When I was last in Canberra Miss Alice asked for closure on this entry, where I put way too much thought into the way I smell. Well, Alice, the choice has been made and my bank account is considerably leaner. Here it is carefully merchandised on my mantelpiece next to my dessicated emo lemon and a book on kittens.



The winner is Tom Ford's Black Orchid. Yes, I know it wasn't one of the original contenders, but it smells so very, very good. When I first tried it I nearly sniffed the skin off my wrist, it's so addictive.

I first tried it the other day when I went on my bi-annual pilgrimage to get more concealer, which is really an excuse to get the MAC lady to make my face somehow better than it usually is. Really, I just liked the bottle, which reminded me of my mother in a pleasant way. Firstly, my mum is a lifelong user of Youth Dew, which comes in a wasp-waisted, fluted glass bottle. Secondly, my mum was hot stuff back in the day. She looked like a military Nana Mouskouri, all high cheekbones, long black hair and ruthlessly tailored RAAF blue.* Going on the bottle alone I concluded that this would be the type of perfume my mum would have gone for in her youth, and in honour of her I gave it a red hot go.

Judging by the bottle I expected it to be a sprawling, heady, dizzyingly 70s sort of scent. You know, the kind of fragrance to fuck Bebe Buell to, or perhaps just do line after line of coke. While the scent has a definite retro vibe it's not quite as Studio 54 as I first hoped. It's far more wearable than that. Actually, it smells as though two of my all-time favourite scents, Mitsouko and V&R Flower Bomb, had a baby. A sexy sex baby, that is. The drydown has the same chypre-spiked fleshiness of the Mitz, which soon settles into an oozing, Flower Bomb-like sweetness. It's like a version of Flower Bomb that has forgotten to wear underwear.**

Anyway, I suspect I am reading far too much into a bottle of stinky water, but you know what? Deep down, in my heart of hearts, I am a very superficial girl who simply likes pretty things. At least now I'm a nice-smelling superficial girl.


* My father, on the other hand, looked like Rutger Hauer. Sadly, I do not look at all like my mother.



Sigh.

** I vacillated for a long time about the appropriate word to use here, and concluded that the word 'panties' made me feel like a sex offender, and the word 'knickers' made me feel like a British sex offender. At the time of writing I am neither, so underwear it is. It still looks clunky to me. In the words of Mates of State, everyone needs an editor.