"You smell nice! What's that perfume house you're wearing?"

Ye olde Manchester pub - Source: Wikimedia Commons

The other week I was in a pub in Manchester with Sarah Waite of Odiferess.  We were perched at a long trestle table and had done that upending of our handbags thing - the table was littered with a messy heap of vials, decants and even the odd full bottle.  These we replaced with more receptacles from several stuffed bags at our feet, as we steadily worked our way through the tabletop stash.  At some point I went to the bar, and by the time I made it back the curiosity of the gaggle of ladies sitting next to us had got the better of them and they were leaning intently towards Sarah, exclaiming that they were catching pleasant whiffs of unidentified perfumes from our direction.  Or as Sarah herself described the session in her post on our mutual love of vermin and associated fragrances:

"We spent a long and joyous afternoon waffling about scent and swopping samples and decants (gaining the curiosity of drinkers in the packed pub who caught thick wafts of the rare and the quirky)."

Not only that, but in my absence Sarah had seized the moment and was moderating a veritable mini-focus group, quizzing these ladies about their own perfume preferences.  The conversation went much as follows:

Sarah: "So what do you like to wear?"
Lady 1: "Chanel."
Sarah: "Okay....but which particular ones by Chanel?"
For after all, for all we knew, Lady 1 may have been a Chanel loyalist, with a scent wardrobe running the full gamut from No 5 to No 19 Poudré to Chance Eau Tendre.
Lady 1: "Coco."

And you just know what is coming next -"Coco" turned out to be shorthand for the ubiquitous, but nonetheless agreeable "Coco Mademoiselle".

Sarah, turning to a younger member of their party: "And so what about you, then?"
Lady 2: "I like Givenchy."
Sarah (patient to a fault): "Right...so what exactly by Givenchy?"
Lady 2: "Irresistible."

When we were on our own again, we mulled over this curious phenomenon whereby 'normal' members of the public (ie non-perfumistas) often choose to denote their chosen perfume in brand rather than in specific product terms.  Like saying you drive a Ford, rather than a Fiesta or a Focus, though the two cars are not remotely alike, or saying you had 'carbohydrate' for breakfast rather than porridge or toast.

Source: tripadvisor.co.uk

Fast forward to Christmas Eve...when I was round at my friend Gillie's for her traditional pre-Christmas get together, and got chatting to a friend of hers I often see at such events.  His mother is a well known figure in the local community, and for some reason he volunteered the fact out of the blue that he didn't care for some of her perfumes.    

"They are really - you know - big", he explained.  "Knock you out they would."  

"Oh," I replied, my interest piqued: "I'd love to know what ones you mean". 

"No problem - I'll find out for you and tell you the next time I see you."

Well, that could well have been next Christmas, but as luck would have it we ran into each other at a party just a few days later, and so this same chap bounced up to me with the news that he had now asked his mother what she wore.  

"Oh good", I said, instantly anticipating a reply that might feature some combination of Aromatics Elixir / Giorgio Beverly Hills / Opium / Youth Dew and/or other heavy hitters of that ilk and maternal era.

So you may imagine my surprise when the bald answer came:

"Jo Malone."

Scary sillage monsters?  Source: ebay.co.uk

Nooooo, I thought.  Here we go again... Too little information!  So I have despatched him again to find out which Jo Malone scents in particular he takes objection to.  He was astonished to learn there are in fact knocking on 30 perfumes in the range...;-)

"Really???  I thought there was just the one called 'Jo Malone'."

So while we wait, have you come across this phenomenon of people referring to 'the whole for the part' when it comes to naming perfumes?  (A kind of fragrant synecdoche, if you will.)

And can you think of a Jo Malone that could possibly be construed as an 'elevator clearer' or anything approaching it?  I would have thought that was a contradiction in terms, but perhaps there are powerhouse florals in the line that have managed to pass me by.  Is 'English Pear & Freesia' a stealth Flowerbomb?  Or is Blue Agave & Cacao complete choco-overload?  I have smelt both - albeit a while ago now - and wouldn't go that far.  Then Orange Blossom is a bit of an in-your-face tangfest, and Plum Blossom teeters on the brink of shampoo-dom - or doom, even - but still.

