Going Quantum: My Perfumed CNY Adventures

Title totally misleading. But I do have some stuff to say about quantum thingies, perfume (as always), and CNY.

This CNY has seen me behaving like a big girl. This was largely thanks to the incessant nagging of my colleagues who insisted that I Absolutely Had to get Lim Chee Quan bah kwa for my 'future mother-in-law' (their words, not mine) after they saw what I had originally planned to give (cookies). So after much haggling ('Can I give 500gm?' 'Too little!' '800?' 'Too little!' 'But very expensive! Ok ok 1kg lar.') we trotted down to Lim Chee Guan after work only to learn that the sliced pork had already been sold out, and we had to settle for the inferior (oh tragedy!) golden coin one. And even for that we had to queue for about an hour! An HOUR! But, as my more experienced and wiser colleague sagely noted, Lim Chee Guan is more than bah kwa; it has become a symbol of patience and virtue. Buy 5 cans of abalone also not better than 1kg of Lim Chee Guan bah kwa! 5 cans of abalone just use money can buy already, but Lim Chee Guan bah kwa still got to queue up and then maybe queue finish already still don't have.

It's things like this that make me realise how much I enjoy where I am now. Sometimes I think, I could work here forever. Sometimes.

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Today I dropped by the discounter near my workplace, and to my huge surprise, discovered a gem of a perfume. A banged-up box of Guerlain's Vol De Nuit in parfum form(!!!!!) was sitting alone in a crowd of Guerlain's Samsara. Now I confess that before today I'd never smelled this perfume before, and I actually knew very little about it. BUT what I knew was that this was a perfume that was launched in 1933, has since been discontinued, and is nearly impossible to find in parfum, especially in Singapore. I also knew that parfum extrait in general tends to be horrendously expensive compared to EDT & EDP. And here was this little perfume sitting calmly on the shelf selling for SGD39!

Ok, so the box is a little discoloured (read: very) and torn and even a bit mouldy. But I got the salesperson to open the box, and inside was an absolutely charmingly retro black and gold box, with the 8ml gold bottle nestled inside. So of course I jumped on it, hugged it, announced it was mine, and got a discount of two measly dollars. I confess my purchase had nothing to do with the actual juice. It's just the sheer joy of unexpectedly discovering something old and pretty and expensive and has a bit of romantic and tragic history to it, and being able to buy it for practically nothing (haha ok not really), and I would really have regretted it if I'd let it go. (I sometimes have the same reaction to really old books, but I'm a bit more wary with books because I am convinced the old ones are all infested with gigantic silverfish).

For an idea of what my perfume looks like, and how much it costs online, look here. The picture is on the right. It's selling online at $100+ for 8ml! Needless to say I'm reasonably pleased with myself.

In other perfume-related news, I am seriously considering setting aside a perfume fund. This arises from a recent visit to Sephora, where I fell madly in love (again) with Sisley Soir de Lune, and fell madly in love (for the first time) with Aqua di Parma Iris Nobile and Sisley Eau de Campagne. All of which cost about SGD200 each.

I think I'm rather fond of the iris note. Iris perfumes (Prada Infusion d'Iris, Hermes Hiris, Iris Nobile) tend to sit well with me.

I also like rose perfumes, but I think those are a little harder to do well. I don't like Bvlgari's Rose Essentialle because it's a little too sweet to be a real rose perfume for me. I've got Agent Provocateur, but oh man, that is a rose perfume with a huge wallop. It is the only perfume that I don't spray directly on my skin because it's too damn strong. Instead, I spray into the air and walk through the cloud of perfume. For most perfumes doing that just wastes the perfume, because the smell doesn't stick to you. But for Agent Provocateur it's a totally different story. I love AP, but it's incredibly strong, plus it's a rose perfume with a dirty/skanky note, all of which makes it not-so-polite. Thing with rose perfumes is it's too easy to be a) boring; b) old lady-ish; c) too strong; or d) too candied for my taste. But Sisley's Soir de Lune is such a wonderful gem of a perfume. It is a perfectly rounded rose perfume with no sharp edges; it's incredibly incredibly well-made, very sophisticated, and just all in all wonderful. At this juncture I should also inform you guys that I have a bad habit of sniffing congratulatory wreaths as I walk past unsuspecting newlly-opened shops. I especially love to sniff the lilies and roses, but this makes me rather embarrassing company, methinks.

As for Sisley's Eau de Campagne - For the longest time I've been looking for my perfect 'green' perfume, and this is it. Some green perfumes are nice but rather boring (Guerlain Vetiver), some are too strange for me (The Different Company Sel de Vetiver), and some are too sweet. But Eau de Campagne evokes freshly cut grass, the damp earth after the rain, and salty ocean breezes. It works. It works dammit.

Incidentally, I also love Annick Goutal's Encens Flamboyant, which smells exactly like incense in churches. It also costs more than I should pay for perfume. Just like the rest.

Bloody thing is, Sisley, Aqua di Parma & Annick Goutal don't usually turn up on Singapore's discounters' shelves. Argh! *tears hair out*

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On my going quantum - In the midst of all the stress and work early this month, I anyhowly bought a book by Stephen Hawking that is called [[something something] Baby Universes. It is coolness man. It has things like quarks and parallel universes and black holes. I was so fascinated by it that I bought Hawking's A Brief History of Time as well as A Very Short Introduction to Cosmology. Why in the world didn't they teach us this stuff in secondary school?!?! For all these years I thought that electrons were the smallest things eva! And if they'd told us about this stuff maybe I would have gone into science! (nah.) Reading these books, I feel somehow as if the world is actually pretty magical. I need to remember that not everything is prosaic and expected...