That sinking feeling: my spontaneous scent spotting shame in a Titanic pub

Source: thepotteries.org

This isn't about the Titanic. I have written a couple of posts on the subject in the past, as it happens - well, one was about a sniffathon in my home town of Belfast, where the ill-fated ship was built - there were monuments to the vessel dotted around the town centre, and a museum I have yet to visit, four years on. The other post featured a perfume called Night Star, which was based on a scent by a German perfumer that went to the bottom of the ocean (the 'Rosa Maris'), but was later recovered and subsequently reformulated / adapted for modern tastes by a company called Scents of Time. Happily, the perfumer himself - Adolphe Saalfeld - survived. ;)

Night Star was one of the few perfumes ex-Mr Bonkers was ever keen to try, as I go on to explain in my Scents of Time review:

'The reason his curiosity was piqued by this perfume is because Titanic is "the best film ever made”, even though it doesn’t feature Nicolas Cage, “the best actor ever made”, and - unlike his usual fodder of corpse-strewn zombie films - only has “minimal violence”. (That's if you exclude the not inconsiderable impact of ship against iceberg.) Mr Bonkers has another personal interest in all things Titanic-related, for rumour has it that his family is directly descended from Captain Smith, who, like Mr B, was born in Stoke-on-Trent. You may say that that is not the most auspicious of family connections to broadcast, but still."

NB I have a feeling that this proved to be an apocryphal story in the end, and will update my post if I can verify the facts of the matter either way!

Source: reedsrains.co.uk

So no, this is another tale of my hopeless nose, which happens to be set in a pub belonging to the Titanic brewery estate, The Greyhound in Hartshill. The Greyhound is a veritable shrine to White Star (the shipping line) trappings and memorabilia, and host to a range of Titanic-themed beers, such as Slipway, Anchor, and Steerage.

I had gone along to attend a gig of a band my friend Gillie is in, called The Idioms (vid of one of the songs they played below). The pub was packed with regulars and friends of the band, so there was no shortage of familiar faces and people to chat to. At one point I was sitting near a lady who let slip that her birthday was 15th April, the day the ship sank. 'Not 1912, obviously,' she added, in case I might have thought she was just a young-looking 113. That said, my old babysitter in Belfast was born in 1905, and as a little girl was taken to watch the Titanic being launched. She has died now, sadly, but only a few years ago. Why, she went up in a helicopter (by choice!) to mark her hundredth birthday, even though she had lost her sight by then.

At the end of the night I got chatting to a friend of Gillie's, whom I will thinly disguise as Lauren, and her friend, whom I shall even more thinly disguise as Odile. They were up from Hertfordshire, staying with a chap (I shall call Gareth) whose compact but bijou collection of scents has cropped up before on Bonkers. It was he who blew me away the Christmas before last by wearing a woody oriental scent that turned out to be Lynx Excite! He also rejoices in the surname of Spray, which is just too good to disguise, but I don't think he'll mind.

And inevitably I was asked to sniff the trio's SOTEs and guess what they were wearing - at which party trick I am famously terrible. I have occasionally idenitified the likes of Paris or Coco Chanel on people, but as a general rule I am complete rubbish at this game, and so it proved last night.

The Idioms band

ODILE: Cacherel Noa

I had no idea what Odile was wearing, though I have once smelt this, I believe. Yet I was getting something almost green and citrus-y, which was not at all my memory of how Noa smells, fuzzy and historic though that may be. And then I turned to Google, and found this review on Boisdejasmin, which explains that the perfume has both a powdery and a sparkling facet all the way through. Noa certainly wore very bright and vegetal on Odile.

"How many scents can you think of that are simultaneously powdery and transparent? I think of very few, and I recommend smelling Noa just to see what I mean. It starts out with a fizzy, champagne like note that reminds me of crushed coriander leaves and the bitter white part of orange peel and smells astringent, metallic and sharp. And then it’s as if someone opened a box of face powder and filled the air with the glittering dust."

Source: Cacharel

GARETH: Joop! pour homme

And well may it exclaim!, because this strong, sweet, powdery, woodsy and patchouli number had me totally floored. I blurted out 'Body Shop?' but I had no idea what I was thinking of, though in hindsight I may have been rummaging for the provenance of the one that was actually Lynx. It was rather moreish on Gareth, it must be said.

Not sure about that pink...Source: shopclues.com

LAUREN: Nothing!

I do feel an exclamation mark is also called for here. Lauren proved to be the unexpected control, wearing nothing but 'Eau de Lauren', as she dubbed it. And I didn't even bother guessing this time after my failure with the other two, not that there was anything much to go on except maybe a vague vestige of shampoo. Because this was the interesting thing - both Odile and Lauren proffered their hair for me to sniff - seemingly that is where Odile spritzes her perfume, and maybe Lauren too, when she does apply some. (Dior Dolce Vita and D & G Light Blue are her two favourites for the record.)

As for myself, I was sporting the far drydown of 'Eau de Decant'. Layers of several Roja Doves, Magie Noire and Salome were all present in the pungent palimpsest - or it was certainly pretty pungent earlier in the day!

So it would seem that my powers of spontaneous scent recognition may be as doomed as the Titanic. And much like the ratio of iceberg above and below the surface, for every Paris or Coco Chanel I am able to recognise, there are twenty more I can't. I am not sure I'd even recognise Night Star now if I met it in the street - or 400 miles off Newfoundland, even.

How about you? Does your nose fare better? If so, what is the spontaneous scent recognition coup of which you are most proud?