kerosene: which one(s) to buy?

the house of kerosene is a niche perfumery based in detroit. i got a box of samples to try in order to figure out which one(s) to buy.

MiN New York: and i'm officially a niche fragrance convert

if you've been reading this blog for some time, you know that i love perfume. i've always been a pretty mainstream perfume kind of girl and admittedly, most of my scents have been acquired through the years in the duty free shops of airports around the world. my sister has a good friend who is a scent aficionado and she has sent my sister to small, esoteric shops in paris after some amazing, exclusive scents. so it was no surprise on my recent trip to new york city, that monica had a couple of perfume places on her list. we lost quite a lot of one day of her stay (we won't say why, but a late show at a comedy club and a cheap bottle of wine on top of oysters and foie gras might have had something to do with it), so we chose to visit just one of them - MiN new york in soho.

just peeking in the window of this beautiful shop made me quiver with intimidation. if my sister hadn't been there, i don't think i'd have dared to go in on my own, thinking the experience and the prices would be far above me. i expressed a bit of that intimidation when i came into the dark, warm, richly scented interior, but the people in the shop very quickly put me at ease - one was the president of the company, an attractive guy with longish hair and a cool manner and the two sales girls, with their exotic accents and easygoing, totally not snobbish manner.  they quickly made us feel welcome and as if it was exactly our kind of place. i realized very quickly that i could get used to niche fragrances.

in addition to a lot of exciting niche scents from around the world, they have their own line of what they call scent stories. there are 11 chapters to their scent story book, each with their own personality and heady fragrance. we tried only three of them (your nose can't really take that many more) and we were also trying some of the kerosene scents (more about them in another post).

my sister fell in love with one called magic circus, which the folks a MiN describe as: "Turn of the century, a carnival travels at dusk. A scrumptious gourmand perfume. A splendid wonder swirling in enchantment. Candied nuts, cotton candy, caramel, sprinkled with pink peppercorns, bergamot, labdanum, geranium, patchouli, and woodchips." all of which rings scrumptiously true in the complexity of the scent. it smelled wonderful on her, but less so on me.  it was obvious that my sister needed the magic circus and she serendipitously got bottle number 72 (of 1000 - they only make 1000 of each of the scent stories per year), which is both the year of her birth and her lucky number. it was meant to be. i went away with samples of memento and barrel, as my skin chemistry can be temperamental with perfumes and so i need to see if they go bad on me over several hours (when that happens, it isn't good, believe me).

and in the end, tho' i had decided that i loved the barrel most, but was chickening out on going all the way back down to soho and spending $240 on myself, when my sister called and said, "can you get back to MiN by 6 and pick up your barrel, i've just ordered it for you." i couldn't believe it and told her not to buy me a christmas present for the next five years. but i also jumped on the subway and headed to MiN immediately. there was a film being made on the street right outside of MiN, so i didn't have quite the same slow, drawn-out experience i had when we had visited together, but that was ok, as i wasn't in the market for more scents right then anyway. i did grab a sample of barrel to send to my sister so she could test it out as well.

my bottle of barrel is #86 of 1000. as the MiN folks say of barrel, "Evident in the first sniff, a slight floral opening gives way to bold, beautiful notes that we taste in full-bodied dark spirits and wine. Peaty, smoky, smooth, and earthy, this is the scent of the selfless vessel that rest in halcyon, incubating the finest spirits throughout the years. A complex cocktail of spirits, spices, dirt, tannin, and woods: absinth, coriander, pink pepper, rum, myrrh, orange blossom, tuberose, oak, oak moss, leather, vanilla, patchouli, and vetiver." in other words, deep, dark heaven. and i would love to go back and try some of the other scent stories. i have a feeling my book of scents in nowhere near complete.

