Field Notes
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You aren’t supposed to play favourites when you love smells as much as I do. I’ve harped on this very blog before about how there are no bad smells, just smells giving us different information, but I don’t like Lily of the Valley…there I said it. I don’t like the plant, I don’t like the
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Over the last year I have had several requests for more information and deeper reads on subjects brought up on the blog. So after banging around my shelves a bit, here is the Death/Scent reading list. Some of them are staples of both olfactive and death literature, others are weird and wonderful deep cuts. This
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When I was a teenager I pretended that I didn’t like flowers, “They’re the genitals of plants why would I want those as a gift, gross!” I made a huge show about telling everyone how much I hated them. Clubs in my school routinely sold flowers for fundraisers. While the idea is nice, in the
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If you are a Fummie, you know Oud and its sweet balsamic smokey woodiness. It is also one of the rarest, and most beautiful scent ingredients who’s path to your bottle is so strange it seems almost mythical. It is also in danger of being lost forever. If you have been watching perfume trends for
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When I was a girl, I went for a walk in the forest with my family. While prancing about, as I was wont to do, I came across a bush of the most beautiful berries surrounded by flowers that looked, to me, like small purple bluebells. I was young, but I remember the allure of
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Remember kids, the most toxic plants are often the most innocent-looking and alluring. Datura is a girly sweet-floral, but its other names give away its true nature (Devil’s Trumpets, Hell’s Bells, Poisoned Moon Flower). Datura, as with most of its Nightshade sisters, holds its poison in both its seeds and blossoms. The most likely cause
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If you are a lover of perfumes, you have many joys, one of them is getting to explain the mystical substance known as Ambergris to the unsuspecting. Aged ambergris (literally grey amber) has an earthy mildly marine sweetness. Think of warm, sea-salted skin after a day of sailing. The Scented History of the Plague Series:
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Death Scent 