House of Sillage - Whispers in the Garden Ranking

 

That's the video. I did two rankings on each fragrance, first on paper and then on my skin. I'll post the ranking below as skin/paper, because I ultimately ordered them in the skin order. If you don't want to watch it, here's a rundown of what it says:

In last place, 7/7: Whispers of Strength. This is the perfume in the purple bottle. It is a white floral and isn't for me mainly because it has tuberose in it, which smells rotten on my skin. Very sweet and floral.

6/5: Whispers of Innocence. This perfume comes in a white bottle. This is another white floral and even though it doesn't have gardenia in it, the overall effect is gardenia to me. It is very strong and really makes a statement. That statement is, "I'm wearing perfume!!!!" If that's the statement you want to make, then this is a good choice for you. 

5/6: Whispers of Truth. This perfume comes in an opaque white bottle with multi-colored crystals on the cap. It is the most expensive perfume in the line. At $495/bottle, you might not be surprised when I tell you I bought the travel version, which is much less expensive. The overall scent is very powdery to me. It has a sweet/bitter scent which competes for your attention. 

4/3: Whispers of Enlightenment. This perfume comes in a peach bottle. It has a clean scent and is much more fruity than the others in this collection, which tend to be more floral. I think it might not have had a lot of staying power on my skin.

3/1: Whispers of Guidance. This perfume comes in a green bottle. It has something called "green notes" in it and even though I liked this one on paper the best, when I put it on, it smelled like tomato plants on me. I'm not sure if I would ever want to smell like a tomato plant or not. It was clean and green, but just not an ideal match for me.

2/4: Whispers of Time. This perfume comes in a blue bottle. I wonder if the color of the bottle influenced how much I liked this one. I really wanted it to be the best one, because the bottle is blue. It has ginger in it and that's the main thing I could detect. On paper, the ginger was sharp. On skin, it was softer.

1/2: Whispers of Admiration. This perfume comes in a pink bottle. It is sugary and reminds me of cotton candy. So again, not very floral, but I liked it the best. I didn't buy a full bottle only because it seems to either be sold out or never on sale. To me, that means it is the favorite one by everyone. Why put it on sale when they can't even keep it in stock? I only have a travel size of it because I'm not going to spend full price on any of these bottles without there being an amazing gift with purchase on offer.

There you go. The bottles are very pretty. I didn't hate any of these perfumes and ranking them was a little bit difficult because none of them were really horrible.

Whispers in the Garden Noir collection ranking is coming soon...

Lost Cherry Luxuries

 According to Google, when converting milliliters to ounces, 1 US fluid ounce is the same as 29.5735 milliliters. For practical reasons, many converters equate 30 milliliters to one ounce. This, of course, is for liquids. When converting solids, measured in grams, to ounces, one ounce is 28.35 grams. More precisely, Google tells me that one ounce is 28.3495 grams, but I don’t want to quibble.

Many of the things I enjoy in life require that I learn these conversions, although I haven’t. Instead, I look them up whenever I need to figure out if something is a good deal or a bad deal. In solids, I use ounces and grams when buying my jewelry supplies. Silver is measured this way when bought wholesale. It would be unusual for, say, Tiffany’s to list the price of a bracelet per gram. They price things as things, including not only the cost of supplies but also labor, design, research and development, advertising, office overhead and CEO bonuses, amongst other things. But if you take that same item to a pawn shop, you might be surprised when they pull out a scale and base the price on the weight of the metal. Although if you took in Tiffany jewelry, you would be surprised because they wouldn’t do this. JTV jewelry would probably be priced based on the scale. I think we all know that the cachet of something being from Tiffany’s means it will cost more than the sum of its parts.

My pandemic hobby of perfumery is also measured this way. Although, confusingly, some companies will tell you the amount of liquid you are buying in ounces while some with stick to milliliters. A small, purse size of perfume will often be either 9 or 10 milliliters, or .3 ounce. While larger bottles, although often really measured in milliliters, will be described in ounces. Common sizes are 100 milliliters (3.4 ounces) and 50 milliliters (1.7 ounces), which is why the ounce numbers are unusual. Many cosmetics are measured this way.

More expensive perfumes aren’t necessarily seeing the cost translated entirely in the juice (the perfume oils in the alcohol liquid). The higher-end fragrances I have tried also spend a fair amount of money on the packaging. An expensive purse/travel spray ($60-$100) will be in a nice, sturdy case. A less expensive one ($30) will just be in a glass vial.

I took my most recent perfume acquisition, a 10 mil bottle of Tom Ford’s Lost Cherry, over to a friend to get her opinion of it today. At $75, that little bottle of perfume is priced at $225/ounce. Compare that to silver, at around $28/ounce as of writing, and gold, at just under $1900/ounce today. That bottle of perfume is on the high end of the cost of printer ink, but not outside the realm of possibility.

Although I’d like to pretend I’m find with spending $225/ounce for perfume, that is high for me. I might be able to justify buying something extravagant like that occasionally, but I have trouble getting past “what would my dad think” to really enjoy the expensive thing, whatever the expensive thing might be. Which is why I got on the waitlist for the $75 version. But that is still expensive enough that when the perfume arrived, on a Thursday afternoon, I debated if I should spray any on my arm or not. There was no one around to smell me. I was just a couple of hours away from my nightly shower. My cats probably wouldn’t care how good I smelled. But I sprayed it. Just one spray.

