Perfumistas reunited - by a cat collar that wasn't - and remembering Gucci by Gucci edp

When I started Bonkers, the blogging landscape looked quite different.The 'grande dames' like Robin, Victoria and Denise, Marina, Pattie and March, Elena and Olfacta and Marie-Helene were around, and well established, but I ran with a different crowd  of my own (more or less) contemporaries, including Ines of All I am - a Redhead, Shelley of Notes from the Ledge, Josephine of Notes from Josephine, Martha of Chicken Freak's Obsessions, Rita of The Left Coast Nose - and The Scentimentalist. (Who is the only one to whose blog I have added a link, as it would be a veritable sea of blue highlighting otherwise!) I had met The Scentimentalist over on Basenotes in the very early days of my hobby, where she went by the name of Soirdelune. She was into retro and vintage scents by the likes of Patou and Sisley and Balmain, and was down to earth and witty and warm.

I first met The Scentimentalist in real life the following year, on the occasion of her 40th birthday, for which she had organised a canal boat trip. I was flattered to be invited and didn't hesitate to accept, though I realised I wouldn't know any of the others there, including (technically) the birthday girl herself. But not knowing the guests - or even the host - at a party famously didn't stop me attending one at a fellow music fan's house in Ohio in 2005. I was in town on business and felt I knew the chap in question well enough from exchanges on a forum. And when I did pluck up the courage to go along, I received a warm welcome from him and his wife and their houseful of lively friends and band mates. These two experiences have made me bolder ever since about jumping at the chance to meet people you feel you know from Internet dealings based on a shared interest, whatever that might be. You will rarely be disappointed.

For her birthday, I had bought The Scentimentalist a purse spray of The Party in Manhattan, an aldehydic animalic chypre (or something along these lines). There's an amusing three way take on the fragrance in this post on Perfume Posse. Anyway, I felt it suited The Scentimentalist because it struck me as elegant, festive, effervescent, and not a little luxurious.

Source: fragrantica.com

Fast forward to the end of 2015...The Scentimentalist and I had kept in touch very sporadically, but I hadn't heard in a long while - my fault as much as anything - and wasn't even sure that she was living in the same town.Then, thanks to the wonders of WhatsApp, a platform I had not long acquired -specifically for the exchange of kitten pics with Truffle's owner! - I received a message from The Scentimentalist out of the blue one day and our friendship was 'reactivated', to give it its proper technical term.

She explained that she had been following Truffle's progress / antics / occasional bouts of inexcusable naughtiness on the blog, and had spied a potential gift for her, namely a designer collar for kittens, by Gucci, no less! It had been reduced in T K Maxx from a whopping £100 to £3, and as such had to be bought we felt, so a purchase was duly made. The presentation mount was a bit stained, but The Scentimentalist kindly had a go at buffing it up. I said it didn't much matter if the collar itself was fine, which it was.

Of particular note is the astonished face!

Anyway, the collar duly arrived, and when I looked at it it didn't seem quite as I expected. Stripy, with holes in it and a buckle, but somehow not as quntessentially collar-y as I was expecting. I left the present out on the dining room table for some days, looking quizzically at it from time to time. I didn't try it on Truffle at any point, as she was still small and I didn't want to scare her with an item I wasn't 100% sure how to competently fasten.

Then one day a male friend was over - the one who lives on a canal boat, aptly enough, if you recall. He is the fellow who is noted for his crumble-making skills, and who dutifully keeps his bottle of BEX Londoner SE1 in the fridge. Anyway, it turns out that he is also bonkers about watches, and thus it was that he took one look at the cat collar and pronounced it to be a 'field watch strap'. Absolutely unequivocably. A quick google of 'Gucci men's watch strap' fetched up pictures of the very item, or others bearing a pretty close resemblance. So...I had a bargain designer watch strap, but no watch. And Truffle had no collar, but it doesn't matter a jot really. I hope The Scentimentalist would agree that £3 is a small price to pay for the rekindling of a friendship, and now that Truffle is chipped, arguably she doesn't need one anyway.

Collarless Truffle - specially for Asali

So The Scentimentalist and I are able to zap messages to each other on WhatsApp now, whenever the fancy takes us, which is great. Meanwhile, I have been thinking some more about Gucci, specifically which perfumes I know or like of that brand. I can't say I am familiar with the whole range, though Gucci Guilty smells fab on a friend of a friend, while Bamboo is pretty, but insipid. I didn't care for Flora, but can't put my finger on why - I think a slightly odd note of some kind spoilt it for me. The only other Gucci scent I know - and own a decant of - is Gucci by Gucci edp, which is not to be confused with Gucci Eau de Parfum, or any other slight reframing of the brand name, with or without 'Intense' suffixes!

