Comments on: Neil Morris Fetish; Boudicca Wode; Ava Luxe Kretek

By: Nathan Branch

Nathan Branch — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:22:53 +0000

Oh, believe you me — Dark Earth deserves its double meh designation!
I’m kind of afraid of the blue Wode edt. Have you seen the photo ads for it? They’re kind of disturbing . . .

By: Marin

Marin — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:02:19 +0000

Bless you… both for going meh on Neil Morris and for the phrase “double meh.”
p.s. — I kinda want to see the blue stuff. Just to see it.

By: TaraT

TaraT — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 16:12:49 +0000

Now now, I wasn’t THAT hard on you. And you know I appreciate you.

By: Nathan Branch

Nathan Branch — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 20:55:47 +0000

Oh . . . OH! So, it’s Thanksgiving, and THIS is what I get? Scorn heaped upon the inadequacies of the Movable Type format?
*cries buckets of tears into his turkey gravy*
Mmmmm, sorrow is oh so salty!

By: TaraT

TaraT — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 20:41:28 +0000

Yeah, that’s what I’ve been resorting to doing. I just hoped there was an easier solution… the systems that Now Smell This and Andy Tauer’s blog use are a bit more user friendly, but I’m not sure if you have the choice of a different system. Just thought I’d mention it, in case it was a question of adjusting a setting or something simple.

By: Nathan Branch

Nathan Branch — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 16:47:40 +0000

Agh! Sorry to hear about the captcha issue — as far as I know, there isn’t anything I can do about it. It’s a Movable Type thing. What I can suggest is that, before typing the captcha, first copy your reply so that if it gets wiped out, you can just paste it back in before trying the captcha again.
Not much help, I know.

By: TaraT

TaraT — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 16:36:34 +0000

Like you Nathan, I have pretty much given up on dept store fragrances for the same reason. It’s never going to be true love with a commercial release so I don’t even bother.
As for Ava Luxe, I have an old bottle of Cafe Noir and a bottle of Red Tara (for obvious reasons) but I have neither the patience nor the energy to dig through umpteen scents trying to find the few gems in the lot.
BTW, is there a way to fix your Captcha letter recognition thing so that if you type the wrong letters it doesn’t erase your whole entry and make you start all over again? The characters are actually rather hard to read and often I make a mistake and it wipes everything out.

By: Nathan Branch

Nathan Branch — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 09:47:13 +0000

Waiting for Andy Tauer to toss you a salad bowl is probably a good idea. I have no idea what’s up with the Wode fragrance, but it does seem to have a tendency to explode from the bottle, and it was fairly messy to deal with.
While I appreciate some of the Ave Luxe scents, I do think the line would be better served if the perfumer wasn’t in a complete rush to shove the latest fad-smell out into the market. Stepping back, taking a deep breath, and perhaps spending more time in the creation process might save us all from future Kreteks, and could only benefit the reputation of the line as a whole.

By: ScentScelf

ScentScelf — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 06:26:23 +0000

(Looking over comments…) Hey, you two are more fun than an exploding vial circus!
As for the reviews, I actually kind of liked the idea of smelling like you rolled around in a salad…that’s an option I’d like to have on my shelf…but between the mechanics of the vials and the “meh” factor of the execution of the juice, I’ll wait for somebody like Andy Tauer to serve me fennel in a perfume bottle.
Sorry to hear about the Ava Luxe; I have a couple “vintage” (relative to the age of the manufacturer), and they are fine. (Yes, Incense Rose is one of them; so is Vamp.) I hear what you are saying, though…I wonder what kind of pressure she feels to “diversify,” or if that’s just a habit that’s akin to buying bulimia? (If it is, maybe it will slow down, as has some of our buying manias…)

By: Nathan Branch

Nathan Branch — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 23:55:57 +0000

“Bulimic buying” . . . LOL! That does explain a few of the bottles that stare back at me from the cupboard depths. I look at them and think, “What in THE h*ll was I smoking when I purchased THAT?”
Regarding champagne tastes, reading Chandler Burr’s ‘The Perfect Scent’ kind of ruined me as far as mainstream scents are concerned. He went into great detail as to how cheap the corporate heads are and how they try to make the perfumes as inexpensively as possible, giving woefully low budgets to the subsequently horrified perfumers while still expecting them to accomplish the task.
I’ve pretty much avoided mainstream offerings since then, not out of any snob attitude, but because I know they’re deliberately not working with the best tools available to them.