LINKFEST!: Smell this

It's a running joke in the blogsphere that if you've no longer got anything funny to say, you just link up to something funny someone else has said and you're all set... for another post at least. Well being the forward-thinking girl that I am, I've decided to cover all my bases (censorspeak for covering my ass) and make this a monthly feature. So welcome to Linkfest!, where I chatter on about my latest obsession and related links.

This month is all about perfume- the famous ones, the homemade ones, the historic ones, the celebrity ones, and the ones that just plain reek (I'm talking about you Chanel No. 5).

Sometimes I think if I only managed to pass Organic Chemistry* I would have been a perfumer. There's something so real about someone's scent, like they're not fully there until you smell them. I'm fully aware of just how weird that sounds but it's true- it's as if people are two-dimensional if they don't smell of anything, like cardboard cutouts. Scent is that third dimension, it says I'm here, I'm human and this is who I am- sour, soft, floral, spicy, intense, or just plain sweaty and rugged (yum).

That's why I find perfumers just so fascinating- how they bottle up all these synthetic copy-cat chemical smells, fitting in top notes, base notes, all flowing one after the other like music. Pure genius. I read somewhere about a famous Parisian perfumer called Jean-Claude Ellena who is now the in-house perfumer for Hermes. He has a son and a daughter, and when they were younger he would ask them to think of things they want to create into a perfume. His son asked for snow and his daughter asked for clouds. The first was apparently easy; all he had to do was use some ketone to invoke clean, cold, light (of course he did!). The second was much harder, but his daughter was so impressed she decided to become a perfumer herself.

But he's not the only one to bottle abstract. Kate Moss wears a perfume that smells of rain. I read about it online and figured it would just smell fresh, creamy and flowery. But I was so surprised. It actually smells like wet earth, almost bitter, no sweetness at all. So interesting- it was almost like seeing her picture in a magazine, then meeting her personally, in a sense (no pun intended) and finding out your first impression was completley wrong. A few years ago, when I was still that nerdy kid with a National Geographic subscription (now I just do it in secret), I managed to get my hands on their only (ever) scratch-n-sniff issue that had samples of the actual perfumes of Napoleon and Cleopatra, re-created especially for the Society. If you live within mailing distance I can lend you my copy (for the record Napoleon is very regal citrusy and piney, Cleopatra is like yellow-y incense).

So what do I smell like? This. It's smoky, spicy, not too sweet and a touch sour. But for days when I want to be a little more intimidating (like when I'm invited to a work lunch with the all-boys club...dread...) I wear this one. It smells of leather and tobacco, with a just enough rose to stop it from smelling like a gentleman's club. It's like subliminal messaging through your nose :)

So if all this has tempted you to start sniffing, walk to your nearest cosmetics counter at lunch tomorrow, or if you can't, try this site- you can order tiny 1ml perfume samples online. Remember to keep a jar of coffee beans on hand to help with the inevitable nausea.


*No thanks to the horrible witch of a professor I had. Her face was very badly scarred, apparently the result of having failed one deranged student so many times he could no longer graduate.