I cannot tell you what Rendez-Vous smells like*. I have spent eighteen months with this sample, trying over and over again to smell it and experience all the things I am told are wonderful about it. But I can’t. 

It is the Tunguska event** in a tiny glass vial. On me, it’s the perfume equivalent of standing right in front of the speaker stack. Or perhaps standing in the middle of a motorway, with artics thundering past me. I can’t hear myself think, let alone pay attention to the molecular dance. 

I project it wildly too: one parsimonious spritz and snarlish can smell it from twenty metres away. For hours and hours. I can smell everywhere I have been for over a day.

It’s exhausting. 

I’ve tried it on paper, and on snarlish.  It was slightly smaller, slightly less overwhelming but still with the impact of godzilla on downtown tokyo. Maybe it’s hyperosmia from something in this, rather than me being an amplifier.

From what I’ve read (and I recommend Alex Musgrave’s essay above all) I should love this. You probably love this. My experience of Rendez-Vous doesn’t seem to be even slightly normal. Please enjoy it on my behalf. I believe it’s really good.

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* I know, I often don’t tell you, not directly. That doesn’t mean I can’t. But note lists are awfully dull, and I will never rise to the magnificently obsessive tracking of unfolding layers of scent that Kafkaesque achieved in her blog.    

** The Tunguska event? The wiki entry has some fascinating eyewitness accounts. It you want to know about other, bigger impacts, may I recommend Riley Black’s The Last Days of the Dinosaurs?

Damn. I’ve used Baryonyx in posts twice in a row. But it seemed the most fittingly in-your-face dino in my flock. Compsognathus, on the other hand, is the smallest known theropod.