[perfumeblogging] 'Cuir de Russie', Chanel
And now for the opposite side of the coin: Cuir de Russie, the Chanel scent I love, and own an entire bottle of.
thatyourefuse just described this as ‘very posh’, and I agree technically. It is posh in the sense of being sophisticated, elegant, put-together. But it is not clean. I wear it all the time; it is both an ‘I am femme and lovely and designed’ and a ‘fuck you if you thought that didn’t mean I was dangerous’ scent for me. Of all the things I own this is my default. When I give a talk next week in front of several leading scholars in my field, I will be wearing this.
The major notes are leather and iris. Wet, the leather is a little filthy, with a scrim of top-note aldehydes and bergamot; it dries to a rich smoky leather with iris and jasmine and ylang-ylang and rose somewhere hidden in the middle. Fragrantica tells me it is built on tobacco and amber basenotes, and I am not surprised at all.
It has an air to it which reads ‘third-generation New York intelligentsia with money’; kind of a fuck-you intellectual scent, a woman who could be sitting in a Park Avenue apartment but who has instead spent the day at the Hungarian Pastry Shop outside of Columbia University, drinking endless cups of coffee and smoking. She is wearing a leather jacket, perfect lipstick, and last night’s eyeshadow. The seams are straight on her stockings and if you got her dress up over her knees there’d be a laddered run from mid-inner-thigh to crotch. She probably curses in an entirely unexpected language.
I want to be her, pretty much all the time, and thus, I own a bottle of this perfume.
thatyourefuse just described this as ‘very posh’, and I agree technically. It is posh in the sense of being sophisticated, elegant, put-together. But it is not clean. I wear it all the time; it is both an ‘I am femme and lovely and designed’ and a ‘fuck you if you thought that didn’t mean I was dangerous’ scent for me. Of all the things I own this is my default. When I give a talk next week in front of several leading scholars in my field, I will be wearing this.
The major notes are leather and iris. Wet, the leather is a little filthy, with a scrim of top-note aldehydes and bergamot; it dries to a rich smoky leather with iris and jasmine and ylang-ylang and rose somewhere hidden in the middle. Fragrantica tells me it is built on tobacco and amber basenotes, and I am not surprised at all.
It has an air to it which reads ‘third-generation New York intelligentsia with money’; kind of a fuck-you intellectual scent, a woman who could be sitting in a Park Avenue apartment but who has instead spent the day at the Hungarian Pastry Shop outside of Columbia University, drinking endless cups of coffee and smoking. She is wearing a leather jacket, perfect lipstick, and last night’s eyeshadow. The seams are straight on her stockings and if you got her dress up over her knees there’d be a laddered run from mid-inner-thigh to crotch. She probably curses in an entirely unexpected language.
I want to be her, pretty much all the time, and thus, I own a bottle of this perfume.