Parfümlein

Is a fragrance really 8.5 points "good" if it gets a rating of "8.5"?
An obsolete question.

Yes, there are users who rate this fragrance 8.5 points out of 10.
That's still 11. And 11 out of 69 who rated the fragrance. And 11 out of 138 who own the fragrance. If those 11 also all own it...this is still the case for 6 out of 11! So 6 out of 11 who voted "8.5" may have also tried this fragrance more than five times...or not. Maybe the 5 who don't have the scent at all have tried it twice as often on the boyfriend/girlfriend? We don't know... But you do know: 11 out of 69, that's not even 20 percent of those who actually rated the scent. In addition, there are also
- 11x10 points
- 5x9.5 points
- 14x9 points
- 10x8 points
- 5x7,5 points
- 7x7 points
- 2x6,5 points
- 2x5,5 points
- 2x5 points

If 69 users claimed, "This fragrance is worth 8.5 points!" then you could probably be pretty confident that the fragrance is quite nice. If those users' collections are anything like your own, and if no more than those 69 users own it. If 11 out of 69 say so, but 13 say "It's not even worth 7.5 points!" and again exactly half of the owners don't comment at all, this by the way only if the 69 who have commented are really the second, talkative half of the owners, if there are still 30 users who find the fragrance clearly better than the 11 who voted "8,5" and on top of that, one or the other user is secretly trying to get rid of the scent without having to comment on it - if that's the case, then the perfume lover who is still in the dark shakes his head and cries without knowing it. Kafka would probably say. For as opaque as his parables seem the statistics, to which the average parfumo or the average parfuma, self-generated with just those methods, is oriented.

Can there be an average parfumo or average parfuma? Statistically speaking, yes. Actually considered: What should that be? On the contrary: Most existence-threatened is indeed just the statistical average - can it but only be generated, BECAUSE there are so many individual and non-comparable perfume lovers. Individuality is virtually the mother's milk of statistics.

Everyone, really everyone knows that it's no different with these mean scores. And yet everyone keeps falling for it. What good does it do to know that 386 users with ratings ranging from "0.5" to "10.0" give a fragrance an average score of "7.3"? Isn't that just a reason not to be even remotely interested in this number, and at most to consider the number of those who have rated the fragrance at all as a decisive argument for a possible test?

Summa summarum: The statistical mean score is information that is as helpful as a third shoulder when considering whether to test or even buy a perfume. Of course, if you like to see individual perceptions and differences in taste leveled, you can use it as a guide. And buying a "Choco Musk" really doesn't cost much. Buying it means no financial loss - but this knowledge alone does not make the perfume a good perfume that you would like to wear and in which you feel your bright joy again and again.
Therefore, in the end, probably applies but the old, simple proverb: Trying goes over studying.
Especially with Choco Musk I can only recommend that. The fragrance smells - as many have already noted - for many hours from beginning to end of sweet, bright, milk-chocolate cocoa, underpinned by skin-tight musk.
Whether you want that - to smell for hours after milky cocoa, without the fragrance goes through any significant development - that can only enter one's very own, individual taste with the best will in the world: What do you need the fragrance for? When do you want to wear it? Is it suitable for this idea? Do you like the smell of hot cocoa?

A number, no matter how beautiful it is and no matter how close it is to the greatest classics in perfume history, can't help you with that for a second. Sometimes you just have to decide all by yourself. And from that moment on, it's fun.

While working in bed this morning (yes, that's right, right now actually!), I say to the coffee-serving hubby, "Smell how I smell!" I'm wearing Boucheron le Parfum today. He: "Hmm... Wait... that could be... that COULD be perfume!" Me: "... That joke is so old, I can hear the beard winder groaning.... You might as well put on some perfume!" And here it comes, the long awaited exclamation, "There's nothing left in there!"

