'Perfumista protégé' progress reports: No 1 - Sheila, English teacher turned artist

'Listening to the plants grow' - Sheila's painting of 'a sybaritic bathroom' 

During the past six years since I 'got perfume', my passion for the subject has spilled over into a kind of missionary zeal, prompting me to gently steer friends, family and neighbours in the direction of a wider selection of perfumes than they had previously tried or considered.  In some cases I have even managed to convert non-wearers of fragrance to wearing it at all!  I have been plying away at my campaign of perfume proselytising for a good while now, and decided that enough time had elapsed to take stock of how some of my 'protégés' were faring, and how their perfume repertoire - and attitude towards fragance - had changed under my influence.

So I sent a bunch of these people the same three questions about their own 'perfume j***neys', and here is the first response from Sheila (preceded by a bit of background on the origins of our friendship):


SHEILA

Sheila was my English teacher when I was in the sixth form studying for A-Levels. When she joined the school as a newly qualified member of staff she was only 21 herself, which sounds so very young now, though she seemed perfectly grown up to my 16 year old self!  She was an inspirational teacher and the epitome of 70s style and cool - arguably a contradiction in terms in this, the heyday of Noel Edmonds, Supertramp and unfeasibly tall platfom shoes.  Sheila opted for a more toned down interpretation of the fashion of the times, however, including swingy corduroy pinafore dresses in sludgy shades of blue and grey, teamed with suede wedges and a selection of long silky scarves.  Although I was pretty tuned out to perfume at that age, I do remember catching an occasional whiff of her signature scent, Elizabeth Arden Blue Grass. One night a few years back while watching footage of an old Queen concert from 1975, I was overcome by an impulse to connect with my youth and made this purchase of a vintage bottle from around that time (full story here)!

Anyway, I kept in touch with Sheila down the years: I knitted her oldest son a tortoise (complete with properly frilly shell and jaunty mob cap!), and my never-to-be-repeated attempt at baby sitting her middle son gets a mention here.  Sheila has recently retired from teaching and is pursuing art in her free time, producing some quirky and ethereal mixed media paintings, some of which she also sells in greeting card form. She has also taken a lively interest in my perfume hobby - to the point where, during a visit a couple of summers ago, I handed over a bunch of samples I had picked out for her to try, in a bid to identify fragrance styles towards which she had a leaning.  Sheila soon got stuck in, systematically sampling each and making notes on her impressions, which is how it all started...

So without further ado, here are her answers to my three questions:

My perfume collection before  

"I love catching the whiff of a good perfume in someone else’s wake, so I have always owned a bottle - but it was something to use mainly on special occasions. So my ‘collection’ typically comprised one bottle that took up to a year to finish. I was using Calvin Klein ‘Eternity’ for a few years and then Estee Lauder’s ‘Pleasures’. The tendency to stick with what I knew was compounded by my sons checking what I was using and then duplicating it for Christmas and birthday presents. It hadn’t occurred to me to own more than one scent."

What do I own now?

"I now have a proper collection which appeals to me visually as well as for its potential for creating a tiny moment of pleasure to start each day selecting what to wear. I have Narciso Rodriguez ‘For Her’ – a particular favourite, Hermes ‘Vetiver Tonka’ which I like for evenings or special day occasions, White Company ‘Noir’, Penhaligon’s ‘Quercus’, Jo Malone ‘Pomegranate Noir’, Agent Provocateur ‘Eau Eursticielle’ (? Can’t read this on the bottle…)**, Guerlain ‘Vetiver’ in a beautiful vintage tiny green box, Lidl’s ‘Suddenly Madame Glamour’ – which I love even for its name as it does add a sudden whiff of glamour, but I would also like to get Coco Mademoiselle which inspired this copy."

Source: gammaparfum.ru

How have my feelings about fragrance changed?

