Life Before Perfume and Other Things

Since it looks like I have what I call a "baby cold" and a stye on my upper eyelid, reviewing a perfume is out. I still can smell but with a small cold, I can't smell that well to judge anything. It turns out that I did have a little more funds than I thought due to holiday pay, spending less than I thought for Christmas and returns. But I dared not and really couldn't spend a whole lot for a new bottle of perfume.

Inexpensive and niche perfume is not easily used in a sentence. But periodically, you do find something. What I have on my to buy list, in terms of perfume, is fairly up there in terms of price, so I proceeded with caution on Luckyscent and took at look. I posted on Twitter to Luckyscent that they shouldn't be so reliant on that sale page of theirs. Some of those bargains, are not exactly bargains. My idea was to every 4 or 5 months, offer a 10% or 15% off your order. Hopefully, they will take that into consideration. So after dithering on Andy Tauer's Vanilla Flash or spending extra money Viktoria Minya's Hedonist travel set, I went with Vanilla Flash. For $63, that's practically free in terms of niche. I'm going to have to wait until I file my taxes to see what's going to be my deal in terms of a refund. Maybe that full bottle of SDV is in the cards. But I digress.

But it got me into thinking about how things were before perfume. Before 2007, I only had one or two bottles of perfume. They were popular perfumes at the time, Clinique Happy and Estee Lauder Pleasures.  I wasn't someone who wore perfume every day. If I remembered to put some on, I did but it wasn't something that crossed my mind very often. So they sat around most of the time and took quite a while for me to use up. Somehow, I had received an e-mail from Chanel, telling me about Cuir de Russie. At the time, spending $200 on a perfume was a massive deal to me, especially since I had never smelled it. I figured that it was 6.8 ounces and if I didn't like it or had an allergic reaction, I would return it. Now, spending $200 or more on a perfume, doesn't scare me so much and I don't do the blind buy thing any more. I do consider the price and if I am going to spend over a $100, it better be for something I absolutely love before I commit. It's funny that now I can't really leave my house and go anywhere without perfume. What's even funnier is that in 2018, Cuir de Russie is no longer in EDT form and while they have a 2.5 oz bottle and a 6.8 ounce bottle, the prices have changed dramatically. The 2.5 ounce bottle now costs as much as what I paid for a 6.8 ounce bottle 10 years ago ($200). The 6.8 ounce bottle is a whopping $350. That made me shudder to think of Chanel becoming uber expensive to the point of not wanting to buy perfume from Chanel anymore.