I've been going through a mini phase of going through my collection of full bottles and wearing them. I have been testing to see if I still love them or even still like them. For one thing I need the space on my dresser because in the past year, I've added more than I have wanted to. Yeah, having about 30 bottles has gotten a little overwhelming.
Since going through my collection, I keep forgetting how wonderful Shalimar is and why I am not wearing it more often. L'air du Desert Marocain has gotten a lot of that same treatment of being ignored. So has Chanel's Sycomore. I think with the latter two, they are in the same vein of being mostly bone dry and they require a certain mood to be worn.
What made me decide to go through some of my collection is that I have been looking for a bottle of Theorema EDP to add to my collection even though I have a huge decant of it. Well, I did fall head over heels for it. I went to Amazon and found a bottle for a reasonable price. I ordered a bottle and with a couple recently discontinued scents, I've ordered and gotten said discontinued perfumes. Not this time. Instead of sending me Theorema, I got Fan di Fendi and the lotion that came with it. I was not happy. I e-mailed Amazon to let them know I received the wrong thing and that what I ordered was a 1.7 ounce bottle of Theorema and the picture was Theorema and I wasn't happy. They let me know that they are sending me the right item and that I could keep the wrong item. I sure hope that I get the right item this time.
Saturday, May 31, 2014
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Previously Loved
Right now, it seems like I am in a little bit of a dilemma. I have always loved jasmine dominant perfumes and had longed for A La Nuit for a while. But now, most jasmine dominant perfumes drive me up the wall.
For the past two weeks, I've been trying to wear A La Nuit off and on and it's not working. It's become like Fracas and most tuberose perfumes. Just too much no matter what is going on. I do have to agree with Tania Sanchez on A La Nuit that it's "Death by jasmine". It's funny that I've never had much of an issue with A La Nuit before but now I am finding it a little too dense. In the past two weeks, I have worn Patou Joy in EDP, Serge Lutens Sarrasins and Diorissimo in EDP.
While Sarrasins and Joy were fabulous smelling on my skin and wasn't horrifically overloaded with jasmine. Diorissimo was a lily and indolic jasmine overload and I'm just not understanding this. I love an idolic jasmine but apparently the jasmine can't be too dense and white flower and must have something that will stand up to the jasmine.
Sarrasins is one of my favorite jasmine scents. The jasmine is indolic but there is a wonderful leather note in Sarrasins that keeps the jasmine in check. But I have noticed in Montale's Jasmin Full, it's more of a clean jasmine, a mainstream jasmine. I have noticed that Jasmine Full has a certain stickiness to it. Some days, it's the feeling after I ate too many jelly beans or the sticky hand feeling.
For the past two weeks, I've been trying to wear A La Nuit off and on and it's not working. It's become like Fracas and most tuberose perfumes. Just too much no matter what is going on. I do have to agree with Tania Sanchez on A La Nuit that it's "Death by jasmine". It's funny that I've never had much of an issue with A La Nuit before but now I am finding it a little too dense. In the past two weeks, I have worn Patou Joy in EDP, Serge Lutens Sarrasins and Diorissimo in EDP.
While Sarrasins and Joy were fabulous smelling on my skin and wasn't horrifically overloaded with jasmine. Diorissimo was a lily and indolic jasmine overload and I'm just not understanding this. I love an idolic jasmine but apparently the jasmine can't be too dense and white flower and must have something that will stand up to the jasmine.
Sarrasins is one of my favorite jasmine scents. The jasmine is indolic but there is a wonderful leather note in Sarrasins that keeps the jasmine in check. But I have noticed in Montale's Jasmin Full, it's more of a clean jasmine, a mainstream jasmine. I have noticed that Jasmine Full has a certain stickiness to it. Some days, it's the feeling after I ate too many jelly beans or the sticky hand feeling.
Friday, May 16, 2014
Guerlain L'Heure de Nuit Review
Guerlain is one of those perfume houses that I have come to love. I've had a hard time liking, let alone loving a good most of what I have tried. It took me a long while to love Mitsouko, L'Heure Bleue and understand Jicky. But I understood and loved Shalimar right away. But I realized one thing about Jicky. The EDP version of Jicky doesn't last all that long on my skin, even when wearing a thicker moisturizer. I had ordered a fresh bottle of it and was so excited to spray it on my skin. I had gotten about 4 or 5 hours of wear before it petered out to nothing. Boy, I was disappointed and Shalimar in EDP kind of does the same thing too. But Mitsouko and L'Heure Bleue (in EDP form) simply last forever on skin. So there is a lot of head scratching there.
