Flossing

If it hadn't been for the description of this Possets scent, I would never have known flossing could be something else than dental care. 

A pretty, dear and yet spicy little blend. Flossing is named after the dainty stitching put on many corsets to keep the stays in place. A comforting blend of gingery peppery small vanilla and wood, Flossing is very cheery and is like being the Queen in a Sewing Bee! This is a marvelous everyday perfume which can lift your spirits immensely. Highly recommended as a first Posset for the persnickety or those who want to try Possets but are diffident about it.

In the picture above you can see how the V-shaped embroidery is keeping the 'bones' (preferably iron these days though plastic is also used) in place. I suppose the 'bones' used to be the whalebones. I like the Dutch word better, it's more mysterious because it doesn't tell you right away that they are whalebones: baleinen. 


I must say that the scent works for me as a new Possets user who is diffident about it. Or perhaps I should say I was not overly pleased with the first scents I tried. My problem with Possets is (I think) the use of synthetic components and the fact that apart from a small all-natural series which does not sound very tempting (at least two minty scents there) I can never be sure how large or small the percentage of synthetics is. I tried Eva, a scent with a rhubarb note, and although I liked it when I put it one and it didn't really change, I had to wash it off because I would have gone mad if I hadn't. It was like a sound that goes on and on, something that keeps pulling at your awareness. That is what synthetic scents do with me (or electrical buzzing sounds, for instance). I suspect there is a synthetic vanilla in this Flossing, but this is a scent I can live with. In fact I still like it and I have been wearing it for about three hours now. But I am still a little suspicious. 


By the way, the corset inspiration makes it rather obvious who are the buyers of Possets scents. There must be a large cross over with BPAL, but it seems to me that Possets buyers must be younger in general, and fond of corsets, vampires and Victorian dresses. Which no doubt goes for a lot of BPAListas as well, but BPAL also has a more literary inspiration and it attracts old ladies like me as well as young girls.


Just in case you now want to know how you floss a corset, I found a tutorial here and some information here. Good luck!

Screeching Parrot

I started the day with Titania's partner Oberon, but he was too much a men's cologne for me. The reviews differ on this, to many it's a wonderful scent and some compare it to Old Spice. I must be in the last group. I would not have guessed it from the description: "Orchid, white musk, and bergamot wafting over juniper berries, with a gentle touch of soft, earthy patchouli", and I have no idea what makes it so for me. Perhaps it is the combination of juniper and bergamot, or perhaps the white musk. Whatever it was, it made me go for something different which was the loud parrot.

The day was warm and sunny which goes really well with the tropical Screeching Parrot. I much enjoy its bitterness which is probably more than just the grapefruit.

Golden rum, apricot liquor, pineapple, pomegranate, ginger, brandy, grapefruit, and pink lime.

It is hard to say with notes so obviously created from material different from their name, but I think the lime may add to the bitterness, although lime in itself is not bitter and I have never heard of pink lime. Or it may be any of the alcoholic notes. I don't really smell ginger in the parrot's scent, but it may very well be part of why I love it.

Screeching Parrots must be a real problem outside the tropical paradise scene. I found many websites on the subject and particularly on methods to make the parrot stop his noise. I suppose parrots kept all alone in a cage or on a perch must be bored to a stage that in humans  would be recognised as a psychological condition. Their screeching can probably be compared to a zoo confined polar bear's continuous head movement. But of course it is much more annoying to its surroundings. Which in fact gives the parrot more power than the polar bear.

Titania

BPAL's Titania is part of the Illyria series, a series of scents inspired by the writings of Shakespeare. I bought an imp (sample) of it because I am rehearsing for Purcell's The Fairy Queen which is in fact Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream cut up into parts connected by music that fits the theme. It is a semi-opera which for some time was the English compromis between the Royal wish for opera and the English aversion of the French idea of a play in which people do not speak but sing. 


