The Once and Future Perfumes

I am thinking about perfume today, because I am bored and it beats thinking about why fucking Biron is playing so well.

The first "big girl perfume" I ever wore was this one, Dior's J'Adore, and let me tell you, I freaking bathed in this stuff. It's just another item on the laundry list of things my parents tolerated for no immediately apparent reason. They probably should have pegged my gravitation towards Dior as trouble from the get-go, but alas, no such warning bells went off.

When I moved to DC, I discovered two things - Sephora, and Demeter perfumes. Demeter makes perfumes that smell like...stuff, which I realize sounds incredibly indescript, but I don't know how else to explain it. You can buy a perfume that smells like tomato, or wet garden, okay? In any case, these were relatively cheap ($17/small bottle) and smelled like things I liked, so I wore Earl Grey Tea, Gin & Tonic (which I still have and use in summer), and briefly (and regrettably), Hot Toddy. Luckily for all involved, I'd learned how to apply perfume without overdoing it.

After the Demeter phase, I moved into a phase I was always concerned about admitting...the Jennifer Lopez Still phase. This smells SO GOOD on me, but something about J.Lo drives me RIGHT up and down the wall, so I always felt kind of weirdly guilty about wearing it. Non lo so.
After the shameful, shameful J.Lo perfume, I wore Benefit's Maybe Baby, which is a great summery perfume and about as flowery as I get. It's got underpinnings of oriental-y stuff going on to avoid the "Violets and Rosewater" crap that I hate with every fiber of my being. I would buy this again, but am lazy.
After my relationship with Maybe Baby ended, I ran back into the welcoming arms of J.Lo, this time to her Live perfume. In retrospect, I'm not sure this is really me, but I like the smell generally and thus stick with it. I still have this.

For this Christmas, I got (and gave to my sister) Marc Jacobs' Daisy, which I adore and smells like early fall/early spring school feels like to me. That is less pigtails and backpacks than one might thing, but it synchs up with what I am feeling about school right now, which is "I love it and am fabulous." Time does not permit explanation of why school equals my own personal self being fabulous, so just know that it has EVERYTHING to do with my ego and little to do with sense and reason, and THAT IS HOW I LIKE IT.
Marc Jacobs perfume number two...this one's called Blush and has it's toe over the Violet and Rosewater Line but I like it well enough. I'm not going to lie to you, either...as you can see, the box of this one is very shiny. YES, I totally bought it on impulse at TJ Maxx because of this. YES, I agree, that's totally pathetic.

I ordered a little smorgasboard of beauty products I'd been considering trying off of eBay a while back, and one of the things I received incidentally was a teeny, adorable bottle of Dior Addict. OH MY GOD, do I love it. Until I got it, I had been considering getting Fendi's Palazzo for my next purchase, but this kicked its way to the front of the list.

There's a wealth of wisdom available on loving the things you hate, etc., etc., and all of it applies to my relationship with this perfume from Juicy Couture that I got as a sample with my Sephora order. I am wearing it right now, and I keep catching a whiff of it and being all "oh my GOD what smells so fucking good?!" That is some serious awesome right there. However. I hate....hate hate hate, hate Juicy Couture as a brand and a concept, what with the tacky-ass sweatsuits with shit written on the butt and what have you. So once again, we are back in the J.Lo place. Other things I love and also hate? Jessica Simpson shoes.