With flankers, there is a lot of pearl clutching going on on my end. Especially when it comes down to classics. No. 19, no. 5, Shalimar, and now L'Heure Bleue have flankers. Even though I like Eau Premiere and now L'Heure de Nuit, classics really shouldn't have flankers.
For the past three days, I have been wearing L'Heure de Nuit. At first, I was kind of unimpressed. It did smell exactly like L'Heure Bleue and I felt a little on the cheated side, Then on the second day, I smelled a whole lot less powder and maybe a little more on the flirty side. With L'Heure Bleue, I got a whole lot of powder with maybe some flirt deep down. L'Heure de Nuit when compared with L'Heure Bleue, there is a whole lot of flirt on L'Heure de Nuit. The flirty part is almost skanky unlike Mitsouko who makes you dig for the sensual or Shalimar that has an animalic growl to it.
While I really do love L'Heure de Nuit, I hate the price tag for 75ml. For almost $300 and packaged in a bee bottle, I just really am not able to fully love it like I should in spite of the color of the juice being blue. I'm guessing that I will have to make do with large decants and my bottle of L'Heure Bleue.
With flankers, there is a lot of pearl clutching going on on my end. Especially when it comes down to classics. No. 19, no. 5, Shalimar, and now L'Heure Bleue have flankers. Even though I like Eau Premiere and now L'Heure de Nuit, classics really shouldn't have flankers.
For the past three days, I have been wearing L'Heure de Nuit. At first, I was kind of unimpressed. It did smell exactly like L'Heure Bleue and I felt a little on the cheated side, Then on the second day, I smelled a whole lot less powder and maybe a little more on the flirty side. With L'Heure Bleue, I got a whole lot of powder with maybe some flirt deep down. L'Heure de Nuit when compared with L'Heure Bleue, there is a whole lot of flirt on L'Heure de Nuit. The flirty part is almost skanky unlike Mitsouko who makes you dig for the sensual or Shalimar that has an animalic growl to it.
While I really do love L'Heure de Nuit, I hate the price tag for 75ml. For almost $300 and packaged in a bee bottle, I just really am not able to fully love it like I should in spite of the color of the juice being blue. I'm guessing that I will have to make do with large decants and my bottle of L'Heure Bleue.
Monday, May 12, 2014
Kat Von D Make-up Review
Yesterday, started off to be a pretty good day for me. I managed to finish off that vintage Mitsouko EDT that only had one or two small squirts left and when that faded, I finished off another small decant of Sarrasins. Then, I checked my email and discovered that waiting in my inbox was overflowing with perfume deals. So I just added more to my collection. And it looks like that I will be able to order Sarrasins through the Serge Lutens website. Right now, I am verifying this. For the past few years, I have been drooling over Sarrasins and a couple other bell jars. The price tag at Barney's had me raise an eyebrow and on the Serge Lutens website, I have to raise an eyebrow. For 75ml, it's about $300 and I am not exactly thrilled in wanting to pay that much and even 75ml of Mitsouko EDP doesn't even cost that much! I didn't decide to blog so much about that but about makeup.
After a few years of either not being able to afford makeup or having it fall of my radar, I have somewhat got back into the habit of wearing it again and forgot how long it could take to put it on. After receiving a gift card to Sephora, I had the opportunity of getting an eyeshadow palette from Kat Von D which I had been looking at. I did enjoy her lipstick in Hellbent. I actually bought two different palettes and have worn them for a little bit. Sinner and Beethoven were the two that I have been experimenting with and both palettes are very similar in colors. I did enjoy experimenting with the colors but did find them a little too glittery for my liking and the glittery part did catch me off guard even with the neutral colors. While I liked the set up mostly, I had a hard time with the fact that the eyeshadow itself was not compacted and seemed pretty loose compared to other brands of eyeshadow that I have used. What really took me by surprise is that in Sinner, there is no applicator brush to apply the eyeshadow, instead there was eyeliner instead of a brush and had to hunt one down. Thus far, after a lot of experimenting, I'm not exactly thrilled with the Kat Von D eye shadows even though I like the eye primer that I got.
After a few years of either not being able to afford makeup or having it fall of my radar, I have somewhat got back into the habit of wearing it again and forgot how long it could take to put it on. After receiving a gift card to Sephora, I had the opportunity of getting an eyeshadow palette from Kat Von D which I had been looking at. I did enjoy her lipstick in Hellbent. I actually bought two different palettes and have worn them for a little bit. Sinner and Beethoven were the two that I have been experimenting with and both palettes are very similar in colors. I did enjoy experimenting with the colors but did find them a little too glittery for my liking and the glittery part did catch me off guard even with the neutral colors. While I liked the set up mostly, I had a hard time with the fact that the eyeshadow itself was not compacted and seemed pretty loose compared to other brands of eyeshadow that I have used. What really took me by surprise is that in Sinner, there is no applicator brush to apply the eyeshadow, instead there was eyeliner instead of a brush and had to hunt one down. Thus far, after a lot of experimenting, I'm not exactly thrilled with the Kat Von D eye shadows even though I like the eye primer that I got.