The name Titania for the Queen of the Fairies was not used before Shakespeare. In traditional folklore she has no name. Shakespeare took the name Titania from Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which it was a name for the daughters of the Titans. After Shakespeare named the Fairy Queen, others (Spencer, Goethe, Tennyson), used the same names for her and her husband King Oberon.

Black Phoenix's Titania is a mix of nocturnal scents, probably for the same reason why Titania is often pictured while fast asleep. She then was enchanted by Puck who took this order from his master Oberon. She would fall in love with the first person she would see when waking up, which was the mechanical Nick Bottom who had been given an ass head as part of the scheme.

A nocturnal bounty of fae dew-kissed petals and pale fruits: white grape, white peach, iced pear, musk rose, sweet pea, moonflower and snapdragon.

The scent started out rather faint but grew in strength until it was rather penetrating and had me wondering if this was something that I could like. I am not sure what the penetrating scent was, as most of the notes mentioned must be accords because there are no essential oils of grape, peach, pear, snapdragon or even sweet pea. But in fact the perfume is rather fitting for the strong willed Titania: the lightness of the fairy is deceiving, after a while she shows her real strength. 

Oak Moon

This is rather out of season for Oak Moon (which was the full moon in November) and in fact I went to my scents to wear Atlas, but as so often I suddenly changed my mind and Oak Moon it was, the first scent I bought directly from the lab and unsmelled too, because for a moon you only have three days, the days of that full moon. But somehow I knew I would love this scent and I was right. The perfume came with the poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson:

 The Oak

Live thy Life,
Young and old,
Like yon oak,
Bright in spring,
Living gold;

Summer-rich
Then; and then
Autumn-changed
Soberer-hued
Gold again.

All his leaves
Fall’n at length,
Look, he stands,
Trunk and bough
Naked strength.

Of course I love oaks in general and one special Oak in particular. And the move from Atlas to Oak Moon was not too strange either, because another reason for me to buy Oak Moon was that it had notes similar to Atlas, which I had not bought when it was available. 

Eternally evolving, blooming in power and grace: acorns, oak leaves, oak bark, and oak sap rising through a mist of traditional lunar oils.

Well, in fact it is only one note, the oak bark, but it was an extra reason to take the risk and buy Oak Moon unsniffed. And I did not regret it.

Purple Spotted Swallowtail

Of the Purple Spotted Swallowtail or Graphium weiskei only the male is black with purple and green spots, the female is brown. It is a butterfly of the highlands of Papua New Guinea, it rarely flies below 1200 m (4000 ft).  The underside of the butterfly has the same spots, but it is brown where the upside is black. There is another Graphium butterfly that looks much like it, the Graphium stresemanni:

The Purple spotted Swallowtail was another butterfly of BPAL's  Metamorphosis of 2011. I chose it because it had a castoreum accord as one of its notes, I was curious about that. Castoreum is a traditional perfume note that was originally taken from the castor sacs of beavers, who used it to mark their territory together with their urine. Modern perfumes usually do not contain ingredients than come from animals and BPAL certainly doesn't use them, so the scent is imitated by a mixture of essential oils or often by a synthetic imitation based on the chemical formula. Since I never smelled real castoreum I can't tell if Beth did a good job on her accord, but I trust that she did. And at first I rather liked the perfume, but after some time it started to annoy me. So when it had faded (and fortunately the warm weather made it fade more rapidly) I put on a different perfume. No castoreum for me, and I am so glad it wasn't the real thing: I have read that these animal ingredients last very long.

Pannychis

It is not easy to find a picture of Pannychis online. In BPAL's description she is an attendant of the goddess Venus, but of course being Greek she is an attendant of Aphrodite, Venus is the Roman Aphrodite after the Roman incorporated her in their own pantheon.

An attendant of the Goddess Venus. She presides over nocturnal pleasure, nighttime festivities, and all the joy and delight that can be found in the darkness. In later ages, it became the name of the all-night festival that closed the Eleusinian Mysteries. Night-blooming jasmine, moonflower, cardamom, sandalwood, black currant, ylang ylang, frankincense and lily.

