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Kate Apted
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G’day APJ family. Really great to have you here!
I have been to a few perfume meet-ups now and I have been able to hear other like minded folk talk about perfumery and scent. It has been brilliant to learn how you all feel about, discuss and approach perfume. But what has become very obvious to me is how differently I process, not just my emotions regarding scent, but the pleasure, and pain, I get from smelling things.
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Portia
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Hey All,
Thank You for another year of amazing fragrance chatter and beyond. Last year I wrote that the world was in trouble. SHIT! Seems the world took that as a challenge. Brexit, Putin, Trump, the Middle East, Europe, Africa, almost everywhere there is backlash against saving our planet, it’s flora and fauna and people. Big business has us all hoodwinked and most governments are in the pockets of Pharmaceuticals (drugs), War (guns) and Oil. The big picture is bleak.
Around me though I see regular bright sparks of creative giving and helping that gives me hope for the small picture. Jin cut his beautiful hair for leukaemia fundraising this year and raised thousands. He did it on my Mum’s The gang at Hair by Phd Parramatta Store cut it for free so we could send it off to become a wig for children with leukaemia. Jin is a dead set hero in my eyes.
My friends Rita and Cathy (and a GF of theirs whose name I can’t bloody remember) are fundraising and cooking with the One Meal crew here in Sydney to provide one decent meal a week to families who are right on the edge of the poverty line and street people. We did a Turbo Trivia Fundraiser for them and raised nearly $22,000. In a year filled with fundraising this was a major highlight.
Another mate Matt Moore and his buddies Matt White and Ben Dunley have started the idea of using the Aussie men’s mates’ mantra ‘Grab a pie, Grab a mate, Have a chat’ helping men to talk about their feelings. From Matt’s own depression problems sprung this idea of doing something so regular, so common amongst Aussie mates and making it a moment to discuss life issues. In 2015, preliminary data showed a total of 3,027 deaths by suicide (12.7 per 100,000), 2,292 males (19.4 per 100,000) and 735 females (6.2 per 100,000). Aussie guys are 3x more likely suicide and at a rate of over 6 per day, from a population of just over 23 million. That’s bad, anything that can help is good. Go visit Guys & Pies and donate.
What do I do? Well, I give myself at a heavily discounted rate for fundraisers, help a few people who I know are struggling sometimes with food, time or cash, give regularly to charities that I feel the money is being spent on helping not admin and we rescue dogs. While none of these things are earth shattering they are game changing for the people that are helped. That’s all I can do.
So Happy New Year Australian Perfume Junkies. To everyone that’s contributed, commented, lurked and followed I wish you a peaceful & prosperous 2017. Fill it with fun & laughter, fragrance and stuff you enjoy. Make time to care for yourself, push yourself to be the best you can be and treat everyone you come in contact with as you’d hope to be treated.
We love you all,
Portia xx
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Post by Val the Cookie Queen
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When I mentioned to Portia a few weeks ago that it was sometimes tough to come up with something to write about, he said to write whatever I´d been up to and include the perfume I had been wearing. That would do it. Let´s test it out.
Murmurings from the Uninspired.
Featuring fragrances I have added to my small collection.
Finalised a pefume tour party blogger lunch and cake feast not forgetting the epic ice-cream, kind of thing. In London. Getting to hangout with Volatile Fiction, Olfactoria´s Travels, Perfume Candy Boy, Nick Gilbert and more. Amongst other groovy things we are going to visit Penhaligon`s, the new Bloom, the Chanel Store and the new Malle Store. I am of course taking my daughter the BlondesWunder with me and she will report back as to her second experience of hanging out with a bunch of old perfume freaks.
(Yes Portia and Michael, my heart aches that you won´t be there.)
Wearing a lot of extraits, and only dab them. I love the sensuality of using a glass stopper to apply the perfume. I do like to spray the back of my neck though. However, spraying everywhere gives me a grand mal seizure, and since my kids do that to me anyway, I prefer to keep them to the minimum. I reckon I might be in the minority though. This is a much discussed subject but what do you APJ readers do? What interesting application techniques do you use? I stand in front of a mirror and conduct my perfuming ritual. I do not like perfume on my clothing at all and make sure I get nothing on it from the application of the fragrance. Clothing goes on after the perfume.
Am about to start a new book. A Brief History of Seven Killings. Marlon James. “It´s like a Tarantino remake of The Harder They Come but with a soundtrack by Bob Marley and a script by Oliver Stone and William Faulkner ……..” New York Times. And a lot of it is written in Jamaican Patois. I spent some time in Kingston but that is another fragrant story. 😉
Photo Stolen Fragrantica
Fragrantica gives these featured accords:
Top: Blood orange
Heart: Iris pallida, rose
Base: Incense, patchouli
Have been wearing Maria Candida Gentile´s Burlesque for the last two days. Alluring. Gorgeous. Ordered.
Irie Bussis
Peace and love
CQ
Hey there APJ,
I am writing to you from the weekend of my move, knowing I have to travel on Thursday. It’s Sunday afternoon and I can’t find my drag stockings or shoes and I have to work tonight. Life feels too big and I am engulfed. So I stopped in the middle of a melt down and thought I’d come share my distress with you.
Photo Stolen WikiCommons
By now (when you are reading this) I will have flown away to the USA and will be having the time of my life. I do know that this feeling is for right now and that there will be less dramatic moments in the near future. I even know that the club will not mind particularly that I go to work in Man Drag, and that the crew there will be so fine with it. Still, the feeling that I’ve let myself and the team down is inescapable.
So, I thought I’d go looking through my pictures to level me out.
Here’s a series that have been particularly useful today. Especially number 2 which reminds me that I choose to live at 10,000 m/h and that every great upheaval brings renewal and growth. I can sleep when I’m dead but life is too short.
What did I spray today to keep me fragrant while FREAKING OUT? LouLou by Cacharel earlier in the day and Voile d’Ambre by Yves Rocher, smells like a MILLION dollars.
Thanks for reading my silly, self obsessed rant. Fingers crossed you all are happy and well and that life is smiling gently over your lives, friends and families.
Hugging you in cyber.
Portia xx
Australian Perfume Junkies 