Luxury: Scents and sensibility

Yesterday a package arrived in the mail for me. I've gotten caught up and actually ahead with ThereBucks sales (finally) so I have a little bit of discretionary income to spend and I bought myself a bottle of chanel No 5. I had been reading a book called "Deluxe; How Luxury Lost Its Luster", which talks about the history of luxury and designer brands and how they've changed (or in a very few cases, not changed) over the years. Probably the biggest takeaway message of the whole book is that you should be an informed consumer...you can't just buy a certain brand, whether it's jeans, cars or ketchup and just assume that because you have always purchased that brand and it was up to a certain quality standard before that it still will be or that just because some rap star sings about how they've got so much money and that's what they spend it on, it must be great. Not that I'm aware of any rap stars singing about their favorite brands of ketchup. Maybe Shonen Knife should do a rap album. Most brands compromise the their quality and trade off the reputation they've built eventually...even if the company founder is against it, eventually someone new is head of the company or there is a board of shareholders demanding greater quarterly profits or they feel the need to get their foot in the door at Walmart. More and more these days I think companies don't even have to change and grow to "sell out", these days many of them plan it that way right from the start.

So why did I buy a bottle of Chanel No 5 eau de parfum? The book talks about how No 5 was created and how it is now the standard against which all others are judged and how they still use natural ingredients still grown in the same region of France where they have been since the perfumes inception. I guess I just felt the need to own that standard against which all other perfumes are judged. Which is not to say that perfumes aspire to BE LIKE Chanel No. 5. Actually, smelling Chanel No. 5, with its notes of jasmine, rose and aldehydes, I wouldn't say it's a classic so much as really old fashioned...like your 80 yr old grandmother who doesn't think you should go out on a date without a chaperone and calls you "dearie". Some say it's too mature for anyone under the age of 25 to wear, but I'm an ancient old 40 yrs old and I think it's too mature for me.

I usually wear Bond No. 9's "Chinatown". I'm a little obsessed with perfume. It took me quite a few bottles of things I didn't really like to find Chinatown, and I can't help but wonder sometimes if there is another perfume (maybe another Bond No. 9) that is even more "me". While sampling different perfumes, I purchased many decants from eBay. These were little samples that ebay sellers took from full size bottles of perfume and put into a smaller roll-on or spray bottle so that the buyer could try stuff without buying a whole bottle and the seller could offset the cost of their own bottles. This was great...I mean a lot of perfumes are only available if you are in New York or in Paris or you know, they aren't just in every KMart store, you have to go to the actual store that sells that perfume (often in conjunction with a clothing line, a handbag line, a luggage line, etc.) and then spend $250 or more on a bottle. (This is considered "entry level" luxury...you get to buy in to a brand name without spending $25,000 on a couture dress. Hey, you can't afford the Christian Dior dress you saw on style.com but at least you have the Dior perfume! Actually, I have Miss Dior Cherie and it's not bad. I do wear it once in a while.) So, the decants are a great way to see if you like something.

After buying a whole crapload of decants, I thought "hey, *I* should sell decants on eBay!" I mean, I had also purchased a few full size bottles and it's an expensive habit. Not like I thought I could make money selling decants, but I thought I could maybe offset the cost of trying new fragrances. So, I read loads of perfume blogs and perfume websites, I ordered books on perfume and the history of perfume from Amazon, I ordered loads of decanting supplies (spray bottles, roll on bottles, padded envelopes, cute tissue paper, mailing labels, a usb postage scale, photo studio in a box, etc...etc...) and of course I started ordering a lot of full size bottles of perfume (and cologne). What a great excuse to order a bunch of full size bottles of perfume! The only thing is, I found I was too lazy to actually do it. I've sold stuff on eBay before, but I have other things to do with my time and the idea of photographing everything, writing up listing descriptions, pricing everything, researching what decants have sold for in the past, and worst of all...packing up and actually MAILING stuff just seemed totally not worth it. Maybe I'm spoiled by selling virtual goods most of the time, but I could just not get excited about printing out mailing labels and contacting the USPS or UPS or possibly having to actually GO TO the post office...ugh.