"As I listed the current perfumes in my collection, I realised that I now have a much more subtle interpretation of scents since you first enticed me by spreading a number of little vials on my kitchen table and encouraging me to try to identify the notes which appealed to me. I must say I am attracted to the actual little bottles and the alchemy of capturing a smell in them. I now regard perfume as something that can be worn every day if done with care.

As I got more interested in scent I realised I like being in shops which are a nice smell – such as The White Company, which always smells as though it has just come out of the wash, and Noa Noa in Brighton which uses a Neal’s Yard ‘Women’s Balance’ oil burner. So I suppose my view of perfume has shifted from something of a luxury reserved for special occasions, to something which can be a little bit life-enhancing on an everyday basis. In shopping terms, just as I would never just casually buy books at the airport to read on holiday, now I don’t view perfume as just for birthday and Christmas presents. 

I expect that has something to do with how the perception and marketing of perfume has changed generally, and not just to a change in my thinking. My mother, when she died in 1982, left a full bottle of Chanel No 5. I cherished it – for years – never opening it, as I knew that she would not have used it except for very special occasions and so I didn’t want to ‘waste’ it. When I finally opened it after many years, I decided – probably quite wrongly – that it had gone off, and threw it out! The experience has served as a metaphor for me ever since."

Source: eBay

'Perfume is for life, not just for Christmas', as the bumper sticker goes - that is such good advice, especially to those of us who are sitting on crazy big collections.  Or 'use it or lose it' might be another one, even if we will never know if Sheila's mother's bottle was off, or just in the process of aging gracefully, much like Catherine Deneuve, the face of No 5 advertising of...coincidentally...1975. ;)

Source: eBay

PS If you would like to see more of Sheila's work, visit her Flickr site here:

** Editor's note: am betting this will be AP Eau Emotionnelle. ;)

Bonkers In Belgium - Part 1: Meeting Victoria Of Bois De Jasmin - Well Worth The Wegomlegging

Two weeks on from my last post, the new house continues to consume much of my energies, and I sense I may remain in "light crisis management mode" on an indefinite basis going forward. And just as they say we are all a mere three feet away from a rat, so it is that I am - as ever - within easy arm's reach of a Farrow & Ball colour chart and a tape measure. I did, however, manage to slip away last week on a trip to Belgium, leaving Charlie Bonkers (whose failing kidneys are rallying on a human diet of superior cold cuts), in the care of a friend.

Now I may have a special interest in perfume, but one of the most impassioned pieces of writing on Bonkers has to be this post on traffic congestion in Belgium - or, as Wordbird aptly dubbed it the other day on Facebook - Flem. On this latest trip the roads were relatively "fluide", however, my optimistically named TomTom Go (which mostly thinks in German if it thinks at all), was "totally over-demanded" by the current spate of roadworks throughout the country. I drove aimlessly for long stretches when my sat nav lost the signal, and even when it seemed to have found it again, it was sure to lead me up blind alleys or the wrong way down one-way streets. Yes, the drive to Brussels proved to be more of a wiggly wegomlegging - or detour - than I bargained for, but as noted in the title of this post, the end more than justified the meandering means...

My first stop on the Wednesday was a meeting with Victoria Frolova of Bois de Jasmin . I visited her in her rooftop apartment, which had dormer windows and panoramic views of the city. It wouldn't have surprised me to have seen Nicole Kidman perched on the terrace, straddling the glittering sickle moon of the Chanel logo. We ended up spending the day in Victoria's flat, sniffing things from each other's collection and pausing only to wolf down the delicious and nutritious meals my hostess knocked up in less time than it takes me to snap the top on a 2.5ml atomiser. Actually, that takes rather a long time, if I even manage it, indeed - so maybe make that a 1ml vial...

