My name is Phoenix. I have a new addiction. Or rather, an old one. Perfume is a drug. To paraphrase Katie Puckrick...a spritz is a hit, an afternoon spent at the perfume counter is an overdose. Tuberose. That sweet muse who feeds you cake then bends you over her knee and spanks you... So inconsistent & insistent. I had a one-night stand with Ms. Tuberose last night. Best Valentine's date I've EVER had.
I'm enjoying fragrance and essential oils again for myself. For most of my 30s, I wore them for other people. Now it's for me. I'm in a love affair with myself, and Tuberose and Jasmine are my girlfriends who encourage me to cut loose!
I tagged Kate, Linda, Dianna, Cindy, Casey, Candace, Amber, Tone, Stacy, Sail, Susan, Adi Shakti, Lisa, Pamela, Courtney, Kristen, Ellen, Balprem and Elmari... women I LOVE!!!
Susan said she loves wearing Tuberose & Jasmine together...
I have a small bottle of Alchemy Works "Bone Flower Oil". The Aztecs called tuberose a name which means: bone flower. And the Victorians associated it with aphrodisiac properties and making peace with death. This one has some cool mossiness, earthy with Japanese Hinoki wood, but green & citrusy at first. It smells surprisingly light.
My little sample of By Kilian's "Beyond Love" is like wearing red lace undergarments underneath a nice white dress. Like feeling so full of joy, but having to sit still in church at the age of 5 or 6, when you are just so irrepressible that the adults around you are visibly annoyed. There is a certain feeling of the satisfaction of annoying them.
I have not tried Frédéric Malle's "Carnal Flower", nor Nasamotto's "Narcotic Venus"...but I am as curious as Alice.
Not so curious about "Fracas". I hear tell it is more for the mature palate, and I am most definitely not mature.
That "Beyond Love" has jasmine in it as well. Bliss. Pure bliss.
.....................................
Well, I certainly like this review on Profumum's "Tuberosa":
"We would call this a straightforward tuberose if it weren't for the fact that there is nothing straightforward about tuberose. Ever. It flirts, it teases, it beckons, it distracts, it wraps you around its little finger and whispers sweet nothings in your ear. It keeps you from concentrating on anything practical and tries to convince you to run off for the weekend. This is tuberose at her most bewitching - heady and creamy and fresh, with a flourish of white jasmine and a tantalizing whisper of something warm and spicy that gives this a playfulness that many big florals lack. And make no mistake, this is a big floral. A big, flirtatious, impossible-to-resist floral that will make heads swivel. Outrageously feminine."
I wonder if Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab has any tuberose-infused concoctions?
"The Caterpillar" at www.blackphoenixalchemylab.com/alice.html has jasmine...but no tuberose. A student recently let me smell her "Queen Alice". The whole Charles Dodgson collection sounds yummy! Tweedledee & Tweedledum, Drink Me... her, hee!
Elmari thinks I'm entertaining.
She said: "Now I am wondering...I loved Opium my absolute fav perfume for years. I have not looked at it for a long time... 2 weeks ago I started using it again just a tiny amount because it can be overpowering. But loving it. (Hubby noticed and brought me a big bottle from England as a little surprise gift.) But be it as it may... THE meditation we are doing...? I have also been mixing up different oils focusing on jasmine, rose, bergamot, sandalwood!"
My response: "Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. .....YES! I said YES! The rose, bergamot, sandalwood...and our, iris, violet, vetiver, oak moss, daffodil, gardenia, orange blossom, myrrh, opoponax, um, um, um...
"I think it IS THIS MEDITATION!
"I LOVE a good perfume that misbehaves and does not do what it is told. <snicker>"
Fragrance is a healthier stress release & vacation from the ordinary than... oh, say... heroin? Perfume is my drug.
Balprem said: "Jasmine scent sounds lovely! I haven't worn perfume in quite some time. Heavenly from Victoria's Secret was a favorite and Chanel #5. Tuberose is a beautiful scent. Right now essential oils are what I've been using."
I said: Balprem I 've fallen in love with the By Kilian perfumes, because they are made the old-fashioned way, by enfleurage...not chemical extraction. They have concretes and absolutes in them as well, so more of the flower...but I'm loving my own blend of jasmine, rose, immortelle, lavender and bergamot that I made up several years ago...I put it in apricot oil. Yum. And I love the essential blends others have made too!
Balprem summed it up: "So Kilina perfumes are made in the purest way which would provide a much less irritating scent but perhaps a more expensive way because it is a natural process, possibly taking longer to produce, using more flowers but less waste as more of the flower is used?"
Sail wants some!
Yes! By Kilian. Is. Very. Expensive. A full bottle: $250. It's the real deal Lucille. I have a few samples. You can go to www.luckyscent.com and buy the samples for between $7-14 a piece.
Look up Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab too...they have a whole series of essential oil blends for $17 per bottle that smell exquisite!!! I'm curious about "The Cheshire Cat" and "The Caterpillar" and "The White Rabbit". I've smelled "Queen Alice" and love it!
