exam passed!

on monday i passed my final oral exam with the best result possible: i go a 1,0 which is the best one can achieve at a german university. guess who's happy now!

i also think that after passing so successfully i am worth one of those:




















she wood by dsquared2 (fresh! woods! violets!)



















un jardin en méditerranée by hermès (fresh! figs! woods!) it did occur to me that hermès must be my favourite perfume house. no wonder with all those minimalist masterpieces by jean-claude ellena..




















bvlgari eau parfumée au thé vert extreme (warm! tea! woods!) another masterpiece by jean-claude ellena..




















eau de cartier by cartier (fresh! violets! woods! - oh. didn't i say something like that before? i do think so...)
if i just could decide which one!!

silver mountain water

today i'm smelling of blackcurrants and green tea. and a little citrus also, but just a little.

while sitting at home, studying my head off, i test another perfume: creed's silver mountain water. if ever you want to smell like any choice celebrity (who hasn't come up with their own boring stuff yet), creed is your brand. they make classy interesting fragrances, always inspired by the one or other famous person, preferably royalty.

the one i'm trying right now is supposed to have david bowie as its godfather. now, i'm not a huge bowie-fan, and feel rather indifferent towards his music, but i sure like this smell. it is fresh and clean and a bit fruity and a bit metallic and i think it also must have some iris in it. if it just wasn't so expensive...

expensive is the right word: the other day i also dared to step into one of those sacred halls of highclass consumerism, the hermès store in hamburg, to try out one of their exclusive hermessence fragrances. creed is cheap in comparison to those bottles, trust me, i almost wish i never went in there. but. i did.

the people there were really nice (i did look my best that day also) and let me sniff the scent i wanted to try. and no cheap papercards here: i got a lovely grossgrain ribbon to take home with me. then i asked to try it on skin, which of course i was allowed to, and in the end i went out with a nice and generous sample which i will use very carefully.

the fragrance i tried is called osmanthe yunnan and smells, well, like a nice cup of tea with some orange blossoms besides. as you all might know, i love tea. i love the smell of tea. especially light black tea. this is how tea should smell. sadly enough, it fades quicker than one would like it to, but i would put up with that if i had the spare money. which i don't.

(the pictures are borrowed from:
osmoz.com and creedfragrances.co.uk)

the sniff experience

now, as you can imagine from the title (and from reading some of my previous posts), i have not been idle during those last two weeks of non-posting. indeed, i have been haunting different perfume stores (mainly the big turquoise one, but also three or four different ones in oslo, which actually were not sorted well - one of the ladies there didn't even know hermès! now, i don't expect somebody working in a perfume store to know every single fragrance in the world and every perfume house in the world, but hermès is not the smallest amongst them and doesn't exist only since yesterday... well. mainly they featured celebrity stuff and the general j'adore by dior and the one or other chanel.) and sniffing loads of bottles. i did also test quite a few on skin, most of them after reading a review or two, and i'll try to give you some of the highlights - and some of the failures...

after this post i was recommended to test dolce and gabbana's "light blue" and also chanel's "chance eau fraiche". i personally think that chanel fragrances smell of old ladies with pink poodle hair, and while i don't have anything against these ladies, i just can't stand the smell on my skin. "chance" started off with a nice fresh note, but the rest felt just unbearable..
"light blue", on the other hand, also started nicely and fresh and stayed fresh - and turned into an ugly air-refreshener's smell (think a blend of "sea breeze" and "green apple") after half an hour on my skin. which was sad as i liked the opening a lot. not such a promising beginning maybe..

the next fragrances i turned to was bvlgari's "eau parfumé au thé ..." series, and as the red one didn't appeal, i tried both thé blanc and thé vert. while i don't really recall the blanc version as anything remarcable, i love the warmth of "thé vert". it feels simple and elegant, it is not sweet at all and just perfect for winter. the bad news here was the lasting power: it vanished after an hour, as it is an eau de cologne with a very light concentration. the good news is that there is an "extreme" version which stays an afternoon plus half an evening and even survives a flight from oslo to hamburg (i applied some at the tax free on my way back). so this one is definitely something i will want to own!

what came next? i had read about this one norwegian perfume, "laila", which at some points had been recommended as a nice substitute for an everyday floral such as "j'adore" (which i actually like). i took the chance to try it on spot in norway, and was way disappointed. it was boring and had a weird buttery tone inbetween which i didn't like at all..
the same day though, i tried prada's "infusion d'iris" which turned out to smell special and soft and powdery and had a lovely wooden base. it felt very well balanced and gave me a feeling that you can have after a nice bath with some lovely soap. it felt really clean. lovely.

as i know that i sometimes do like "male" perfumes just as much as "female" ones (or even more), i thought i'd try the male version of the prada fragrance. what a desaster. the review said that "infusion d'homme" contained the same ingrediences as "infusion d'iris", but in different amounts. thus, i found out that i do not like too much incense in my scent. the thing smelled buttery and ugly, well, in the way that cold incense smells. ush. another iris-scent which went just the same way (though i don't know if there is any incense in it) was hermès "hiris". nothing for me...

so. enough perfume for today. there sure is more to come!