Source: johnlewis.com

I came across Gucci by Gucci edp round about the time The Scentimentalist and I first 'met' on Basenotes. It was possibly the first scent I had tried that smelt 'a bit sexy'- I was mostly into designer stuff at the time. Gucci by Gucci is a sweet, honeyed, patchouli and musk number, conjuring up images of black leather sofas in the foyers of smart London hotels, of late night cocktails in low lit bars and making out in taxis, of slippery fabrics and vertiginous heels. It is accessorised with gold jewellery that is a little too chunky and veering to trashy. Some of which impression has been garnered from advertising, some the design of the bottle itself(!). Now Gucci by Gucci doesn't smell trashy as such, that would be unfair, but the combination of tiare (think Loulou!)and honey makes it a little too cloying to be elegant either. But it sets a sweetly sultry tone nonetheless, and I haven't smelt anything similar since, which is also good. Plus I like how it reminds me of my early days of exploration - when my lemmings were more likely to be Sarah Jessica Parker Lovely and DKNY Cashmere Mist than the latest Mandy Aftel or Vero Profumo. Gucci by Gucci certainly bottles that newbie phase of my perfume 'jour**y', and for that reason I will always have a soft spot for it.

Is there any scent you feel you have in some way 'grown out of', but which you remember fondly? 

Source: shopstyle.com

Alyssa Harad: 'Coming To My Senses' - A Fragrant Bildungsroman

The best kind of book is one which you simply don't want to end.  Which, when you realise you have just thirty pages to go - or less, if you have forgotten to factor in the acknowledgements - makes you start to slow down and savour every sentence, or even reread entire paragraphs to postpone the inevitable moment when you set the bookmark to one side and close the cover for the last time.

'The Stranger in the Mirror' by Jane Shilling - a poignant and funny memoir about encroaching middle age - was a book which had that effect on me lately.  In the perfume sphere, Chandler Burr's 'The Perfect Scent' was another.  And now Alyssa Harad's 'Coming to My Senses' completes the trio.  So, given my keen enjoyment of this book, you may be surprised to learn that it has taken me at least six months to finish it.  This is because the place I most like to read is in the bath.  However - as some long-suffering readers already know - the vagaries of my hot water system mean that I have only managed a proper soak once every six weeks or so, and my reading rate has plummeted accordingly.  This also explains why there has been a fair bit of rereading of 'Coming to My Senses' well before the end.  Pretty much every time I settled down in the bath I had to go back 20 pages or more to remind myself where I was up to.  And as I haven't read the beginning of the book since last October or thereabouts, I am a bit sketchy about some of the details, hence why I have deliberately not used the word 'review' in the title of this post.  I must say, however, that it is a tribute to the readability of 'Coming to My Senses' that you could read any random section again and again and enjoy it just as much each time - for the understated lyricism of the language as much as the story of Alyssa's 'perfume journey', or the preparations for her wedding, which forms the climactic centrepiece of the book.

Source: dallasnews.com

Yes, this is more of a passionate plug for the book, a heartfelt plea to readers to just go buy it.  I can't remember the exact sequence of events (and it would spoil things to reveal too much anyway), but I do distinctly remember that I relished every word.  For in telling the story of her burgeoning interest in fragrance - of how she fell down the rabbit hole, as we might say - Alyssa is also articulating the stories of so many of us.  The lurking on perfume blogs in thrall to the beguiling writing of Robin, Marina, Victoria et al, the heightened sensibility to ambient scents, the sniffing forays in upmarket department stores (testing JAR Parfums and my beloved and sadly defunct Plus Que Jamais!), the tentative sharing of her interest with friends, the sample packages winging across the globe, the fellowship of Sniffapalooza, the epiphanies, the transformative joy of a scent wardrobe with its infinite possibilities of toggling between selves, the dogged search for a bottle of vintage perfume containing the fragrant quintessence of her mother...There are so many vignettes and little touches which chime with the perfumista reader, though I feel sure the book will have more mainstream appeal.

Plus Que Jamais - missing you more than ever

And while not all of us have been married, there is much about Alyssa's 'coming of age' story - that runs in a seamless parallel to her olfactory awakening - to which the reader can relate.  For there is an endearing girl-next-door quality to Alyssa, with her wayward hair and curvaceous figure that needs to be corralled by 'serious underwear' on her wedding day.  Like us, Alyssa admits in the book to being a bit starstruck by the 'grande dames' bloggers, a number of whom have cameo appearances in the book (including that dainty duo, Victoria and Marina of Boisdejasmin and Perfume Smelling Things).  Since then, Alyssa has gone on to clock up guest writing credits on PST, NST and in magazines such as Marie Claire.  With the release of 'Coming to My Senses' Alyssa puts the lid on her own 'grande dame' status, all the while remaining the friendly and accessible figure she was before her publishing fame.

For it sums up the warm inclusivity of our perfume community that this eloquent conjurer of a perfumed life is still just a mouse click away from liking your photo on Facebook.


Photo of Guerlain Plus Que Jamais from fragrantica.com