Valrahmeh

Apparently, Ella K's scents are meant to trigger wanderlust. That's especially nasty in Corona times, because who wouldn't like to sit in Ha Long Bay with an aperitif or listen to the cry of the Kalahari, whatever that is. I was there once, at least in the "miserable half", where it is dry. Nothing screamed there, at most a few grumblers in the tour group for water. And from the smell, I'd guess dust with sand. No idea what Ella K aka Sonia Constant smelled there. Probably nothing, because her publicity people probably came up with this pretentious stuff in front of the screen. But this is all about the memory of Daisen-In, that is, a wonderfully poetic temple near Kyoto. Which smells of delicate roses, that's the idea. If you bought ten bottles of it, you would have the equivalent of a ticket to Kyoto, which would be much more exciting than Ella's expensive rose water. The bottle looks like it came from a drugstore, so even the heavy cap doesn't help. Perfume closures that are reminiscent of Merovingian coffin lids in terms of weight (Heeley, Different Company, etc) should be out by now...
And what's in it? The fragrance is a delicate rose, wearable anywhere, quite fresh, even slightly bitter, which wins me over to the scent. It floats pleasantly in the room, is charming and light-footed. Short of facial tonic. Suitable for summer dresses and suits alike, definitely not for sweatsuits. But Daisen In has nothing to distinguish it from 100 other light rose scents. Of course, it lasts a long time, doesn't change into a rancid floral, or sag on the wearer's skin. No, the rose remains a rose remains a rose. That comes at a price for a fresh, elegant rose water with no unique selling point. Still, you can't go wrong with it, not at a restaurant, not at a dinner party, not at Grandma's 80th birthday party, not at your own wedding or someone else's wedding. You can wear the fragrance at 18 and at 80 - and you can throw it at yourself all you want, it will always remain equally delicate. Maybe that's its secret: a built-in boom reducer. This is a recipe Ella/Sonia could share sometime. It would be a gift to troubled noses that perish from Angel, Samsara, Alien or Amarige

Smelly smells in hotel cupboards and stale pub smells that have settled into clothes regularly bring me to the brink of death. Recently on the train from Strasbourg to Paris I enjoyed 2 hours the olfactory remains of onions, Munster cheese, bacon and smoke, which clearly came from an Alsatian Flammkuchenbude. And now they were emanating from a denim jacket hanging on the hook directly behind my head. Since the train was full, I could not move and tied a silk cloth sprayed with Chanel 22 around my nose. Although face veiling is forbidden in France. But I would have had good arguments for it. Somehow I staggered out of the train after about 2 hours at the Gare de l'Est and even felt the dusty-sweet smell of the metro as a relief. That means something, because I actually hate him too. Fortunately my professional appointment went by faster than I expected and so I unexpectedly had the afternoon off. So nothing like going into the Palais Royal, into the garden, past the usual stupid Selfie tourists, under the arcades - to Lutens. We did it! We did it!
I wanted to buy El Attarine, no idea why, probably the subtle dried fruit notes had stuck in the synapses.
In the darkened Lutens shop, a beautiful saleswoman Madonna with flowing hair is always scurrying around and saying her usual saying: "Je peux vous aider?"
Yeah, sure, El Attarine. But first of all I had to try the novelty of the house, L'innomable, that which cannot be named, raved the Madonna. Sounded very promising.
Until I got a splash of it on my hand. And I almost vomited: A plate of saffron rice with curry chicken at the Indian restaurant, whose smell got stuck in a jeans jacket. I was finished, I was still smelling the train ride in my neck, I had to go to the door, such a dainty automatic iron door, the saleswoman Madonna got a fright, I breathed deeply outside and stared into the garden. I don't-want-no-smell-after-eat!! God damn it.
When I came back in, the Madonna taught me it was the Siam-Benzoe. I smiled nicely. It wouldn't have helped to tell her that it was more like the smell of a Siamese cat steamed in curry.
So I grabbed my El Attarine and escaped. I also found several samples in the black bag, including L'innomable. I think the Madonna wanted to convert me so badly.
A few days later and after overcoming the stale clothes I sprayed it bravely into the air. Nah, guys. Who wants to smell like an Indian restaurant? It doesn't work at all

I love old stuff. Old books, old furniture, manuscripts, hats, gloves and fans from the Belle Epoque to the 50s. For old perfumes, however, I only prefer the original packaging, because I hate it when an oily drop of upset perfume drips on my fingers. Recently, a perfectly preserved, still unopened bottle of Gin Fizz with its packaging from 1960 fell into my hands at the antiques market in Nice. Just looking at the bright yellow balloons and the funny ornate writing on the white cardboard, the whole lightness of this era, which I only know from films, blew towards me. Young Brigitte Bardot in a puffy summer dress in St Tropez, Grace Kelly in a Mercedes sports car on the Grande Corniche, wearing a pink top with a white pattern - or Cécile, the young, vicious main character from "Bonjour Tristesse".
But back to modern times: After my holidays, everything fell on my nerves in the office without exception, but really everything, so much of it, I needed lightness, a good mood and a reward - and without further ado I blindly ordered "Lipstick on" from Margiela on the Internet during my lunch break.
The original imprint "Chicago 1952" on the bottle had taken a fancy to me. And "replica"! Would "Lipstick on" bring me back the scent from the time of the blonde Hitchcock heroines? Marnie? Or Eve Kendall?

