Molly: Late Summer Perfume Diary
I have a few bigger things I want to write about in the immediate future but my thoughts have not cohered nearly enough for any of them so here's some more perfume detritus.
Every year, my family goes to Hilton Head Island for the last week of August. Long sad story short, we had a house there from when I was about 4-28. I consider myself to have partially grown up on HHI. It's still enormously bittersweet to visit this place that I can navigate in my sleep but not have the familiar home to land. I had this crazy idea right before my parents sold the house that I would someday take a few months just to live there and unplug and write. Still, our vacations are very special and I look forward to them all year.
This year I packed a total of 12 perfumes. They were mostly sample sizes. I think I managed to wear all of them! Hilton Head, with its salt air, heat, and high humidity, is a great opportunity to take notice of how weather and sweat change the experience of a scent. So no, it is not overindulgent to put perfume on before going for a run. The biggest revelation through this process was Amphora Parfum's Virginal. I liked it well enough in Amphora's discovery set, though after much deliberation I picked Sublimate for a full bottle. Virginal is top to bottom notes I enjoy and/or seek out so it seems crazy in hindsight that I didn't seize upon something with a gin-strawberry combination. But I don't know. It's extremely summery in a way that wearing it inside my air condintioned house just didn't awaken. Humidity and sweat transformed it into one of the best scent experiences I've had this summer.
It's hard to describe, as most things olfactory are, but sweat seems to amplify and lend some perfumes a staying power, as if it were a magnet catching these beautiful notes out of your personal orbit. Other superstars in this alchemy are J-Scent's Yawahada, which I gather some people find too light and utakata. It is, appropriate to its name and inspiration from Yasunari Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties, an intimate scent. Wearing it while working out makes it extremely sexy. Ditto Loveshackfancy's Forever in Love. I was not expecting a ton from any of the LSF perfumes, but something about pear on my skin really works with a bit of salt.
After getting a mini of Olympic Orchid's Tropic of Capricorn and testing it one afternoon, I decided I would only wear it at night going forward. Fragrantica reviews of the scent frequently mention the idea of tropical fruit and flowers that are so ripe they are on the verge of rotting, of being almost obscene. That's correct. It's erotic and slightly offputting - or maybe erotic because it's slightly offputtng - in a way that's more primal than something that explicitly references sex, like Yawahada or Putain de Palaces.
Back home and now in September, I'm looking forward to cooler weather scents. I got to catch a screening of one of my and a million other people's favorite movies, In the Mood for Love, the other night. I usually try to theme my perfume to a movie but I was torn about this one. I figured I could so with something iconically feminine and retro, like something Mrs. Chan might have worn in the 1960s. I could do a rice scent in honor of Mr. Chow's bag of sticky rice. I could do a rain scent! I ended up wearing Thin Wild Mercury's Girl of the Year, a bold and smoky scent with a lipstick accord. It may not resemble anything that would have been on trend in the '60s, but I thought the idea of an unforgettable woman was pretty appropriate.
I'm currently waiting on a sample of Guerlain's Apres L'Ondee after reading this beautiful essay about it. There's also a pacakge on its way from Fantôme, a new-to-me house that I found while looking for a tatami scent for Paul. I'm especially excited about Kyuu Kohi and Kinmokusei.
I want to write something about ITMFL and its loose trilogy but I need to rewatch Days of Being Wild, which definitely seems like a high humidity pefume pairing movie.