Day 50 ~ One Year, One Nose

This is beginning to be exhausting -- for two reasons. One, I'm behind in posting, and two, I'm always the kid who couldn't wait for recess so I could go out and make daisy chains and hide the other kids' soccer ball (mostly because they found it such fun to bounce it off the back of my head on the way out to the playground).

Last fall I received a 1.7 oz bottle of perfume from a niche company called Crow Water + Perfume, named after Aesop's Fable "The Crow and The Pitcher". Crow Water's philosophy is that its perfumes are made without alcohol (water-based), without parabens, and without phthalates. The scent I received was #3 Enchanted + Lily. It was a bad, bad day for me when I opened the package and sprayed the perfume. I was kind of grumpy and irritated, so I didn't give the perfume a fair shake at first. I liked it, but I was preoccupied and busy and just really out of it so I shelved it. When I began this project, however, I literally went to the walls here in the studio -- the entire room is paneled about halfway up to the top of the nine-foot walls, and a shelf sits atop the top end of the paneling, and that's where all my perfume collection and perfume bottles and rusticos and antique and vintage finds are sitting. And there it was, that big bottle of Enchanted + Lily, just waiting.

One thing is for certain, for the price, you cannot go wrong with this company's offerings ~ $38 USD for 1.7 ounces of handmade, hand bottled, artisan niche perfume. Enchanted + Lily is a beautiful fantasy scent redolent of white flowers in the moonlight ~ jasmine and lily-of-the-valley. Fairly linear, the scent maintains the white flower theme for several hours before fading very, very slowly into soft white flowers with a hint of sweet leafy greens. Something you must know is that while the scent is strong, it isn't harshly so. Quite a lot of scents that follow the lily/jasmine theme tend toward an odd sharpness that screams discount-drug-store-cheap, but definitely not this brand. And the reason for the smooth, seamless, silkiness of the scent may come from the fact that no alcohol of any kind is used in the production of this perfume. When sprayed, this perfume doesn't mist off into the air around your skin, it shoots straight on and sticks. You will find a shallow puddle of scent cleaving to your skin once you've sprayed it on, enough to pass around to other parts of the body. The skin feel is definitely different from alcohol-based perfumes. Crow Water + Perfumes are only slightly tacky at first, then dry off completely within 5 seconds or so, leaving your skin a little softer than before. The scent lasts for hours (12+)

I recommend Crow Water + Perfume if you're not entirely into all-natural scents, want a bargain for your hard-earned dough, and are searching for an alternative to alcohol-based perfumes.