Pink grenade : how Viktor&Rolf Bonbon (flower)bombed my search for myself

Source: Soundcloud

 

It's Valentine's Day again... regular readers know better than to come to Bonkers looking for inspiration on the Ten Best Rose Perfumes to give your loved one, or anything else of that predictable romantic ilk. Which is not to say that I haven't written posts in the past tailored to this (sadly increasingly commercial) occasion - several may come up in this link - but the post that popped into my head to write this morning is more pink in its inspiration than the classic deep red of rose and heart motifs...

For at the weekend a friend in the US sent me a link to a Luxe magazine article; it lists the "37 Best Perfumes for Women", with the byline: "Find your signature scent". You can immediately tell that this piece was aimed at a mainstream audience, for perfumistas prefer to own fragrance wardrobes, on the basis that "more is more". Anyway, each of the 37 perfumes listed had won a separate category, which included "Best Luxury", "Best value", "Best floral", "Best for night", "Best as gift" (another notion we don't hold with, unless the person has specifically requested said scent as a gift!), "Best over 50" (Dior J'adore- pardon?!?), "Best for young", and so on and so forth in that reductionist and inevitably doomed pigeonholing vein. FYI, Black Opium was "Best for night", which says it all right there. And how Byredo Bal d'Afrique could take the prize for "Best earthy" beats me. Where is the oakmoss and patchouli? And right at the top of the list was the perfume deemed "Most popular"- or should that be "Best popular" for the sake of consistency? - namely Viktor&Rolf Flowerbomb.

Seeing this accolade awarded to Flowerbomb fired me up with indignation, which may have coloured my reply to the friend:

"Ah, that list had more of a 'designer' bias than the niche perfumes I am mostly into, and when that happens I always wonder if the perfume house has chucked them a load of money to promote their product. I say this, because Viktor&Rolf gets a mention, and if I do an Internet search for my blog - Bonkers about Perfume - up comes a load of images of V&R bottles as the first result, even though that clearly has zilch to do with the search terms. So I tend to completely disregard 'Best of' lists in women's magazines, sorry!"

 

 

 

I may have been a bit harsh there, but I have been really exercised by the monotonous regularity with which Bonbon ads bombard the search results for the blog, the butterfly-shaped bottle serving as an additional taunt, in view of my online "flittersniffer" identity. It doesn't happen with any search engine, mind - just on Microsoft Bing, which I have on my netbook. Google has no ads, whether accessed through my Firefox browser (desktop PC) or Chrome (phone). I spend most time on my netbook though, so the pink-winged bottles will continue to torment! Do let me know if you use Yahoo or any other search engine (eg Duckduckgo?), and get ads as the first search result.

 

I would also be interested to know whether you would assume that Flowerbomb really is "the most popular perfume" through its own merits, or whether a massive marketing budget has managed to lob it front and centre of consumer consciousness, like a great big pink grenade on a mercenary mission. And I don't necessarily even mean by greasing reviewers' palms with silver - which is mere supposition on my part, after all - it could be by aggressive in-store promo campaigns, or saturated magazine advertising, or SEO-jiggery pokery, or any other kind of above or below-the-line spending.

Anyway...I guess I got myself a bit worked up - more over the nefarious power of brands to buy exposure and/or influence than the mere fact of my blog not having the prominence you would expect for an exact match of the search phrase. Tomorrow I will sally forth as is customary, and hoover up any out of date Valentine's bargains I spy in the form of flowers or foodstuffs. I would say "in a therapeutic act of 'self-care'", but I have come to dislike the expression "self-care" every bit as much as "uptick", "put food on the table", and "baked in". "Baked in" being my newest and most irritating mot du jour - usually used in connection with Boris's character flaws rather than to denote the inclusion of dried fruit in a cake. That's assuming you have the funds to put the ingredients for food on the table.

