This is not a girly scent. Full review coming up in a few days.

My new year's new scent is going to be Rihanna's Rogue, as soon as it arrives. :) What are your perfumes for the start of the year? What are you looking forward to the most?

Since it's too much of a bother to add each and every one to Souks... Note that I have tried these all at least once unless otherwise noted, so they are not 100% full, more like 90%. Seriously, if you want something just drop me a line. Some of this stuff I can give away for postage. Carded manufacturer's samples: Carolina Herrera "212 VIP" (x3, untouched) Thierry Mugler "Alien...

Over the past few days' sampling spree I have certainly learned a lot about my tastes. I still have a lot of samples to tackle, but I'm progressing! Most importantly, I've noticed I can't stand musks. Every perfume I've tried in which musk plays a part smells sharp and pungent to me and is effectively unwearable. I finally figured out what it was that kept me from really, really loving Loulou which is otherwise a great perfume:...

Received a whole lot more perfumes today, some rather unexpectedly. I went to fetch some Diptyque samples from the post office this morning and it turned out they had had quite a few more packages for me that I was never notified about and had supposedly been left to stand abt a week ago when there was threat of the postal workers going on strike. The strikes were luckily called off and all's well that...

I had a good sniff of Samsara last night and now I am absolutely sure I have smelled it before, somewhere, some time ago in my childhood. Now I'm really haunted by who wore it? when? where would I have encountered it? In my relatively poor rural community few people would have had fragrance beyond Alyssa Ashley or Yves Rocher at all during the 80s and 90s, especially the 90s. But I KNOW I have smelled this before. ...

I just got the news that I won one of the lots of Fragrantica user Pansylady's charity raffle. There are plenty still left so check it out at F's forum! EDIT, my lo(o)t: 4.5ml of each: Guerlain Apres l'Ondee Guerlain Shalimar Ode a la Vanille Sur la route de Madagascar Guerlain Shalimar Ode a la Vanille Sur la Route du Mexique Guerlain Mayotte 2.5ml of each: Guerlain L'Heure Bleue...

And it came with Guerlain's Insolence Eau Glacée, Chanel's Coromandel and a cute leather bag from Mona Moon in Spain. Mona Moon deserves praise for their extremely fast shipping: the bag was sent on Friday from Spain and it was already here in the Arctic today. If you are in Europe and looking for a cute purse or bag (for yourself or as a gift), check out their stores on Etsy and monamoonshop.com. I...

Also would be cool to figure out which era of YSL perfumes my mini is. It wasn't sold as vintage as I recall yet Raiders of the Lost Scent's guide to dating YSL perfumes is not giving me any conclusive answers. The pressed batch code says either EOC or E0C. Maybe it's a fake (although who'd even bother), maybe we'll never know. Beautiful aldehydes nevertheless.

Thanks to Parfumo and other perfume enthusiast sites, I've been able to browse perfumes not just by house/designer but also by nose. I find it increasingly useful the more I smell things and learn about the kind of stuff I like, and sometimes keep finding the same people named as noses. I was going to get organized and start sniffing house by house instead of getting a sample here, another there, but maybe I should...

Now on my main blog in Finnish.

I thought I might try and get familiar with this olfactory group, or just scents with prominent citrus notes. A friend dropped by yesterday, noticed a Mandarine-Basilic sample and sprayed it on. She didn't like it any more than I do, but it got me trying on more citrus scents and wearing Versense for the rest of the day. I swiped the following citrus fragrance recommendations/favourites from...