I'm sure once upon a time air travel was ultra-glamorous and the shops at airports were too. Frankly, my recent air trips have shown me a succession of disappointing, identikit duty free shops. I'm lucky to be able to take nice holidays, and in a way it's good that you can buy on the high street what you can buy at the airport, but there really is no magic to airport shopping, no way to buy something really special that you can't get at home. I wish at least one airport had a real perfume boutique, there for something other than shifting hundreds of bottles in the minimum time.

I did sample Dior's Escale a Pondichery (disappointing; the French branch of my family were in Pondi and I'd hoped for a scent blending French perfumery and some of India's amazing ingredients, but found a nice cologne that was not worth the money) and Cacharel's newie Scarlett. Scarlett was a double disappointment as the bottle, which looks so pretty in photos, simply feels cheap in real life, and the scent was so utterly unremarkable as to be a waste of time sampling.

Ah well, Christmas is coming so I shall see what Boots has in stock. They're doing Girard gift sets this year - three 30ml bottles in each. Hmm...

I love L'Heure Attendue. I bought a set of samples of Patou's discontinued 'Ma Collection' scents, fell in love with them all, managed to find a bottle of Colony on Amazon and have been mourning the others ever since.

Today I managed to buy a bottle of L'Heure Attendue. You have no idea how excited I am. This is the unicorn in the back garden. For months now I have been refraining from buying perfume, telling myself to wait before purchasing more, and it feels as though this was the reason, so I'd have the money for this.

I am going to be very bouncy today!

It's Germolene! Well, that's how the opening few minutes smelled, like the medicinal pink gloop that got smeared on grazes and bumps when I was a tot. It sweetens rapidly, leaving one with a strange Germolene/ bubblegum combo.

According to Basenotes, there's white thyme and mandarin in the top (the thyme would account for some of the medicinal quality), orchid, lily and ylang ylang in the heart and tonka, vanilla and woods in the base.

This is a jolly bizarre fragrance, and one I wouldn't mind sampling properly, with more than a squirt. It seems that most scents right now are sweet, and I'm learning not to hate that so much. The woods stop the sweetness in this becoming too puerile.

This has that strange, sugary note that a lot of perfumes have nowadays, along with a sort of melony or mimosa-like fragrance. It's sweet and light and not very challenging, as long as you like your perfume sugary. To be honest, I'd probably like it as a summer scent if it had less sugar and a bit of citrus instead.

According to the official list of notes there's water lily in there, which may be what I thought was melon (ha! nose of inexperience strikes again) along with things like 'lady apple' (which just sounds rude to my smutty mind), golden apricot and pink guava. I couldn't distinguish any of the individual fruits, just an overall fruitiness. I definitely did not pick up the wild tuberose, and your guess is as good as mine as to what 'forbidden woods' are, but it's sounding the smut alarm again for me. Mandarin meringue, dark chocolate, chiffon vanilla and pink frosting accord are all also in there, probably accounting for the high sugar levels.

I'm not fond of sugar in perfumes as I find it cloying – even some really skanky notes still smell 'open' to me, whereas sugar is just sticky and closed-off. This isn't hideous, but I couldn't wear it.

First, 'carnation' is French for 'flesh-coloured', and that's what the name of this scent refers to. Lots of people seem confused by the fact that it doesn't smell of carnations!

Now, I'm surprised by the list of notes, because to me it smells very tuberosy, and apparently there's no tuberose in it. It's supposed to contain ylang ylang and jasmine, but neither of those really sprang to my mind when I first started wearing it. Nose FAIL. Perhaps it's the geranium that's confusing me, because there's something I'm not over-fond of in here, and I love jasmine and ylang, so it's not those. I am having epic nose fail when it comes to identifying what's in this.

So, enough of the attempting to be educated. It reminds me of tuberose perhaps because it's very floral and somehow fat and fleshy - this is a very carnal floral. According to the notes there's musk in the base - I had guessed civet, as it has the same slightly sicky note as Jicky and Shalimar do when I first put those on. This is definitely not a shy or retiring perfume. It's loud enough to have a 1980s feel, but it's not quite as brash as, say Poison. It's Lady GaGa!

