Q: How many notes can you shoehorn into the drydown of Allure? A: One to many.
Good-bye brunch today for Emily at Richard's, otherwise known as St. Richard. (Say Ree-shar, in French.) Emily is our lovely, lovely National Hospital Fistual Clinic worker–I've been trying to post my Embassy newsletter article with pix on the Niger photo-a-day site for days, but I'm having issues. Richard is full of hilarious stories, remind to tell you the one about him being robbed in Brazil on Christmas Eve.
I was feeling completly out of my league story-wise and perused his bookshelves and ran across Perfumes, the Guide. They describe perfumes with all these fabulous metaphors, like, "as shocking as Dylan going electric." They review maybe a thousand perfumes in the book, and the long detailed love letters are wonderful, but the disses are probably better.
Kenzo pour Homme Fresh: I'm not saying there's nothing charming about the orange-spice oriental lurking in the this fresh woody flanker…I'm just saying that's it's basically soap that doesn't get you clean.
And this about Kouros, (Peter won a bottle as a door prize and we gave it, without opening, to Leopold, our cook): It smells like the tanned skin of a guy stepping out of a shower wearing a pre-WWI British dandified fragrance: citrus, flowers, musk. It has that faintly repellent clean-dirty feel of other people's bathrooms, and it manages to smell at once scrubbed and promissory of an unmade bed.
And about Creed's (Creed! I thought they could do no wrong!) Vetiver: Deserves some sort of prize for managing to make whatever vetiver it contains mostly imperceptable.
They give five stars to only twenty perfumes, one of them being 100% Love, which I have never heard of, and Timbuktu, of which I am going to start ordering a case, based on the discription.
One of the delightful properties of intelliegence is its ability to counter dumb questions with smart anwers. This is how they describe a perfume! Yeah, this book is cheering me up.
twenty-something years of "what have you been up to?" 
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