Guerlain "Aqua Allegoria Gentiana"

Fair warning, this is a bottle I unexpectedly unearthed while clearing up the flat. It is one of those bottles I mentioned in my very first post, the tiny airport testers my father brought back for Olive and myself. My friends, this bottle is probably about twelve years old, and has been treated abominably, and yet somehow managed to cross the Atlantic with me and survive three different England moves. So I tried it today more out of loyalty than anything else.

The aldehyde smell is pretty sharp. There's a dried orange smell, like the candied fruits you can get at specialty stores, coated in fine granulated sugar. Spices as well, like a packet you're just about to put into mulled wine. I'd imagine that there are potpourris that smell exactly like this on sale at Christmas. But the dried orange slowly changes into a powdery packet of orange gelatin, and the floral scents that emerge are incongruous with the entire holiday scene. They fight against the spiciness somehow, and that clash finally results in an oddly musty tone -- like a freshly halved grapefruit covered in pollen, gelatin and cinnamon? Sprinkled, of course, in aldehyde.

Verdict: A winner at the start, but the drydown's just a random crush of things out of a dried goods pantry (I'm choosing to blame the aldehyde on the sample age).

In other news, I just got back in touch with my high school friend Lank, who is getting married this fall. My neighbourhood boy from childhood, Gil, has been keeping us informally updated about each other, and finally I rang Lank up. Apparently he is now some sort of hotshot at a NYC perfume house, totally unbeknownst to me, and the first thing out of his mouth?

"Gil told me you're interested in fragrance!"

Ack! Thanks, Gil. Unexpectedly caught in a situation not unlike a tai chi novice discussing martial arts with Bruce Lee, I babbled incoherently for a while, and am still too humiliated about the entire thing to really focus on it for any amount of time. Then again, lovely Lank could end up being a bit of a sample source?