Fracas On The Dance Floor: A Friend's Fabulously Fragrant Fortieth Birthday Bash

My friend Sharon (my first and most resounding convert to Roja Dove Scandal, as some readers may recall), turned 40 on Friday 13th and celebrated in style. It turned out to be a more auspicious date than it may sound, for some 30 family and friends converged on her home town from all over the country, bearing gifts and trailing party outfits in garment bags. Sharon's birthday haul included some beautiful pieces of jewellery, flowers and champagne, while I gave her a bottle of Piguet Fracas, having noted that it was her favourite of the "big white floral" samples I had given her lately to try.

As I was getting changed at Sharon's parents' house (from whom I am equidistant in age!), I cast my mind back to a few of my own milestone birthdays, which went roughly like this:

18th: Revised for my English Literature A-Level on the fire escape. Parents gave me a suitcase. Was that a hint?

21st: Cleaned the bungalow I had been sharing with two other teaching assistants in France, my housemates having already cunningly skipped the country. Then treated myself to a solo moped ride and a picnic.

30th: Unintentionally played gooseberry on a yomp in the New Forest with a friend and her...person of interest. Ended up lost - possibly deliberately shaken off - and covered in nettle stings and scratches. This was in those dark pre-GPS days when (as I learnt to my cost) orienteering skills really counted for something.

40th: Checked into a spa for a day of solo pampering. Failed dismally to crack any of the yoga positions, and had a blart in the grounds when I realised I would never receive another greetings card from my mother, who had died a few months previously. Spent the evening doing serious damage to a bottle of Bollinger, which rallied and ended up doing considerably greater damage to me.

So in view of my own mixed bag of mostly solitary birthday celebrations, I was pretty confident that Sharon's 40th would comfortably top them, and so it proved. She had booked a table at a popular nightspot with panoramic views of the sea from its upstairs bar. When we arrived, we were already several sheets of pink cava to the wind, and if I am honest, not all the squinting I found myself doing could be attributed to the dazzling rays of the setting sun.

By 8pm, after more pre-dinner drinks, we were seated at our table in a prime spot close to the stage, all set to tuck into a surprise three course meal (surprise in the sense that none of us could remember what we had pre-ordered back in February...), and to be entertained by a Robbie Williams tribute act with the disappointingly normal name of Paul Reason. Now I am not saying we would have preferred the more punningly satisfactory "Blobbie Williams" instead - that's with or without "Gary Lardo" in tow - for that particular Robbie Look-alike-ish is reputed to be quite large, and this Paul chappy was on the stocky side as it was. He did, however, have the obligatory weird eye/eyebrow combo, and a lot of Robbie's moves.

Understandably, given our high liquid intake over the course of the night, repeated trips were made to the ladies, not least by me. Both in the toilets and on the dance floor, I was struck by how fragrant the air was, and enjoyed deeply inhaling this pleasant pot pourri of contemporary women's scents. Everyone at the venue was very dressed up (well, I say that, but we did also spot one or two vertiginously high hemlines, which skimmed their wearers' bottoms more by luck than design. Which in its way I suppose is a sort of dressing "up".) And though people may have skimped on fabric (not in our group, obviously), crucially, no one seemed to have skipped the finishing touch of applying perfume.

For example, in our party there was birthday girl Sharon, wafting her freshly opened bottle of Fracas on the dance floor, Angela in Gucci Guilty, Ruth in Chance Eau Fraîche, Max in Parisienne, Sarah Jane in Gucci II, while I gave Amouage Honour Woman another spin (chosen with care for its tuberose note, which Sharon loves, but no vanilla, which she hates!). And beyond our table there was the throng of unknown women contributing to this beguiling cocktail of scent...

And my overriding feeling at that moment was one of pride. Pride in my relative sobriety such that I could capture highlights of the night on my camera phone. And I'll admit to a bit of self-satisfaction at the part I had played in helping Sharon find another diva scent to love.

But most of the pride I felt was directed towards women in general - all these unknown women at large having a great night out, myself included. Proud that they cared enough to wear fragrance - any fragrance - not that I smelt a duff one.

OUR PARTY WINS THE AWARD FOR BEST SHOE OF THE NIGHT!

HOPING THAT POSING WITH A YOUNGER BALLOON WILL SHAVE YEARS OFF MY AGE


Now they say that alcohol oils the wheels of a great party, and it would be fair to say that the wheels of ours were pretty darn lubricated. Yes, we bonded through sharing a drink, through making fools of ourselves on the dance floor, and through making light of the burnt bacon (my fault!) at our fry-up breakfast the next morning.

But over and above that I felt an invisible extra connection with every woman in the room who had chosen to put on a Scent Of - and For - The Evening.

Yes, it was as fabulously fragrant a fortieth bash as you could wish for, and I look forward to doing it all again in ten years. Which gives us ample time to find a Robbie act with a snappier name. And next time, I shall remember to smell him as well when he does his mock stage diving routine...

Photo of Fracas from perfume-malaysia.com, other photos my own

The Perilous Process Of Picking A Crowd-Pleasing Scent

I have just come back from my friend's housewarming party "up north", and am feeling decidedly delicate. This is despite probably having had the least to drink of the 40+ revellers, though I suppose 2-3 glasses of Chardonnay is still a lot for me... Though it may not be the drink - can you get a hangover from excitement? Or perhaps I have the sugar equivalent of DT's from the Swizzle lolly I "just felt like" at 1 o'clock this morning, not half an hour after I had put away a generous serving of lemon meringue pie and cheesecake. Or maybe I am just jaded from a fitful night's sleep disturbed by nightmares about being in a Middle Eastern war zone and having to run the gauntlet past armed guards to retrieve a knitting bag from a minefield...

