Niche!!

My Luckyscent samples came!!

My nose has not fully recovered from the recent sinus meltdown, so probably I'm not smelling anything very well. Today I doused myself in Annick Goutal Shut-the-Door, which seemed to disappear after half an hour, but don't ask me, ask my students. At least I didn't see any of them gagging. But I couldn't resist playing with my samples, which are five different niche scents from five different niche houses.

Opening up the little plastic vials for a preliminary sniff was like peering through the keyhole into an entirely new world. Granted, it's a world I am too poor to live in; nay, a world I am too poor to visit, a world where even if I took a three-day weekend and stayed on a friend's sofa the price of coffee and public transportation would break me within a matter of days. A world that sounds a lot like London, only better smelling.

It's a world where husky, dirty vetiver seems to climb all over you like the Latin dance partners who kept thrusting their legs between your thighs last time you went salsa dancing; a world where musty aoud stinks like the binding of books in the rare bookshop you always wished you could work at; a world where the gentlest breeze brings a rippling of hallucinatory notes that seem to change the color of the trees, the sidewalk, everything around you.

In other words, a world well worth exploring.