Oh, dear!
It's one minute to twelve!
There's a manly scent running low in the house of Perfume!
And just this fragrance has a) only two registered Parfumo users, b) no comment and no statement and c) 8.5 points!
In all brevity - because in this lies, as is well known, above all the spice - and also because I have no time at all, quickly a few words to this fragrance...
First: Yep! It's done! I'm glad hubby has finally emptied this fragrance, it was given to him by his ex many light years ago. Twenty years I've been married now and twenty years this behemoth of a 125 ml pour bottle has been.... yes, perhaps not directly between us, but nevertheless between my body oils and English powder on the beautiful, antique bedroom chest of drawers known to you by now...
Secondly, it was - quite unrelated to the ex who, unbeknownst to me, sought me out in my student digs one fine Sunday morning with the meaningful words, "Is he here?"; an experience of which I have rather unpleasant memories - a very beautiful, a fine fragrance.

What always intrigued me about this perfume was the exceptionally strange, rare sweetness I smelled in the opening. This slight sweetness always demonstrated a far-from-mainstream, individuality that came across very, very quietly. Very unobtrusive and in that respect, I have to hand it to the ex, very well chosen for my husband: no testosterone hugger. No Pantydropper. But also nothing in the direction of British Landlord Harristweed understatement. No French niche refinement, with the popular corners and edges as an invitation to an olfactory voyage of discovery. Instead, it is perhaps most likely an Italian feeling of sunny, gentle sovereignty, independence from fashion, from self-portrayal, from image cultivation. And therefore, despite everything - in the sense of Watzlawick's axiom - a statement: you can't not communicate, can you?
This opening, I now know, was the cognac, which entered into a wonderful melange with the lemon, the lavender and the allspice in the most beautiful harmony. A fragrance to dream, that much I can say.
As it progressed, Escada pour Homme après Rasage always behaved very gently, as is just the way of a classic aftershave. A few long hours, maybe six, I could always perceive the fragrance very well on my husband, and he is really not a Dick-Auftrager. In this respect, the durability as well as the sillage was absolutely excellent.

A soft, beautiful, subtle and delicate fragrance has come to an end here. A few words I wanted to dedicate to him. Farewell, Escada pour Homme!

For one it's chocolate pudding with custard, for another chicken fricassee with rice. For the American author of a meditation book I own, it's corn porridge doused with hot pinto beans cooked for hours, and a cold pilsner. For the French author of a diet book I also own (howl), it's big slices of fresh bread spread with crème fraîche and dusted with cocoa. And for most, it's definitely a sweet, warm dish to spoon up: Semolina porridge with hot butter. Rice pudding with cinnamon and sugar.
Soul food, especially of its childish variety, is necessary for survival for anyone overtaken by the daily grind every now and then, which is probably why sweet soul food in particular is so often the mental base for gourmands. Sure, there are perfumes that imitate the scent of freshly cooked sugo with minced meat and tomatoes. Such scents even cost a lot of money. But you usually come across them in some niche sale. They may be a masterpiece in terms of craftsmanship - olfactorically they are as superfluous as a third shoulder. Sweet soul food, on the other hand, exposed and constructed in a seductively comforting scent and captured in a precious bottle, satisfies our need to let go, fly, cuddle, dream and feel safe in a particularly comforting way.

