What the What

I am sitting here and I am one big itch. This heat has brought on my eczema and rain has brought the mosquitoes. Something always itches and I am going through the calamine stuff like crazy. Since Amazon Prime Day has come and gone and the big part of my dad's gift has been bought, I took a look at Luckyscent. My dad is asking for another one of those hinoki scented soap bars and they are not in stock right now but I will keep looking.

I stumbled on the regular Roja then the Roja Dove stuff. There was always one of the Roja Dove offerings that I have been interested in was Diaghilev. I really wasn't super interested in ordering a perfume. When I saw the price tag of Diaghilev, I almost had a heart attack. The cost for a bottle was over a thousand dollars. Yep, a thousand dollars. I couldn't remember what any of the Roja and Roja Dove line had cost, but reading on Basenotes.net some one made the comparison from what a bottle of any of the Chanel extraits to the Roja and Roja Dove extraits and Chanel was more expensive price per milliliter than Roja Dove. I did a little bit of the math and the costs are pretty similar. But the difference with Chanel, there are different sizes to choose from with the extrait but with Roja Dove there is only once size.

I know that if I fell in love with any Roja Dove perfume, you would have to save pennies for quite a while before I order a bottle. But on the other hand I could buy a minimum of 3 other bottles of perfume that are on my list. But it just seems like arrogance to charge that much for a bottle of perfume and just the thought of charging over a thousand dollars for a perfume makes me raise an eyebrow.

Perfumes that Haunt

Mitsouko has turned 100 this year. It's amazing to have any perfume that makes it to be in current production 30 or 40 years but to make it to 100 years is phenomenal. I have been obsessed and worn Mitsouko on and off for 10 years but never exclusively. I never could figure out why I enjoyed/loved Mitsouko until I read from the original book, The Guide and tried Diorling. It's the balance of three notes.

But digging around those perfume boxes that I had to set in another room. Yes, 4 cardboard boxes full of my perfume collection. I can't get to all the boxes and we are still rearranging stuff and getting rid of stuff. I stumbled of part of my stash of vintage and current Mitsouko. I am still attempting to get that one monster bottle of vintage Mitsouko unstuck. It's a teardrop bottle of Mitsouko with the dolphin label. In the description from the seller on E-bay, she said that there was a chip on the bottom of the dabber and he/she managed to get the dabber unplugged once but never again. Unless I end up busting the bottle, I might say screw it and just but the dabber part and transfer the perfume to another glass container but haven't brought myself to that point.

The last time that I wore Mitsouko was this past Easter and I had used one of my vintage bottles. But I sniffed the current stuff and some of my vintage and realized that Mitsouko does have a haunting quality to it. Mitsouko is like an onion, to discover her secrets, you got to peel back the layers and it takes multiple wearings before you can begin to figure her out. But she never really leaves you alone. I think that I might have to start wearing her once a week and probably wear her tomorrow, heat be damned.

That Time of Year

I know that it is halfway through June and it's already started. Articles about Amazon Prime Day. I hate it when the news channels online start up on it almost a month before it even happens. Then a couple weeks later, the TV news channels start talking about it. After a while, I get sick of it.

I have been a fan of Amazon ever since the beginning. After a while, some of that changed. Amazon Prime was freaking awesome when it was launched and it was fairly cheap too. Then the price hikes for Prime started happening and then I wasn't exactly a fan. And I became a sporadic Prime user. When Prime would offer me a month free, I would take it and usually I used it around Thanksgiving and Christmas, when I needed it the most. Three months of Prime was okay for a while. I was the only one in my house that had an Amazon account and I was the only one using Prime, so having Prime wasn't really worth it. Then my mother got a Kindle and her own Amazon account and things changed and I added her to my Prime account and then Prime became worth it again. But if the price of Prime goes up again, I probably won't be renewing, in spite of all of the benefits.

Right now, Amazon Prime Day will be coming up some time soon in July and I am thinking that it will be sometime in the next two or three weeks. Right now, I have a little bit of money on my Amazon account and I am thinking of ordering a Fire Stick for the TV that we have and since we have Direct TV already I hope it isn't a bust. That is hoping that Prime Day has some special pricing for a Fire Stick.

Kiehl's Original Musj Blend no 1 Review

For some strange reason, I had a wicked craving to try something new but that something new had to be a musk perfume. I do have a liking for musk, even the laundry musk smell. Even laundry musk in a perfume can smell pretty sexy in a perfume depending on the other notes. L'Heure de Nuit smells sexy with the laundry musk to my nose. This time, I pulled out Kiehl's Original Musk Blend no 1 to test out.

