Guilty Pleasures – a Sydney sniffy meet up!

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TinaG

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Hi APJ!

Perfume people are the best! It’s great to be able to chat online & catch up in real life to swap fragrance stories and smell different things. Group catch ups are fun afternoons, and we tend to go a bit crazy….there’s always some awesome frags on the table.

Simon and Kerri from FaceBook Aussie Fragrance Network lead the charge organising a sniffy on Sunday 11 June, with a general theme of ‘Guilty Pleasures’. Heh. I think that’s an umbrella statement that we all fall under at some point in time. We met at Hotel Sweeny in Sydney, a pub which has missed the renovation revolution having street-rescued sofas and worn sticky carpet, but with some interesting beers on tap – I did try Illawarra Brewing Company: Smashing Rumpkin which had a funky pumpkin note. Odd but tasty.

Guilty Pleasures – a Sydney sniffy meet up!

We met at the rooftop bar & spread out our stashes. We did a LOT of sniffing!! I asked Scott to bring along a range of Rive Gauche by YSL for me to run through, as I’d heard so much but never really sniffed, and I knew Scott was a fan. He brought along (L to R in the photo) vintage EDP, vintage EDT, current EDT 2006 and vintage parfum 1980s. Fab.

Some of the “Guilty Pleasures” people brought along were:

Amouage Gold Man: you spray this and it takes over the room.
Cool Water by Davidoff: the vintage stuff is still incredible. Done to death by uncles, dads and other male relatives but still fantastic.
Giorgio Beverly Hills: an overpowering 80s tuberose bomb that lays claim to 5 metres around itself at all times.
Pure Honey by Kim Kardashian: Undeniably pleasant though, and very affordable.
Dark Ride by Xyrena: a super weirdy that polarises people through its green, medicinal, water-park dankness.
Baraonda by Nasomatto: when you know you shouldn’t spend a silly amount of money on a tiny bottle, but you do it anyway because it smells like the best dark chocolate and roasted nuts and boozey goodness.
Scent by Theo Fennell: a spectacularly lush floral with a skanky underside, like a beautiful, rich, classy lady wrapped in furs who just doesn’t shower often enough.
Glamazon by RuPaul and Diva by Ungaro I suppose because I expected them to be awful – the price point and the tacky bottles – but they are both amazing and rich and tenacious – thus they became guilty pleasures
Gaiac 10, Sacred Wood, MDCI sets – all generous gifts from online friends that he had never actually met.
Pino Silvestre: this is an old favourite of many people, and cheap as chips.

What’s my guilty pleasure when it comes to perfume? Oh, so many…. But I think my top hit would be that I seem to be starting a collection of vintage Guerlain – Vol de Nuit, Mitsouko, and Apres L’Ondee. Oops. I love them though.

What’s your fragrant guilty pleasure?

Till next time
Tina G xx

Sniffa – Eugenie, Oregon 2014

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Post by ElizaD

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Hi Australian Perfume junkies,

What do you get when you combine wine, food, perfume and friends in Eugene, Oregon USA? A Sniffa – Eugenie!!!!

Sniffa – Eugenie, Oregon 2014

Here’s the recipe:

Sniffa – Eugenie! Ingredients

1 tiny coffee table
5 fabulous fumehead friends
lots of small glasses
lots of cotton balls
your favorite perfumes–any size bottle or container will do
food
drink
stories

Sniffa - Eugenie 2014 girl Esri Nederland FlickrPhoto Stolen Flickr

Sniffa – Eugenie! Instructions

Invite your friends over and ask them to each bring 3 to 5 of their favorite perfumes. If they only have one, tell them not to worry, you have lots! Encourage them to think of a story about their perfume and be ready to share it. Then ask them to bring a little something to nosh on and a complementary beverage.

Prepare your space by gathering as many small glasses as you can muster and a bag of cotton balls (which is what we call them here in the States–I think others call them cotton wool 😉 ). Place the glasses and the cotton on your coffee table, along with a small bowl of lemon slices (coffee beans make everything smell like coffee, lemon dissipates quickly). Spend the rest of the day thinking about what perfumes you will choose to share from your expansive collection of samples and bottles. Will it be your treasured 1978 bottle of Guerlain L’Heure Bleue, which you bought on eBay for a song, or your tiny sample of Chanel No. 5 Eau Premiere? Your equally small sample of Cacharel LouLou or your mini of Prada L’Eau Ambrée? Remember, only three to five!

Vacuum your floors, puff the sofa pillows, prepare the food table, and wait for the magic to happen.

Which it did!

C brought an amazing walnut spread, olives, and a lovely bottle of Blanquette de Limoux, a sparkling wine from Languedoc; K brought home-made brie en croute; and E provided bread and veggies and other bottles of whites and reds.

Since C and E are enthralled with perfume history, they arranged the fragrances by release date, using the book Scent and Subversion: Decoding a Century of Provocative Perfume by Barbara Herman as a guide. As each perfume was introduced, the owner carefully sprayed or dabbed a cotton ball and then placed it under an upturned glass. As the scent released, it was caught in the glass from which each took a sniff. Anyone watching this group would surely had thought we were participating in something most illegal!

Sniffa - Eugenie 2014Photo Donated ElizaD

And the stories!

C had her treasured bottle of Guerlain’s Mitsouko, brought all the way from Paris, and her Andy Tauer minis. She told the stories of how she had been captured by Mitsouko’s incense notes, and how she had discovered Andy Tauer on her trip to the Perfume House in Portland. E shared how she had been sitting in a meeting when she found out that she had won the eBay bid for her bottle of L’Heure Bleue and had immediately launched into a hamster dance. K had everyone in fits of giggles as she related how her perfume, Revlon Intimate, had been a gift during high school and how it still made her feel oh so sexy, even fifty years later. S was so happy that she had found other fumeheads and how perfume was becoming a wonderful connection between her and her daughter. T brought a tiny bottle of Holy Smoke Oil….”one drop lasts all day”…and entertained us with the story of how she found it in a small shop on the lower East Side of Manhattan, far from where she lives now.

Sniffa - Eugenie 2014 The Perfume House Portland TwitterPhoto Stolen Twitter

And when the wine was drained and there were just crumbs left of the brie, we all agreed that this event had only sharpened our appetite for even more fragrance fun…Perfume House in Portland, here we come!

Have you ever participated in a fragrance get-together? DO TELL!
ElizaD xx