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
General Stuff
At this point, I'm none to thrilled with trying to deal without a microwave. Yes, I know that it can be done but when it's busted and can't be fixed there are a lot of things that one must plan out meal wise long before. My microwave was less than a year old and was destroyed by my elderly grandmother. I do suspect that she is in the early stages of dementia but her problems of not being willing to pay attention to what she is doing dates back about 25 years. My grandmother was yapping on about how much she doesn't like Dunkin' Donuts coffee while chugging a huge cup of it that she got there that morning, wanted it reheated and she destroys it by interrogating me about what I'm doing (doing dishes). Naturally, she presses a lot off buttons to heat it without looking and the stupid thing is locked. I looked it up online on how to fix it and it can't be fixed and the warranty is voided because of her. I shouldn't be complaining but since she has already destroyed two of my cellphones and a laptop, replacing this kind of stuff gets expensive when there is no remorse of offer to help cover the cost to replace it. I tremble to ask about what it cost for my aunt to replace a brand new oven because she totally destroyed it.
At this point, I'm trying to figure out if I should just bite the bullet and finish my midget decant of Mitsouko EDT. I have a larger decant of vintage Mitsouko but I do have the tendancy to hoard my vintage perfumes. Or just go with wearing my current formulation of Mitsouko EDP. It's not too funny after a while when I got this huge collection of perfume and trying to figure out what I am going to wear. Now, Shalimar Ode a la Vanille has entered the picture. I'm thinking of wearing it just to see what the fuss is about this flanker.
At this point, I'm trying to figure out if I should just bite the bullet and finish my midget decant of Mitsouko EDT. I have a larger decant of vintage Mitsouko but I do have the tendancy to hoard my vintage perfumes. Or just go with wearing my current formulation of Mitsouko EDP. It's not too funny after a while when I got this huge collection of perfume and trying to figure out what I am going to wear. Now, Shalimar Ode a la Vanille has entered the picture. I'm thinking of wearing it just to see what the fuss is about this flanker.
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Sometimes I am
Sometimes, I am a bottle slut even though I am mostly not. But what did catch my interest, is in buying a couple full bottles and an e-mail from Chanel, is changing bottle designs. The Chanel bit was the only one that kind of did rile me due to marketing.
Let's take Chanel no. 5, the larger sized (1.7 and 3.4 ounce) EDP versions and the parfum version has the classic Chanel design bottle wise while the no. 5 EDT and most Chanel EDT versions don't come in the classic bottle. But the Chanel Eau Premiere bottle was somewhat of a cross between the EDT bottles and the EDP bottle. I was okay with that because Eau Premiere did mostly smell like no. 5 but I considered it something different and did warrant something a little different. But I signed up for news letters from Chanel and was mainly getting a lot of emails about Coco Mademoiselle and all of the Chance flankers, I never much paid attention because I'm not really interested in Mademoiselle of the Chance flankers. But now, Eau Premiere is now packaged in the classic Chanel bottle and I am not impressed. But I am thinking that the younger crowd did want the classic bottle and maybe the 5 ounce bottle was a little over the top. After owning 2 of the huge 6.5 Les Exclusifs line, I can relate and wished that Chanel offered the 2.5 ounce bottles of the Les Exclusifs line much earlier. But still, it annoys me and for no real reason that I can fathom.
But I did like how Andy Tauer seemed to revamp his bottle design after just getting Une Rose Chypree. The wooden cap to his line was a kind of a bad fit for his sprayers because they never did stay all that well and they seemed to absorb every other scent imaginable. But when getting Une Rose Chypree, I expected it to look exactly like Une Rose Vermeille because it looked like it when I bought it off of Luckyscent. I was in for a pleasant surprise when the bottle color was brown, plastic cap and the fact that it didn't have the glass beads. Which was cool in away but I'm one of those who if it's a 50 ml bottle, I want the most perfume available and not have something that isn't much more than a filler no matter how cool it looks.
For a long while, I was flirting with Viktoria Minya's Hedonist just because it has many of the notes that I do love in a perfume but wasn't so thrilled with the price since the bottle was filled with crystals and dropped from 50ml to 45ml of perfume. But I did get it and the presentation from the box to the perfume is phenominal and it's like buying a full bottle of Amouge in many ways just by looks alone. I figured that this is Minya's first perfume, presentation probably means quite a bit and just by taking off the cap and getting a whiff, it smells like it's a little more worth the price point.