To me, the scent opens with cherry liquor, which quickly dries down to a blend of brimstone and cherries. You might be thinking that brimstone isn’t a great thing for a perfume to smell like, but when I say brimstone I mean the Sulphur/fire/wood combination which fills the air after a match is struck. A fire in the fireplace or on the beach, both of which tease the idea that roasted marshmallows are in the not-to-distant future. For me there is a specific memory of when my mom taught CCD and we needed to prepare for a craft where we were going to make crosses from wooden matchsticks. My mom didn’t want to light and douse hundreds of matches, so I got the job. She sat me down in the back yard with some safety supplies (probably an ashtray and some sand) and boxes of matches. Strick each one, blow it out and knock off any of the remaining bulb of Sulphur so the matchstick was smooth. Repeat.

From the few sprays I’ve allowed myself of Lost Cherry, this is the scent that lingers for me… Brimstone and cherries.

My friend, before I told her the name of the perfume, said “powdery.” After I said cherries, she could smell them. She liked it, but I don’t think she was as enamored with it as I am.

I will complain, though, that the atomizer unscrews on this spray. This might seem like a good thing, especially for people who want to make small samples of the scent to sell on eBay, but for me, this is a disaster waiting to happen. My life is the convergence of cats, clutter and occasional clumsiness, so an expensive perfume which could open and spill onto the floor is anxiety-inducing.

I have made this perfume purchase in June, but I think the perfume is better suited for autumn or winter. I’m not sure I’ll wait, though.  

Perfume Obsession, from Sweet Pea to Passion Flower

 In the summer of 1996, I went to France for summer school. Nice. I didn’t take advantage of any of the tours you could book for non-class days, but I did spend a fair amount of time shopping in Vieux Nice. I bought some perfume extracts there. Colorful liquid in mass-market bottles with the name on a band around the cap.

 

The scents weren’t complex. Violette, patchouli, lily. The liquid was a color to match the scent. The shops selling the scents were abundant. I bough several, although I only have one left. Years, moving and broken glass took care of the others. I didn’t ever wear them as perfume. I would just open them and smell them to bring back memories of my summer.

 Back in 2014, I went, by myself, on a trip to Europe, and made sure to include some time in Nice. I went to Vieux Nice and couldn’t find these same parfumiers there. But I did take tours. Two of those tours included visits to the parfumier Fragonard, in both Grasse and Eze. The tour each time ended in the giftshop. Can you believe it? And there I was, on tours with maybe 6 people in them, in the factory at the start of the off-season, in November.

 I fell in love. I fell in love with the aromas. I fell in love with the packaging. I fell in love with the history. I bought as many items in the giftshop as I could justify buying. And then a few more.

 Fragonard had already started making one flower the “flower of the year” by that time, although I wasn’t really aware of it. They didn’t emphasize it during the tours. The year I went, the flower of the year was sweet pea. Sweet pea also happens to be the flower of my birth month. I bought some. And because of their amazing packaging, I bought some remainders of the 2013 flower of the year, lily of the valley.

 

I’m someone who likes to wear perfume. If the perfume is too spicy, though, it can give me a migraine. I started using the sweet pea perfume, sometimes adding a spray of The Body Shop strawberry with it. I loved it. And I would get compliments on it. I decided to buy more. That’s when I found out what flower of the year meant.

 Flower of the year meant that after that year, they would still sell it only if they had stock remaining. Nothing else was being manufactured in sweet pea. And my timing was so bad that I bought it in November. The new flower of the year, jasmine, came out in January. I think I managed to buy one more bottle, but that was it.

 I was, however, so happy with the first flower of the year I had encountered, I was hopeful that the next flower of the year would be just as good. I might be one of the only people around, aside from those employed by Fragonard, who waits eagerly in early January to see what flower has been given the coveted title. It’s a bit like Pantone’s color of the year. There is no competition. The award is given by the people who invented the award, to a product they make. But it is still fun.

 Alas, jasmine did not live up to my expectations. But it did come with some lovely merchandise when you ordered it. An umbrella, a shopping bag, a small gift set with travel spray and soap, all with beautiful jasmine paintings. The flowers-of-the-year scents lacked the simplicity of the essences I bought years before, and the more complex “perfume” nature of them was missing the mark for me.

 So, jasmine had been an overall dud, but I was not deterred. I stuck with them through iris, peony, verbena, lavender and magnolia, each time thinking the perfume would be as good as the flower extract. Each year I was disappointed in the perfume, but happy to collect my umbrella and shopping bag with the beautiful artwork. I would also like to add that I am extremely frustrated by their website. They offer various products to different countries, and the US seems to have gotten the short end of the stick on what’s available. And being in California makes it even worse, because some products, like candles, are illegal to ship to California. Who knew? I didn’t until I tried to buy a candle.

 When I left the factory in Grasse, in 2014, they were having a contest/drawing for a big basket of products. I entered and did not win. But I was put on their mailing list. An actual, in-the-mail mailing list. Every few months I get the latest gift with purchase offer and some sample towelettes of their fragrances. This way, I did stumble upon another perfume of theirs that I really love, bigarade jasmine. Bigarade is bitter orange.

 

But the bigarade jasmine perfume is very heavy. It isn’t an everyday, go to work fragrance. The sweet pea had been.

 For 2021, the flower of the year is passion flower. And…so far I really like it. My sticking with them through thick and thin might have finally paid off. And I’ve learned to get the perfume early in the year, so there is plenty of time to stock up should it become a favorite. It is light and sweet, not sickly or overpowering. The other perfume elements of it work. And, as always, the packaging is beautiful.

 

I still have an alert on eBay to let me know if someone is selling their bottle of sweet pea. Unfortunately, the $25 (at the time bottle) now sells for $100 when one turns up. Too rich for me. Maybe one day they’ll look back on their best of the best flowers of the year and make it again.