tigrushka

Though my journey will undoubtedly continue (does it ever really end?), this blog post will be the final part of these small series, at least for the time being.

As far as the unhappiness bit is concerned "the year of vetiver and roses" was, sadly, only the beginning. Things went finally so bad that I was forced to reconsider my life choices, and though leaving a safe, steady, governmental job wasn't an easy choice, I ended up resigning. No salary can ever be big enough...

I started to collect scents in 2002 and to keep stats of what I wore in 2004. The following is a list of the scents I have worn at least twenty times since then.

Because my stats are simple Word documents, I have to go through all of them and do the counting, so it will take some time before this list is complete, but it already gives a picture of which scents have been most "busy".

I will update this at the end of this year and then again at the end of the...

The next turning point in my hobby/passion/addiction came in 2005, which I later named The Year of Vetiver and Roses.

The name might sound poetic, but the times were anything but. Suffice to say that I was deeply unhappy due to various things (most of them connected to the place where I worked then) and consequently started to use scents in a different way than I had before.

Whereas fragrances had been something I wore for my own pleasure, at this point I started to...

Just like I had been a long-time fan of Serge Lutens's make-up artistry, I had also been a big fan of Comme des Garçons clothes and couldn't wait to try the CdG scents. In 2003 it was still impossibly difficult to get samples of them, so I did my first CdG buys blind. CdG is the biggest house in my scent collection, but the first one I tried and got remains my favourite: the original Comme des Garçons EdP. I love the way the house has explored various themes in their several series and produced...

In the beginning of 2003 two important things happened: I got my first credit card and started the Great Chypre Quest.

Many fragrance forum fellows kindly made recommendations and generously provided samples, and I soon learned that the Chypres that were most me were either leather Chypres like Bandit or Jolie Madame or fruit Chypres like Femme, Mitsouko or Y, but I didn't get along with green Chypres like No 19 or Eau de Soir. Not surprisingly, one of my greatest Chypre loves, Le...