Yes, for as long as it takes till I bump into this bloke again, I am agog.

Twentieth Night: Taking The Christmas Tree Down And A Tale Of Two Festive Perfume Cards

So I just finished my project late on Friday night, and yesterday I was a whirling - well, maybe more of a slowly twirling - dervish of activity: dishes washed and tumble drier emptied from Tuesday, plants watered, a load of washing on, prescription collected and....Xmas tree and decorations finally taken down(!). Not the one in the living room window facing the street, I hasten to add, which Mr Bonkers had already consigned to the garage in a timely manner. No, I mean the less conspicuous one in the conservatory at the back of the house, which hopefully only a handful of neighbours will have noticed after its due date for removal...

"That's shockingly slack of you!" I hear you cry, and it's fair comment. I may even have just heaped a year's worth of bad luck on my head by this failure to follow the tradition of taking down the tree and its trappings on Twelfth rather than Twentieth Night. But orderly routine and compliance with social convention (on any front!) - while not exactly strangers to Bonkers Towers - are certainly not seen there on more than an occasional pop-in basis.

And given that the paraphernalia of Christmas is still fresh in my mind, I will take this opportunity to post some pictures of my presents from Mr Bonkers this year: a corporate Christmas card from Chanel (sent to one of its staff, who - as we learnt in post-purchase correspondence - has since left and had the foresight to stick it on Ebay!), and a Christmas tree-shaped perfume card, also from Chanel.

Following a brisk bidding war, the Christmas card - with its pretty dangly gold charms of snowflakes, perfume bottles and the intertwined "C"s of the Chanel logo - ended up costing Mr Bonkers as much as a bottle of Coco Mademoiselle. However, it is a much more desirable object in my eyes, not least because I am of course already sorted on the Coco Mademoiselle front with a couple of bottles of Lidl Suddenly Madame Glamour. : - )

So yes, the card will come out every year and take pride of place on the mantlepiece, and I shall continue to puzzle over who the signatory may be...If anyone can make out that name and knows who they are, I would be most curious to know!

Then the second card - shaped like a Christmas tree, and fashioned out of a collage of bottles of No 5, No 19, Coco and Allure - is very small by comparison at 4.25 inches tall. This is because it is in fact a rather elaborate fragrance blotter. I am so used to the ubiquitous long white blank ones, that I forget that there are also these more colourful preprinted ones in assorted shapes and sizes.

A quick scurry through the Interwebs has revealed that perfume cards date from the late 1800s and were originally impregnated with the fragrance, though this one is not very old. Well, not older than Allure at least, which places it in the mid-90s onwards.

Funnily enough, I recently came across the Versace Yellow Diamond blotter pictured below, and kept it because it struck me as rather impressive - more so than the fragrance, certainly - but by and large I don't tend to encounter anything more patterned than the normal white strips, with at most the name of the perfume house or the store printed on them.

Now it turns out that the seller of the perfume card is a journalist and published author called Kathy Flood, who has another book coming out shortly on the subject of faces in jewellery*. Kathy lives in the mid-West, but has also spent time in Europe, where she studied French like me. Her Ebay store is also mostly devoted to vintage jewellery. So she sounds an all-round interesting character, and we have got into a bit of an email exchange since the tree card arrived, which is a nice spin off of the gift itself. Kathy reckons it is quite rare, and I have certainly not managed to google anything similar on collectors' sites.

For yes, there seems to be a thriving special interest based around collecting these speciality blotters, as well as perfume-themed postcards and other promotional bits and bobs.

And in terms of actual samples of perfume, as opposed to unfragranced blotters or other printed matter, I have now learnt that "liquitouch" is the correct term for those credit card-sized plasticky samples, which include a small amount of perfume encased by a thin film. Then of course there are the peel-back fragrance strips you get in magazine ads, while somehow I have also managed to acquire a "blister pack" of DKNY Delicious Night (which looks for all the world like one of those plastic bubbles disposable contact lens come in). So when you think about it, there is a whole host of promotional perfume delivery systems of which I am only vaguely aware, being so focused on getting my mitts on a proper sample vial!

