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Capote, Truman & Evening in Paris
Comme des Garcons LUXE Champaca
Comme des Garcons Series 7 Sweet Nomad Tea
Estee Lauder Private Collection
Estee Lauder Private Collection Jasmine White Moss
Frederic Malle Bigarade Concentrée
Frederic Malle Une Fleur de Cassie
Histoires de Parfums Blanc Violette
Histoires de Parfums Vert Pivoine
In Memory (w/mention of Lanvin Arpege)
L’Artisan Parfumeur Passage d’Enfer
Maitre Parfumeur et Gantier Eau des Iles
More Roses (rose cookie recipe)
My Heart Has Skipped A Beat (summer smells)
Olivier Durbano Black Tourmaline
Parfums Karl Lagerfeld Sun Moon Stars
Perfume Quotes - The English Patient
Sarah Horowitz Parfums' Joy Comes From Within & Beauty Comes From Within
Serge Lutens Five O’Clock Au Gingembre
Serge Lutens Tubereuse Criminelle
Tauer Perfumes: Incense Extrême, Incense Rosé, Lonestar Memories, & Reverie au Jardin
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Parfumerie Generale “Private Collection” Bois de Copaiba
I’ve been meaning to write about Bois de Copaiba, from Parfumerie Generale, for a long time. I bought a decant eons ago but stashed it away after only a couple wearings, thinking it really wasn’t my kind of thing…a fragrance so resinous it bordered on the medicinal. Then one day this past winter, when I was feeling bored, I dug it out and lo, fell head-over-heels in love with it. Yet falling in love with a perfume doesn’t always make the job of writing about it any easier; the images that this scent evokes when I wear it don’t lend themselves to words, but I’ll try my best.
Bois de Copaiba smells like the perfumed remains of an elixir that a medicine man set about making in an ancient forest, where he spent his days pounding ginger root and orange peel and gum arabic and sugar cane on a slab of wood so green, the sap was still oozing from it, before setting the whole hodge-podge to ferment in a wooden bowl. Yes, this is the scent of sticky, spicy resins clinging to a piece of balsam wood.
The notes for this fragrance are listed as crystallized orange pulp, red ginger, amaretto, copahu balm, mahogany wood, myrrh and sandalwood. Ginger is an integral part of the scent, and there is something about its warmth, combined with the piquant, slightly bitter orange and amaretto notes, and the pine-like smell of the copahu balm, that makes me think of amber—and here I’m referring to the fossilized, tree-resin amber, and not the amber of perfumery, which is an entirely different thing. Bois de Copaiba smells so deeply of forest, I suppose that’s why the image comes to mind, especially since its beauty makes me feel like an insect trapped and held enthrall forever inside its golden ooze.
Based on my own experience, newbie perfumistas should sample this scent first before buying. There is a very bracing, medicinal facet to this perfume that I now quite enjoy but didn’t at first. It never fully fades away, even after becoming married to the creamy qualities of the wood; both elements, the medicinal and the creamy, wrap so tightly around each other that it makes for a fairly linear scent, but one with a constant vibration, like the excitement—the mystery, the lifeforce—that exists in prehistoric things.
__________________________________________________________ 1000 Fragrances Scented Salamander
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WAFT by Carol