Jingle

Milk, a difficult note for me to pick out beyond diffuse roundness, particularly interested me in this scent - and Elemi is one of my favorites. I was curious about vanilla insofar as I find it to be a fiddly, often cheaply made, and therefore widely disliked fragrance note. I appreciate the vanilla in Eau Duelle, in my beloved Santal Carmin, the one in Milk Musk I approached skeptically, as I do most vanillas. Wrongly so.

For me, Milk Musk has a clear baking ingredient assonance in the opening, lush, edible vanilla as in the thick-flowing, full-fat Danish vanilla sauce from the tetrapack. Delicious, safe, like at mama's house. No dark vanilla bean here (there's always something tobacco-y about it for me in real life), but Black Dot vanilla dissolved in milk. A great vanilla, and again quite different from the ones I know from other perfumes, but not my favorite either. (Compared to bspw. Eau des Missions it is here: butterier, less spicy, more familiar and more cozy than elegant.)

The tonka bean represents in the fragrance, as well as in the seasoning with the same, a supporting role for the vanilla, without itself too strongly emerge. This is well done, I think.

The fragrance has gourmand qualities for me, not the biggest gourmand fan, and musk, ambroxan, benzoin only underscore the edible aspect. They move the scent out of the nibbling corner, but only just enough to make it smell perfumey and not cakey. I don't get woody notes here at all (sadly, I love wood), but I can appreciate the liqueuriness I mentioned earlier. The sweetness holds up in my estimation, thankfully.

The bottle matches its contents wonderfully, by the way: the creamy white bob on top, like a snowball, a milk chest, the pom-pom on the winter hat. You read the bottom line: a scent that reminds you of your childhood, a scent of security for the cold season, for falling asleep. For me, a scent to wear in private, at home or maybe under a warm sweater for a comforting walk. Nothing that would equip me for a day at work, nothing that I would wear to go out

All right, I love this one! Long skulked around, sample after sample consumed, now tingling in the belly every time I mock him in the closet.

I've never been to the Serpentine Galleries, never been to London. And if I were to come to London, I'd check out the Barbican first and foremost, too. But the Serpentine Galleries hold a fascination for me that can only come from ignorance, and I don't want to disturb it at all. A friend told me about a reading she gave there, I was killer impressed, I fantasized.

And then Tracey Emin, whose career I haven't really followed but whose marquee artwork "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With" I've never forgotten. I had seen it once in a women's magazine as a teenager (and was awestruck at the number of people!). Emin designed the bottle, which with its frayed print looks like someone didn't know how to crop a drawing and/or said to themselves, never mind, I'll leave it like that now. A certain snottiness in art making = me like. So strictly speaking, Serpentine is a celebrity scent then, non?

Lots of avant-garde arty mist around the perfume then, lots of 90s, when Comme des Garçons and Rei Kawakubo's fashions respectively promised the spasmodic Arte-watching small-town girl something of breakout, exciting future and promising distance (Japan!).

Yeah, but what does it smell like now? At the start, the lawn is immediately recognizable, shaved-domesticated, clean grass, the florality of iris announces itself, galbanum. The impression is bright, flat, like a park in the middle of a city, with man-made hills spread out before a view of the distance, cloudless skies above in June. A few skyscrapers in the distance, for this is an urban scent. I suppose that stems from the asphalt and ozonic notes, the often mentioned synthetic impression. I find this one pleasant, tidy! If you're looking for unspoiled nature, you're in the wrong place - with Serpentine, you can almost think of turf or plastic lawns when you think of grass, the science fiction greenhouse. Musk is clear, with a little sexiness coming in via the nutmeg. I don't get anything differentiated in the base, consider it more functional. I was glad I didn't smell the guaiac out (or maybe I subsumed that under the nutmeg).

The scent is summery light, doesn't project strongly, but it - warning, pun! - helps me to project fat and channel again this promising feeling, this art promise, there would be something incredibly cool sublime, and well, what you feel is always real, and with Serpentine I feel state of the art and dream and associate so around, as I would escape the profanity.