I'll bet Tone Rini would love By Kilian's "Liaisons Dangereuses".
..............................................
Just found a passage in Gurucharan Singh Khalsa's book "21 Stages of Meditation", on the Stage of Delight (which we are working on in class), where he talks about savoring, tasting the rasa, the sweetness in life... he talks about a chef tasting his food slowly, deeply, observing every subtle nuance; this is what is happening for me with perfume!
...............................................................
UPDATE!!~
Erin Vehige contacted me through Facebook to become friends, based upon this post. I want to remember what she wrote, since it isn't always so easily accessible later through Facebook.
"Thank you for accepting my friend request. I almost never reach out like that to someone I barely know, but you tagged Stacy in your post about fragrances and I happened to see it on my news feed and thought it was so beautify a description! I am inspired to try this scent and to explore fragrances with that kind of passion! I'm sorry if this seems strange!"
It is a beautiful niche line of fragrances. My friend Chela sells it at Saks Fifth Avenue in Saint Louis.
Then.... I met Erin in class! She was curious about the gong too...and I was unfortunately a scattered mess, but, ah, well...
I told her that I was sorry for being a bit flighty, and that I had just burned a pot of soup! I think all this new vibration is making me a bit dizzy! Lol!
She replied back: "Oh it was so lovely meeting! And glad I could smell the scent you wrote about! I teach freshman writing and its rare for me to read something so eloquently written. I was so moved; I think it started to stir my own (lost) love of writing. Thank you for helping that! I do hope we have many more moments to chat, too! I will be making snow Angels tomorrow before the snow goes away for sure. It's a promise I've made to my grandma to enjoy her spirit with every snow fall! I'm excited."
Oh! That is lovely! How snowily lovely! Here's to writing and repeated readings of Natalie Goldberg's "Writing Down the Bones" & Clark Strand's "Seeds from a Birch Tree". Writing is bliss! Snow angels are bliss! Yoga is bliss! Bliss! Bliss! Bliss! AND WAFFLES!!!
~
ONE LAST UPDATE FOR TODAY!!!!
Floating on a cloud of tuberose, like the little girl gypsy I was... I feel the way you do after a rainstorm that slaps the fragrance out of all the rhododendron bushes outside, the hyacinth in the garden. Like a little flower with big dreams...
Listening to Fleetwood Mac's "Gypsy", and found this quote about Stevie Nicks lyrics...
"This song actually has a definite meaning, and it's beautiful. The first meaning is about Stevie herself, and the second, more emotional part, is about the death of someone, particularly her best friend Robin, who died of leukemia before it was released. That's what the line "I still see your bright eyes" is about. And "Lightning strikes, maybe once, maybe twice" - you'll only find a friend like that once, maybe twice in a lifetime. She's explained this in several interviews. Here's her explanation of the rest of it: "Oh boy, I've never really spoken about this, so I get verklempt, and then I've got the story and I start to screw it up. Okay: In the old days, before Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey [Buckingham] and I had no money, so we had a king-size mattress, but we just had it on the floor. I had old vintage coverlets on it, and even though we had no money it was still really pretty... Just that and a lamp on the floor, and that was it. There was a certain calmness about it. To this day, when I'm feeling cluttered, I will take my mattress off of my beautiful bed, wherever that may be, and put it outside my bedroom, with a table and a little lamp." On March 25, 2009 during a show in Montreal on Fleetwood Mac's Unleashed Tour, Stevie Nicks gave a short history of the inspiration behind Gypsy. She explained it was written sometime in 1978-79, when the band had become "very famous, very fast", and it was a song that brought her back to an earlier time, to an apartment in San Francisco where she had taken the mattress off her bed and put it on the floor. To contextualize, she voiced the lyrics: "So I'm back, to the velvet underground. Back to the floor, that I love. To a room with some lace and paper flowers. Back to the gypsy that I was." Those are the words: 'So I'm back to the velvet underground, which is a clothing store in downtown San Francisco, where Janis Joplin got her clothes, and Grace Slick from Jefferson Airplane, it was this little hole in the wall, amazing, beautiful stuff, 'back to the floor that I love, to a room with some lace and paper flowers, back to the gypsy that I was.' I love this song."...
MY NOTE: For anyone who has ever lost someone, some part of themselves, or is leaving behind a way of life... with nothing but a "backpack", may you sleep in bliss on a mattress on the floor covered with flower petals.
~Love to you Kristen Coyle.
My very, very first album ever bought, on the day that my sister bought Alice Cooper's album with that boa constrictor around his neck... was Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours".
Balprem said that her husband Rich bought her tickets to see Fleetwood Mac as a Valentine's Day gift, and that "Gypsy" is one of her favorite songs! Mine too! And I keep thinning of "Thunder" as well...in relation to a certain someone, being a little bit of a player... but we all learn our lessons with time and in time.
No comments:
Post a Comment