Oh, dear. None of it. "Lipstick" on opens with a woody rose, not bad, not too sweet, quite pleasant. As in Guerlain's "Little Black", soon after the rose a syrupy cherry liqueur comes out, which even has something mandelious and gourmandish about it.
Margiela, you can't do this!
Noooooo, it's screaming inside me, that's exactly what I didn't want. I didn't want a pseudomodic petite-robe-noir-voice in retro-design, I wanted an old, sticky 50's kitsch-fragrance. Such a mixture of kidney table, bag lamp and Marilyn Monroe with sticky red lips in "Niagara". And what does Margiela mix with me? A modern rose cherry brandy.
I did the cross check with Lipstick Rose by Ralf Schwieger (Malle). That's a sticky, authentic lipstick smell! It's got violets, raspberries, white musk. And it holds like Pattex on the skin. Although it is difficult to endure after repeated use, Lipstick Rose is without doubt a successful chemical experiment. Especially the wax note is perfect.
No, "Lipstick on", on the other hand, is not a perfume for dreaming with which you can go on a journey through time to the chic blondes of the 50s. It is modern and anchored in the present. If you want a good fragrance with roses, wood and cherry, you are well served, it is absolutely not a bad perfume. But neither 1952 nor lipstick has anything to do with it.

Wine and perfume have a lot in common. A conspiring clientele finds out taste and scent directions that an ordinary person would never come across and this clientele also spends a lot of money on an ephemeral work of art that only they and a few initiates appreciate. And there is another thing wine and perfume have in common: they tempt you to make holiday-related purchases.

The ice-cold rosé from Ramatuelle, which tasted so tender and fresh on the sun-drenched terrace in St. Tropez, turns out to be a flat swill on the balcony in Hanover, for which one would not have spent 10 euros per bottle. That's what happened to me with Mediterraneo.

On my tour of Italy, which ended in Capri, I could not leave the island without a bottle from the house of Carthusia. Perfume decency demands it. And so I fell for Mediterraneo this time, no wonder with the constant lemon buzz you are exposed to there: lemons by the mountain for breakfast, lemons in the large marble fountain in the spa, lemons in colorful ceramic bowls by the pool, lemons in wooden boxes in the displays of the shops.

Mediterraneo smells exactly like sliced, thick, irregularly grown lemons with bright yellow elephant skin around it, which is so firm and snow-white when sliced open that there is hardly any room inside for too much juice. But a juice that is aromatic, fresh and not even really sour. So lemons that have nothing to do with the measly, Spanish industrial lemons in the yellow network in the supermarket.
The lady at Carthusia's recommended the large bottle of 100 ml, which proved to be very useful. So I sprayed myself with Mediterraneo and was immediately my own lemon grove. There were also a few mint stems lying around in the lemon grove. When I glided in from myself lemony-minty enthusiastically towards the hotel terrace for the aperitif, I might have put a few fragrance brands on the stairs, but my family smelled nothing. Or very little. After an hour, nothing. Mediterraneo doesn't develop at all with me, it's there - and soon afterwards it's gone. On the clothes, it'll be gone in ten minutes. Just dissolved, squeezed, gone.

That is very sad, because it is a really immediate, fresh and genuine lemon smell with some mint, which does not remind at all of cleaning or dishwasher detergent (which citrus smells sometimes have so at itself).
A kind of holiday wine, which was great on the spot and no longer has much strength at home. Never mind, I love Mediterraneo anyway, because it is a nice memory and I like to spray the lemons again and again as Capri longing into my hands and back my ears. But without this personal relationship it is really just a nice, very fast flying capresian lemon water.

It's always nice to get a perfume as a gift from friends who know you like perfumes. What most of these friendly people can't even imagine: There's nothing more bitchy than perfume freaks who already know everything. They're more happy about a piece of curd soap than about a meaningless and futile mainstream tweet from Kaiser's Drugstore.
That's how I felt recently, when a nice colleague thanked me with a copy of Eternity Intense for a courtesy. My first thought was: Thank God, only 30 ml.
Above all, I still had the Eternity original in my nose, those white-artificial blossoms that 30 years ago used to decouple as free radicals from the wearers and led a cruel life of their own in the shopping streets of the inner cities
In fact, the fragrances of Sophia Grojsman, especially Trésor, Paris and Eternity, had the unpleasant characteristic of seizing air sovereignty on the spot after the first spraying stroke and having a fine dust like existence for hours.
And this I had now received in intensified form, horrible. But before I passed on the spray bottle, curiosity prevailed and I tried it out.
Oops? What was that? No trashy plastic blossoms from Mars, but there was a solid base of sweet and wooden teen notes, over which the anonymous perfumer had laid a powdery iris. I was flat. That actually met my taste. A mainstream, initially considered ghastly, turned out to be a wearable, even fine and elegant scent that goes wonderfully with any dotted afternoon dress with frills and lace or with a plain, sea-blue costume.
Whoever designed this fragrance ironically managed to do exactly the opposite of the intrusive original. Eternity Intense almost smells like an apology, a kind of Eternity excuse: look, we can also be posh.
Well, I've kept the scent and wear it more often, I've even received a compliment for it (very rarely the case with me), from a German organic saleswoman with orange dreadlocks in a nature shop : "Oh, but that's n jutes Paföng, wat Sie da ham." (Oh, that's not a good idea.)
That's fine. A lightly woody, slightly sweet, powdery iris scent that does not offend a nose from a green eco-shop to a fine afternoon tea at the Reids Palace in Madeira. You can hardly ask more of a perfume of the day