Waft Custom Perfumes

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The Lair has been pretty quiet lately, so I decided to order a custom fragrance from Waft as an experiment. I have been looking for something sort of gloomy, goth, unusual, so this seemed like a good way to get a scent like that. (I got a couple of discovery kits from Lucky Scent for Christmas and they were all duds on me!)

There are four main things Waft asks for, so that they can develop your custom fragrance:

  • First you are asked to select a perfume you like, as a kind of guideline or pointer for them to understand your taste. I selected Marilyn Miglin’s Pheromone, which (if you have read my older posts) you’ll know is my best old standby. It does have a somewhat warm and hypnotic feeling to it, although to me it’s more like a sophisticated evening fragrance for an extravagant upscale party. (But: I do wear it as a day fragrance quite frequently.)
  • Next, select three olfactory notes from a fairly basic list. Several options are available in each category. For example, the “Green & Aquatic” category has ocean, green leaves, or green tea for the choices. For mine, I chose green leaves, incense, and black tea. My nose considers incense and black tea to be “darker” notes and green leaves to be more sprightly.
  • They also ask you to name the fragrance. Since I was going for the dark and goth scent, I chose the name “Cemetery.” Sounds pretty dark and gloomy, right?
  • Lastly, there is a comments box at checkout for any other notes that a buyer may wish to mention. I said, “Prefer a warm & dark scent, not floral or fruity.”

All this, taken together, I felt was pretty strongly indicative of the style of fragrance I was hoping to receive. If I were writing marketing text for my desired scent, it would be something about a cemetery in summer, at midnight, with a dying fire before me, incense tears in the coals of the fire, and sage bushes nearby, while I drink black tea.

Today my Waft order arrived and I hurried to put it on…and it smells like jasmine and coconut. Like a light, ephemeral jasmine-scented sunscreen! It’s airy and floral and fruity and sprightly, with no sense at all of incense or black tea. It’s quite similar to Veronique Gabai’s “Sur la Plage,” although that is more sophisticated than this Waft fragrance.

Waft also included 2 sample vials of layering fragrances to wear with this. I tested the one marked “Elegant” and it smells like any generic drugstore fragrance, fake sharp floral with that watermelon Jolly Rancher scent underneath that I loathe so much. The other sample vial is marked “Fresh,” which wasn’t anything I asked for. I’ll try it in the morning but am not expecting much.

So, caveat emptor to anyone shopping at Waft! If I had sprung for the full-sized bottle, they would refund me my money, but I got the smaller 15ml bottle, so I’m stuck.

Good luck on your fragrance quests!

Coming back on 3/13 for an edit. I contacted Waft, specifically to complain that this fragrance was fruity and floral despite what I’d explicitly written in the checkout notes. Their first response said that my selection of three notes from their list was simply a guideline to the perfumer of the type of thing I like. It didn’t mean they would use my three notes in the finished fragrance. So, bleah; they should say that on the website. They offered to take this order back as an exchange which they would try to get more accurate. However, if I were to decide I didn’t like the exchanged fragrance, I’d be stuck with it. They won’t offer more than one redo.

Since I didn’t want to be bothered with the post office and stuff, I gave the bottles to a friend and wrote back to Waft that we could close the issue. But I also pointed out that my checkout notes said “Not fruity or floral” and yet the finished fragrance had jasmine and blackcurrant in it! I suggested they fix up the site so it’s clear that the three notes will not be in the final product, then declined a redo, thanked them, and mentally drew a line under the incident.

I dealt with the same customer service rep for all these replies. She wrote back to thank me for my suggestions and to once more say they would like to redo it for me. Once again I declined, because of the fear of getting another fruity, floral mess. (For fruity and floral I’m still in love with HoS Whispers of Enlightenment.) So I pointed out one more time that the risk of disappointment was not worth it.

In the end, she refunded my money in full, without me needing to send the perfume back. For me this was the best-case outcome, but I’ll still never risk Waft again. I’m actually considering taking online perfumery courses so that I can end up creating this vision of the perfect somber fragrance!

Tom Ford Lost Cherry

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Remember an earlier post, from 2019, in which I compared a couple cherry scents? At the time I really thought Lost Cherry was the best, except for the price. Well, Sephora had it in the small atomizers this season, so I bought one for myself, intending to have a real cherry wallow over New Year’s.