One such fragrance, of course, is "Lait de Vanille." Of the many Chabaud gourmands, it is not without reason rather restrained rated, he does not come up to the mimetic-olfactory images of our childhood memories: the hot cocoa after sledding, the delicious caramel sweets at grandma's house you do not immediately recognize here.
This is due to the top note, which shows itself a little bulky; a little bitchy it closes itself to the "Aaahhh" and "Ooooh" experience, because it is so difficult to assign, and the attempts in the statements to determine it probably confirm this. There is something like hot, sweetened milk, not burnt milk, not sour milk, not coked-out breast milk. It's already just hot milk and it's sugar, it's just that the two take quite a while to come together.
Then, in the heart note, the difficult couple succeeds in this challenge and an incredibly soft, sweet, but not too sweet, delicate, milky scent opens up, perhaps most reminiscent of semolina porridge with sugar, only without cinnamon. From that moment on, "Lait de Vanille" is a lovely, pleasant and wearable gourmand that holds back on the sillage and wraps itself around you like a tender embrace, granting a privacy that doesn't tolerate onlookers and so can never seem too ostentatious. Light vanilla and caramel tones, as the pyramid calls them, slowly flow into the fragrance picture and give it depth and also rudimentary complexity.
"Lait de Vanille" is in this respect a gourmand that a) is simple in terms of the number of its notes and also its development, b) is very pleasant and delicate in its simplicity and c) is just right for lovers of these fragrances or for longing for lost childhood. It is not a star among gourmands, but it does nothing wrong either. The fact that the top note is so slightly lost in space illustrates a bit of the process it takes to make a nice semolina porridge: patiently stirring with a whisk so nothing burns, and carefully adding sugar so it doesn't get too sweet. So if the image of a loving mother at the stove emerges - preferably a pretty French one, whose strands of hair falling into her face symbolise the serenity of a woman at peace with herself, and whose flower-printed apron accentuates her slender waist - then ideally "Lait de Vanille" really has done everything right in its quest for childhood.

One of the very few, select fragrances that I would never voluntarily give up is "Aurum". It has already been written here by Frau Holle: "Aurum" gives you a glimpse of paradise. I do not know whether Mrs. Holle suspected how right she was with her enthusiastic statement - but since we are already here in the realm of fairy tale characters, an almost fairy tale, an in any case legend-like episode from history shall take the evidence:

When the emperor Leo III, born around 680, was about 45 or 50 years old, he experienced in the year 726 or a little later, without any warning, a natural disaster of apocalyptic proportions: the Santorini erupted, causing the sea to shake terribly and enveloping the Aegean Sea in darkness for several days. This traumatic event left him with unanswered questions: "Why is it suddenly so dark?", "What have we angered God with?", and presumably, in medieval fashion, following the principle of 'reflective punishment', illustrated in many subtle shades by Dante as "Contrappasso" in his "Inferno", he concluded that "not being able to see" must necessarily be the consequence of "seeing too much". But what had he seen too much of?
His answer was as simple as it was terrifying: God.
His consequence was frighteningly simple: he had the great icon of Christ removed from a gate of his palace in Constantinople in order to appease God and henceforth be content with the image of the Pantocrator alone.
His idea that a non-orthodox religious practice could be responsible for the unleashed force of nature triggered a period of war and persecution that would go down in posterity's memory as the "Byzantine Image Controversy." It took several councils and over a hundred years of persecution of the weaker side in each case to end once and for all the combative disputes between iconodules (the lovers of the images of God) and iconoclasts (those who denied that any image of the Most High was a sin).
What exactly transpired in those years between 726 and 843 (the year of the decree of restoration of the images issued by Theodora, the reigning widow of Emperor Theophilos) falls, like so much that occurred in those dark centuries, into the realm of imaginations and legends, just as the trigger of the dispute is primarily legend. What remains of this dispute, however, is known to anyone who has ever seen a Byzantine icon or an icon painted in the Byzantine manner: the radiant gold background, which allows no earthly representation, however small, of the ambience surrounding the icon (the "image" of the divine). This radiant gold background, which refracts the light in hundreds of small places through the striking of gold leaf, through the resulting unevenness, and thus virtually shimmers - a principle that has been utilized in the nimbs, which are always sculpturally designed and detach themselves from the background of the picture - this gold background symbolizes the beyond, the paradise that is inexperienced and unimaginable for humans, which only opens up to the earthly wanderer when he crosses the gate into the beyond forever. The shimmering gold symbolizes at the same time also the divine light, the eternal radiance, which embodies and glorifies the majesty of the Pantocrator and which illuminated the darkness of the world.

Gold - the colour of the divine, the colour of paradise. Golden paradise. Aurum. This perfect balance of the individual notes: This is what paradise must smell like.

