Bildungsniffin

Since I am home sick today and can't smell anything, this might be a good time to post about how I got interested (so very recently!) in perfume.

My first ever bottle was Bulgari Omnia, which I bought this winter with Christmas money and found myself wearing as often as my first cashmere pullover, for the same reasons. Cozy, soothing, like sticking your nose into a dry wooden box with a couple of cloves rattling around at the bottom, Omnia is my definition of a comfort scent. After buying it, I started reading perfume blogs obsessively, and that's when La Niebla and I started hitting Sephora and Nordstrom on the weekends, giving ourselves headaches in search of what we liked and why. (La Niebla had been wearing perfume for years, so perhaps she was just keeping me company at first. That is for her to say.)

Angela at Now Smell This would likely call our department-store adventures stage one of becoming a perfumista. Being obsessives, La Niebla and I raced through this stage in record time and landed squarely in Stage Two:

Stage two: Beginning Perfume Mania. Somewhere, a switch flips, and your drive to know more about perfume ramps up. . . . You’ll never call a scent “perfume-y” or “old lady-ish” again — at least not in a derogatory way.

Now you start to explore Caron and Guerlain, or maybe you focus on L’Artisan Parfumeur or Annick Goutal instead. You try Mitsouko for the first time, and chances are you don’t like it much. You’re still making your mind up about the murky Mousse de Saxe in many of the Carons. You hear there’s a line called Serge Lutens that doesn’t export some of its perfumes. You learn how to pronounce “chypre”.

You might start to try to define yourself in scent, but it’s more an intellectual exercise, more aspirational than based on how a perfume really smells on you. For instance, you tell yourself, “Vetiver is sophisticated and earthy, and that’s how I want to be, so I love vetiver,” when in fact picking out the vetiver in all but the most vet-laden scents is hit or miss with you at this point. You just know you can find that signature scent, and it will surely contain lots of vetiver (substitute leather, tuberose, oakmoss, etc. as needed).

Yes, I have indeed had that precise moment with vetiver, which gets paired in descriptions with leather so often that I was surprised to find it's actually a grass (not to mention it's not French, so my "sophisticated" internal pronunciation of it is ridiculous). I can't tell plain musk from a hole in the ground yet, but I'm trying.

The day before my birthday I wandered into a Saks Fifth Avenue downtown and wandered out with eight miniature Annick Goutals - six beautiful refillable square bottles plus two "bonus" decants, complete with reusable atomizers and funnels. Toni, who sold me this smorgasbord, affirmed quite seriously that a woman needs a "scent wardrobe." I think she might have been wearing Petite Cherie, but I forgive her because she insisted on pronouncing Chevrefeuille "shut-the-door," as her AG trainer had advised. How an Annick Goutal rep stumbled on that particular phrase to approximate the French language I don't know, but the image of Toni gleefully shouting out "Shut-the-door!" every time I took a whiff will stay with me until I die.

In addition to the little fleet of Annick Goutal bottles that stand on my dresser, I will soon get my first order of samples from Luckyscent. These include a niche vetiver and something called "The Unicorn Spell" that I couldn't resist. As soon as I get my nose back I'll write about them all.