Curate your Chanels the Budweiser Way!

In a former life I used to be a product manager for a range of chilled foods. Every office at the company had its own fridge for storing product samples. It was absolutely ingrained in us that you pop a chilled product back in the fridge immediately after use. And like those forensic scientists who can age a corpse on the basis of its degree of maggot infestation, I could take one look at the bowing foil lid of a non-refrigerated yoghurt pot and know the precise moment when it would blow, projecting its creamy ectoplasm in random directions.

Fast forward 25 years and I am still very conscious about the ravages of unchilled storage as it applies to perishable foods - and latterly also perfumes. From my research on Basenotes I have learnt that the Osmotheque perfume museum in Versailles curates its ordinary scents at 10 degrees C and its citrus-dominant ones at 4 degrees C. I also gathered that glass atomizers preserve a scent better than plastic. But please don't ask if a glass atomizer at ambient temperature keeps a perfume longer than a refrigerated plastic one - my research didn't grapple with such fiendish interlocking variables...

But on the premise that cold was better than hot, during the brief heatwave that struck the UK at the end of June I bought a second hand beer chiller on Ebay for £50. It is set to 10 degrees and the citrus fragrances will jolly well have to take their chances, for I am darned if I am going to buy a separate chiller for them. The chiller contains most of my 50 full bottles, a box of plastic atomizers, and bags and bags of minis and samples. I still have two drawers' worth of overflow FBs, glass atomizers and more samples, so in retrospect I could easily have filled a fridge twice the size. Things have got to the stage where when you open the door, a bottle that you are not reaching for teeters to the edge of a shelf and falls off, like one of those rare snack vending machines that actually "vend".

I find the intermittent whirr of the fridge (in a cold spare bedroom) quite comforting, though the recent appearance of icy stalagmites just above the top shelf is a little concerning. For as well as heat and light, perfumes don't much care for humidity of course, but you can't have everything. It might not be a bad idea to defrost it, come to think of it.

So, not a perfect solution, but it's got to be a cut above the bathroom cabinet. : - )

Lidl Suddenly d'Or - a Swiss Ghost Story

Anyone familiar with the European discount chain Lidl will be aware that it sells both food and non-food items on a pretty random basis. On one day last week they had a delivery of guitars, apparently, and you can routinely find everything from spaghetti hoops to crocs via shower curtains, table soccer games and the occasional security camera.

One day earlier this year I noticed two new own brand perfumes named Suddenly D'Or and Suddenly Fleurs, selling at the ludicrously cheap price point of £3.99 for 50ml! My nose was drawn to Suddenly D'Or, a pretty decent fruity floral. I bought a bottle on the spot - £3.99 is a bargain by any standards. It smelt to me like a perfume that cost up to five times that ie what I would consider as the lower end of the designer market. Or at least three times, say - comparable in quality perhaps to those frequently remaindered lines like Elizabeth Arden. A few weeks later, I ran across a promotional display for the new Ghost scent, Ghost Luminous. The bulbous-bottomed bottle looked uncannily like Suddenly D'Or and the scent was even more reminiscent of the Lidl one! Notwithstanding the chronology of events, I assumed the Lidl scent was most likely a knock off of the Ghost, and not vice versa...

I felt I couldn't ask Lidl outright if they had modelled their scent on the new Ghost release, but I could at least ask them what the notes were, to see if I had correctly identified a strong resemblance. My phone call to Lidl customer services was met with a refusal. They could not help me because their Swiss supplier would not permit the release of this information. I tried to explain that the note information I was after was very much in the public domain for all designer and niche scents, and that I wasn't trying to extract the precise chemical formulation from them. So I asked the lady to go away and put my question to the supplier again.

Weeks passed, when "suddenly" I received a letter from Lidl's Product Quality Services department in Scotland:

"On receipt of your query we contacted our Quality Assurance Department who have advised that the fragrance used for our Perfume consists of apple, lime-tree blossom, violet, melon, jasmine, lily of the valley, peach, rose, iris, musk and sandalwood.

If the product is not to your liking, please return the item to your local Store for a refund."

But I do like the item! I like it £3.99's worth and more! With trepidation, I googled a note listing for Ghost Luminous - common notes are highlighted in italics:

"Bergamot, pineapple, orange, blackcurrant, melon, apples, sea breeze accord, champagne, jasmine, lily of the valley, raspberry leaves, violet, rose, freesia, sandalwood, vetiver, powdery dream, candied raspberry and peach sweet.

