'Be more Undina': another full juice count and radical 'reorg' of my perfume collection - Part 2

I am a little bit behind with things, even by my own 'slow blogging' standards, but I did say the deliberations over my full bottle collection warranted a separate post, and so I think it will prove. In Part 1 I quoted some of my thoughts at the time of a collection 'reorg' in 2014, having completely forgotten that three years later I conducted another one, and wrote a post focusing on my decision-making MO, entitled: 'Lemmings and lemons reprised: a current capsule collection of 20 desert island scents'. I was clearly getting maximum mileage out of its pleasingly rhyming title...! And how could I even have missed that more recent post, which suggests that I am drawn to such existential musings every three years...;) Maybe it is good that it had slipped my mind, because I compiled my latest list of 'what I would keep plus what I would acquire' - aka 'my desert island scents' - without reference to the choices I made in 2017 or 2014. Or at least not until the very end, haha, when I succumbed to a spot of last minute tweaking. Nor did I consult the list of possible ways to make my selection, though looking back it is spot on, for this time round I did in fact use a haphazard melange of all the MOs mentioned in the 2017 post. These may bear repeating, namely:

1. The burning building speed grab method
2. The systematic review of ALL perfumes owned, including samples, to determine favourites
3. The travel bag 'nuclear precedent' approach (that's nuclear in the 'capsule', not 'apocalyptic' sense)
4. The fragrance family method
5. The scents for all seasons method
6. The scents for all occasions method
7. The covering all my favourite notes method
8. The scents I had happy times in method
9. The inclusive perfume house / perfumer approach
10. The Bois de Jasmin seal of approval approach

I have just thought of another one: 'The association with the early days of my perfume hobby method.' Jasper Conran Woman snuck onto my list that way...it was discontinued for a while, but seems to be back in stock now on a number of internet retailer sites. Ooh look - my fourth post out of a current tally of 704...;)

Does anyone remember this? ;)

Eyeballing that method list, I think I mostly homed in on #3, #4, #5, #7, and #8, but I did have a bash at #1 and #2 before abandoning both: with #1 I feared I might miss things, and with #2 I ran out of patience pretty fast, limiting my research to anything in a bottle, in a decant with a metal top(!) (because that connotes value/importance in the receptacle pecking order, ditto Travalos), or smaller samples I could remember spontaneously. So given this slapdash, flip-flopping smorgasbord of scent selection methods, there is no way I could remotely liken myself to Undina, hehe. I am reminded of my Latin textbook, which was called: "The Approach to Latin". Five years into learning the language and it still seemed like a hazy mirage on the horizon - I may have been approaching Latin in tiny imperceptible increments, but I certainly never got close.

Now before presenting my list of 20 (so much for the 15 target!), I have had to revise the figures of my bottle count, as a few more came to light, plus one had gone off**, and one I decided was more of a purse spray, when larger quantities were available. 30ml is therefore my chosen cut off to be classed as a 'bottle', unless the brand don't do a bigger size. Hence the inclusion of HOCB Immortal Beloved, for which the largest size appears to be 10ml. 

Source: HCOB

(**There might be more scents that have turned in fact, but I haven't the heart to try them all to find out, hehe.)

The total (excluding the perfumes I can't bring myself to include for reasons touched on in my earlier post) was 63 in the end, though a few are nearly finished. 

Of these, I bought 31, so about half. As I mentioned, the remainder were a mix of gifts from friends (mainly fellow perfume lovers), and the brands themselves, plus a handful I inherited (from my own -and somebody else's - mother).

For reference, here is my modest list of 20 from 2017... To which I retro-added a seasonal split, though I don't think it was a major driver of the final cut. I have added italics to the ones I actually owned at the time, so you can see the lemming proportion (quite high!).

2017

Wintry scents

Guerlain Attrape-Coeur

Chanel Bois des Iles

Caron Parfum Sacre Hermes

Hermes Doblis

Tom Ford Private Blend Fleur de Chine

Ormonde Jayne Ta'if

PG Brulure de Rose (have run out of this now, but used to own it)

DSH Cimabue 

Flower by Kenzo Oriental

Christian Dior Ambre Nuit

House of Cherry Bomb Immortal Beloved

Prada Candy

Summery Scents

Annick Goutal Songes edt

Ann Gerard Perle de Mousse

FM Carnal Flower

Mona di Orio Tubereuse

Serge Lutens Un Lys

EL Bronze Goddess

ELDO Fils de Dieu, du Riz, et des Agrumes

En Voyage Perfumes Zelda

And here is today's selection, with only very minor amendments, when I realised I had forgotten a few things.