Hmm...I do hope I haven't suddenly uncovered another rabbit hole down which to fall, having so far largely managed to tune out to the twin allure of vintage and extrait versions of scents. I note that one of the books Kathy has written is about the whole business of collecting. Called Things, it features a chapter on fragrance! As for our perfume cards, there is even a name for people who collect such things - or there is in French at least - and I daresay the English is the same word:

OLFCARTOPHILE

I tried googling it, mind, and all I got was "olfactophilia", a type of fetish into which I shall leave you to make your own inquiries... : - )


UPDATE: Following a suggestion from Cymbaline in the oomments below, I contacted noted wordsmith Pyramus via his blog, Cephalogenic, about the origins of the word "olfcartophile", and on Monday (16.1) he kindly devoted a whole post entitled "Card Games" to his reply!


So, I have to ask - and I know I am rather backward in coming forward when it comes to asking readers questions...

Are you already - or do you reckon you have you the potential to become - an olfcartophile?

What promotional perfume delivery systems have you encountered, and what are their relative merits?

Do you come across many of these fancier perfume blotters, and if so, did any of them smell?

Could a more striking style of perfume blotter ever boost sales of a given scent, or is it just a bit of harmless point of sale fun?

PS The other three cards pictured were extras that came with my Chanel tree!


**The Jewelry Face Book of Pins & Pendants: Vintage Visages

Lidl Suddenly Madame Glamour - Sniffing Out Stocks For The Big Sniff Off

On Monday I reported on the remarkable news broken by the News of The World that discount chain Lidl's latest £3.99 perfume, Suddenly Madame Glamour, was preferred by 150 women in a blind test to Chanel's Coco Mademoiselle, which costs 15 times as much. Since then, I have spent quite a bit of time on the phone to several helpful people at Lidl Customer Services in a bid to track down the new scent in a store near me. Stocks arrived in Cannock yesterday, some twelve miles away, but the Stafford branch of Lidl had none in its delivery this morning, and I was advised to call again on Saturday to see what had turned up in the next shipment.

But that's the problem, you see - the stores don't seem to know what is going to come in the next drop: it might be perfume, it might be salami, and it might equally well be a rotary clothes line, a motorcyle helmet or flippers. Now you'd think there must be some kind of a method in this merchandise madness, for how else could an individual store replenish its stocks of milk, say? It seems unlikely on the face of it that the deliveries of all categories of goods could be totally arbitrary, as opposed to just the discretionary items like all the above...and, er...perfume?

Given the vagaries of the Lidl distribution system, and the fact that I was afraid I might be racking up a phone bill to the 0870 number of Lidl's Customer Services that far exceeded the cost of Madame Glamour itself, I decided tonight to seize the initiative and drive to Cannock. My main contact at Lidl had tried valiantly to speak to the manager on my behalf to confirm that there were still stocks left, but had not been able to get through by the end of his shift, so it was a calculated risk to go that far on spec.

Well, as it happens I nearly didn't make it, for my satnav had one of its funny turns and kept taking me to Church Street, Bridgtown (an outlying district), instead of Church Street in Cannock proper. So in the end I just switched the darn thing off and started asking passers by, particularly anyone carrying shopping bags. A mere three people later (the photocopying quest in Poland was excellent training!), I turned into the car park of Lidl, seven minutes before closing time.

Imagine my disappointment to find the perfume fixture all but bare!: just three lone bottles of Suddenly Fleurs were left standing, looking a little lost on their own in the large cardboard tray. Instinctively I knew there was no point asking the staff if they had "some more out back". As with T K Maxx, I always assume with discount stores that what you see on the shelf is all there is.

So with a heavy heart I started to head out, but something made me ask the check out assistant if they had in fact sold the entire stocks from yesterday's delivery. "No", she replied brightly, "it's here by the till - it's new, you see.". Hallelujah! There were about 10 bottles left, so I picked one up, resisting the allure of Suddenly Madame Glamour's glamorous shelfmates of fruit juice, raisin and chewing gum multipacks, and handed over a fiver. Pocketing my change, I thanked the assistant profusely, a broad grin on my face from yet another tricky mission accomplished...

