Happy New Year, everyone!
I’m wishing you all good health and peace of mind in 2021.
For NYE, I’m wearing Coco Mademoiselle EDP Intense. I was in the mood for Chanel. Coco Mademoiselle felt appropriately festive for tonight, even though I’m staying in.
I’ll be back with a post next weekend. I haven’t worn much in the way of fragrance this week. I’ll be back to a regular schedule the first full week of January. Until then!
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Well, hello, everyone. I hope you’re all taking care of yourselves right now. If you’ve been out protesting, good on you! I hope you’re safe and wearing a mask.
Perfume and fragrance has not felt terribly important this past week. However, I noticed on social media, several people began circulating lists of Black-owned beauty and fragrance brands. I took a look at the perfume brands in particular. The only two brands that I had heard of before were Chris Collins and Maya Njie. I realized that I haven’t sampled or made a purchase from any Black-owned perfume brands. Not a single one!
I fall back on my designer scents, my favorites from Dior, Chanel, Burberry and YSL. They are comforting to me because they’re familiar. The thing I hadn’t realized is that these designer scents in particular exist in a very carefully cultivated bubble of whiteness. The vast majority of people involved with these fragrances are white, from the brand executives, to the perfumers, to the models chosen to front the ad campaigns. And I had never given it a second thought before! That’s how pervasive and insidious white privilege is.
Now, I am making a commitment to purchase from Black-owned fragrance brands. Each month for the rest of 2020, I am committed to exploring new Black-owned perfume brands. As you can see from the photo above, I am starting with a discovery set from Motif Olfactif for June.
I want to approach this in a mindful way. I will make purchases. I certainly will not behave like an entitled influencer and beg for free samples and bottles! I want to financially support Black-owned brands and bring some awareness by posting about them. I also want to take it a few at a time, rather than ordering all at once. I want to spend time with each sample, each fragrance, and really give each brand its proper due. Like I said above, I am kicking this off with Motif Olfactif right now.
This is only the beginning! It feels like we’re on the precipice of real global change. Let’s make sure that it’s lasting change and not just a fleeting moment.
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The photo above was taken by me. Nothing in this post was gifted.
David @hoodscentz on instagram put together his own list of Black-owned fragrance houses, which is the list I’ve been paying attention to.
Fashionista posted this list of 250+ Black-owned and founded beauty and wellness brands.
@esteelaundry on instagram compiled their own list of Black-owned beauty brands.
Hi, guys. As you can see, I don’t have a regular What I Wore post up this week.
It just does not feel like the right time. I’ve never used my blog as a political platform before, but I am white. That’s part of my privilege. We had a Black Lives Matter protest here in Pittsburgh yesterday, like in many US cities. The Black organizers worked hard to plan it so that people felt safe showing up. It was a peaceful demonstration for 2 – 3 hours. It was then hi-jacked by a couple of white kids, who escalated things to chaos and violence.
It’s all weighing heavily on my heart today, so I did not feel it was appropriate to do a normal weekly post.
Who knows what this next week will bring, so please stay safe, everyone! If you’d like to continue commenting about your scent of the day, you can still comment on last week’s post.
*I moderate comments here and I will not be approving any troll comments. No racist comments, no “all lives matter” here. This is not the time or place.
Hi everyone!
I’m posting a quick update just to say that some real life stuff has come up this week, and I won’t have any posts up this week or over the weekend. Hopefully I’ll be back next week!
I hope you’re all doing well!
This post is different from my typical Wednesday break-down of one fragrance in particular. I’m feeling inspired by Colognoisseur’s post Am I An Influencer? on the topic. And I think the topic of influencers is something that’s been going around on social media lately in general.
I started this blog in 2012 when blogging was still the popular thing to do. Youtube was still a niche hobbyist activity. I remember watching some early makeup tutorials from Lisa Eldridge and the Pixiwoo sisters around 2011 – 2012. Being a youtube “content creator” wasn’t a job and I’m not sure if you could even monetize videos back then.
The landscape has changed so quickly. I haven’t always kept up with my blog posts here on a regular schedule, just due to work or personal life commitments. Although, part of it was that I could sense the shift away from blogging. Everything moved to youtube and instagram. I will be honest, at times, I felt like my blog was too irrelevant to keep updating, even just for my own pleasure. (I do still keep up with reading a couple of the OG beauty blogs, like Temptalia and The Beauty Look Book, so blogging is not completely dead!)
I’ve decided to lean into blogging here because I enjoy writing and I enjoy perfume. Writing out detailed analysis of different scents helps me work through my own thoughts. And I think it’s important to look through a critical lens, even towards a subject you love. There are so many fragrance releases these days — it would be impossible to blindly love everything! (I think we can also be critical of this crazy volume of launches and releases that we’re dealing with. It’s far too much and not sustainable.)
I also love the community here on wordpress with fellow perfume bloggers. The community on instagram is different. People make sponsored posts and do not always disclose the relationship, or only show photos of bottles they’ve been gifted without indicating that it was gifted. I’m not inherently against sponsorships or being gifted PR items. I just wish more people would be completely upfront about what they’ve been given. Right now on instagram, you almost have to do a little bit of detective work and look beneath the surface to figure out what you’re really looking at. An ad should be more straightforward than that.
If I were trying to be an influencer, I’d be doing a pretty bad job of it! I don’t think I’ve ever influenced anyone, which is just fine with me. I’m a blogger, a writer, and a perfume enthusiast. I will continue to keep up with instagram, but make an effort to not get caught up with the number of likes and followers, etc. The numbers and metrics aren’t the important factors for me. Connecting over scent is what matters to me.
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Thank you all for reading my writing week in and week out!
The photo was taken by me. It’s my travel spray of Do Son set against an editorial from the Chanel Spring/Summer 2019 magazine. Chanel sends me their seasonal magazines (they are clear: it’s not a catalog!) because I tend to purchase quite a bit of makeup and fragrance from the brand!
This Side of Perfume 