2020

Lemmings

DSH Foxy

Chanel Bois des Iles

Caron Parfum Sacre

Hermes Doblis

PG Brulure de Rose

DSH Cimabue

House of Cherry Bomb Immortal Beloved

Prada Candy

EL Bronze Goddess

Mona di Orio Tubereuse

Ann Gerard Perle de Mousse

Source: hww.ca

Scents I already own

DKNY Gold

Annick Goutal Songes edt

Annick Goutal Chevrefeuille

Flower by Kenzo Oriental

Bvlgari Black

Jasper Conran Woman

Papillon Perfumery Bengale Rouge

Ormonde Jayne Ta'if

Diptyque Volutes edt

I think I am disproportionately leaning towards wintry fragrances, although these are not flagged up as such. This is likely in response to our current dismal weather. ;)

Note that the two lists have a lot of crossover, even though they were largely compiled independently and several years apart - 13 of the 20 (or two thirds approx) are the same as last time - and if you said I could only have 2017's list I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. I came very close to including five of the perfumes on that list, in fact! The same goes for the more generous list from 2014 with 30 perfumes in it. Because as we perfumistas know, so many alternatives would fit the bill we'd probably be happy if a friend picked us out the scents we had to wear. After all, it is through friends (you know who you are!) that I have discovered most of my recent fragrant loves. 

Then bubbling under the twenty are a number of what I called 'podium-hustlers' in one of my earlier posts - some of these are from the earlier list; others are sadly discontinued, so it seems a bit pointless to include them, but I have strong feelings for those scents regardless. Thinking of Balenciaga Cristobal - the edible fig scent - Damien Bash Lucifer #3, Guerlain Plus Que Jamais, and Prada L'Eau Ambree to name but a few. Strictly speaking, I shouldn't have Hermes Doblis, as it was released as a Limited Edition, and the chances of finding some today are vanishingly small. If I shouldn't be breaking my own rules again, I would substitute Cuir de Lancome instead. 

And of course I reserve the right to change my mind the moment I hit publish!

As you feel about your 'wardrobe' today, could you limit yourself to 20 perfumes? I'd be interested to know...

Editor's note: Oh dear...I spilt a full mug of tea on a pale carpet in my efforts to take this photograph of the bottles I already own that made the list without getting a shadow of any of my body parts in the frame! All the photos I have subsequently taken are a bit blurry, probably due to the artificial light. It does at least show the lengths to which I go to try to illustrate my posts with appropriate images. ;)

'Be more Undina': another full juice count and radical 'reorg' of my perfume collection - Part 1

I am confined to barracks at the moment, for reasons which will become apparent in a later post (in case you are wondering, no, I'm not ill ;) ). I would challenge the notion that staying in - whatever prompts this - is the new going out, and I soon began to feel a little odd and 'not myself', as evidenced by uncharacteristic flurries of decluttering. On a whim one day I decided to move the half dozen or so full bottles which had somehow insinuated themselves in my decant drawer and store them with the other bottles. Then before you could say "leaky atomiser", I had knuckled down to a comprehensive reorganisation - or 'reorg' as they say in the aerospace company where my friend works - of every bag, box, and tray containing every bottle, decant and sample I own. This took all day, and even the cat wearied of it after a while, and she does like boxes as a rule.

It is six years since I undertook anything comparable, so I have scurried back to look at that post and see how I approached things last time. It seems the theme of it was more about 'fantasy collection whittling' than the process of reorganising per se: 

"...following a recent massive reorganisation of my perfume collection - the tedious and largely illogical principles of which I will spare you - I kept coming back to the idea that I would really love to own far fewer full bottles - maybe around 30, say, instead of well over twice that number. I couldn't quite face sitting down with a blank piece of paper and compiling a list of which scents should be in the 30, so I decided to approach the question from another, more intellectually - and emotionally - forgiving angle. I took a long hard look at my current collection of full bottles and asked myself which ones I would buy again if I had my time over...I decided to strip price out of the equation and focus purely on which perfumes I would wish to hold on to for themselves, and not because - when considered in the round - they represented 'good value for money'."

Six years on, I reckon I could easily be happy with a collection of 20 full bottles rather than 30 - perhaps as few as 15. But we will see...I'd like to come back to that later in Part 2 and see what has changed in my collection itself and my preferences within - and outwith - it.

So the focus of this post will be the 'tedious and largely illogical principles' of my perfume reorg, for though I agree wholeheartedly that it has been just as illogical this time round, I think its very illogicality might conceivably be entertaining. Well, you can be the judge of that, hehe...

Step One - Remove full bottles from boxes, and store boxes in a separate container

Except, that is, where the footprint of the box with bottle in it is minimally extra (Crabtree & Evelyn Iris), or where I am especially drawn to the box for some reason (Papillon Perfumery Bengale Rouge and those novel-looking Tauer tins), or I want to keep the box and bottle together as I might sell the perfume in question soon (Miller Harris Fleurs de Sel), or I have an irrational fear that the bottle might fall over on its own (no examples, due to aforesaid irrationality of the idea). In short: 'Store some boxes in a separate container'.

