Sometimes, an obsessive love of fragrance is about creating the opportunity to reunite with an old friend. On Sunday, wandering around on a rare unscheduled afternoon, Thomas and I ended up in Perfumarie, a treasure trove of fragrance adventure in downtown NYC. We hung around and chatted and nerded out about scents, and did their Fragrance Flight, an experience I recommend wholeheartedly to anyone else in New York with an hour or so to spare who wants to discover new and strange favorite scents. It reminded me of the winter when I first got into fragrance, the year of the polar vortex in NYC, when my best friend and I would have adult slumber parties at her apartment on the weekends, burrowing into its radiator warmth, hiding from the outside world, safe from the weather and from our own lives. She would order perfume samples from Surrender to Chance and Olfactif and Luckyscent, and we'd spent hours applying them to our arms until we ran out of skin, marveling at how often they smelled different on each of us, trying to find the weirdest and most heart-stoppingly accurate way of saying how each one smelled, narrating the stories and recollections that the scents brought up out of sleeping memory. Perfumarie’s fragrance flight felt similar - Thomas and I smelled 25 unlabeled clay bowls with a mystery scent inside, each one wafting up associations, memories, and sometimes the stubborn mystery of something familiar. We wrote notes on each one, some as straightforward as "floral" and some as silly and flailingly specific as "soap with a PhD,” or "small town Christmas," or "evil hotel." It reminded me of the way that fragrance is playful, and emotional, deeply personal and deeply silly at once.
I ordered the discovery set (LOVE that packaging) after reading this review, and have been delightedly making my way through the samples (except for "Neon Graffiti" because it contains something I'm allergic to). Thank you for introducing me to Jazmin Saraï-- I've loved everything I've tried so far!
I ordered the discovery set (LOVE that packaging) after reading this review, and have been delightedly making my way through the samples (except for "Neon Graffiti" because it contains something I'm allergic to). Thank you for introducing me to Jazmin Saraï-- I've loved everything I've tried so far!
H, you are an astounding writer. Thank you.