Perfume Pen Pals: Nez a Nez Bouche Baie and Figues et Garcons

Dan,

Now what about these Nez à Nezssss? Suddenly, there are 59 (or, to be more specific, 10) of these NàN perfumes cluttering up the counter at Scent Bar, and the volume is daunting. But I started methodically working my way through them, and bizarrely, I really like a completely fruity-tutti-sweetie one: Bouche Baie. Get a load of these crazy listed notes:

Blackcurrant, blackberry, passion fruit, orange blossom, jasmine, cherry, peach, coconut, vanilla, almond, honey

And dig this informative copy on the Nez à Nez website re Bouche Baie:

"...our berries do the Indian swim and whisper marmalade stories in a bath of flowers."

OMG -- me too!

Forget Sean John I Am King -- Bouche Baie really is the missing Harajuku Lover! It’s a Mai Tai mush from which I could not even begin to contemplate isolating individual notes, other than lollypop-marinating-in-melted-lollypop-juice accord.

At the same time, there’s a certain creamy starchiness that keeps this candy mack truck from jackknifing and spilling its cargo all over the highway. Any way you slice it, Bouche Baie smells like fruit-punch boiled sweets, but it gives you teenage kicks without the usual shrill white musk hangover.

The youth of today need to know about Bouche Baie! Bouche Baie could be their perfume hero! If only it were available in a $25 perfume oil roll-on pen at Sephora, instead of costing hundreds of bucks at ritzy-titsy boutiques.

I was making such a foofaraw over Bouche Baie that I geed-up another Scent Bar customer, an arty Chinese girl with a giant fish tattoo on her neck, to buy it, along with NàN Figues et Garçons.

Figues et Garçons was great, too: a sharp, herby fig that’s brisk and green rather than syrupy.

Katie

Katie,

That fruity/sweet Nez à Nez looks appalling on the LuckyScent website. Is there any secret ingredient that makes itself apparent when you spray it on, something that causes some friction, wrinkles some shirts, re-arranges some furniture, anything? Because its combination of ingredients makes me want to commit hara-kiri (though, admittedly, I'm a little fragile to begin with).

As for Figues et Garcons, or Figues et anything, I learned my lesson early: one fig perfume is enough and, for me, that's Diptyque Philosykos, which I never wear. Which either indicates that one fig perfume is more than enough, or that Philosykos isn't the one for me.

Either way, I don't like fig perfumes enough to find out. Though I do like fig candles. Fig is the one category of scented candle that never makes me grumpy. So it's obviously not the scent of fig I don't like, I apparently just don't like the scent of fig on my person. And there's a long list of things that falls within that category: dogs that shed, watermelon, Ernest Borgnine....

Dan