Medusa00

...think about my life for a while. She sniffles, straightens the blanket on her legs. She has sat down in her old rocking chair and is annoyed with herself at the same time because it's so hard to get out of it. "Well," she thinks, "if I get the right momentum, he'll throw me off anyway." She giggles a little. She is known for her gallows humor. On the side table is a (large) glass of sherry and a bottle of "Shalimar", the pure perfume. "They call it extrait these days. What nonsense, you spit on yourself when you pronounce it." She sips her sherry and spritzes herself with Shalimar. "Yes, the harsh old woman. Jicky's playing in here and they haven't removed the lavender, I bet."
She puts an LP on the old record player. Old blue eyes sings:

"When I was 17, it was a very good year
It was a very good year for small town girls
And soft summer nights
We'd hide from the lights
On the village green
When I was 17"

Yes, she could have been such a girl. The crazy 1950s! Aunt Ava had traveled to America with her and Eddi, her brother. Mummy had made her a purple petticoat dress from Atlas silk. There was what felt like 85 meters of tulle under the skirt. AND Aunt Ava gave her Shalimar. It was already a famous perfume back then and it was very different from the perfumes she knew. Scratchy, powdery, vanilla unsweet and somehow roasted.
They saw the crazy Jerry Lee Lewis. Who shook his blond curly head, played boogie woogie with a crazy look and lit his piano on fire. Sometimes the hall even had to be cleared because the audience was swaying on the chandeliers.
They would have loved to see Elvis too. But Aunt Ava already had a TV back then and so they saw his famous hip swing on TV. Elvis the pelvis, yes yes.
When they got back, the rock'n'roll wave had of course already taken hold. There was a dance hall at the pub where they could let off steam. Eddi played the piano and mimed Jerry Lee. When he tried to light it up, he was stopped. Willi danced with her like crazy, rolling his shoulders and pulling his legs. Shalimar was always there, whether it suited her or not. But the expansive sillage spoke for itself.
Willi gave the hip swing of Elvis on stage, but he looked like a hip-sick cat trying to climb down a tree backwards. Eddi had grown a moustache that made him look like he had just eaten a mouse.
The pork knuckle eaters sat at the front of the restaurant and got upset about the indecent monkey hopping.
In the early 60s, she flew to Las Vegas with Aunt Ava to see the Rat Pack perform at the Sands Hotel. She wore a cream-colored, beaded sheath dress. Her blonde hair was pinned up. She almost looked like Doris Day. Although she already had many other fragrances, her faithful companion was Shalimar. Dean Martin wouldn't have pushed her off the edge of the bed.
She sniffed her hand. Now she's already a great-grandmother. She and Shalimar are still there
Yes, and sometimes it was a very good year.

Pierre-Francois Guerlain was a young chemist and doctor when he opened a small store in Paris in 1828. He was primarily interested in the world of beauty and perfume. This was not yet an industry at the time.
He created his first fragrances such as "Esprit de fleurs" and "Senteur des Champs". From 1830, he insisted on creating a unique fragrance for a unique woman. His success grew steadily and he became court perfumer to all European courts. Guerlain continued to expand and became a family business.
If I were to write the history of Guerlain here, it would fill pages, but this is about Jicky.
When the sons Gabriel and Aimé followed their father in 1864, Gabriel took over the business and Aimé the creation. After Aimé's success with "Fleurs d 'Italie" and "Excellence", he decided to break away from the constant floral perfume trend with a new, innovative fragrance. He had also just fallen in love with a young English woman, who probably inspired him to create Jicky. He experimented with synthetic products such as vanillin (an aldehyde from vanilla) and coumarin. Jicky became a completely new kind of fragrance and started off with cirrus-bergamot, herbal notes. Whole fields of lavender were harvested, which were reinforced by other green ingredients. A few flowers are just extras and negligible.
Woody animal notes, smoky and dipped in suede.
In short, Jicky, originally conceived as a women's fragrance, became a scandal after its release. Dandies and bon vivants wore it. Mostly in clubs or salons. André loved Yves, but only behind closed doors. It wasn't allowed, of course. Both of them would have alibies with little mistresses who sat at home and taught the children to put the napkin on their laps properly, sit up straight and use the cutlery in the right order, while their dad cuddled with a cuddly friend in a separate room. Fortunately, times have changed and today everyone can cuddle with whoever they want.
From the early years of the 20th century and with advancing emancipation, women also discovered jicky for themselves. Corsets were passé, dresses and hair became shorter. Women smoked with long cigarette holders and thought about Siegmund Freud's babble.
Jicky is still one of the great Guerlain classics, although from 1925 onwards Shalimar somewhat outstripped it.
Jicky lacks any sweetness and is not for gourmandines and dinosaurs. The good housewife who screws in curlers in the evening and brings the sweatpants patriarch his slippers and fried potatoes with aspic will not wear Jicky either.
Jicky is a statement. Elegant, somewhat unapproachable and actually unrivaled.
Only for adults or those who want to be.

