Scenting a Book Fair, Part 2

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Queen of Dreams: The Pastry Problem

At first, I thought creating a scent inspired by Savage Gourmand would be the harder challenge. After all, Killer Sillage revolves around Lycoctonum, a fictional perfume composed of dark roses, damp green things, and leather. Surely the fragrance world already contained at least one dramatic, vaguely poisonous rose chypre I could point to and say, “There. That’s close enough.”

Meanwhile, Savage Gourmand features a recurring fragrance called Queen of Dreams, a scent inspired by kouign-amann, the caramelized Breton pastry made from extra buttery, laminated yeast dough and sugar. While modern perfumery is absolutely drowning in gourmands at the moment, most of them smell less like actual pastry and more like cupcakes. Also marshmallows, frosting, and straight-up sugar. Sometimes a sweet coffee drink. Rarely, if ever, bread.

What I needed was something that smelled of yeast. Kouign-amann is not merely sweet. It is caramelized and deeply buttery, yes, but also almost savory around the edges, with crisp browned layers and a distinct suggestion of bread beneath all the sugar. This sent me on a quest involving many orders of perfume decants, leading to an alarming number of blotters scattered across my desk.

I thought I had a breakthrough when I found a couple of Etsy sellers offering pastry-scented perfumes. I ordered several samples from one, and while they all had the right vibe and appropriate yeasty notes, they also smelled very... inexpensive. There's a note like wet cardboard in low-quality perfumery ingredients that I cannot not smell, and it ruins things for me. Yet, when I saw another seller's fragrance called simply, Butter Croissant, I ordered it anyway. And it was... perfect. At least as far as the bread component is concerned. It smelled of salted butter and yeast, not exactly like a croissant, but close enough. Much like grape soda doesn't taste of actual grapes, but we still recognize it as such. (And no wet cardboard!)

Another fragrance called Asian Bakery, by a company called Mochiglow, instantly transported me into the bakeries I haunt in my adopted home-away-from-home, Manhattan's Koreatown: warm milk bread, lightly sweet dough, tender pastries. Not super sweet, and thankfully not artificial. Just... bread. Beautiful bread. (Personally, I love bread so much I would marry it if I wasn't already married.) 

Butter Croissant layered with Asian Bakery fulfilled the essential bready aspect of kouign-amann. But I still needed a subtle sweet note. Something caramelized. 

Suzy Nightingale of the On the Scent podcast had suggested that I look into Demeter Pretzel, which honestly was almost perfect on its own. But I really wanted additional yeasty notes that it was lacking. It also has the vaguest cinnamon sugar vibe that's not quite right. When I placed that order, I also added their Sticky Toffee Pudding. That was a flash of genius on my part, as it turned out to be the missing piece of the puzzle that added the proper caramelized sweetness to my buttery pastry base. Since Demeter fragrances have the longevity of a fart in a windstorm, I ordered the oil formulation, which serves to anchor the concoction to my paper blotters and makes the scent last quite a long time. Weeks, actually.

Suddenly, there it was.

Not a literal kouign-amann, perhaps. No perfume can truly replicate the experience of standing in a bakery and taking a big bite out of a flaky pastry. But close enough that someone picking up a blotter at a book fair might immediately think: “Wow. That smells delicious.”

Which, frankly, is exactly the reaction I am hoping for.

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Posted by theminx on Minxstinks
Note: this post is my opinion. I am not affiliated with the companies mentioned in this post or any other companies.

Scenting a Book Fair, Part 1

There’s a book fair for local authors coming up in May, and I’ll be there with stacks of my cozy mysteries, Killer Sillage and Savage Gourmand. Since my stories are set in a perfume store, I thought I'd bring a bit of that atmosphere to the table. And no, I’m not going to attack people with atomizers. I’m thinking smaller: pre-sprayed blotters that a customer can pick up and sniff, or not.

I thought that finding a scent for Killer Sillage would be the easy part. The central fragrance, Lycoctonum, is all dark roses, damp green things, and a bit of leather. It’s moody, elegant, and solvable. There has to be something out there already that would fit the bill. Right? Right?

Savage Gourmand seemed like it could be far more difficult to scent. Not that there's any shortage of gourmand fragrances on the market at the moment, but I wanted something specific. In the book, there’s a recurring scent called Queen of Dreams, which is supposed to evoke kouign-amann, that buttery, caramelized crown of laminated dough originally from Breton. In my thirty-ish years of fragrance collecting experience, I've encountered few gourmand scents that actually smell like pastry. Oh, sure, there are plenty of vanilla cupcake and roasted marshmallow clones out there in perfume-world, but how many of them also have the essential bready, yeasty quality that actual pastries possess? Um, none? At least none that I've encountered.

