The Scent Crimes Series: No 12 - Impregnable perfume miniatures

I had my friend Sharon to stay this weekend.  Readers may remember her as the born again Roja Dove Scandal and Fracas fan featured in a couple of earlier posts here and here - I guess I could consider her as another 'protégé'  - one whose scented explorations I have been documenting as I go along here. Anyway, Sharon is sufficiently keen to continue her perfume j***ney that every time we meet she always asks me to bring some new things for her to try, or - if she comes to my house, as on this occasion - to get my stash out for her to have another delve into.

Today she had a very specific request, namely to sample whatever I could lay my hands on by Bvlgari, a brand recommended to her by a friend.  Bvlgari also happens to be one of my favourite brands in the mainstream/designer sphere, along with Kenzo and Prada.   So I fished out my one bottle (Black), a large and disastrously leaky decant of Rose Essentielle, and samples of Femme, Mon Jasmin Noir and Voile de Jasmin. Unfortunately for my friend, I had already sold my bottle of Omnia Crystalline in last year's yard sale, and given away my bottle of Jasmin Noir to a neighbour who had fallen hard for it at the time (a well-intentioned impulse I now regret).  I was pretty sure I also had a sample of Omnia Coral, but I had found it so insipidly fruitily inconsequential that it - and the rest of my 'bag of hell' - had been banished to the outer darkness (quite literally!) of the garage.  Underbed storage had failed to put enough physical distance between me and the offending items, you see, despite my general success rate in life with the 'spider under the bed' principle...

As it turned out, Mon Jasmin Noir was the only one of my patchy Bvlgari collection that Sharon cared for, when I suddenly I remembered that I also owned a miniature of Omnia Green Jade, and managed to extract this last example of the brand from the not inconsiderable coat chaos of the cupboard under the stairs where my perfumes now reside.

Before I come onto the specifics of the Omnia Jade mini, here is a 'class photo' of my miniature collection, with twins standing next to each other and small ones at the front, as is customary.  Okay, with regard to the Micallefs, one is the younger sibling of the other one, as you may infer from their differential height/size.

Two sets of twins, one other sibling set...;)

Out of all these perfumes, only TWO have a spray mechanism - can you guess which? The rest have tiny holes, and you have to upend the bottle and dab as best as gravity and a pinpoint aperture permit.

In terms of the cap mechanism, my experience with minis is mainly of the 'yank off sharply' variety, with some screw tops in the mix, plus a few obdurate bottles that require the 'combination method' of yanking AND unscrewing.  It can be quite a fiddly exercise, comparable to the difficulty level of unstoppering those tiny plastic wands from the smallest size of glass vial, which readers intermittently write to me to complain about.

And then...then there is Bvlgari Omnia Jade, verily the Rubik's Cube of perfume miniatures.  Well, I use the word 'cube' advisedly, as it is more of a figure of eight really, like two thick silver coins getting it on.

And could Sharon and I figure out how to take the top off?  Could we hell as like!  We alternated at having a go, but no amount of pulling, pressing or prising seemed to do the trick.  Twisting, turning and tugging were equally fruitless.  'Okay', said Sharon calmly, 'let's figure this out from first principles.' (I should point out that my friend is a Project Manager, supervising the complex build of fighter aircraft no less, a logical thinker and 'critical path'-follower to her fingertips.)

'It must HAVE a top, surely?' I volunteered lamely, when suddenly a piece of green plastic trim flirted off and fell on the floor, revealing an impenetrable metal casing within.

'Yes, but where?' replied Sharon, as we both simultaneously experienced flashbacks of that classically pesky 'Where's the end of the Sellotape?' variety.

So we spent a few more minutes scrutinising the housing of the mini, looking for even the slightest hairline crack, that might possibly be suggestive of a demarcation between bottom and top.  Then, her frustration mounting, Sharon took one last enormous - and completely random! - tug to the bottle, when to our surprise not so much 'the top' as 'the most of it' came off!

Then we dabbed a bit of Omnia Jade on - in our all-consuming bid to 'crack the cube', as it were, we had all but forgotten our original interest in sniffing the perfume enclosed within - and pronounced it to be quite pleasant and refreshing, in a limpidly nutty, faintly green kind of a way - though we may have been subliminally influenced by the colour of the box or bottle...  Or the name indeed.  Speaking of the box, as Sharon was casually lifting it up to check the name of the perfume again, she spied a little diagram inside the lid...

'Oh look, this tells you how to open it!'  Typical women, we had just dived straight in there without reading the instructions first. ;-) But there again, who would have thought a perfume bottle would come with instructions about how to take its top off...?

So have you ever seen such a diagram?  And have you experienced problems opening minis in particular, or figuring out how to get tops of full-sized bottles?

I do remember puzzling for ages over the location of the Prada Candy spray nozzle (which of course had been cunningly integrated into its Cadbury smash robot head - or half head, to be anatomically correct about it).

Source: sephora.com

Whole-headed Cadbury Smash robots ~ Source: youtube.com

Here are the surprisingly eclectic notes of Omnia Green Jade, should anyone be curious:

Notes: spring water, green mandarin, white peony, nasturtium, pear tree flower, jasmine petals, fresh pistachio, white woods, musk

Finally, I must just mention that as I was gathering my minis together for this group shot, I nearly included the one pictured below...which turned out to be the top of my full-sized Cuir de Lancome bottle, which - as any readers who own one will know - is chronically prone to toppling off at the drop of a hat, and looking rather like a miniature when it does.  Somewhere on the Interwebs I am sure I read about a clever fix to make this top fit snugly again, but I can't remember where now...