First spray: Fantastic. I mean, this was the Sour Cherry Pie of my youth, one of my favorite memories, and it did make me get a little drooly. Really remarkable. I just sat on the bed and repeatedly sniffed my wrist, floating on a tide of summer thoughts.

Two minutes later it was time to finish dressing, so I gave it one last sniff and felt that it now had a kind of marzipan undertone. This is not bad, although I’m not a fan of marzipan in general. It was still harmonious and still had the sour cherry zing!

Sadly, by the time I was dressed, the scent had dried down into a distinct and unpleasant “cherry pipe tobacco” smell (which, if you’ve ever smelled it, you’ll understand is a very artificial and heavy scent). The word “disgusting” floated through my consciousness and I immediately went to wash it off, applying Whispers of Enlightenment afterwards to counteract it.

This was disappointing in the extreme, since it had been in my mind all this time as such an excellent scent. It’s going back to Sephora.

Well, happy new year to all, and may you have a lovely-scented life! I have run out of new fragrances to test, but will be checking out more of them eventually. Hope your 2021 is better than 2020 was.

The Jo Malone Advent Calendar

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I just opened the last of the drawers in this year’s calendar. This was the first year I was able to have this treat, and it will be the last.

You may remember one of my earliest posts in which I complained of companies using fancy packaging. I’m sure part of the high cost of this advent calendar is due to the box. But you can’t really have an advent calendar without a fancy box, so I was prepared to accept it. Still, a less-fancy box would have been quite acceptable. They’re not really useful for anything I can think of, afterwards.

The cost of the gift box was $450. It contained 24 mini sizes of Jo Malone products. If these had been rarities, or more generous sizes, it might have been worth the cost. But many of the items in my box were the type and size offered free during checkout at Sephora, with VIP points or a code. Jo Malone also occasionally offers these sizes as freebies with a code, when ordering from their site. All the colognes, for example, were the 9ml size.

And very few of the fragrances in the box were unusual. I got multiples of several fragrances: English Pear & Freesia (cologne, a candle, a soap); Blackberry & Bay (body cream, cologne); Lime, Basil & Mandarin (hand cream, cologne); Red Roses (cologne; bath gel); Wild Bluebell (cologne, bath gel). Luckily all of those are scents I like (but: they are also scents I already owned). Note that these are all very standard JM items. There was also a Peony & Blush Suede candle and cologne; this scent is easily available, but I don’t like that one.

There were in total 4 candles, one body cream, one hand cream, one soap, two bath gels, and all the rest were colognes (five of those from the Cologne Intense collection). I was really hoping to try some of the interesting scents that I’ve not yet tried: Earl Grey & Cucumber, or Pomegranate Noir, or Vintage Gardenia, or even Black Vetyver Cafe. Nope. None of those were included.

For this complete set as is, including the box and taking into account the actual contents, I would be content to pay $200-250. Not $450. Next year I’ll look for someone else’s offering. But if you need a swish gift for a Jo Malone fan, this may suit your needs. They’re still in stock as of today.

Incense Fragrances

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A young man entered the seminary with every intention of becoming a priest. However, he met a woman and became obsessed with her, and ended up leaving the seminary. Givenchy Encens Divin is the worldly and knowing woman he was obsessed with; she may also be the Pheromone woman from an earlier post. He is making his way in the world, but everything he does is colored by his need to attract this woman.

Until today, Encens Divin was my top-rated Catholic incense scent…

This morning I tried a sample of Heeley Cardinal, and that tops the Givenchy. It’s cleaner with no unusual undertones (Encens Divin had a vanilla note at the outset which was off-putting, though it dried down quickly). Cardinal is a kind and noble woman that our mythical seminarian has spotted. For this woman, he is happy to view her from afar, and think pure thoughts about her.

Also, Encens Divin appears to be discontinued so I was looking for a replacement anyway.

Thoughts on House of Sillage

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This line is carried at Neiman Marcus, which is what intrigued me about them. However, for such a high-priced product, I’ve seen a lot of things that really surprise me, mostly in their own website’s marketing.