Pannychis as a perfume has been discontinued, but I managed to get a bottle of it through eBay. She is very strong on the lily scent and that seemed appropriate because all day I had been smelling the wonderful lilies in the bouquet my partner was given after a performance. So when I went to the opera on the evening of the 25th of May it was Pannychis who went with me, not the purple spotted swallowtail butterfly.

Semiramis

Semiramis has been a popular subject for paintings in the style of the one above which was made by Christian Köhler in 1852. I don't know if this was a result of Rossini's opera Semiramide, or if both paintings and opera were prompted by another cause. As Semiramis must have been:

a mythical Assyrian queen, noted for her beauty and wisdom. She was reputed to have conquered many lands and founded the city of Babylon. After a long and prosperous reign she vanished from earth in the shape of a dove and was thereafter worshiped as a deity, acquiring many of the characteristics of the goddess Ishtar. The historical figure behind this legend is probably Sammuramat, who acted as regent of Assyria from 810 to 805 B.C.

I have my doubts if this was how Assyrian Queens dressed in the 9th century before we started counting. I think I prefer this statue:

although I have to admit that it looks more like a dancing queen than like a warrior. But of course even a warrior queen must have had time to dance.  


The perfume was one in the series of Warrior Queens that was issued in 2009 by Black Phoenix Trading Post. The story that comes with Semiramis's perfume is this:

A legendary Assyrian queen, often identified with Sammu-Ramat, the wife of Shamshi-Adad V, she was believed to be the daughter of the goddess Atargatis. Her youth was filled with mythic adventure, and her otherworldly beauty and voluptuous sexuality ensured her two advantageous marriages. When she took the reins of power of Empress of Assyria, she expanded her kingdom by conquering much of Mesopotamia and Asia. She beautified and revitalized Babylon, and implemented improvements in Nineveh that helped to moderate the flow of the Tigris. She was renowned for her military and political prowess, as well as her ferocious and merciless sexual appetite.

HER PERFUME
Red musk, pomegranate, orange blossom, and melon.

The legend of her sexual appetite seems to have sprouted form the story that in order to have her power safe from men making presumptions because they had a relationship with her, she had each lover killed after one night of passion. (source) 


It may be because the perfume has aged for three years now, but unlike the first reviews I read the first note I smell is the melon note and I think the orange blossom, not the red musk or the pomegranate. And in fact the color of the perfume is no longer red (if it ever was), it is a rather dark brown. It has a lot of staying power. I find that scents disappear fast when the weather is warm, but although this is a very warm day Semiramis stayed strong and I only reapplied once.

Mama-Ji

The name Mama-Ji also exists outside Neil Gaiman's book American Gods, but I could not find much more about it than that it is another name for Kali or Kali-Ma (except for one source in which the mother of a family was lovingly called Mama-Ji, but this probably also points to the mother goddess Kali). Of course the perfume Mama-Ji was named after the American incarnation or appearance of Kali as she appears in this book. There are series of perfumes named after characters from several books by Neil Gaiman, I earlier wrote about The Marquis de Carabas from the book Neverwhere.


I have wanted to try Mama-Ji for a long time, but since these series are special there are no regular imps (samples) of any of these scents. In fact I have read American Gods because of Mama-Ji whose perfume I still had not smelled. But I have now, and it is as good as I hoped it would be. I shall one day need a bottle of this.

Shadow saw the old woman, her dark face pinched with age and disapproval, but behind her he saw something huge, a naked woman with skin as black as a new leather jacket, and lips and tongue the bright red of arterial blood. Around her neck were skulls, and her many hands held knives, and swords, and severed heads.

Spices, cardamom, nutmeg, and flowers.

To me Mama-Ji is sweet and spicy and very comforting, obviously more the mother part than the destroyer part.