So now I have all this perfume STUFF. It's been sitting around for a while now. Not just perfumes I don't care for or colognes I have no use for, but all the packaging and such for decanting and mailing. *sigh* And...I'm looking around the other day to order my bottle of Chanel No. 5, and I get a little interested in some Hermes cologne that I'm wondering if my bf would like so I think "maybe I can find a decant of it on eBay". Not only did I NOT find a decant of it on eBay, but I couldn't find a decant of ANYTHING on eBay. It was actually rather strange. I did a little investigating and I found that apparently, due to some pressure from some large corporations, including some that also have filed lawsuits against eBay for refusing to take responsibility for all the counterfeit goods sold on their auction site, eBay has prohibited the sale of decanted perfumes. People who like to sell and exchange perfume decants have now moved to sites like Perfume of Life where you need to be a paid, premium member to access the private section of their forums where you can connect with others looking to sell or trade decants and/or full and partial bottles of all sorts of perfumes. Perhaps that will be a suitable place to sell my rather expensive box/bottle of limited edition Fleur d'Oranger 2005 Vergers de Nabeul Eau de Parfum from L'Artisan Parfumeur.

Ebay's stance on decants along with the pending (I think they're still pending anyway) lawsuits should be very interesting to anyone freaking out about IMVU and their apathy wrt music rings, those small objects some imvu developers create to enable the owner to play a full song by a music artist without actually having any rights to that song. IMVU's attitude seems to be "well, we'll deal with those when the music companies and artists actually come and file a dmca takedown notice and/or threaten to sue us". Until that time, developers can steal and redistribute all the music they want, it seems. Perhaps some of them don't even feel it's wrong...especially depending on what country they are from. I've had people say to me about piracy "well, it's not illegal in my country". I don't even know if that's true, but I think just because maybe the police won't prosecute you for doing it in your country, it's still illegal under international copyright law. But anyway, I suppose eventually music companies and artists will start filing lawsuits and dmca takedowns...and then IMVU will probably take some drastic measures to eliminate this stuff quickly...something that also ends up removing a bunch of legal content. Now, how they will deal with lawsuits against allowing people to use trademarked stuff on avatar clothing and stickers and such seems a bit trickier...who is going to go through millions of items to find that stuff? Well, maybe that day will coincide with the day that some big company wants to buy IMVU for megabucks to use for their own purposes, and this big company will just pretty much discard the whole dev program or severely restrict the whole thing because it's not what they want the chat program for and THEN IMVU will have nothing to worry about. (OR, perhaps the pending lawsuits will prevent a sale instead...)

Okay...backing up from that tangent and coming back to perfume...

My bf and I had gone to brunch and then wine tasting in Livermore one Sunday. (I know, I know...who names a city Livermore? Great place to go for wine, though.) Afterwards we stopped at a mall...him to buy a new suit jacket and me, I wanted to stop by Sephora for some Frederick Fekkai Glossing Cream. That stuff is so awesome. I hope they don't decide to ever ever change the formula to please some shareholders board. It's the stuff that turns my hair from a rats nest to smooth and manageable. Of course, a little goes a long way and my bf bought me a large tube of it that will probably last about two years, so I could imagine that the shareholders board would be quite tempted to try and make some change that would force me back into Sephora to buy more creme brilliante on a more consistent basis.

While at Sephora, my bf decided he also wanted to buy me some perfume. We tried a bunch and finally picked out Chanel's Coco Mademoiselle. I don't know if après wine tasting is the best time to pick out a new perfume. It's very nice...you don't have to be 105 to be mature enough to wear it. However, it's no Chinatown, with its notes of peony, gardenia, peach blossom, patchouli and cardamom. After a few months of vainly TRYING to wear it, I went back to my beloved Chinatown and am currently plotting to buy their Bon Bon collection...and I'll have to be sure and judge each one against the bottle of Chanel No 5. It's funny how I just read this whole book on the homogenization of luxury brands and how we are first lured into the dream and the promise of these things with gateway items such as perfume, and yet here I am...pickier than ever, but still obsessed.