I may be feeling fragile, but at least the house is nice and quiet. Charlie Bonkers is snoozing in the bedroom next door, unaware (in her blissfully deaf state) of the fireworks cracking off all around the neighbourhood, while Mr Bonkers has gone out to "earn money for crunchies".

Yesterday, as I was setting off, Mr B asked me if I wanted him to choose a perfume for me to wear that day, using the aleatory method featured here. He is on a bit of a roll with this method at the moment, having picked out my SOTD on Friday on this random basis. I tipped my turquoise travel bag of samples and small decants onto the floor and he barked out coordinates:

"Third from the left!" That was Chanel La Pausa, and to be honest I wasn't really in the mood for iris, but neither it seems was he, for a follow up command was quickly issued:

"No, I don't mean that one - the one two to the left of that!" APOM pour Femme. Okay, I thought to myself, that would be fine. Suddenly though, Mr Bonkers' eye was drawn to a small spray vial of L'Air du Desert Marocain.

"Nope - I've changed my mind - that one with the purple label - THAT's the one I want!"

"If you say so", I replied, retrieving it from the melee. I was more than happy with his choice, but correctly predicted that Mr B might not care for it. Having apprised him of the desert theme, I watched him lean in for a tentative sniff, with the "Tauerade" at the most potent point of its trajectory.

"Ergh! Camel dung!" Mr B exclaimed, visibly recoiling. Well, clearly that was a glib, facetious comment on his part, prompted by the exotic context with which I had just furnished him. I am not sure how he would have described the opening without that frame of reference. But it was perhaps foolhardy for a non fragrance-lover to sniff a Tauer so early in its development. That's like Mrs Bonkers Senior, a lifelong teetotaller and non-smoker - though we have managed to press her into a single Babycham or Snowball on Christmas Day - suddenly downing several shots of Jack Daniels in quick succession, before lighting a crafty fag.

So when Mr B suggested trying the aleatory method again for what would have been my scent of the day - and evening - I stood firm, explaining that I couldn't entrust such a weighty decision to chance, if that is not too grandiose a term for Mr B's arbitrary and mutable leanings.

So...the first thing to consider was what the hostess would be wearing at her party, so as not to clash, or appear to be trying to upstage, her own choice. Which I suppose is why female wedding guests are generally discouraged from wearing white, or indeed any colour of frock involving an 18ft train and/or a crinoline. Okay, fine - that ruled out Scandal, as well as any "statement white florals" such as Carnal Flower, Marc Jacobs, Fracas or Joy.

Then I suddenly remembered my friend's aversion to overt vanilla, which knocked out whole swathes of my favourite scents from Guerlain Plus Que Jamais to Diptyque Eau Duelle, and Floris Snow Rose to Sonia Rykiel Woman Not For Men!

My friend isn't particularly keen on "weird" perfumes either, so that put paid to a number of scents I had been toying with (because of their tenuous connections with bonfire night and its concomitant baddies, images of burning wood, nocturnal goings on etc) - namely PG L'Ombre Fauve, Damien Bash Lucifer No 3, Guerlain Bois d'Armenie, and Bvlgari Black - here I may have been thinking back to the toxic (literally and figuratively) July 12th celebrations in my home town of Belfast...

Now, the alert reader may have twigged to the fact that in vetting a SOTE for the party, so far I have only catered for the preferences of the hostess, while the tastes of the other 39+ guests remain unaccounted for. The enormity of this crowd-pleasing concept was not lost on me.

So what did I choose in the end, you may wonder? Well, it was more a case of being chosen than doing the choosing, because of an accident early on with an atomiser of Natori, which led to my whole neck area being covered in that. One arm also had lingering test sites of Bois d'Armenie and Lucifer No 3, though these had been rejected as contenders, and then over the course of the day I additionally acquired patches of the following during my visit to Fascination Perfumery in Lytham (separate post follows shortly):

Jesus del Pozo Duende
Hermes Eau Claire des Merveilles
Etro Etra
Etro Via Verri
Serge Lutens Cuir Mauresque
Floris Bouqet de la Reine

As if that weren't enough, on reaching my friend's house at 5 o'clock (who was busy preparing for the party, stirring a cauldron of mulled wine with one hand, emptying 24 bags of crisps into a big glass bowl with the other, and and sipping a mojito with the third), I realised that I had one wrist still going scentless and spare, while the Natori from the morning on my neck was now largely residual.... so I added a few squirts of FM L'Eau d'Hiver for good measure, also on top of the Etro Etra on the other wrist, as I figured that might layer quite nicely.

In short, therefore, the whole notion of picking a single scent to wear - which would encapsulate my perfumista persona whilst not offending the sensibilities of the consensus - had gone totally out the window, basically. Starting the day by wearing the reject test scents (particularly pungent ones at that) was perhaps an error of judgement, which set the tone for the random chaos that lay ahead as I slipped into "kid in a sweet shop" sniffing mode at Fascination. Now, FM L'Eau d'Hiver might well have been an appropriate choice on its own for an innofensive SOTE, but as part of the muddled palimpsest that was my arms and neck, who can say??

Yes, I know, I might as well used Mr Bonkers' selection method after all...for everyone was far too merry to care what perfume I was wearing, myself included.


Photo of record from coverbrowser.co.uk, photo of Swizzle lollies from sweetheaven-online.co.uk, photo of tyre pyre from dailymail.co.uk, photo of camel shadow from igougo.com and photo of mojito from best-mojito-recipe.com