Tetherd Cow Ahead

Satan’s Cologne too rich for your blood? Well here at The Cow we are pleased to be able to point you to a real world alternative. Yes shoppers, at the Demeter Fragrance Library you can purchase the fragrance of Holy Water in your choice of Cologne, Calming Spray or Bath & Shower Gel.

Fight vampires and smell nice too!

UPDATE: I just noticed that ‘Funeral Home’, one of the fragrances in the Library, was designed by Christopher Brosius from ‘I Hate Perfume’, who has been mentioned in despatches previously.
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While you’re there, be sure to spray on a little Laundromat, or Riding Crop. Or maybe Funeral Home is more your thing.

You can bet that I’ve put a dozen of these gems on order!

When looking evil is simply not enough…

Sometimes the Blogosphere just catches you unawares with its downright joi de vivre. Over the last few weeks I’ve been visiting the Joey Polanski Show and having a good ol’ chuckle at Joey’s adventures in the land of expedient spelling. Just now though, Joey was kind enough to link to me, via a typical Joey post, and although it is always a flattering thing for a blogger to be accorded that honour it doesn’t necessarily mean a reciprocal post will occur, as you all know.

Except that Joey made me laugh. I mean, really, really laugh. This is why: some of you will remember this post I made about perfume a little while back. Those of you who don’t should read it before going to this post of Joey’s.

See? I fell about.

Joey rocks.

For your consideration, today a scent map of my tiny house. From front to back:

My bedroom smells of l’Occitane Pepper Rose. It is one of the best incenses I have ever found. It’s a dense dusky rose with smoky peppery undertones that stop it from being cloying. The scent lasts very well and if I burn it in the morning, it tones down through the day into a slightly musky pleasantly dusty after-image. To my immense disappointment, l’Occitane have discontinued it. I have about twenty five cones left.

My study smells very strongly of cardboard from the big piles of boxes that almost completely fill it up. They are the boxes that contain all the stuff I have removed from The Treehouse. Cardboard is an amazing smell. You’ve probably never thought about it, but if you were to close your eyes and I put some under your nose, you could recognize it instantly. Isn’t it incredible that something so bland as cardboard should have its own unique and powerfully nostalgic smell?

My loungeroom has a complex scent that is a combination of a hint of dust, of carboard from the study and cinnamon from a jar of Atomic Fireballs next to the tv. It is a comforting and restful smell. The Atomic Fireballs were given to me as a present by Mike Axxin and Bruce Lacey, the dialogue editors I worked with on The Ring. That was a few years back. It was a couple of pounds of candy. I don’t eat much candy, so it’s lucky it doesn’t go off in a hurry. I figure with that much sugar and the level of scorch in the cinnamon in those things, they may last for millennia. The scent of them is still so strong that if I take the lid off the jar, I can smell them for hours.

My dining room and kitchen smell, at the moment, of basil and garlic since I am just about to make some bruschetta for dinner. A little while ago the dominant aroma was curry spices from last night’s chicken curry. I didn’t grind my own spices, although I sometimes do since, as well as the other advantages of doing so, the smell is just incredible.

My bathroom smells of lavender hand soap and faintly of wet towels. Nothing is very dry, because it is raining outside.

My tiny backyard smells of rain on wet stone, and of murraya, faintly at the moment because the first few flowers are just starting, but as the summer draws on, it will become overpowering almost to the point of intoxicating. It is a smell that has an almost corporeal weight. The combination of wet stone and the murraya is astonishing. I reckon that if I could bottle it, I would be a millionaire.

As we age, the first sense most of us lose is that of smell. I’m trying to take as much notice of mine as I can while I’ve still got it.

For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it is a pity that you use it so little ~ Rachel Carson

I don’t really, as you all know. But this is the name of an intriguing project by perfumer Christopher Brosius at CB I Hate Perfume. Brosius says of himself “I am an artist, and perfume is my medium”. One of his fascinations seems to be that of creating memories with perfumes and he claims to have successfully captured the scents of ‘Snow’ and ‘Skin’ (I think we can take it that he is speaking poetically) and is working on ‘Birthday Candles’ and ‘Puppy’.

Speaking of birthdays, September 27 is fast approaching, and I quite like the sound of ‘Mr. Hulot’s Holiday’ which is described as “the salty breath of the breeze off the sea, driftwood, rocks covered with seaweed and the smell of old leather suitcases”. What more could anyone want in a perfume? Or for a birthday present?

You can read reviews of a couple of the scents from CBIHP here on one of my favourite blogs Now Smell This.

Try this: go for a walk in your neighbourhood, and every ten paces or so stop and have a really good deep smell. Walk a couple of blocks doing this. If you’re really obsessive like me, take a notebook and write down everything you smell. Isn’t it amazing? Cut grass, curry, bitumen, paint, cat piss, magnolia, mildew, petrol, leaf mulch, cigarettes, burnt toast, eucalyptus leaves… why is it that we don’t pay more attention to our sense of smell?

I really like perfumes. This is not these days usually considered a desirable trait in a man unless he is gay, or a perfumier, or both. I’m not talking about the industrial solvent-style ‘male’ scents that are marketed under irksome butch brand names to wearers of cheap bling, but of the astonishing seduction of jasmine and sandalwood, vetiver, Damask rose, freesia and magnolia, gardenia, rosemary, frangipani and murraya, frankinsense, golden wattle, carnation, bergamot, lilac and violet, pine and vanilla… some of the gorgeous fragrances that are, for the most part, the province of perfumes made for women.

I know almost nothing about how to assess a perfume. But I do know that when I smell certain things, I have strong, sometimes almost knee-weakening rapid-fire flashes of nostalgia or desire. It’s almost like the scent is a hardwire directly and unambiguously into the usually mazelike recesses of my emotional core. I remember a few summers ago passing a woman in the street not far from my house. It was dark between the streetlights and I couldn’t see her face at all. The perfume she was wearing was, as far as my conscious brain can tell, not something I had smelled before, and yet the sense of eroticism and yearning it evoked was so overpowering that it is a testament to the sterling quality of my upbringing that I didn’t ravish her on the spot.

The amazing thing is, the mechanism of the sense of smell is very poorly understood. In fact, there is quite some controversy in scientific thought on the matter, and there is no better account of it than Chandler Burr’s fascinating literary portrait of maverick perfume scientist Luca Turin, ‘The Emperor of Scent’

Some of my favourite perfumes:

Guerlain ‘Vetiver’
George Trumper ‘Eucris’
Annick Goutal ‘Gardenia Passion’
Christain Dior ‘Dioressence’
Guerlain ‘Pamplelune’

I can really understand how people get passionate about perfume and I love to dip into this blog every now and then: ‘Now Smell This’