Okay, so the Lidl one is not an exact replica, but eight of the eleven notes listed for it also feature in Luminous. Even to my neophyte nose, that counts as a "ghostly resemblance".

The Scent of 'Suffering To Be Beautiful' - Avon Anew Ultimate (Day) Cream

Today I am tentatively retrying an anti-aging day cream from Avon. It comes in a sleekly contoured brushed gold pot and its rather involved product name (helpfully also given in French) is etched on in a black, slightly space agey font not reproducible from the modest list of options available in my blog settings.

The product inside also sounds pretty futuristic and leading edge. For it is apparently "powered by pro-sirtuin TX technology". And although sirtuins might sound to you and me like dwellers of a distant galaxy, I learnt on the site http://www.thebeautybrains.com/ that they are in fact a family of proteins that "have been shown to reduce cell death by protecting cells against reactive oxygen species and DNA damage". I had to look up "reactive oxygen species" in Wikipedia to make sure this wasn't yet another alien race out of Star Trek - but they turned out to be none other than those pesky little mischief makers, free radicals. So far so good.

On further consulting a Cosmeceutical Peptide Glossary (no, really!), I noted that the particular sub-group of sirtuins we are talking about here are Heptapeptide-6. In an article in the journal "Nature", Dr. David Sinclair explained their role: "What we think is that if a cell is at a point of deciding whether to live or die, these sirtuins push toward the survival mode and let the cell try a little harder and longer to fix itself." said Sinclair. What valiant little enzymes! I am liking these sirtuins more and more. Never mind their role in anti-aging creams, The Samaritans should be trying to hire these guys....

But though the science does indeed sound wonderful, the experience of applying this sirtuin-rich technology on my face was not a happy one. I spread some over my top lip, which was immediately yanked upwards into a bee-stung sneer. And boy, did it sting! While the inevitable seepage made my tea taste horrid and undrinkable! But worse than the rictus I have now developed is the smell....which is the smell of burning flesh. I quickly googled "Avon Ultimate" and "burning flesh" and could find no one else with the same impression as me. However, I did find a review of a Prescriptives moisturiser (for the curious - Prescriptives' Good In Bed(!) Skin Restoring Night Moisturizer with sunless tanners) which likened its smell to "burning flesh and cat pee", and attributed the odour to the tanning chemical DHA. I can find no ingredients listing that would confirm the presence of DHA in my cream, so maybe these plucky little sirtuins simply don't smell too clever either. This is a blow, but according to the Avon website, if I can just grimace and bear it the Ulimate cream will "restore the look of natural volume and cushion" (sic) in just three days. So if no more posts appear by that time, assume I have either died of dehydration or seared my eyeballs.

The Hidden Truth Behind The Weaselly Sales Blurb

I was flicking through the Fragrance brochure of a high street retailer at the weekend, and my attention was caught by this quote from the magazine's Beauty Editor: "If you're thinking of a celebrity perfume, remember they're created with the help of experienced 'noses', for an elegant scent."

Well, yes they are, and yet that statement leaves so much unsaid....notably the fact that perfumers creating celebrity perfumes are typically constrained in terms of the briefs they are given and the budgets they have to work with. So just because you have a great perfumer developing your product, if you tie their hands in terms of costings, you won't get to see that greatness fully deployed. As the saying goes, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Chandler Burr, the NY Times perfume critic, cuts to the chase: "They use cheap ingredients to be more affordable and make more money", and goes on to liken celebrity scents to throwaway fashion.

The position in which perfumers find themselves reminds me a bit of my partner, a bass player, who has toured Europe and even played The Albert Hall. But there are also times in every session musician's life when they inevitably find themselves down the pub playing Mustang Sally...

The perfumer Yann Vasnier, who has developed perfumes for Sarah Jessica Parker and Baby Phat (Baby What?), summed up the process of working for mainstream companies with diplomatic vagueness: "Working for bigger projects is really competitive, challenging, a lot of different factors must be taken into account." His answer is interesting, for it reveals another aspect to this question, namely that while the perfumer may not have the wherewithal to make a silk purse, if he makes a half-decent smelling one in polyester, that almost certainly constitutes a greater technical feat than if he had come up with the next Chanel No 5 with unlimited funds. In other words, the achievement is entirely relative. So next time I am passing a tester of a J Lo or Kylie scent that actually smells a cut above lolly water, I will remember that the ingredients in these celebuscents probably cost tuppence halfpenny, and treat them with a new respect...

6.11.09 - "DKNY Delicious Night" Day

Remember, remember the 6th of November...that title needs some explaining, I know.

