One Thousand Scents

Friday, August 18, 2006

Demeter Strikes Again

After buying three new scents for myself for my birthday, I made a solemn vow that I wouldn't buy anything else until my next birthday. I mean, I can always get samples, and I have so many that I don't need any more ("need" being an extremely relative term, I know).

But then I walked into the local hypermarket the other day, the one which has an amazingly large fragrance department, and I was mildly shocked and very amazed to see that they've started stocking Demeter fragrances, the bastards. I tried very hard to resist, but at only $14.99 per, I couldn't stop myself. I did manage to walk out with only two, but that's two more than I had planned to buy in the next year.

So I'm weak. So sue me.

They have only a small selection, ten or so from the entire library of 200+: I'm guessing that the ones they stock are the most popular. Some of the ones in stock aren't terribly interesting: Rain doesn't smell like rain but like an ozonic cologne. Some of them just don't work on my skin: Chocolate Chip Cookie, while authentic enough when spritzed, smells weirdly synthetic on me, and likewise with Angel Food. Others do: Kahala Blue Hawaiian is wonderful, smelling like its namesake cocktail, a concoction of rum, blue CuraƧao (an orange liqueur), and pineapple juice, but I just bought CSP Vanille Pineapple, so I don't need it (there's that word again). Orange Cream Pop is a startlingly realistic liquid reproduction of a Creamsicle, but again, don't need it, which isn't to say I won't ever get it, even though I don't need it now.

All this is merely a preamble to the fact that 1) I have no self-control when it comes to scents and 2) I bought a couple of the Demeters, fun, strange scents that I'm happy to have in my collection.
Dirt ought to smell like filth, but it actually smells like a handful of garden soil: dark, loamy, gritty. (It was evidently concocted to smell exactly like Pennsylvania farm soil, from the birthplace of perfumer Christopher Brosius.) It's surprisingly tenacious on me, and, unlike most Demeter scents, it develops: after the slightly harsh top note burns off, it's warm and enveloping and, yes, earthy--it calls up reveries of sun-drenched childhood gardening.
The other one I bought was Pink Lemonade. How it's supposed to differ from regular old lemonade is, I'm afraid, lost on me, but by god it does smell like lemonade: a cold, wet, brilliant flash of barely-sweetened lemon pulp. I can practically taste that tartness: it grabs hold of my salivary glands. It has no lasting power at all; people complain about this with various scents but I've never actually experienced it before now--a scent that is literally undetectable within ten minutes. This would ordinarily be a serious deficit, but I don't mind: some pleasures, perhaps, ought to be short-lived. Most fragrances are movies; this one is a vivid short feature.

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