Back home, Mr Bonkers was standing by to officiate over our very own blind test, albeit one comprising a not terribly representative sample of one, namely me. First of all I put ear plugs in, in case I might be swayed by the sound of differential sloshing noises (the small vial of Coco Mademoiselle vs the 50 ml bottle of Suddenly Madame Glamour). Then I offered up my inner arms to Mr Bonkers (the prime wrist sites having been taken earlier that day by Opium Fleur de Shanghai), and squeezed my eyes tight shut. Mr B did his best to spray jets of scent of comparable force from a similar distance, so that the only thing I had to go on was the respective smells of the two perfumes on my skin.

As the first spritz hit my arm, it wafted up to my nose and I thought: "That's Coco Mademoiselle, I recognise that!", but once the second one was applied, I was not so sure any more, as they were remarkably similar. The second one seemed stronger, with more of a patchouli note to it, so I decided that it was probably the Coco Mademoiselle after all. I actually preferred the first scent, because it was softer, like an EDT version of the Coco, near as dammit. And yes, I sensed that there might also be "less going on with it", but to be honest, my perfume deconstruction skills are so remedial that I couldn't really tell you what I thought WAS going on with the scent I now believed to be Coco Mademoiselle.

After several solemn challenges by Mr Bonkers of the "Is that your final answer?" variety, I settled on my verdict and he confirmed that I had correctly told the two scents apart. I asked him if he would like to smell them now and see which he preferred, to which he replied: "I can smell them both from miles away - just take yourself away, will you?" So no advance on our sample of one, then...

On a whim I doorstepped my next door neighbour, who just happened to be wearing Coco Mademoiselle herself today!! I told her that I was wearing it on one arm and the new Lidl scent on the other, and challenged her to figure out which was which. She smelt my arm with the Coco on and pronounced it quite clearly to be "NOT Coco", and was unable to detect any perfume whatsoever on my other arm! Granted, Suddenly Madame Glamour is quite a light scent for an EDP, but I could still smell it myself. And how interesting that she didn't clock the Coco Mademoiselle on me, whilst wearing it herself. It just goes to show how bamboozling this blind testing lark can be, even with odds of 1 in 2.

Now here's the rub...as the evening wore on, I warmed to the Coco Mademoiselle sample on my left arm: it seemed to have more body and complexity, but for reasons that I could not put my finger on. Pressing into service a medical term typically applied to urinary tract infections, I now believed the Coco sample was slightly superior for "non-specific" reasons that were something to do with its "modern chypre" base.

But I am wary of this shift in my appreciation of the two scents, for I feel that the truest response was the one I gave when deprived of other sensory stimuli like price, brand name and pack design. And while we are on the subject of packaging, I must say that compared with the cut out, "cut on the bias" box Suddenly D'Or comes in, Suddenly Madame Glamour looks more upmarket, though the bottle itself is identical to Suddenly D'Or, bar the opaque cap.

So in summary, to be perfectly fair, you should count me in with the 91% of women in the blind test, because I did genuinely prefer Madame Glamour blind. It is the quieter of the two, and as regular readers know, I am a sucker for quiet. And what I also learnt is that to my nose it is not so much that Suddenly Madame Glamour smells all that expensive (though a darn sight more expensive than £3.99, I will say unequivocally), but rather that Coco Mademoiselle doesn't either...


Photo of miscellaneous Lidl products from infotradegallery.com, photo of Lidl logo from lichfieldlive.co.uk, photo of Coco Mademoiselle sample from cgi.ebay.uk, other photos my own

Lidl Suddenly Madame Glamour: Has Keira's Coco Campaign Been K.O.'ed By A Cardboard Case?

I am interrupting my current slew of travel posts for an important news flash!

Since the early days of Bonkers, I have been a champion of the "way cheaper than chips" range of perfume from European (mostly grocery) discount chain Lidl. I was the first - and quite possibly the only - reviewer to detect a marked similarity between its fruity floral Suddenly D'Or and Ghost Luminous.

