One Thousand Scents

Monday, January 15, 2007

Soap Opera

Sometimes I feel a little guilty, or even appalled, at just how many scents I have, but it always passes. One of the reasons I own so many, apart from an obvious addiction, is that you never know what you're going to be in the mood for, and it's a wonderful thing to be able to select a scent that exactly matches, or amplifies, your mood.

Today I was looking through the cabinet trying to figure out what I wanted to wear, and being habitually indecisive, I couldn't make up my mind, so I grabbed L'Artisan's Poivre Piquant, which I love. Ten minutes later, I reached up to adjust my glasses and caught a whiff of something, and what I thought was, "What's that?", at which point I remembered that it was a scent which I had chosen and deliberately applied.

Obviously I made the wrong choice this morning. (I still love Poivre Piquant. Just not today.) I'll have to scrub it off and try again.

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Most commercial fragrances nowadays have a matching bath line, and anyone who expects the bath products to smell exactly like the original scent is in for a surprise.

Every product base carries with it its own scent and its own scenting problems, and soap is a really good example of that. Soaps and detergents, liquid or solid, have a smell, and that has to be dealt with: you can minimize it, but it's always there, so either you drown it out or you incorporate it somehow into the scent.

I recently bought a coffret of soaps scented like Boucheron's Trouble, and they're really nice: faceted like the bottle, in a dark red case to match the scent's box, and set into little niches in a flocked platform, like jewels--fitting enough for a jeweler's brand name. But the odd thing is that they don't really smell a whole lot like Trouble. They have a distinctly detergent smell, and it's not shy, either; it's right out there. The pungent detersive scent is there when you open the box, and even more so when you unwrap a bar.

When you're washing with the soap, you still get that detergent smell, and it's a little disappointing. But when it's all washed down the drain and you're toweling off your skin, the damnedest thing happens: the soap smell is gone, and what you're left with is the smell of Trouble and nothing but. It's not strong; it's not as if you'd just sprayed some on. But it's there, completely authentic and untainted with any residue of soapy scent--a nice surprise, and a testament to the artistry of the chemists involved, I think.

2 Comments:

  • I love most of the perfume soaps that I find, can I ask where you got the Trouble soaps and at what cost?

    Thanks.

    d.

    By Blogger Bobby D., at 5:38 PM  

  • I got them at a little place called Couture Parfums in a local mall here in Moncton, which is a small city in a small province on the east coast of Canada, so I'm guessing you're out of luck, even if you should happen to live here. I got the last set, and it wasn't even an ordinary retail package: it was one of those things that companies offer as a gift with purchase, three little one-ounce soaps.

    I wouldn't say that Couture Parfums seems to be a bunch of stuff that fell off a truck, exactly, but they carry an amazing range of fragrances for such a tiny location--it's not a shop, it's a freestanding booth. They have, say, eight different Hermes scents, one or two bottles of each, and likewise lots of YSL (one bottle of the Eau Legere version of Yvresse but none of the superior original), Dior, Chanel, and on and on.

    There are quite a few of these Couture Parfums outlets in Ontario, too, so maybe you can find it there, if that's a little closer to home.

    By Blogger pyramus, at 8:33 AM  

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