an evening in hamburg

yesterday i went to hamburg to sniff perfumes, to look out for those frames in grey and to meet with a fellow blogger, ulrike, who writes Dotti's Dots. we had a great time at the café paris, drinking beer and talking about one thing and another and another and everything, basically. sadly enough (for me, as it is happy for her) she is moving away soon, but as the world is small and the internet makes it even smaller i guess we'll meet again. i mean, she has been to a restaurant in the little village where my godmother comes from, and that's a place nobody else i've ever met knows - apart from those living in the region, that is...

about the frames. well. i had a list of seven different opticians carrying chanel-frames. two of those where in a street i didn't find, two didn't exist any more and the other three didn't have that model. so. in the end, i found frames in what seemed to me the same greyish tone, tried them and asked the optician to take a picture of me:

























the lighting there was weird, i think they looked better in real life than here, but i am quite convinced that the colour is not as nice as the dark red one.

i sniffed some perfumes and had some on my wrists as well. i got a sample of un jardin sur le nil by hermès, and sniffed the classic acqua di parma eau de cologne. not my thing at all. then i tried acqua di parma's fico di amalfi, which reminded me a lot of hermès' un jardin en méditerranée and which was really nice, and i also tried a classic dior fragrance, diorissimo, which is lily of the valley through and through. very much spring, i'd say, nothing for winter. but nice. i'll go on searching and trying and sniffing and smelling, it's a lot of fun to explore the world of fragrances...

a fragrance for me

not only have i begun to search for a pair of new frames, i also started to look (and sniff) out for a new fragrance. the world of fragrances is not as scary as the world of make up has been for a long time, but it is just as huge and seemingly unorganized. where to start? what to look for? i have real difficulties saying what i like and what i dislike in a scent. i know it when i smell it.

so. here's my history. the first edt i ever owned was davidoff's "cool water". i got a sample at some point, didn't even like it so much at first but it grew on me and so i bought a small bottle which lasted me for about two years. then i looked for something in that direction and ended up with kenzo's "l'eau par kenzo". i still got about half the bottle left. a little later i got to smell "eau de cartier" which i really really liked but somehow i ended up buying cartier's "declaration". which i like a lot - on some days.

i finally realized that i really need more fragrances to actually be able to use one every day, which i really would like to. it's just that i prefer going without if i don't have a fragrance i like for the situation or mood i'm in.

the difficult question then was, or is, where to start with all those gazillions of bottles out there? the answer is probably rather simple, ask a friend.
my friend rana had talked about a fragrance she really likes at the moment, so i thought i'd just try it out. it was one of a series of three perfumes by hermès, "un jardin en méditerrannée". i thought it was interesting but maybe not so much me, so i tried another from the series as i found the idea of a garden fascinating. "un jardin sur le nil" felt like it suited me much better, and i am seriously considering it (but first i'll have to try it out a few more times. it is so important to try fragrances more than once before buying, as you may like them one day but detest another). i still want to try out the third one, "un jardin après le mousson" which another friend of mine is quite in raptures about.

as i also want to know what it is that i like in a perfume, i started reading reviews and one thing led to another, i found other interesting descriptions of scents worth trying.

one that i got a sample of today is another by hermès, "kelly caleche". it is not at all like anything i have ever had on my skin before and i couldn't stop sniffing my wrist since i put it on. it has a light sense of leather somewhere within a cloud of flowers. it made me feel sexy. and sophisticated. and very feminine. just the thing. i guess it's the first totally feminine fragrance i ever really liked on myself.

what do you like in a fragrance? and what do you detest? would you recommend anything especially, from what you know about me through my blog?

i hereby declare it to be unisex!

last friday, on my trip to oslo, i couldn't get myself not to walk through the tax-free at bremen's airport and check out their perfumes. actually, i had been looking for some new fragrance for quite some time now. i am still really content with my "eau par kenzo", which feels sporty and refreshing, but already last winter i felt i could need something new, something that felt a bit warmer, more spicy and less fresh. for some time, i had been walking about "l'eau de cartier" (i guess i got a thing for watery perfumes, my first one being "cool water" by davidoff, the second one the above namend water by kenzo and now cartier's water..), which i also found at the tax free and thought i'd test it one more time, but..

directly next to the flacon, they had another one, as well by cartier, "déclaration", which i thought i might test as well - and it tested good. real good. i liked it so much that i bought it, more or less directly (well, after consulting a total stranger by putting my wrist under her nose and asking "what do you think??"). as i myself am rather untalented in describing perfumes, i quote some online shop selling the thing: "A fragrance introduced by the sensuality of birch wood, bergamot and bitter orange; juniper wood and artemisia mingle with cardamom, underlined by cold spices for the middle note; the base note finally emerges, sensually, releasing oak, cedarwood and vetiver, as an echo of the birch wood."
anyway, it feels warm and spicy and elegant enough to use for theatre or opera (and university as well=) and those who i asked all thought it fitted me well. the only thing that really made me wonder now was that when i was looking for a description of the fragrance, all onlineshops seemed to think it was a perfume for men??
i guess they all got something wrong, so now i hereby declare it to be unisex!!