The first couple minutes, I couldn't get much of anything when I first sprayed, just a vague floral element. Then it was a holy crap moment when I could really smell it. A slutty musk with flowers. I can't really pick out one single floral note, okay, a hint of rose. The floral aspect isn't huge but I think that the floral aspect is to keep the musk in line. To keep the musk from getting too out of line and not go down the full on skank in a bad way. The musk is definitely a player in Original Musk. The musk likes to flirt with the clean side of things and the dirty side of things but mostly in the dirty. I find the whole perfume to be pretty awesome. If you find that vintage BaV is too slutty and dense but like it in theory, Original Musk would probably be more of up your alley. The lasting power of this one is about 7 or 8 hours on skin. For an EDT, that is pretty awesome to my EDT eating skin. Projection is pretty mild and not in your face.

I did thourghly enjoy Kiehl's Original Musk no 1. Would I get a bottle? The answer is a resounding yes! I did look online and find that Original Musk no 1 is under $50 for a 1.7 ounce spray. In the world of perfume, that is pretty much free. I think that I will get this for my birthday in September.

Tauer L'Oudh Review

Yesterday, I decided to suck it up and just try something to review, even though I wanted to wear Ubar. I will admit that I have never smelled a perfume where oud. I was thinking of testing L'Oudh on Saturday while at work and I am happy that I didn't.

L'Oudh starts off really strange. It started off as this strange cat pee type of thing. That sticks around for a good 15 minutes. Then there is a shift to something rubbery. A cross between a Band-aid and asphalt and L'Oudh just kind of stayed there. I didn't get a whole lot of development after those things except what smells like a little pepper. The dry down was okay but there wasn't anything is L'Oudh that I enjoyed or even tolerated.

I might be the biggest Andy Tauer fangirl but this really stunk on my skin. Too much of this composition smelled like Zoologist Civet, which I wanted to like but just hated. So I guess that it's money saved for me.

Stuff

Throughout my perfume journey, I went and still do go through phases. First it was Chanel's Cuir de Russie, Mitsouko, Lyric, Deneuve and probably a few others.

I couldn't help but think is I obsessed over some of these perfumes, I saved up for some of these only to not wear them. That made me ask, "what the hell, genius, why aren't you wearing the hell out of this?' I have gotten into the funk of wearing the same old thing. Mostly wearing Tauer offerings. Now I am starting up on wearing no 5 exclusively for no good reason.

Some of this is because I don't carry a purse and full bottles of anything don't quite fit into. There really isn't any place to store anything safely and I am paranoid about my stuff getting stolen. Especially my wallet. Who wants to make a billion phone calls and wait for your cards to be replaced? And go to get their license replaced? So I just keep a credit card and my license in a pocket that zips. Since my fleece work jackets that work gives employees, the pockets are not that big, just big enough to hold my cellphone, my iPod and a decant of perfume. In theory, I can probably fit a full bottle in the pocket but I am not willing to test that theory.

Sometimes, it's the people I get to live with. The comments of it's gross, smells weird, smell like an old lady or has a cat piss vibe is what I get a lot. So figure, why wear it? Maybe I should start wearing some of these when I go to bed at night because I sleep with one of my dogs and the dog won't complain.

One Over the Other

Ever since I've started down this perfume journey, I've noticed a few things. I have always preferred one house over the other. Or I lose interest in a house at a certain point. Some perfume houses seem pretty prolific when releasing perfume, others, not so much. But I lose interest all the same.

Let's start with Chanel. I do have some Chanel offerings in my collection. No 19, no 5 and no 22, Cuir de Russie. For a while, it was pretty easy to get decants of any Chanel offering, all I had to do was bop on over to TPC or STC and get a decant. Then Chanel decided that they didn't want that stuff and probably said that not so hot legal stuff will happen if you don't stop selling Chanel decants. That kind of ended a good chunk of my Chanel thing. I live out in the boonies and don't have access to a mall too often let alone a Chanel boutique. I just can't justify blind buying and I have underwhelmed by recent releases nor am I amused with Chanel changing the formulation of the Les Exclusif line (EDP instead of EDT). So it was time for me to move on.

Serge Lutens was another house that I kind of was obsessed with for a while, especially in the beginning of exploring what perfume had to offer. After a while, I did get kind of bored with his work. It all started to smell the same and the new releases started to smell like they were just poorly constructed. What also got me is some of the pricing has gotten outrageous. Three hundred plus dollars for a bell jar. Not happening unless I somehow manage to win enough with a scratch off lotto ticket (which ain't gonna happen since I don't play).

Amouage got irritating to me. While I love a ton of the earlier stuff, I did lose interest after Honour. Then Amouage really departed from their roots. What I did try were things that I have already smelled a million times before with a lower price point. So I am not amused with an already expensive brand cheapening itself but keeping the prices.

The one house that still fascinates me is Tauer Perfumes. Andy Tauer has experimented quite a bit but stayed true to his roots. Andy Tauer has kept prices reasonable in terms of niche perfumery and makes the effort to give the best quality perfume he can. The works released have been consistently good even though I didn't get along with a couple perfumes. I know that Andy Tauer is coming out with a new perfume and I can't wait to give it a go.