"Aurum" starts with rose for me, unlike most others. This may be because my copy is already about two years old and the "storm" that actually unfolds in this small, fantastic, heavy in the hand "water glass" has since subsided a bit. The rose, as its lightness demands, has made its way to the surface and, when sprayed in the finest mist from a perfect spray head, the likes of which I now only know from Penhaligon's, unfolds a deep, widely faceted sense of a rose garden in full bloom.
The fine powderiness that floats around the petals soaked in intense essential oil is like the many layers of gold leaf on an icon, or even the many layers of a puff pastry, held apart by the butter evaporating under heat - so many-leafed and multi-layered are the powder and rose petal nuances interwoven. Mixed into this weave from the very first moment is a soft, completely unanimalistic oud note that turns the garden rose into a dark, velvety oriental rose, lending it sweetness and a golden, Byzantine-like shimmer. Perhaps the fragrance is actually called "Aurum" because it repeatedly evokes images of the Orient, Byzantine decorative elements, highly complex gold embroidery on purple velvet, finely chased gold earrings with tiny pearls, golden thrones and golden icons. Worthy of a Theophanu or a Theodora.
Like the many fine gold leaf layers of an icon, the oud rose unfolds among the finest, only gently perceptible fruit tones: sweet oranges, tangy lemons, full-bodied strawberries. None of these fruits takes the lead, at any stage of the fragrance. It's just splashes of fruit that reveal themselves for seconds between rose and oud, making the scent sparkle: If rose and oud signify the image, the mimesis of the divine and at the same time their inaccessibility through complete immobility, the fruit tones in "Aurum" embody the golden background of the image, moving, shimmering, describing paradise. Speaking of "paradise": Chocolate. Heavy dark cocoa sweetness, but used so finely, so delicately, that the heaviness can only be guessed at. It only appears in a later phase of the fragrance, when the rose gradually becomes paler and gives way to a completely soft sweetness. Only then do the finest wisps of vanilla float through the air, never solitary, always interspersed with oud, fruit and cocoa. And because the rose is weaker here, but the fragrance should not lose itself in childish sweetness - anyway, Aurum is never, really never TOO sweet - the labdanum enters here, replacing the flower-pure rose at the end with delicate honey notes in an earthy resinousness.

"Aurum" is a dream scent, a paradisiacal fragrance whose preciousness is reflected in the heavy bottle and in the no less heavy metallic sphere with its fine chasing. "Aurum" is worth its weight in gold, and those who do not know it should urgently try it - to catch a glimpse of paradise.

Yes, I confess: I'm a crybaby - for now.
That's why I actually can't write comments or blogs.
There are so many things that weigh on me and make me grumpy again and again...
BUT there's also Mon Guerlain Intense, and I'm wearing that right now
The same second I press the atomizer, I enjoy the fine, rather tart lavender scent, which is so soft and delicate underscored by vanilla. And by the tangerine splashes that sparkle now and then, but not dominantly in the top note.
Above all I perceive the dark, heavy lavender, which - never losing its heaviness - nestles around my shoulders like a warming velvet and delights me with its warm, violet shine. And almost at the same moment the light, very slightly sweet vanilla comforts and whispers to me:
"It's not as heavy and dark as the lavender here The lavender is completely dissolved! You only perceive individual particles! It just flies around you!
These are words of consolation that gladden my heart and warm me incredibly.
Lavender and vanilla - what a wonderful combination.
While I'm busy with a lot of resentment, squeezing myself between audio book and work before reflection, I'm looking forward to the evening - because this is the time of Mon Guerlain Intense.
Freshly showered, I slip into my nightwear and treat myself to two or three generous sprayers - just for me and only for the happiest.
When I saw the bottle, I knew immediately that I would want it someday - the heavy shape, the centimeters of glass forming the bottom, the folded corners - it made a wonderful impression on me.
Inside it was a copper-coloured liquid that seemed to me like a heavy, sweet sugar syrup. It's not at all like that - but it does have that effect on me in the bottle, and that impression has real comforting quality.
Mon Guerlain Intense is a reliable companion. Not a clown who dominates. The Sillage is just now well perceptible for me; my husband has to come closer to smell the fragrance. Wonderfully he holds - until I have fallen asleep.
And tomorrow night, I'm gonna reach for that bottle again.