Well, sudden onset perfume mania struck me on 29.1.08, and not long after the initial frenzy of Internet research I began buying carded fragrance samples on Ebay. The very first one was DKNY Delicious Night. I had high hopes of this scent, as I had seen a review of it illustrated by a twinkly backdrop of the New York Skyline. Of course this reeled me in immediately, even if you could only just make out the spire of the Chrysler Building in the shot. As a total newbie, I was also mesmerised by the description of the mysterious and sultry sounding fragrance notes:

Frozen pomelo, crushed ginger, chilled blackberry martini accord, purple freesia, night-blooming orchids, satin jasmine petals, purple iris, molten amber, incense, myrrh extract, patchouli and velvet vetiver.

Here was a intriguing mix of very cold and very hot things, smooth textures, exotic fruit, strumpety flowers that only come out to play after dark, and sophisticated cockail ingredients. It simply couldn't get any better than this.

The reality was a raspy, fuzzy scent that reminded me principally of Ribena and steel wool. It was cacophonous and rough - and chilly, all at the same time. At this tender stage in my perfume appreciation I could so easily have been put off from further exploration. Luckily I wasn't, but the presence of the carded sample in my drawer all these months has had a strangely dispiriting effect - acting as a symbolic reminder of the many disappointments that can ambush a budding perfumista in her quest for the Holy Grail Scent.

And then yesterday a swapper on MUA asked to take Delicious Night off my hands, along with a bunch of other scents I was not sorry to lose, mostly of the berry-centric variety. As I type, Delicious Night is on its way to a new life in the USA, and the spell is broken. My sampling future looks bright, and I will never again be seduced by things "satin", "night-blooming" or featuring "chilled blackberry martini accord".

The "Scent Crimes" Series: No 2 - Confusing Stella Flankers

I am not a big fan of flankers as a rule, though occasionally they are an improvement on the original. The most notable example of this in my view is Opium Fleur de Shanghai, a 2005 Limited Edition that was conceived as a lighter, more summery interpretation of the heavy-hitting 70's original, and which I find infinitely more wearable.

Ordinarily though, I find all these "L'Eau", "Eau de Printemps" and "Eau Legere" versions deeply irritating, along with the various suffixes that afflict men's fragrances, such as "Intense" and "Extreme". Estee Lauder winds me up no end with White Linen, Pure White Linen and now Pure White Linen Light Breeze and Pure White Linen White Coral. These flanker names are getting to be like those ever increasing lists of random items you have to memorise, of the "I went to market and bought myself a XXX" variety.

But my biggest disapproval is reserved for the Stella McCartney range of perfumes, a line so muddled I have long given up testing them as I can never remember what I already know. The line now comprises: Stella, Stella in Two, Stella in Two Peony, Stella Rose Absolute, Stella Nude and not one, not two, but FOUR different editions of Stella Sheer (2004, 2007, 2008 and 2009).

Rather than spawn any more Stella-named fragrances, I would urge the house to consider a perfume just called "McCartney". Which will give me time to prepare myself mentally for the McCartney Extremely Intenses and In Three Peonies that I know will be coming along shortly.

A Soapy Tale

As I mentioned in my opening post, this blog was largely prompted by my partner's total lack of interest in perfume, and my wish to find an outlet for my musings on the subject. Along with 40% of British men, he uses no form of scent, moisturiser or other male grooming product except for soap and anti-perspirant, and falls into the category of "retrosexual"(!) according to a recent research survey by Mintel. Before learning of this amusing label, I had come up with my own classification of his fragrance leanings as "Palmolive/industrial".

So imagine my delight when I walked into the living room last night to be greeted by the comment: "Whatever you have got on today doesn't smell like 'craft shop' - in fact it's okay, actually - like an expensive soap." I approached and proffered my wrist for him to smell - I was wearing Poussiere de Rose by Les Parfums de Rosine. "Ugh!" he exclaimed, recoiling. "That's not what I smelt - that's horrible." After a bemused pause, I remembered that I had just been to the bathroom and washed my hands. "Could it possibly be the soap I used to wash my hands that you are smelling?" I inquired, crestfallen, as I extended three fingers in his direction. He took a sniff. "Yes, that's it! Nice. Like I say, expensive soap."

Well, well, Heyland & Whittle Tea Tree is the surprise soapy interloper than won my partner over. He doesn't want me to smell of feminine roses, or heady jasmine or sultry tuberose - no, he likes his woman to smell of tea tree oil. Which explains a lot...