Step Two - Group all full bottles together, whether or not they are still in their boxes

Except, that is, the ones I wish to disown, because I don't like them, or because they are in some way not worthy of being counted as 'proper perfumes' - these will be stored with the boxes and not included in the final tally. (I am trying to give them away to charity, but it is hard to get charity shops to take donations these days, if they are even open.)

For reasons of discretion, I shan't name names, as most were gifts or PR freebies. The remaining two bottles are vintage Lancome Magie Noire, my visceral attachment to which in the 1980s I am at a complete loss to explain, and Lidl's Suddenly Madame Glamour. Sure it is a great dupe of Coco Mademoiselle and all that, but at £3.99 it is without question much too cheap to count. In case anyone is interested at this point, the tally (excluding pariahs) is 62. This includes a nearly finished 30ml bottle of Jo Malone Vanilla & Anise, and another of vintage Rochas Femme parfum. So if I got a wiggle on, nostril-wise, the total could be down to a round 60 in no time.

NB The keen-eyed observer may spot that there is a sub-set of bottles grouped together by square or rectangular top design.

Step Three a) - Divide the 'book-shaped' carded samples into thematically meaningful categories

This is interesting...and further evidence that packaging format is 'shaping' up to be a key driver in determining where a perfume ultimately lives. The three way split turned out to be:

Designer / Niche / Samples in the little blue cards from Les Senteurs ;)

Step Three b) - Keep all other carded samples of whatever shape together 

To this I added 'samples in paper bags from meetings of Perfume Lovers London', as they didn't fit anywhere else.

Step Four - Throw away empty or leaky vials, and any I vividly remember being disagreeable 

This was hugely satisfying - you wouldn't believe how many things had evaporated in the four years since I last inspected my collection up close! NB If I couldn't remember clearly whether a perfume was disagreeable or not, it got a last minute reprieve. I did not venture to retest it..oh no...

Step Five - Isolate vials with just a tiny bit of juice left in them

The aim here was to keep this set of nearly finished samples to hand in my bedroom to encourage me to 'thunk' a sample a day until further notice. I should move the Jo Malone and Femme to join them really.

Step Six - Bag up big collections of samples by brand and keep in a box

The thinking behind this was logical, while appearing somewhat arbitrary...for while small bags of samples such as those belonging to En Voyage Perfumes or Vero Profumo could be comfortably housed in little compartments in my wooden drawer divider, the bigger bags needed to go elsewhere - the likes of Papillon Perfumery, 4160 Tuesdays, and Geza Schoen, who kindly donated lots of samples to the band when he memorably attended a gig in 2018.

Staying with the system (I use the word loosely) for the wooden drawer divider and beyond:

Step Seven - Group decants by colour of metallic top(!) 

Step Eight - Keep miniatures and Travalos broadly together

Step Nine - Group atomisers by body material - glass / plastic - and by length (in any material!)

Step Ten - Keep vials in individual poly bags together

I am not sure why these samples were ever in poly bags in the first place, except where the perfume names were too long to write on a label on the vial itself - these being all 1ml.

Step Eleven - Bag up remaining spray samples, split by niche and designer

BUT don't bother doing that with the 1ml samples! - being of a lower order, on account of their size and lack of sprayability, they just got stuffed in bags with no theme, though to be fair in that size they are more than likely all going to be niche - eg from The Perfumed Court or Lucky Scent (ah, those were the days...;) ).

Step Twelve - Keep unlabelled / unknown samples together 

(Oooh, I came very close to chucking these.  For I will never run so short of perfume that I will need to resort to sniffing anonymous samples...though I suppose it could be fodder for a blog post some day.)

Hmm, a Twelve Step Programme, I see, hehe...

Yet one so haphazard as to make the comparison with Undina and her rigorously methodical cataloguing almost blasphemous. Though you could also say that the 'Be more Undina' injunction still holds for that very reason.

And I am not sure that this account of my sorting MO was even slightly entertaining after all. In terms of its illogicality, however, it was arguably right up there with some of the Covid guidelines.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Now, going back to the full bottles, out of the 62, 31 I bought; 13 were gifts from friends and fellow perfumistas; 13 were PR freebies, and 5 I inherited - quite literally - from a deceased person.

I only paid full retail on about 10 of the c30 bottles, and bought many on eBay, Amazon or discount sites.

Of the 62, I probably would only wish to own about 10 of them again, but I do have quite a few additional lemmings, which would take my tally to something approaching the 20 I mentioned. But that might be better explored in Part 2...

Do you have a more logical system to storing your decants and samples? It could hardly be less logical! I would be curious to know...