A lot has already been written about me here on parfumo. Positive and negative. Many just had to add their two cents. Some have not left a good hair on my head. But what does an old oak tree care if a pig rubs against it? I'm happy about the positive and the negative.... va te faire foutre. Hello, I am the most famous perfume in the world! I've been in New York since 1959, in the Museum of Modern Art.
Someone has to imitate that first. At the top of the world rankings. The others come and go. None will manage to become a legend. The mouse won't bite off a thread, it can nibble as much as it wants.
102 years old! I'm a sprightly granny, I can tell you that, and sprightly grannies usually love me too. it was 102 years ago that Gabrielle Chanel commissioned Ernest Beaux to create a fragrance for women that smelled like a woman. Coco Chanel was called the "Angel of Death of Fashion" by Jean Cocteau. Of course, she had freed women from their corsets and encouraged them to cut off their hair.
She didn't want a cute floral perfume. As Beaux was experimenting - he was supposed to create an innovative perfume that the world had never smelled before - an abstract creation was to be created and so Beaux used aldehydes to create a synthetic fragrance that was in no way intended to imitate nature. The aldehydes slowed down the heavy floral essences and gave them a soapy, intoxicating freshness. Aldehydes also smell a bit like a hot iron on wet linen. Of course, I'm not just made up of aldehydes. I also have bells of the valley, roses, powdery ires etc. and in the base wood and green vetiver. From all the experiments, Mademoiselle Chanel fished out the 5th sample. So they called me Chanel No 5.
I don't even know if Coco was aware at the time of the avalanche she was triggering. Did she realize that I would become the most famous perfume in the world? in 1944, American GIs in liberated Paris were queuing up outside perfume shops to bring a bottle of No 5 home to their wives or girlfriends.
Marilyn Monroe (who allegedly only wore No 5 at night and nothing else) made me a star worldwide in the 1950s.
There you are looking! And you know what? No one will push me off my throne. Not today and not in 102 years.
Girls from 16 to 86, if you love me and your significant other doesn't, send him to his mommy so he can play "Mensch ärger'Dich nicht" with her and Aunt Irma.

First of all, thank you Can for letting me get to know this great fragrance.
Well, Marieposa and Can have already put it poetically and erotically into beautiful words. I wouldn't want to top that either.
Nevertheless, this Diego awakens the full woman in you. How should you imagine full women? Like a shot-putter from the Olympic team? No. Like one of those blow-up dolls from an island dating show? With atomic silicone breasts, inflated lips and the IQ of a squeaky duck. Who no longer knows which parts of her were of natural origin. Nope! Or those felt wearers with eyebrows like Schulze's giant moustache, who think a bra is a slingshot and a mascara is a Japanese car brand? Definitely not.
The term "woman" should not have a negative connotation here. "Guys" are also allowed to wear it.
Full women have both feet on the ground, wear a work suit with the same grandeur as an evening dress, have their own opinion, express it, but also know when to hold their tongue.
Diego can't be worn half-heartedly and then slurp off a comment like that. You're more likely to melt away here. And believe me, I'm not so easily impressed anymore.
Actually, I can't even begin to describe this work of art, it's so complex and multi-faceted.
Ripe citrus fruits roll by, but only as sorbet. Foam, with a slight sweetness. A sea or more of flowers and all the ones I like! Iris powder, violet sweetness and no, I can't categorize them all. Beguiling, intoxicating. Somehow otherworldly!
Cream, musk, coked shavings of sandalwood. And there is always a hint of subtle sweetness. Powder!
Now what? A negligee is needed. Lace from Plauen! Not black, not white! Purple, emerald green or midnight blue. The slipper hero in the flannel pyjamas will make eyes. Your all14 days Tralalus is getting lively again!
Discontinued! Unfortunately, the beautiful ones sometimes die early. But Diego reminds me of other beauties who are even a bit similar. The "Anonimo Veneziano"
from Nobile 1942 or "Love, the Kay to Live". A hint of Poison, without the oomph. A somewhat surrealistic, animalistic dissolution of the 80s fragrances by Dali.
The bottle. I wonder what kind of derangement the flacon designer has fallen victim to? Such a beautiful fragrance in a bottle that looks like a toilet duck on the run. Perhaps he also wanted nobody to buy Diego so that he could have more for himself. We will never know.

Tomorrow is Halloween. The festival of horror has its origins in Ireland: In pre-Christian times, the Celts celebrated Samhain, one of their most important festivals, on October 31. They celebrated their harvest, the beginning of the cold season and the start of a new calendar year. The Celts also believed that on this day there could be contacts in the realm of the dead. Also simply called Reformation Day and in some states is a holiday because on Oct. 31, 1517 olle Luther nailed his 95 propositions to the church gate in Wittenberg. Of course I know that Halloween and Reformation Day have as much in common as bats and flying ducks. Only if here again a Erklärbär is on the way.
Back to Halloween and even terrible, disgusting things, which occur.
A small town somewhere in the nowhere. On the outskirts of town family homes in front of a renaturalized moor. At the edge of the moor swampy banks. Some of the residents are every year at Halloween in competition who has the scariest decoration. At neighbor Meier's house, a lone ghost climbs up the gutter. In the front yard stands a gallows, from which dangles a hanged man. Rehpinscher Zorro was dressed up as Cerberus the hellhound. Meier gives this year the Prince of Darkness, his wife Lucretia Borgia. Müller next door has set up a guillotine. Under the wooden platform is a bucket with a chopped off head that St. Bernard Fiffi has already dragged away a few times. This time Müller is on the road as an alien. The night advances. Gases emerge from the moor. Will-o'-the-wisps dance on the horizon. The thing floats closer, looks beautiful in the darkness. It offers sea notes and noble blossoms. The closer it flies, the more putrid notes are revealed, flowers of slimy water. The beauty was deceptive. An ugly beast peels out. She grins broadly, can laugh around the head with black stump teeth and musty mouth odor.
She calls out, "Musk, finest musk!" Yet it is her earwax. Brown and already lumpy.
" Amber, creamy amber!" Actually corpse wax from dead people who were driven up after the bog washed.
"Patchouli, cozy, earthy, velvety!" Earth from mole piles, with droppings and vomit.
Müller and Meier take flight. In the distance, a tawny owl clamps will-o'-the-wisp under its wings and seeks the distance. The hanged man laughs and laughs......