But at the end of the day, with my perfume collection, buying huge bottles is not my style anymore. If I were looking to be loyal to just one or two perfumes, a larger bottle would be worth it but since I have about 30-50 bull bottles of perfume, it's less is more. And niche perfumes are a little more difficult to obtain and I am kind of forced to do more online shopping than I would really like but I do love the thrill of knowing that a package is arriving at my doorstep on a certain day, it's like Christmas.
Let's take Chanel no. 5, the larger sized (1.7 and 3.4 ounce) EDP versions and the parfum version has the classic Chanel design bottle wise while the no. 5 EDT and most Chanel EDT versions don't come in the classic bottle. But the Chanel Eau Premiere bottle was somewhat of a cross between the EDT bottles and the EDP bottle. I was okay with that because Eau Premiere did mostly smell like no. 5 but I considered it something different and did warrant something a little different. But I signed up for news letters from Chanel and was mainly getting a lot of emails about Coco Mademoiselle and all of the Chance flankers, I never much paid attention because I'm not really interested in Mademoiselle of the Chance flankers. But now, Eau Premiere is now packaged in the classic Chanel bottle and I am not impressed. But I am thinking that the younger crowd did want the classic bottle and maybe the 5 ounce bottle was a little over the top. After owning 2 of the huge 6.5 Les Exclusifs line, I can relate and wished that Chanel offered the 2.5 ounce bottles of the Les Exclusifs line much earlier. But still, it annoys me and for no real reason that I can fathom.
But I did like how Andy Tauer seemed to revamp his bottle design after just getting Une Rose Chypree. The wooden cap to his line was a kind of a bad fit for his sprayers because they never did stay all that well and they seemed to absorb every other scent imaginable. But when getting Une Rose Chypree, I expected it to look exactly like Une Rose Vermeille because it looked like it when I bought it off of Luckyscent. I was in for a pleasant surprise when the bottle color was brown, plastic cap and the fact that it didn't have the glass beads. Which was cool in away but I'm one of those who if it's a 50 ml bottle, I want the most perfume available and not have something that isn't much more than a filler no matter how cool it looks.
For a long while, I was flirting with Viktoria Minya's Hedonist just because it has many of the notes that I do love in a perfume but wasn't so thrilled with the price since the bottle was filled with crystals and dropped from 50ml to 45ml of perfume. But I did get it and the presentation from the box to the perfume is phenominal and it's like buying a full bottle of Amouge in many ways just by looks alone. I figured that this is Minya's first perfume, presentation probably means quite a bit and just by taking off the cap and getting a whiff, it smells like it's a little more worth the price point.
But at the end of the day, with my perfume collection, buying huge bottles is not my style anymore. If I were looking to be loyal to just one or two perfumes, a larger bottle would be worth it but since I have about 30-50 bull bottles of perfume, it's less is more. And niche perfumes are a little more difficult to obtain and I am kind of forced to do more online shopping than I would really like but I do love the thrill of knowing that a package is arriving at my doorstep on a certain day, it's like Christmas.
Sunday, April 20, 2014
One of Those
Did you ever go through your decant collection to find multiple decants of the same perfume? It maybe one of those that you got way back when and tried once, maybe got it when you were starting out with perfumes. Then comes the wanting to use up decants and then you find way too many multiples. It can be a little funny to find that I've got 2 decants or more of certain things. But when I take into account that some of them are vintage or can't get them here in the US, it's not too bad.
After rooting around my decant pile, I found, not one but two fairly large Muscs Koublai Khan decants. MKK is one of those polarizing perfumes that I can never make up my mind about and I'm one of those who loves skank in perfume. On one hand, I do love it but the people in my house hate it because it smells like I've been sleeping around all weekend and never bothered to shower. All I'm getting is clean skin that's been warmed by the sun and some clean sweat. And due to the fact that maybe they are smelling something, I am not, I really can't make a fair judgement on it. So, I don't wear it or when I do remember to wear it, I make sure that I'm alone in the house and not going anywhere.
After rooting around my decant pile, I found, not one but two fairly large Muscs Koublai Khan decants. MKK is one of those polarizing perfumes that I can never make up my mind about and I'm one of those who loves skank in perfume. On one hand, I do love it but the people in my house hate it because it smells like I've been sleeping around all weekend and never bothered to shower. All I'm getting is clean skin that's been warmed by the sun and some clean sweat. And due to the fact that maybe they are smelling something, I am not, I really can't make a fair judgement on it. So, I don't wear it or when I do remember to wear it, I make sure that I'm alone in the house and not going anywhere.
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