Talk About Gs

I have promised that I will write something for someone, so I'm practicing here by yakking.

Let's talk about Gs. Two Gs, to be exact. First=Galaxolide.

Galaxolide: Wow. I've just been able to smell a 50% dilution of it, and I have to admit that I'm absolutely amazed. I started in my usual way: smelling from the bottle. And I couldn't smell anything. Well, I can't really smell ambroxan from the bottle either. So I put some on a blotter (blotter=torn up piece of paper) and left it to smell later. Verdict with requisite colon: It's incredible! While I knew that White Linen and Tresor have galactic amounts of this musk, I was so not prepared for how it would smell. I just assumed it would be like all the others: powdery, fresh, blah blah blah...... But no. It's very sweet. And bright and floral. And recognizable, if vaguely. It's cool and sweet and all around lovely. It's something I would put with a floral accord. If you haven't smelled it by itself, you really should, because I was amazed that a musk chemical smelled so sweet and fresh. And it just gets better as the days go by. It's been about 5 days now, and it's still powdery fresh and beautiful, and I'm starting to get a fabric-softener feel from it. (Contrast this to Habanolide, which after a few days smelled like a version of that harsh ambery smell in Karanal, except 1000 times less intense and without the body. Ethylene Brassylate, by contrast, smells sweet but recognizably musky.) I can't believe I went so long before smelling one of the basics.

The other G: Grisalva. This is supposed to be "the character of ambergris... in a single chemical." I have no idea what ambergris smells like. Or, rather, I don't remember if I do, because I'm pretty sure I smelled a tiny piece of it at Enfleurage once, but I wasn't sure what to make of the scent. I mean, how would I know if it smelled like "high-quality" ambergris or not, right?! My friend A, however, bought some, and he said it had a certain "locker room" tonality to it. Interesting. Enter Grisalva. For some reason I was expecting to smell something like Karanal or oxyoctaline formate from it, because its odor was depicted as "medium," as opposed to ambroxan, the odor of which is colossal. So I smelled it from the bottle. Interesting! Not at all like Karanal or OF. More like what I'm used to thinking of as ambroxan, but less woody. Put it on some paper. Waited. It started to remind me very much of D&G's Light Blue for women, and I don't like that scent anymore. It seemed citrusy sweet. And of course, it reminded me of a whole slew of men's colognes. More like a class of men's colognes, I guess. And the more I smelled it, the closer to nausea I got. I assumed that this was what ambroxan maybe would smell like if I took the trouble to dilute it to where I could actually smell it. Because it wasn't as 'mineral' or woody as ambroxan had seemed to me. Then it started to seem almost foliage-like, and I thought that this (Grisalva) would go great with sharp, celery-green notes. And then it stopped nauseating me. A couple days later the smell on the paper faded enough to where I could sort of see how it could be described as "animal... leathery." It's much less unpleasant now that it's faded. My verdict is that I'd love to try to make some kind of novelty scent from it, something not meant to be taken seriously. That said, I definitely see the value in it.

That's the beep for now.