid's ice cream counter, CC represented an extreme novelty, standing apart with its garish marble of pinks and blues, while vanilla just seemed... well... kind of vanilla. About as basic as you could get. Little did I know that cotton candy (at least the pink kind) is actually vanilla flavored! I was super surprised to learn that a few days ago when I was going down a HistoryOfVariousSweets rabbit hole. Of course, cotton candy is literally made of sugar, which adds a lot of sweetness to an otherwise creamy flavor.
Regardless, the marketing and food coloring was doing a lot of the heavylifting in making CC my favorite ice cream flavor. But what can I say, I'm still extremely biased towards pretty foods, and I don't think that will ever change. In my opinion, presentation is a powerful and in many cases inextricable piece of the experience of an art, whether that be the art of creamery, or perfumery. As for the presentation of Vanille, it's pretty cute. The bottle wears a floral design, with four big open blooms in each corner. I like to leave the bottle on my desk because it's so pretty and matches my makeup drawer and general decor.
Anyway, out of all my favorite fragrances, this one is without a doubt the most generally appealing. Everyone I've shown it seems pretty enthusiastic about it. On the level of vibe the most similar perfume I've tried is Serge Lutens' Jeaux de Peau, which also gives the impression of a bakery but with the added suggestion of milk tea! Both of those scents will make you want to chill out on a bean bag chair or cuddle up on a couch lol. All in all, major props to Outremer for creating an affordable and delicious vanilla perfume!
ANGEL'S DUST — FRANCESCA BIANCHI
A masterpiece, I think, though it will definitely not be to everyone's taste. What I get is honey with hints of rose, iris, and sweet musk, all wrapped in a generous puff of talcum. What it *feels* like is an angelic being, perpetually turning to dust.
Falling apart, into almost a nothingness, but holding together, still, somehow. Twinkling, sustained gently on winds that do not moan or sigh. To what extent, as it swirls and floats, is it moved by its own will or by God's? But there is no answer to be discerned, and then there seems to be no difference. Without form, with substance that may just be nominal, so slight as to only be held together by belief, this perfume captures a sense of ethereal fragility: an otherworldly purity invisible under scrutinizing eyes, intangible to fingers' crude investigations, but radiant to heart's belief; fragility followed all the way to its last end. Angel's Dust promises the impossibility of loss.
LAIT DE BISCUIT — CHABAUD
This simply smells like shortbread and milk (one of my favorite snacks). There is not much more to it than that. I love it.