"sky of Paris as a memory of past love"

July 29, 2024 4:29 AM

The rest are additional details added to please the ever-changing fashion. [fragrantica]

inspired by a comment

posted by HearHere (5 comments total)

Hah, thanks for taking the inspiration.

Fragrantica has longform reviews like the one you linked, but it also has shorter and often much more bizarre reviews in classic yelp fashion on individual fragrances.

Check out some of the reviews on “Against Nature”

Hypnerotomachia02/09/22 13:24
Definitely get the sing of metal here, as well as the melon, a sickly, malformed hothouse gourd of asiatic origins. Like the non-boring take on decadence.

Birnam_Wood10/29/18 00:14
The nauseating sense of carsick, on a newly painted bus in a roasting summer day.

jacquesbyrne06/17/24 16:23
This is the single worst fragrance I’ve ever put on my skin. Blood, sharp artificial greenness, sheet copper, printer ink, antiseptic citrus. And I’m a fan of experimental scents (or at least I thought I was), but this is unwearable. It makes Comme des Garcons look like Paco Rabanne. Seriously, not even CdG’s odeur 53 come close to this in terms of sheer abstract ugliness. I’ve smelled fragrances that reminded me of rotting bacon and I’d rather wear them than this.

Even after scrubbing and scrubbing for 10 minutes with soap and a rag, it still has stronger projection than practically every fragrance I own. The only reason I could imagine someone buying a full bottle of this is for the sheer novelty.

I swear, every fragrance is like this. Either the reviews are so filled with vernacular and shorthand I cannot hope to appreciate it beyond word salad, or they have traumadumping personal stories evoked by a memory of a difference smell entirely, or a mishmash of sensory poetry and disgust. This is what you get when trying to describe one sensory experience through the medium of another.
posted by Mizu at 5:08 AM on July 29 [5 favorites]

I remember a (positive!) review of a perfume/cologne in Fragrantica. It was a short blurb of lovely sounding scent descriptions that ended with the full sentence: "A memory of fox urine."

Now that's poetry! Some years ago I used to read Fragrantica for fun, even though I never got much into cologne or perfume personally.
posted by SoberHighland at 6:07 AM on July 29 [2 favorites]

I was coming here to recommend the member reviews! I love them! I start reading these things and get lost for hours! For my favorite scent:

"If melancholy smelled like anything, it would be this."

"This is depression in a bottle"

"Frankly, it smells like sad, raw potatoes. Solemn and disappointing."

"Call me a an olfactoric philistine. I tried to sell it, but had no success."

Haha! All true! Well, not the potato bit. And I adore it so, so much. In fact, I need to go get a little spritz right now. (I'm conservative with my spritzes, because I really cannot afford it ... but I love it, so I still manage to find discounted bottles on eBay or whatever, just to be able to fill that hungry little Hiris shaped space in my cold, melancholy, depressed, disappointing, potato shaped heart. 🥀)
posted by taz at 6:11 AM on July 29 [4 favorites]

gosh why does iris always smell sad to people
posted by ersatzkat at 8:53 AM on July 29 [2 favorites]

erstazkat, "it’s like adding a third dimension to a flat pyramid: it’s synesthetically palpable" thank you for the question; searching for an answer to why people respond strongly to the scent of iris, i found fragrantia also has a forum

Mizu, you are most welcome & thank you for the inspiration! i'd never encountered the site before & posting about a neat new discovery on the web seemed a fun way to think through Wordshore's question about how one might describe Metafilter, scents-wise.

This is what you get when trying to describe one sensory experience through the medium of another
ekphrasis fascinates me still
posted by HearHere at 9:40 AM on July 29 [1 favorite]