The Search for the Perfect Citrus Perfume

You know how you'll smell a perfume and it will just rock your world? So you take it home and spray it like an angry skunk and three hours later find yourself marinating in something that smells like a pile of hot garbage?

I know you know what I'm talking about.

My body (and my diet until recently) is full of sugar. When I try on perfume, whatever the sweetest note is, my body is going to exploit and exaggerate it, until I end up smelling like baked Skittles. I have, over the years, fell in love with a number of high-end perfumes that ended up so nauseatingly sweet on me, it's like I rolled in a pile of middle school girls eating sugar cookies. Armani Code is fabulous, but not on me. It quickly turned overpowering and caused me to have asthma attacks. Coach Poppy smelled so good in the bottle but after an hour, it smelled like I had just finished my shift at Uncle Buddies Bikini Barn Emporium.

Same with Bvlgari BLV, Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue, Clinique Happy, Marc Jacobs Lola, DKNY Be Delicious...

So after a while I realized I only like two things in a perfume; citrus scent and amber. Unfortunately they are often paired with stupid, stinky vanilla, which I seem to be allergic to. Lucky for me, as I already loathed vanilla. I work at a college and my sniffer gets assaulted daily by Bath and Body Works and Victoria's Secret sickly sweet vanilla scents.

So finding a nice, long wearing scent seems impossible. Citrus scents tend to be more orange blossom than a fresh orange and I don't love flowery scents. So I recently researched... and yes I'm a huge dork, you didn't know?

I narrowed it down to a handful of expensive and cheap citrus-y perfumes. I was able to buy roller ball versions (read: cheap) of all but one*.

Love & Toast Candied Citron
Love & Toast Persimmon Plum
Pacifica Tuscan Blood Orange
Ralph Lauren Big Pony 1 for women

*Lancome O de L' Orangerie 

So far the Candied Citron is a total bust. Smells like medicine on me. Tuscan Blood Orange is awesome, love the scent, sadly the scent disappears in an hour. I might experiment with layering if I choose it.  I tried layering it on top of Bath and Body Works Coconut Lime Breeze and Bath and Body Works White Citrus. Both of which are okay on me but not great. That seemed to make the scent more complex but the blood orange scent disappeared just as quickly. So I dunno. Tomorrow I'm going to try on the Persimmon Plum and Wednesday will be Big Pony 1. I still haven't found the Lancome scent to try on. Though, while I was writing this, I discovered Bath and Body Works brought White Tea and Ginger back, which they had discontinued, much to my sads. I might have to
order a bottle...

Anyhow, that's my completely uninteresting foray into the world of eau de toilette.  Just makin' conversation.

What's your favorite scent? Got any recommendations for me?

Adventures in Streaming: The 100

I like to hate-watch TV shows. I'm currently hate-watching The Tudors and gleefully complaining about it on Facebook. But I'm nearing the end of that and I need some new pop culture heroin for my veins. I have mad love of teen dramas so I started watching The 100. It's lousy but I keep tuning in, like I've got streaming Stockholm Syndrome.

The 100 is a particularly maddening show because the premise is so good. The Earth done got nuked and a bunch of survivors got on a ship called the ARK and outta dodge. Eggheads said Earth wouldn't be livable again for two hundred years. So the survivors live on the ship, dress like they're in the real world from The Matrix*, and have a murky political system with a
Chancellor and a council. The problem is, it's only been ninety-seven years and the council knows the ship can't sustain the number of peeps on board for another hundred plus years. They gonna die when the oxygen runs out. Oh noes! Now here's where it gets cool. This is an unusual show because they don't give a shit about kids. They don't value them, they see them as a burden on their already burdened ship. So kids get jailed for breathing wrong.So they have 100 kids in jail for various petty and a few not-so-petty crimes. They decide the kids are expendable and shove 'em all on a pod and drop that thang to Earth. But not before equipping the kids with wrist band telcoms and telling them how important it is to keep them on. I'm sure the disenfranchised youth can be trusted with that, right?

Anyhoozle, the kids are basically told, if you peeps die, it'll suck to be you. But if you manage to live that means Earth is sustainable. So we'll all hop pods back to the motherland and ya'll will get pardoned. We good, homies?  Then it turns out, Earth is sustainable, but oh-so-effed up. Radiation fog that kills, snake monsters, nuts that make you hallucinate. It's a Brave New World except that the idiots took off their wrist bands. Spoiler?

Anyway, that's the premise that was spoiled by terrible actors, a main character so inconsistent and hypocritcal that she might as well be a Fox News anchor and a bunch of romance BS no one cares about because everyone is an asshole who deserves to die, except the one character I liked, who died for no reason. Unless acting-while-black (AWB) is punishable by death, now.So here's my review of  The 100 as I watch the latest episode on Hulu. 

Shut up, Clarke.

You want more? I don't have much more.  I don't know where the CW went awry. Sometimes they do such a good job. Elena on Vampire Diaries is one of my favorite teen drama heroines. She's so tough and smart and honorable. But Clarke is the very worst kind of person. She's humorless, self-righteous and thinks she needs to be everyone's moral compass. Which, they really need one, but she has self-serving morality that goes out the window every damn episode. The last four episodes have
pretty much gone like this:

Clarke: Bellamy I think we should do [insert whatever stupid idea Clarke has that will make things worse].

Bellamy: That's stupid. Don't do it. 

Clarke: I'mma do it anyway. Oops that was a bad idea. Bellamy fix it!

Bellamy: I hate you so much.

Clarke: I know. We're so gonna bone some day.


So it's all murder, mayhem, bullies who pee on people, love triangles that can suck a two-headed deer dick and some seriously uncomfortable racial undertones. Like really uncomfortable. Watching a room full of Caucasian kids stand around while one chained up a brownish man and whipped him with a seat-belt buckle was a touch distasteful. Especially coming off of the murder of the only black character who was immediately replaced by a black extra who suddenly developed lines long enough for quotas to be met.

It's a mess. I hesitate to even call it a hot mess. It ain't hot. It's room temp, baby. Well, mostly. Because Bellamy? He's so freakin' hot.

Don't worry. I IMDB-ed him and he's thirty years old. So while I'm still tragic, I'm not yet skeevy... Well not as far as you know.

* For some reason, I made this. Don't ask questions.*