Now a 50ml bottle of Ghost Luminous will set you back about £25 vs Suddenly D'Or's phenomenonally bargain price of £3.99. And now it has come to my attention that Lidl may have topped this discount feat with its latest fragrance release, the rather cheesily named Suddenly Madame Glamour. For according to an article in the News of The World, which broke the story yesterday (as we have come to expect the NOTW to do with any matter of vital public interest : - ) ), in blind tests involving 150 women Lidl's Suddenly Madame Glamour knocked the sequins off that iconic stalwart, Chanel's Coco Mademoiselle (with a price ticket of £61). A staggering 91% of respondents - whom we must assume were a representative sample of the population at large - preferred the cheaper scent.

Of course the lavish TV ad campaign for Coco Mademoiselle is fronted by the elfin beauty Keira Knightley, so the NOTW couldn't resist a teasing reference to her brand being "sniffed at". Lidl, meanwhile, doesn't do any advertising that I have noticed, other than to stuff flyers into my local newspaper. It is therefore all the more of a coup for Suddenly Madame Glamour to have apparently trounced a scent with such a luxurious advertising spend versus one which, like most Lidl products, will be merchandised in its cardboard outer case (the so-called "ready to sell" retail concept). Which isn't very glamorous at all, come to think of it!! But there again the price makes you feel like a million dollars. Or makes you feel that you have saved over 50 quid, at least...!

And wouldn't you just love to know who the perfumer is who has gone and pulled off this wizard stunt?

So does it smell like Chanel's Coco Mademoiselle? I infer that Coco Mademoiselle is the scent Suddenly Madame Glamour most closely resembles, or else it wouldn't have been directly pitched against it. But maybe not - Coco Mademoiselle may simply have been chosen as an example of an extremely successful scent from a well known brand, arguably the most famous perfume house of them all.

Sadly I haven't managed to get hold of Madame Glamour yet. With its cheap and cheerful store model, my local Lidl doesn't advertise its phone number, and the central customer service line is (perhaps predictably) "busy helping other callers". If I get a chance later today, I will drive down and see if I can score a bottle, but I fear it may have already sold out, as the NOTW article suggests.

Has anyone reading this tried it? Got a bottle even? Will you let us know what you make of it? My curiosity about this scent is so great that it has unleashed an uncharacteristic flurry of questions!

Now I don't have the note information - I had quite a job getting hold of the ones for Lidl Suddenly D'Or, though I managed it in the end - but the press release for Suddenly Madame Glamour mentions "fresh citrus and floral notes merging to an alluring, exotic oriental accord", adding that it is a "timeless, affordable and classic fragrance".

Does that sound like Coco Mademoiselle to you? Hmmm...not sure...perhaps it was just picked for its iconic stalwartness after all. What is interesting about all this is that I have always thought of Coco Mademoiselle as a crowd pleaser, as a scent that it is awfully hard not to like. It is not as though in that blind test Suddenly Madame Glamour was up against Jicky or Rochas Femme - or Caron Narcisse Noir, God forbid. Or some terrifying oud number of which there are any number of candidates to choose from.

So if Suddenly Madame Glamour has pipped such a universally popular fragrance, that really is quite something...


UPDATE

I have now caught up with this scent and conducted side by side tests with Coco Mademoiselle, to which Suddenly Madame Glamour compares very favourably on the whole. See my later post on 30th June here for the lowdown on the "big sniff off"...!

UPDATE 2!

On Radio 4's You and Yours programme today (28.11.13) there was a feature on cheap / supermarket perfumes that are good imitations of more expensive scents, and Suddenly Madame Glamour got a resounding thumbs up! You can catch the broadcast here.


Photos of Lidl stores from en.wikipedia.org and notbornyesterday.org, photo of Keira Knightley from beyondhollywood.com

The Bonkers Road Trip - Part Three: Solo Sniffathon in Zürich

So there I was by the end of week two, holed up in a hotel in Wildegg, its foyer steeped in the ambient testosterone of the Serbian U-17 football team. The players may have been young, but they were very tall for their age. And every time I came downstairs, another one would be demanding gluten-free breakfast cereal from the receptionist in an imperious mixture of English and Italian.

