I've turned off comments on this blog, at least for the time being. I kept getting slammed with comment spam and it's starting to tick me off. It's not that the spam even gets published, but I have to keep deleting it and blocking IP addresses and it's irritating.

I may set up this blog to accept comments with a registration, as my personal weblog does, but really, people rarely comment here, anyway, so it's not like I'm losing anything.

Spammers are the absolute scum of the earth. I think they're worse than perfume counterfeiters because spammers pester EVERYONE, not just those who sell and wear perfume....

My husband has a very bad "nose". He can never tell what perfume I'm wearing. He can't even normally tell if it's a floral or not. The only perfume he recognizes regularly is Diorissimo, and that's only because he doesn't happen to like it!

On the other hand, my four-year-old daughter has a very good nose, and she loves "peefeeume". She'll often ask to wear it, and she recognizes the bottles by sight and can name them. At this point, she can't always name the fragrances by smell, but I think that's only a matter of time, really.

The other day I wore Estée Lauder White Linen (I should do a review of that one; it was my signature fragrance for many years). She smelled it and said, "It's dry." I said, "What do you mean? That it dries on your skin? Or that it smells dry?" And she answered, "It smells dry."

I wouldn't have thought of White Linen that way, but now I must admit, she's got a point...

Perhaps she'll go to Paris and become a perfumer. Or perhaps she'll just end up with a few drawers full of perfume, like her mum...

Note: This is a PDF document. You'll need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader (available for free from Adobe) in order to read it. It can also be a bit slow to load, but it's well worth reading:

The Dangers of Fakes

"Counterfeit perfume can often burn your skin or leave you with a nasty rash. Tests on some fake fragrances have revealed that urine has been used as a stabiliser. Handley Brustad, Senior Trading Standards Officer at Cardiff County Council, reports:” With perfume, you really don’t know what you’re getting. We had one bottle of ‘perfume’ analysed, and found it to be pondwater with a fragrance added.”

Let that be yet another caution on the subject of fake perfumes. Only buy from reputable sellers!

Okay, this is something new to me.

Fragipani, as most people will know, is a tropical flower, but it was also a person! The Marquis Muzio Frangipani was a well known 16th century Italian, a lover of perfumes and fragrances. He, or his perfumers, found out that you could suspend perfume absolu (essence) in alcohol, something that revolutionized the perfume industry.

Presumably, the flower is named after him (well, hey, the macadamia nut is after one John MacAdam, a scientist who went on an expedition in Australia and apparently discovered the nut, so why not name a flower after a perfumer?)