Dec 13, 2012
Everything smells better in the himalayas
Back from two months travel in Nepal/India where I have experienced my best and worst olfactory moments to date. The pictures are from a 50 bottle homemade perfume cornershop in Varanasi, juniper in 15.000 feet found in the great himalayas and a Delhi spicemarket.
Aug 25, 2012
The too sweet smell of succes
This is the guide to celebrity scents, subjectively navigating through the best and the worst. So who doesn't have a perfume in their name these days? Here is a little list only counting female musicians and actresses who has:
Christina Aguilera, Pamela Anderson, Jennifer Aniston, Mary Kate & Ashley, Victoria Beckham, Beyonce, Halle Berry, Mary J. Blige, Brandy, Naomi Campbell, Mariah Carey, Cher, Celine Dion, Hillary Duff, Carmen Electra, Fergie, Daisy Fuentes, Lady Gaga, Selena Gomez, Salma Hayek, Faith Hill, Paris Hilton, Queen Latifah, Avril Lavigne, Leona Lewis, Eva Longoria, Jennifer Lopez, Madonna, Niurka Marcos, Nicki Minaj, Dannii Minogue, Kylie Minogue, Kim Kardashian, Karen Mok, Kate Moss, Heidi Klum, Patti LaBelle, Sarah Jessica Parker, Katy Perry, Nicole Polizzi, Katie Price, Denise Richards, Nicole Richie, Rihanna, Jessica Simpson, Shakira, Jordin Sparks, Britney Spears, Gwen Stefani, Taylor Swift, Elizabeth Taylor, Dita Von Teese, Shania Twain, Reese Witherspoon.
Most of these women have more than one bottle with their name on and girls like Jlo, Paris, Britney and Beyonce almost launches a new one each years. Britney has been in the olfactory business for more than 8 years producing 11 different fragrances from 2004-2012 and Jlo made a good 50 million dollars on fragrance sales in 2012. Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds was the first celebrity-endorsed scent making it's debut 20 years ago.These fragrances are generic, simple and conservative. If you read the reviews of celebrity fragrances in Luca Turin and Tania Sanchezs Perfumes Guide, most of them get mediocre rating, not being good or bad but just boring. I believe that this is the case concerning most of them.
Celebrity-endorsed perfumes are commonly manufactured by either Coty, Elizabeth Arden or Avon and created from the same formulas by the same perfumers. This makes most of them pretty much the same. Still some of them stand out. This happens in the case where they are either surprisingly well made or beyond horribly smelling. For example I have heard good things about Sarah Jessica Parker's fragrance Covet and some surprisingly positive reviews on Madonna's Truth or Dare. The following is my thoughts on some of the ones that you should definitely stay away from.
Circus Fantasy Britney Spears
What
the hell is a ‘Circus Fantasy’? Until she launched this scent in
2009, women everywhere had to cover themselves in popcorn, beer,
fried Oreos and elephant dung to properly mimic the sweet odor of
circus life. Now women can have it all in just one bottle. So do you have a
circus fantasy? If it happens to be a vanilla and apricot smelling trapeze
artist or a clown for the day, then Circus Fantasy is the scent for
you.
Lollipop Bling Mariah Carey
This
scent is nothing but sickening. With ingredients like melon, cucumber
and to much jasmine you wished that you had scoured yourself in a
random lollipop instead of putting on this shit. New York Times perfume critic
Chandler Burr recently wrote “They take the cotton candy molecule,
pour it in a condom, add some helium, put it in a bottle, and sell
it” reviewing Mariah Carey M. I get a similar vibe from this one.
Royal Desire Christina Aguilera
This is the yuck sensation bottled. Too sweet, too sugary, too fruity and way too many marshmallows. Perfumers experiment with many funky ingredients now a days but marshmallows is not something that anyone has mastered yet. I have no idea how she got the idea to named it Royal something with the subtitle “Fell like a queen”. It's more of a teenage tart desire - if even that.