Time to break out, I thought, so on Saturday morning I took the train to Zürich, which cost over £20, but it was less stressful than driving (I surely needed one day a week off!), and I managed to persuade myself that the parking would have cost as much.

Zürich has numerous associations for me: hotels on the Limmatquai with geranium-filled window boxes, woozy cheese fondue, banking secrecy, my home and contents insurer - and of course lately the city has become the European capital of voluntary euthanasia.

My first impressions on this occasion were of the North Face of the Eigeresque prices (£1.50 to use a public toilet, £1.50 for a picture postcard, £7.50 for 30 mins' Internet time!) I could tell early on that this was going to be a window shopping kind of a day and resolved to sniff freely, but resist all temptation to purchase anything more than essentials.

My first stop was a branch of Import Parfümerie in the Bahnhofstrasse. A native Swiss perfumista might not give this discount chain a second glance, but for me everything was new and different and interesting. Nothing remotely approaching a bargain, mind you, even in the promotional bins, and after testing a fairly forgettable Issey Miyake (Fleurs de Bois), I headed on to Manor, a mid-market department store, and Marionnaud, the (French?) specialist beauty chain run on similar lines to Douglas.

In Marionnaud I sniffed the new Prada Infusion de Tubéreuse. It really didn't strike me as being much like tuberose at all, but at least it didn't mug me and leave me for dead like its disappointing stablemate, Infusion de Fleurs d'Oranger. I later read Robin of NST's review of this scent, which she dubs "Infusion de Fleur Nonspécifique", which amused me no end - and frankly I couldn't agree more.

Next up was Hermes, where a friendly SA let me have a sample of Voyage d'Hermes - the only sample I scored all day, haha! Sadly it was rather sharp and overly limey - the J-C Ellena equivalent of a "Friday afternoon car", as they say in the motor industry.

I popped into Chanel, and tried to blag a mini of Beige, but no samples were forthcoming. Indeed they didn't even have one of their distinctive square blotters saying "Beige" on it, and I was blowed if I was going to walk out with Beige sprayed on a piece of card saying Coromandel, when I know perfectly well what Beige smells like anyway - I was just on the scrounge.

I also made a detour to the Moroccan-themed book shop - Le Maroc - in the Spiegelgasse, which inspired Andy Tauer to create Le Maroc pour Elle. It was a veritable Aladdin's Cave of books and sumptuous greetings cards featuring arty photos of Marrakesh and the surrounding area. Sadly, they started at 5 SFRS! Just inside the doorway was a homely display of Andy Tauer's scent range - I say "homely", because the tester bottles were tied loosely to the table they stood on with garden twine. Extrapolating from the greetings cards, I didn't even bother asking how much they were, much as I aspire to own L'Air du Désert Marocain some day.

Back in the Bahnhofstrasse, I spent quite a while in a very good branch of Douglas - very good because it had an extensive range of Micallefs, which I had only ever previously come across in an independent perfumery. I sniffed my way through quite a few:

Printemps, Ete, Automne, Black Sea, White Sea and Royal Musk

Printemps and Ete were surprisingly designer-ish to my nose, Automne was spicy but not pleasant, Black Sea was weird in that "push the envelope-loft dwelling-perfumisto" kind of way, White Sea was like a cross between a nice CDG such as White or 3 and one of the dodgier Platinum Life Threads - I am thinking Silver might be the one I mean. Royal Musk smelt of musk and was not the least bit objectionable.

