My Sin is Shocking

Yeah, I'm still a dork.

I've been collecting, sporadically at best, miniature vintage perfumes. I've got an entire collection, a coffret, of drugstore perfumes from the 50's, used to have minis of the entire Guerlain line, but couldn't get into the Guerlinade that's used in nearly every single one (I think it's a vanilla thing), and more recently purchased eensy beensy bottles of 'My Sin' and 'Shocking'.

My Sin is classified as floral/aldehydic -- well, duh. The aldehydes come screeching out of the bottle like banshees on broomsticks. Scary. The drydown is much nicer than the beginning, taming down to a scent very reminiscent of AquaNet hairspray, which, I suppose, if you grew up in the 60's or 70's, and depending upon whether your mum let you stand in the overspray of her toilette ritual, could be pretty comforting. Otherwise you get to smell like hairspray and ylang-ylang. While applying this stuff onto a scent strip, I accidentally dribbled about a quarter ml onto the last three fingers of my left hand. That was four hours ago. And three scrubby hot-water-'n-soap washes. Still there, shrieking, "I belong on your hair!"

Shocking is, well, pretty frickin' shocking! But I didn't faint or anything like that. It's a chypre/floral and the initial sniff reminded me of that old shoebox in Grandma's closet, the one filled with half-full bottles of whatever the hell struck her fancy. Really overpowering stuff, which was probably just an amalgam of stench created from mostly Avon products and one or two 'classics'. Shocking is just stinky -- like a big, wet, warm blanket of flowers and powder and musk getting whacked up the side of your head. Yeah. Just like that. The drydown, however, is lovely. Musky and sweet. Possibly has civet.

It's been a few hours now since I opened the bottles to test them, and the room is still filled with their essence. I'm trying to be nice here. I may have to take out the trash cans that I threw the scent strips into. And burn off my left hand. My home smells, as my granny used to say, like a whorehouse (and I do wonder how granny knew that).