I’m all talk. I know a lot about salacious subjects, strange places, and shocking-but-true stories, but I’ve lived a fairly sheltered life growing up in the Valley. Kirsten’s mom thought I was “too worldly” to be friends with her daughter in 7th grade, mostly because I was reading a lot of my mom’s romance novels at the time. You know, the kind where pirates kidnap a beautiful, nubile orphan named Annabel who just happens to know how to use a sword (and so does the pirate…wink, wink). I can tell you where to go in Paris for a night of carnal intrigue, but I’m in bed before those places even open. And I will always take the conversation to the “Oh no, you didn’t!” place. I want to be a cool kid, but instead I’m a goofball with a dirty mouth who loves pirates.

Because I love knowing about bizarre and interesting things that are outside my smallish world, I’m always on the hunt for the unusual. I happen to have a copy of Paul Lynde’s will. I own an actual John Wayne Gacy clown drawing (but, trust me, it only comes out at dinner parties) and my bathroom is decorated with vintage doll heads. So when I stumbled upon the perfume Jasmin et Cigarette from celebrated French perfumer Etienne de Swardt of Etat Libre d’Orange, I was filled with curiosity, delight, and a little fear.

It’s pretty audacious to create a perfume that smells like cigarettes. Oh, and also “a woman’s skin when she exposes her freshness to the dark seduction of night.” But with other scents, such as Fat Electrician, Dangerous Complicity, and Secretions Magnifiques, you know this is not the kind of perfume a lady in Macy’s is going to spray on you while you are trying to find the bathroom. These are fragrances meant to work you up, to scandalize, to cause a revolution. Etat Libre d’Orange has more than 30 scents and I want to try them ALL.

I thought the bottle would look really fun next to my Demeter Funeral Home and Holy Water perfumes, so I impulsively bought it online without smelling it, but I was secretly hoping I would love it, because I wanted to smell like cigarettes from France! The fragrance contains jasmine absolute, tobacco notes, apricot, tonka bean, curcuma, cedarwood, amber, and musk. My friend Rebecca thought I was crazy to spend $50 on a perfume I haven’t tested that allegedly smells like…oh, you know, an ashtray in a garden of jasmine, but if you have enough guts to name your perfume Jasmin et Cigarette, I have enough guts to give you money for it.

I have to tell you, it does smell like cigarettes! I also have to tell you that it smells amazing, like no other perfume I have ever smelled before. It is smoky and gently floral. It is mysterious and, yes, kind of scary. It makes me feel like a secret agent or a Bond girl or a wicked temptress. It makes you want to lean in closer. And closer still. It definitely does not make me feel like a girl from the Valley who talks a lot of shit. When I wear Jasmin et Cigarette, I’m not telling stories, I AM the story. I might not ever be as cool as an ingénue who can French inhale, but at least I can smell like one.

But now, it is my bedtime and I hope to be dreaming of pirates.

Stuff Worthy Of Our Notice™ in this post:

Jasmin et Cigarette Perfume

 

Jasmin et Cigarette can be purchased in the States from Le Pink & Co.