The highlight of the day was my visit to Osswald's, one of the most high end independent perfumeries in Europe, at a guess. On a par with Hyazinth, or slightly better, owing to its Guerlain corner. It was a highlight, but strangely also a low point, for I felt so poor, both in relation to the prices and the well heeled clientele happily shelling out 180 SFRs and up at a rate of several every five minutes. Now I was wearing my good work trousers, a designer padded jacket and Ecco boots (from an outlet store and T K Maxx respectively, but no matter!), and yet I still managed to feel scuzzy and tramp-like, in a way I hadn't at Hyazinth. Maybe it was having the company of three stalwart perfumistas on that occasion that made the difference. It was certainly nothing the Osswald SAs said to me. They more or less left me to my own devices after one or two initial inquiries. I don't know what didn't click exactly, but I didn't feel at all comfortable, and tested less that I would have liked - though still managed to cross off quite a few things from my "to sniff" list:

L'Eau de Serge Lutens (unremarkable, inoffensive cologne)
Guerlain Les Secrets de Sophie (bit too ylangy-musky - almost trashy, which really took me aback)
Guerlain La Petite Robe Noire (elegant, dry, can't remember much else about it)
Guerlain Tonka Imperiale (overly rich vanilla - to retry!)
L'Artisan Havana Vanille (overly rich tobacco vanilla - to retry!)
Miller & Bertaux Shanti Shanti (too rosey, too much patchouli)
Humiecki & Graef Askew (good masculine, bit sharp?)
Humiecki & Graef Geste (unisex and beautiful in a way I am at a loss to describe)
Van Cleef & Arpels Lys Carmin (very pretty lily with added welly)
Van Cleef & Arpels Cologne Noire (pleasant cologne - not groundbreaking, but nice)
Van Cleef & Arpels Orchidee Vanille (sickly sweet mess on me)
Van Cleef & Arpels Gardenia Petale (too sweetly indolic)

Next stop was the department store, Globus, where I lingered for a good while - I would rank it above Manor in its market positioning - the Neiman Marcus to Manor's Macy's perhaps. Or Selfridges to Manor's Debenhams/John Lewis (for British readers).

In Globus I had a Vol de Nuit edt epiphany - it was soft and powdery, comforting like a mole's fur, but with a slight frisson of static electricity.

I also retried Ninfeo Mio (just as sharp off-fan!), Daim Blond (not as sweaty loafer as I recall, but not especially good on me), Tom Ford Grey Vetiver (why did I do that? I am not a vetiver fan particularly, though if you are, that is a pleasant example of the genre). I sniffed Michael Kors on paper at a distance of several feet from my body, and tried Bond No 9 New Haarlem aka "My Gingerbread Hell" rather too close to it. I also sampled Paris by Balenciaga on skin and found it exactly as expected in terms of scent - low key violets and greenery - but wasn't expecting it to be so powdery. It could have taken a "leaf" out of Patou Vacances' book and been a bit fresher for my money...

After Globus I was wandering pretty aimlessly by this stage and quite by chance stumbled across a department store whose name I cannot even remember, though the logo had a black background and there may have been a "j" in the name. Jelmoli? Jellyroll? More important than what it was called, it stocked the Tom Ford Musk range!!! I eagerly sniffed them all, and was predictably disappointed by Pure Musk, Urban Musk and Jasmine Musk, and re-bonded with White Suede on a prime skin site, my sample of which having long since been exhausted. "How much is the 50ml?" I inquired of the heavily made up SA, as optimistically as I could muster. "240 SFRS" (£160). Jeepers! That is £60 more than in the UK as far as I can recall. I asked if they happened to have a sample, so that I could evaluate White Suede at greater leisure. "Why would you need to do that?" came the blunt reply. "You have got it on your skin already." There was nothing for it but to make a sharp exit.

My energy levels were flagging by now, and my search for a cheap bar of chocolate led me to a branch of the Coop department store. I was feeling pretty jaded and disorientated, as evidenced by an impulsive trial of the new Avril Lavigne - that rocky "fruitchouli" number - Black Star? Not my demographic is putting it mildly. It was clearly time to go home.

So in summary, the three standout scents of the day were: Guerlain Vol de Nuit (bergamot, galbanum, petit grain, jasmine, jonquil, spices, woods, iris, vanilla, amber), Humiecki & Graef Geste (soft amber, musk, soft violet petals, soft fir resin) and Van Cleef & Arpels Lys Carmin (Lily, Pink Peppercorn, Ylang Ylang, Vanilla and Sandalwood). Which is about a 1 in 10 "love" hit rate. But given that they say you have to kiss 125 frogs before you meet your prince, that really wasn't a bad day's work...