House of Sillage makes a line of “Signature Fragrances” and a line called “Whispers” (Whispers of Innocence, Whispers of Enlightenment, and so on). You’d expect the Whispers fragrances to be softer and possibly more ephemeral than the Signature line, but in all the ones I’ve tried so far, it’s the exact opposite. The Signature fragrances wear off in less than an hour, but the Whispers ones stay viable for several hours.

There was a typographical error on my vial of Whispers of Strength, which was misspelled as “Whispers of Strenght.” I emailed them and pointed this out and did get a nice thank-you. On the header for the Whispers travel sizes, there is a photo of a Whispers of Strength vial, and it too is misspelled. I would be a little more attentive to my spelling if this were my company.

There is also a strange choice of words on the Whispers of Time page. The large photo says “Live in the Moment for the Future is what Motives Us.” I’m sure they mean “Motivates” us, but again, it appears to be a grammatical slip-up. Not to mention the sheer illogic of the statement. If you’re living in the moment, that’s now, not in the future!

There are two HoS fragrances I’m obsessing over (so far): Whispers of Enlightenment and Chevaux d’Or. I also quite like Holiday. Eventually I will probably take the plunge on all of these, but I do wish the website people would get their act together and clean up the mistakes.

Jo Malone English Pear & Freesia

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English Pear & Freesia is an older teen boy with a flexible modern outlook.  He was born a boy and is fine with that, but likes to smell and wear interesting fragrances, even if they are girly.

To me, this is a nice, generic, floral, sort of the floral version of the “children on the beach” scents I wrote about earlier this week. It wouldn’t be a repeat purchase for me because there are a few I like a lot more for that soft floral feeling.

House of Sillage Whispers of Enlightenment

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Whispers of Enlightenment is a girl in her early 20s, going to a county fair with her best friend, who is a guy.  They have a wild and happy time, laughing and playing the games in the midway and riding the rides and eating funnel cakes, and somewhere, during this evening, she realizes that she loves him, and that he has loved her but feared to show it outright.

This may be my second-favorite fragrance ever. Sweet, slightly foody, vibrant. I’ve noticed a lot of HoS fragrances have a distinct strawberry note, and this one is no exception, but it is excellently balanced with other notes to make an exciting fragrance.

Jo Malone Red Roses

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Merry Christmas!

Red Roses is a hustle-and-bustle waitress in a metropolitan tea room.  She is energetic and hobnobs happily with the customers, and she is efficient and gets high tips.  When she goes home at the end of the day, she simply wants to put her feet up with a quiet cup of tea in the garden, and relax.

This is one of my repeat fragrances. I’m on my second bottle. In summer, it tends to smell like lemony black tea (which is still nice), but in winter it does actually smell very much like red roses. I had a large rose garden at our last home, and this helps me recapture memories of it.

House of Sillage – Various Fragrances

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Here are some comments on various HoS fragrances that I can’t even come up with reasonable vignettes for, because they have nothing uplifting to mention.

Cherry Garden: a generic “perfume” smell with nothing distinctive about it.

Disney (Mickey Mouse): another generic perfume smell. This is a good thing because I can’t stand the cult of Mickey Mouse that has been forced upon the public. If this had been a fantastic fragrance I would have had a hard time deciding whether to buy it or not.

Love is in the Air: like cake that has had perfume sprayed on it. Not a good combo.

Nouez Moi: sort of stiff and foresty with a layer of perfume over the top. It doesn’t blend well on me.

Passion de l’Amour: dries down to what I consider a standard “drugstore fragrance.” Sharp, like watermelon Jolly Ranchers, with that artificial note that so many cheap fragrances have.

Tiara: another generic perfume smell. Nice enough, but nothing distinctive.

Whispers of Guidance: another drugstore style.

Whispers of Innocence: another generic, soft perfume.

Whispers of Truth: unfortunately, on me, this beautiful citrus fragrance is tainted by that rubbery/musty smell that Band-Aids used to have. I haven’t needed one in decades so am not sure whether they still smell that way, but this fragrance is definitely not for me.

Whispers of Strength: grassy, with a “floral” scent – not any particular note, just as if I’m standing in a general flower garden.  Started out very nice. Unfortunately after half an hour it dries down to something like sweet hot milk with Band-Aids!

Note that for me, the ones marked “generic perfume” are things I might choose to wear again, at least until the sample vials run out, but the ones marked “drugstore perfume” are absolutely off my list.