While I already have a ridiculous collection of perfumes and samples, including those with the rose, leather, green, and gourmand notes I would need to create my book fair scents, I thought I would also ask for expert opinions. First, I wrote to Sean Colbert, founder and perfumer of Buchart Colbert, a US-based fragrance house that has six very lovely fragrances (which I wrote about here). He responded that while gourmands weren't his field of expertise, he did have some suggestions for Lycoctonum. 

I also requested a perfume prescription from the lovely fragrance mavens from the On the Scent podcast, Suzy Nightingale and Nicola Bonn. They quickly put together a list of candidates for both Queen of Dreams and Lycoctonum. 

Once I had their lists, I ordered samples from Scent Split and Surrender to Chance, and a couple of roll-on perfume oils from Demeter. 

 

This was going to be easy. Right? 

Stay tuned!

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Posted by theminx on Minxstinks
Note: this post is my opinion. I am not affiliated with the companies mentioned in this post or any other companies.

Regrets, I Have a Few

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Many of my perfume regrets have one thing in common: I never smelled them first. I trusted the people who wrote the descriptions. I believed the copy, the reviews, the poetic shorthand that promised restraint, balance, or “just enough sweetness.” I assumed that when multiple experienced noses agreed on how something behaved, it would behave that way on me.  It turns out that trust was often misplaced, and my shelves are littered with the ghosts of blind buys that arrived sounding beautiful and left me disappointed.

Blind buys aren't the only perfume purchases I have bemoaned. Regret comes in many forms, including the heartbreak of lost or leaked bottles, the exasperation of customer-service nightmares, or simply the fading of excitement over time, as well as the betrayal of advertising copy.

Balmain Ambre Gris is Exhibit A in my shrine of blind-buy horrors. When it launched in 2008, it was spoken of as a salty amber, mysterious and coveted. I managed to snag a bottle from a discounter for about $60, a minor miracle, but the victory was short-lived. On my skin, Ambre Gris didn’t whisper elegance. It screamed bad breath. I’m talking the kind of olfactory assault that makes you imagine the scent of someone who forgot to brush, floss, and maybe even rinse for a week.

What I do not regret is selling that bottle on eBay for $250. The market may be irrational, but at least my nose is safe from smelling that smell on my skin again. Ambre Gris taught me two things: first, that blind-buy hubris can backfire spectacularly, and second, that capitalism has a sense of humor. (And, I must admit, that nearly 20 years later, the scent improved considerably, though not enough to keep it.) 

Eau de Boujee Verdant is Exhibit B. I am a sucker for green fragrances that are lush, leafy, and fresh, but I had completely forgotten that the “cactus” note in Verdant was actually crafted with Calone, a chemical I personally find horrid. The real reason I bought it? FOMO. I’d heard the On the Scent Podcast hosts raving about this British brand and felt like I needed to own something from Eau de Boujee. Shipping from the UK was $50, so I decided to go big: a full bottle of Verdant, travel sprays of the other three scents, and a candle. I wanted a taste of the hype, but what I got was a punch of synthetic cucumber and the faint, mocking laughter of my own impulses. (Two of the other scents remain in my collection, as does the candle, so all was not lost.)

Slice Society Snif is Exhibit C, and it broke my heart. The promise? Pizza. A fragrance that would summon mozzarella, dough, tomato sauce... all the comforting, greasy magic of a proper slice. What arrived instead was a cruel joke. For about ten glorious seconds, it hinted at tomato sauce, a fleeting whisper of what might have been. Then came a yeasty note that smelled far more like beer than bread, as if some sad tavern ghost had wandered into my bottle. And then, just when I thought it might recover, BAM! Tart blackcurrants hit, merciless and uninvited, leaving not a trace of pizza behind. I wore it once and never touched it again. Now I'm even afraid to try fragrances with a prominent blackcurrant note.

Akro Awake is Exhibit D, the coffee fragrance that should have awakened my senses but instead gave me nothing but regret. It’s technically accurate: the promised coffee, cardamom, and lemon notes are all present, but the vetiver dominates with the subtlety of a jackhammer. Wearing it felt like enduring a caffeine headache trapped in a glass bottle. It was sharp, spiky, and totally relentless. Every inhale reminded me that just because a fragrance hits all the right notes on paper doesn’t mean your nose will agree. I sampled it, thought I liked it, bought it, and realized my nose had been playing a joke on me.