Then tonight I am off for a girls' night in with two friends. As an offering I am taking a large jar of Sauerkraut, a partly used bottle of magnesium tablets, and a small hot water bottle cover I knitted for the hostess's son's puppy**. Oh, come to think of it - that is red (though it looks more like "hot pink" in this photo, haha).

Happy Valentine's Day, however you are spending it!

 

**NB The hostess and I do have a long and honourable tradition of unconventional present exchanges - packets of quinoa, half bars of chocolate, open bottles of wine and life-limited fruit have also featured.

"She and Salv": two train-themed perfume mini-stories with a surreal soapy twist

The other day I heard I was going to be awarded a partial refund of £11.86 by CrossCountry Trains, to compensate me for missing my connection on a journey that seems like a lifetime, but was only in fact some seven weeks ago. I got very excited by this, for together with the £15 proceeds from selling an old half tin of paint to a friend of ex-Mr Bonkers, that's pretty much it for income at the moment.

And the email made me think back to the glorious era of train travel - or any travel indeed - and to a couple of perfume-related incidents which happened this year, one on a train in fact. In the first case I found myself sitting next to a lady of my own age give or take, when she suddenly fished a canister of YSL Rive Gauche out of her handbag, upended it, and proceeded to use the shiny metal base as a compact mirror to apply lipstick. The resourcefulness and nonchalance behind this gesture impressed me in equal measure, and I couldn't help but strike up a conversation with her, starting with a comment to the effect that you don't often come across people wearing Rive Gauche these days. My fellow passenger, who introduced herself as 'She' (you can readily guess what Christian name that was short for), was fulsome in her praise of Rive Gauche, which was no less than her signature scent. She was so worried that it might be discontinued that she had recently bought a back up bottle at Manchester airport, so we chatted a bit about that dismal phenomenon (discontinuing perfumes, I mean, not the airport, of which I have nothing but fond memories). I learnt that she was recently retired and off to see her sister, 'Mad' (you can guess her name too with relative ease!). There was a third sister, also with an amusing contraction, but it has slipped my mind now. Anyway, I had great fun shooting the fragrant breeze with She for as long as our journeys coincided. And no, Vanessa, it's not "shooting the fragrant breeze with Her", even if that is your understandable instinct.

The same weekend, I was given a present by a fellow fan of The Monochrome Set of a vintage set of Salvador Dali miniatures. I didn't inspect the contents of the box till the following day (on another train!), and it afforded that special kind of delight associated with small, secret things, somewhere between a doll's house, a shape sorting toy, and an advent calendar.

There were two perfumes from the 80s: a daytime diva-ish floral, and an evening diva-ish oriental, plus a tiny bar of soap, perfumed bath oil, and body cream - all of them shaped like Dali's trademark lips. That should perhaps be 'mouth of soap' then. The perfumed body cream container had a dear little swivelly lid like a sugar bowl that only fits snugly in one position, while the other three had pull off tops like the spikes atop a wrought iron gate.

At a guess the body cream is past its best, but still smells rich and opulent, as does the bath oil. You can hear a little bit swishing about if you shake it.

Thanks to Basenotes, I have found the notes for the perfumes, both by Alberto Morillas and launched in 1983:

Parfum (the orange coloured one):

Frankincense, bergamot, clove, rose, jasmine, mimosa, sandalwood, patchouli, oakmoss, musk

Parfum de toilette (the pale yellow coloured one):

Top notes: aldehydes, basil, bergamot, fruits, green notes, mandarin
Heart notes: orris root, jasmine, lily, lily-of-the-valley, orange blossom, rose, tuberose
Base notes: amber, benzoin, musk, myrrh, sandalwood, vanilla, cedar

You can readily tell from those notes how retro and big production the two perfumes smell - definitely of their time. But remarkably well preserved. If I am feeling bold one day - and let's face it, lockdown is the ideal occasion - I might give them an outing. Or the indoor equivalent, obviously. ;)

And I am getting through a lot of soap at the moment, however, I reckon that with it being so distinctive I'd have to be on my very last sliver before I broached the cute little lips bar...