Finally got to sit down and finish these up! Cut a bit into my sleep time, but a Friday night bar or club would have cut in just as much and I’m not particularly tired. Mr. Chokkattu is fast asleep beside me, on the other hand, and has been for hours now. (While he’s sleeping, make sure to click the link and see his photos! He has a much nicer camera and training, so those photos will be much less lackluster than mine.)
It’s been one busy week since I’ve been back, but I think I’ve finally gotten back into the swing of things and I’m just hoping I can keep my energy up. I will probably be making tons of lists and setting alarms as well as calendar events this week just to keep track of everything. And it certainly doesn’t help that I haven’t gotten used to organizing and paying attention to several calendars at once.
Anyway, on the first day in Barcelona, we were walking down Passeig de Gracia and we came across Perfumeria Regia which, if you didn’t know, has a backdoor mini-museum of very old perfume bottles that you can ask to see for about €5. I only wish it was more a museum and less of a fairly unorganized (though it does seem to go by years? Except the Chinese stuff is strewn about the room, and most of the bottles don’t have dates next to them) not well-lit, dusty, hodge-podge of someone’s probably meticulously gathered collection. It’s just doesn’t seem very dignified to toss around history like that. It was more a tome than a museum which is a shame.
That being said, I tried to take as many decent pictures as I could with my afraid-of-the-dark camera phone and then edit them to color correct (though a lot of the yellowness/warmth is native to the room) and make sure the bottles are highlighted! Read More
Just wanted to share some of the great street music we listened to that first day!
We even got one of their mix-tapes. It was fire.
Spanish guitar
Folk music
Some of you may know that every year the Mobile World Congress is held in Barcelona. If you knew that, you’re either Mr. Chokkattu or a huge tech nerd (or both), and as for the rest of you, the Mobile World Congress is held by the Groupe Speciale Mobile Association, a huge network of nearly 800 operators and more than 250 companies in the mobile sphere, every year in Barcelona and is essentially one huge conference with talks, lectures, exhibitions, panels, and demos.
Mr. Chokkattu got to go to this giant annual event and do cool things like interview tech disruptors and play with virtual reality goggles, and I just got a t-shirt.
Just kidding, he flew me out for the weekend immediately proceeding the conference.
Busy bee be real. Lots of things that have happened in the past week or so, so let’s start from the top!
1) I got a job! I work for FindSpark in Partner Sales and Community Development. Yay meaningful work! I’ve already done a bit of little things here and there during my training including this blog post: 5 Quotes from Shakeshack CEO Danny Meyer to Inspire Your Professional Journey
and more importantly, I’d like to push the FindSpark Fashion Conference happening this Saturday from 10AM-5PM! Read More
The first time I had thought about security and privacy beyond skimming the paranoid rustlings of people on internet forums was when a team and I won an AT&T case competition with the issue of using Big Data pitching an idea similar to something that the company actually rolled out within months of the end of the competition. Link to the Prezi we presented, names removed.
We were pretty proud of ourselves, generally ignoring our fellow peers when they made the case that the bulk of our idea was nothing less than an illusory tactic. The ones that tried to come up with cloud solutions and more technical advancements were especially miffed that what won that competition was essentially a huge marketing campaign, though as a marketing major, all I can really say about that is “well, they bought it.” Read More
Took me long enough.
I’ve written about LADDM before:
Tauer L’Air Desert Du Marocain
- Wet: oak, amber, vetiver, cedar, balsamic vinegar
- Dry: vetiver, cedar, coriander, amber, jasmine, balsamic vinegar
Mr. Chokkattu’s first love, and the one he wears the most often, LADDM is a dark, woody, smoky, slightly sweet thing with a low voice and dark hair. It starts with a sharp balsamic over a dark base, and then evens out, and as per the name the resulting fragrance is dry, hot, and slightly sweet. I really like this one, and Mr. Chokkattu only let me borrow this one because he has another sample of it.
New impressions:
L’Air du Desert Marocain is still Mr. Chokkattu’s favorite (though A La Nuit is edging in), and fortunately I am not at his freezing place trying this on, but I still think this could benefit from a bit of heat, at least to give it context.
Sweet sun-dried grass and hay, powdery amber, hot, warm cardamom, basil, singed cedar and oak bark and ashes and incense, all on a bed of jasmine. Read More
Happy Valentine’s Day! I hope you have as lovely a one as I will with someone special!
First of all, it’s freezing where I’m writing this. Mr. Chokkattu’s new landlord sounds like a cheap bastard from all I’ve heard of him and seems to be illegally turning off the heat wherever he feels it would save him money. This is coming from a household that tries to keep the heating and cooling to a minimum, and regularly has to turn up the heat or up the air conditioning for guests; what I am experiencing is worse. I had my feet on a radiator for a while and that radiator has been shut off for god knows why.
Anyway, all this to say that this is not the optimal temperature for Carnal Flower, and I know this, so while I’m going to write my reactions based off of how I feel now, I’ve had Carnal Flower for a while and I know it’s an entirely different beast when allowed to bloom in say, 80 degree weather when driving to the beach, as I have worn it in the past.
Frederic Malle Carnal Flower, for those who may not know, was composed by Dominique Ropion. Mr. Ropion has concocted other potions for Frederic Malle, as well as Alexander McQueen, Burberry, Calvin Klein, Dior, Armani, Givenchy, Gucci, JLo, Kenzo, a regular crap-ton for Lancome, YSL, and the creator of Thierry Mugler’s Alien and Viktor & Rolf’s Flowerbomb. His career has been a pretty veritable success, and I’m sure if we measured perfumers the way we measure musicians, he would have hit platinum or double platinum or whatever the distinction above that is by now. Read More
Oh the things that have been going on in the fragrance world!
1.
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I had discussed the possible closing of Pearl River Mart before under the guise of a fragrance review but at the time it seemed to have been a problem readily remedied by a venue hop, of which the company has had experience with, or just something else that would optimistically dismiss the possibility of the brick and mortar store just closing.
However, this move would prove not to be as easy or as viable as their previous jump, and it seems that there were no viable options for my optimistic heart to hold onto. News has come out that the huge, historic, ethnic icon is going to leave the scene permanently, though I’m not sure when. This was announced in December of 2015, and while I don’t think the store has closed down yet, I count the news as another one of 2015’s losses. A loss that implies a rapid dissipation, as the things that make up the NYC landscape will continue to disappear.
Pomelo girl thoughts 