Guerlain Spiritueuse Double Vanille is Exhibit E, a regret of the heartbreakingly subtle variety. I adored this smoky, rich vanilla so much that I treated it like a treasure: kept it in its original box, stored carefully in a plastic bin alongside other fragrances, and decanted in tiny amounts into a smaller bottle to use at will. But eventually, life got busy, and I didn’t touch it for a while. When I was ready to decant a little more, I discovered the horror. The screw cap had betrayed me and the liquid had leaked, leaving nothing but a smear of residue in the bottle. Years of love, care, and obsessive rationing, gone! (Yes, I cried.) 

I thought this fragrance was expensive when I bought it, but it now costs twice as much. Sadly, it will never again be part of my collection--unless some rich benefactor comes my way.

Ormonde Jayne Ambre Royal is Exhibit F, and its regret lies not in the scent itself but in the Kafkaesque nightmare of getting it. I had smelled the line years ago and remembered loving Ambre Royal, so when a coupon made a 30ml bottle affordable, I snapped it up. Shipping from the UK was fast, but my excitement curdled the moment I opened the package and found that they sent the wrong fragrance.

The website promised a smooth exchange if I notified them within 14 days. I emailed the same day. Five days later, nothing. I emailed again. Five more days later, the message had been read but ignored. Third email. A few days after that, I finally got a reply. They’d agree to exchange it. Around the same time, Black Friday sales started, and I realized 50ml of Ambre Royal was now $30 cheaper than the 30ml I had not yet received. I tried negotiating a creative solution: send me the 50ml plus another fragrance at the sale price, bill me the difference.

By the time the correct order arrived, about a month and a half later, after approximately 18 emails, I no longer wanted it. I haven’t even worn it. Ambre Royal remains, unopened, a trophy of bureaucracy and lost enthusiasm.

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Posted by theminx on Minxstinks
Note: this post is my opinion. I am not affiliated with the companies mentioned in this post or any other companies.

Good News! Sorta...

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When I was in New York in January, I noticed that Macy's not only had a Guerlain counter, but a Guerlain counter that offered their super pricey L'Art & la Matière collection. As I wandered, I noticed other high-end brands like Byredo, Acqua di Parma, and Balmain. I was impressed.

Then I spoke to the sales associates.

At the Guerlain counter, I asked if they had any Eau de Coton, from the Les Matières Confidentielles line. The SA looked confused. Scanned the bottles on display. Opened a few drawers and had me look inside them. "Do you see it?" She pointed to a couple bottle of Les Colognes that were tucked away. "Are these it?"

No. They weren't it.

At the Acqua di Parma counter, I was excited to finally try Buongiorno, a bright herbal-citrus scent. The SA was excited to have a customer, so he kept offering to spray different scents on blotters for me. (Note to SAs everywhere--most of us are perfectly capable of doing that ourselves.) Unfortunately, I had no idea what he was spraying, because he butchered the pronunciation of every single one of them.

Annoyed, I drifted off and spotted Balmain. I had already sniffed their scents at Bergdorf Goodman last summer, but thought I'd give them another go. 

I asked the SA if Balmain was part of the store's expansion of high-end brands, or if they had brought them in because Balmain Beauty was part of the Estee Lauder empire. He didn't know that Balmain Beauty was an EL company and waved that off as "some new gossip going around." (The collaboration between the two companies started in 2022.) He also didn't know that Ivoire had originally been launched in 1979. Sadly, the Ivoire launched in 2024 in no way resembles the original. The same is true of Vent Vert, which now opens with an almost rotten-smelling vegetal note, which may just be how my nose interprets the chemical Calypsone. (Which, according to Frangrantica, "smells ozonic, like sea breeze, with fruity watermelon nuances." Sounds like Calone to me, and we all know how much I like that one. [puking emoji])

I walked out of Macy’s irritated, not dazzled. Yes, it’s impressive that they’re carrying luxury fragrance now, at least at the New York flagship, but it’s hard to take the effort seriously when no one behind the counter seems to know what they’re selling.

High-end perfume isn’t just a price tag and a glossy display. If Macy’s wants to play in the luxury space, they need to do more than stock expensive bottles and hope for the best. Train your sales associates. Teach them the names, the lines, the legacies. Otherwise, this isn’t a luxury experience. It’s just a very expensive scavenger hunt, staffed by people who don’t know what they’re looking for either.

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Posted by theminx on Minxstinks
Note: this post is my opinion. I am not affiliated with the companies mentioned in this post or any other companies.