Fancy
Night Jessica Simpson
Adam
Green once sang “Jessica Simpson where has your love gone, It's not
in your music." It's not in her perfumes either. I guess that someone
will like it if their idea of a fancy night is jelly shots and
a stripper pole. I'm sure that Jessica
Simpson doesn't own the largest vocabulary and this shows in the use
of words for her fragrances. For some reason they are all called
something fancy, starting with Jessica Simpson Fancy and then Fancy
Love, Fancy Night and I Fancy You.
Aug 15, 2012
Aug 6, 2012
Aug 3, 2012
Mystery in Venice
What to think of the new Coco Noir by Chanel? It's inspired by Venice at night and the time Coco spent in the mysterious water city. Right of the bat the contrast of a floral scent with white musk and Indonesian patchouli is interesting for a commercial Chanel product and all in all it's a well made fragrance, plus the bottle is really nice. But on the other hand if I was to go with a noir perfume, I would properly choose Caron Narcise Noir or Orris Noir by Ormonde Jayne.
Jul 31, 2012
Jul 30, 2012
Perfumes on the screen
1. In the Buñuel masterpiece Belle de Jour there are big bottles of Guerlain placed in Séverine Serizy’s (Catherine Deneuve's) bathroom, one of them being Guerlain Mitsouko, which she later in the film smash to the floor before spending the rest of the afternoon as a prostitute. Another interesting fact about Mitsouko is that MGM producer Paul Bern, allegedly poured this scent, his wife’s favorite perfume, all over his body before committing suicide two weeks after their wedding.
2. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) from his the jail cell in Silence of the Lambs “You use Evian skin products and sometimes L’Air du Temps… but not today”. Here referring to Nina Ricci L'Air du Temps.
3. In the not so memorable James Bond film Majesty's Secret Service from 1969 there is a scene where Bond, played by even less memorable George Lazenby, recognizes Tracey's (beautiful Diana Rigg) perfume as Guerlain L'Heure Bleue. In regards to what 007 wears, then I just don't know anymore. In the newest Bond film he’s drinking Heineken instead of straight whiskey or Vodka Martinis so I guess he’s wearing whatever is on sale.
4. While Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) is taking a bath and puts on his herb-mint facial mask and does his thousand stomach crunches in American Psycho a bottle of Yves Saint Lauren Pour Homme is standing on his counter.
5. In Tom Ford’s A Single Man there is a bottle of Tom Ford White Patchouli on Charley’s (Julianne Moore's) dresser. Two things are interesting here: the director is sort of making an intertextual reference/product placement to himself. The other thing is how Julianne Moore's character kind of seems like the exact same person she played in Boggie Nights only 12 years later.
8. In Black Swan the hysteric ballerina/Swan Queen/Black Swan (Nathalie Portman) returns a stolen bottle of Chanel No. 5 to the Dying Swan (Winona Ryder). Chanel No. 5 is also featured in gentleman provocateur John Waters' film Desperate Living when Mink Stole splashes herself liberally with it, plus in every other film with or about Marilyn.
9. Withnail (Richard E. Grant) in the 1997 classic Withnail & I scrubs his boots with an essence of petunia before going out in the countryside. This way he can get up the nose of the Camden bruisers. I know this is not actually a perfume but it's a flower scent of sorts and it's a damn good film.
10. Caron’s Narcisse Noir is a perfume that inspired a novel and a film of the same name. I haven’t read the novel but the film is decent – it’s about nuns. Golden era Hollywood star Gloria Swanson is said to have had herself and the set of Sunset Boulevard sprayed with it every day of the shooting.
Jul 27, 2012
Jul 20, 2012
Jun 15, 2012
Jun 9, 2012
Jun 4, 2012
May 28, 2012
May 24, 2012
May 17, 2012
May 15, 2012
May 14, 2012
May 10, 2012
May 9, 2012
May 7, 2012
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