In the course of our conversation I was intrigued to learn that Victoria and I had a number of key things in common apart from a love of fragrance: for instance we both had all our wisdom teeth out at once - with complications!; we both fortify ourselves with By Kilian Sweet Redemption on challenging days, and for reasons primarily of pigmentation, neither of us would ever be seen dead in lemon yellow. Beyond that, the similarities are more tenuous, for while I do consider myself a bit of a linguist, Victoria speaks more languages than you can shake a stick/Stock/bâton/палочка/kij etc at, has the honed physique of a classically trained ballet dancer (that's because she is one!), the nuanced nose of an industry insider, and the wrist action of someone used to deploying a pestle and mortar in the supreme act of alchemy that is an impromptu vinaigrette.

So what did we smell?

I brought along a number of somewhat obscure, discontinued and/or vintage scents from my collection for Victoria to try, including my beloved Plus Que Jamais and the sandalwood-tastic Damian Bash Lucifer #3. Victoria was especially interested to sample my bottle of Elizabeth Arden Blue Grass from the 70s, pronouncing it to be in very good nick, and remarking on the expensive jasmine absolute used. Conversely, she confirmed the demise of my vintage Chloe and a couple of niche decants, so I entrusted those to her for humane disposal after I had gone.

For her part, Victoria had prepared samples of a couple of scents I was interested to try, namely Serge Lutens Santal Majuscule and Chanel Coco Noir (of which more in the next post). If Hermès Santal Massoia is a soprano, Santal Majuscule is definitely an alto. From its reddish browny colour, I feared it might smell like one of those Serges Abigail of I Smell Therefore I Am famously described as "icky stewed things", but while Santal Majuscule is sweet and gourmand, it is not too heavy. It reminded me of a sandalwood-forward version of L'Artisan's Vanille Absolument or Tom Ford's Tobacco Vanille, but I don't care for either of those the way I liked this (I am not keen on boozy scents, that's probably why). It was "Santal Absolument" for sure though, as the name Majuscule of course suggests - as in "Sandalwood Writ Large" or "Sandalwood With A Capital 'S'", type of thing.

Notes (from The Perfumed Court): sandalwood, honey, cocoa, spices and Arabian Attar rose.

Victoria also introduced me to a couple of Olfactive Studio perfumes, of which I was particularly taken with Lumière Blanche - more than taken in fact - smitten more like. It is a soft, milky and musky, sandalwoody wisp of a thing, and would make an excellent understated day scent. It was milkier and more rounded than Santal Massoia, which - much as I love it - does retain a slight "planky" bite to it, without ever lapsing into "trapped in a tea chest" territory (Tam Dao, I'm looking at you!).

Notes (from Now Smell This): cardamom, star anise, cinnamon, iris, almond milk, cashmere woods, cedarwood, sandalwood, tonka bean and white musks.

And as a souvenir of one of the key ingredients in Lumière Blanche, Victoria kindly gave me a couple of tonka beans encrusted with coumarin to take away, along with a pot of the wonderfully toffeefied speciality from Normandy, "confiture de lait", aka "milk jam".

In the course of our sniffing session, I also got to sample the duo of Amouage Interludes, which were not my thing at all - the men's version was too birch tarry, while the opening of the women's (which has notes of mown grass, apparently), was muddled and harsh and reminiscent of something in the solvent line that might well be the subject of one of my work projects...yes, it was not unlike paint stripper, to be brutally frank.

At five o'clock I headed home to my hotel, and it struck me that this enjoyable meeting with Victoria had nicely kickstarted my interest in perfume again. I have been so caught up in the aftermath of the move and its attendant setbacks that my hobby has had to take a back seat. In a comment on a recent post by Tara of Olfactoria's Travels about the stages of the "perfume journey", I aligned myself with those who felt they were on a "perfume plateau, admiring the view". To that I would now add that thanks to Victoria, my particular plateau appears not to be as flat as all that.

Photo of wegomlegging from brusselblogt.be, aerial view of Brussels park from karine*imagine via Wikimedia Commons, photo of Santal Majuscule from news-parfums.com, photo of Victoria Frolova from boisdejasmin.com, other photo my own