30 days of lists: day 16

my sister was driving our old toyota and she had a 6-year-old sabin in the car. she was supposed to be headed for ikea, where we were to meet, but then the muffler partially fell off and started dragging and leaving a rather alarming trail of sparks. not knowing the greater copenhagen area, she had no idea where she was, so, on the phone with me and trying to explain, she looked around and said, "we're by the side of the road, right in front of a pizza place and a florist." which could be pretty much anywhere in denmark. it turned out that she wasn't that far from ikea, but it wasn't the ikea we were aiming for.

she once licked spilled limoncello off a table at a restaurant in the philippines. as one does. you should always lick up spilled limoncello. that stuff shouldn't be wasted.

a crafty day at home

my sis wanted to make some felty-stitchy bits for her bathroom back home. so we enlisted child labor. they don't have anything better to do since there's no school.

turns out you can pay the child labor in chocolate. of course there's the small issue that you have to get it at the chocolate café in the airport in amsterdam.

i made a soft leather pillow cover. i'm actually pretty pleased with myself on this one.

it has a ribbon & button closure.  i like that too.

bright bits for my sis's bathroom.

more soon.

happy birthday!

i know it's not easy being the little sister...the way totally paved for you, the parents broken in, the rules all set (and in your case, completely cast aside), but i do hope you have a great birthday! and enjoy that last year in the 30s, but don't worry, because 40 is the new 30.

terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

husband woke us up an hour early because he'd forgotten change his alarm clock to winter time. it rained. the fireplace wouldn't start. i got my writing done, but it sucks. the hotel website won't load, so i have no hotel for tomorrow. my right elbow started to hurt--kind of a lot--for no reason.

it was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

i went to get fabric at the fabric store from hell. actually, it's a very nice fabric store, as far as the fabric is concerned, but the help are all deeply unhappy and wish they were somewhere else, so the atmosphere there isn't good.  that's actually when it really started to go wrong. my mood was definitely dragged down after being there.

i found out my sister is, for some reason unknown to me, on some strange spiteful vendetta against me. actually, the reason is known, it's just too stupid to comprehend. it's because i didn't answer an email to a RANDOM STRANGER that she GAVE MY EMAIL ADDRESS to PUBLICLY ON TWITTER!!! so when said random stranger tells her this today, she emails him back and says this:

"Yeah, weird deal.  I made the introduction thinking you'd have interests in common with her, but she had one of her knee-jerk reactions.  She freaked out at the horrible thought of me giving away her super-secret email address to a would-be serial killer in Central Iowa, though you'd have to cross an entire ocean to go about your crime against what, an email address?  So I got in big trouble for trying to introduce you.  My apologies for the wasted time. Turns out you wouldn't be that interested in knowing her, I guess."

and how do i know this, you ask? because she thought it would be amusing to forward it to me. i guess she knew i was having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day and just wanted to help out, in case it was getting brighter.

let me ask you, was it really so wrong of me not to want my email address broadcast on twitter or twinkle or whatever her iPhone version is to everyone within a 150 mile radius of bum-fuck, iowa just so some random stranger could have it and get in touch with me? somehow, i just can't find a way for that to be ok in my head. nor can i find any explanation for my sister's behavior towards me. fine to email him back and say what she said above, it's a free country (for now), but why add the spite by forwarding it to me? why would someone want to be totally disloyal to their only sister and then rub it in her face? i guess i'm just too simple to understand it.

then, just when i thought it couldn't get any worse, i just flipped back to my gmail--home of said address--and it strangely asked me to sign in, saying my email had been deactivated!! causing my blood to run cold (honestly, now i understand what that means). then, i tried again, signed in and had to do one of those little random alphabet thingies and then it went in! WTF? how can all of this happen in one day?

and right when things were looking up a little, because i had just had fun making these cards to put in the mailboxes all along our street, letting everyone know that we're having a children's halloween party on friday night and that they should expect some small trick-or-treaters to be coming by (we have to warn them because this isn't a traditional trick or treat country).  and i had had fun because i got to stamp on the cards and then play with fire--because i burned the edges (my first successful encounter with fire all day).

so now, i think i'll go to bed, i have to get up early and fly to oslo. terrible, horrible no good, very bad days don't happen more than one at a time, do they?