My husband went to the Chelsea Flower Show yesterday - if you're not familiar with it, it's one of the biggest events in the British horticultural calendar. We Brits love our gardens, and one of the high points at Chelsea is intricate and expensive show gardens, many sponsored by major companies and designed by some very big names. One such this year is the Perfume Garden which, along with all sorts of scented plants, has a massive rose distiller in the centre. If you're into perfumes, you won't need me to point out that the oil produced from something operating in full sunlight probably won't be up to the standard of dawn-harvested ta'if blooms, but you can see the garden here: http://www.rhs.org.uk/whatson/shows/chelsea2009/show/gazeley.asp
http://www.bbc.co.uk/chelsea/show_gardens/perfume.shtml

And you can see the rose petals in their glass column on the Grauniad's photo:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gallery/2009/may/19/chelsea-flower-show-medal-winners?picture=347577557

The Times has much better photos of the distiller but I can't find a way to link to it!

Alongside the garden it's possible to buy what claims to be a recreation of Elizabeth I's perfume, and my husband bought me a bottle. I'd been craving a rose scent for a while, so it's nice to have one. However, it's not really my sort of thing. The sugar note is a sort of neutered candyfloss - that said, I should be glad it's not like Kylie Sweet Darling - and the musk isn't really apparent to my nose. The rose is not as full-blown as I'd have loved, and I'm willing to bet that very little real rose ever made it into the scent and that this is 99% synthetic. I was expecting big, dirty, Musc Ravageur with roses-style Tudor filth, and got something that wouldn't remotely hide the fact that this was worn by a woman who bathed twice a year. (Even, history tells us, when she didn't need to!) I really wish the roses had been fuller and fleshier.

I will wear the scent because I have it and my lovely husband bought it for me and I don't have any other roses right now, but I think for inexpensive daytime roses I'd rather go for the Body Shop's latest offering or hang on to see what L'Occitaine's new frags based on rose de Mai smell like. Elizabeth I will probably be saved, ironically enough, for wearing after my nightly bath!

This was one of the samples I got from Les Senteurs. On the whole I'm not a massive fan of edible notes in perfumes - Angel is on my no-go list, and I never want to smell the candyfloss of Kylie Sweet Darling ever again. Nonetheless, I like most citrus notes, adore the pineapple in Colony and Peach in Mitsouko (fruit works beautifully in a classic chypre) and am very fond of spices.

For me, 5 O'Clock Au Gingembre smells of ginger and incense, but not the burning, smoky sort, the scent of resinous crystals. There is a faint hint of tea on my skin, but not masses, and likewise any patchouli note is well buried, and I don't get the honey at all. I find the ginger closest to dried ginger - there's none of the furniture polish astringency of fresh ginger or the sugariness of crystallised ginger or ginger in syrup. A lot of reviewers HAVE found it to be like crystallised ginger, but on my skin it's definitely the powdered sort, and I like that.

This is a dark scent, but not a night scent: it's winter days in an old, dark, yet warm house. Despite the ginger, it's a northern scent, a wrap-up-warm-from-the-cold smell. I'm definitely getting a bottle of this, it's beautiful.

After dithering around at Les Senteurs for a bit, of course I bought a Caron scent! I bought a bottle of En Avion. It's got a curious dry spiciness to begin with. A lot of the reviewers on Basenotes (http://www.basenotes.net/ID10210568/reviews.html) don't appear to like the clove/ carnation note, but I appreciate a bit of spice in my scents, and spice over Caron's classic powderiness is just lovely. When I'm wearing it I find myself sniffing it because it seems to come off my skin in layers; there's the spicy note, the powder, and beneath it all the richness of oakmoss. The damp moss contrasts brilliantly with the dry spices. There's a definite kinship with French Can Can: the powder, the layers, the oakmoss, but En Avion is more eccentric and independent and French Can Can tamer and frillier but not frivolous. You could say En Avion is Katharine Hepburn and French Can Can is Myrna Loy...

It doesn't last as well as the sample I initially tried seemed to, but that could be my nose getting used to it and the spicy notes wearing off so the powder, which sits closer to the skin, is prevalent. Usually I'll give myself a few good squirts of scent to last the day, but with En Avion I think I'll put a couple on first thing and top up at lunchtime. My workmates mostly liked it, which surprised me - the one who didn't is a very modern type who I'd guess is a big fruity-floral wearer, but I had thought all of them would find it a little old fashioned so to have four thumbs up is good going.

I'm feeling a little gloomy today because of what IFRA 43 might do to my beauties. I have enough Mitsouko to last me a couple of years if I wear nothing else, and add to that my three Carons, the Habanita, Ormonde Woman and Songes... I could probably last nearly a decade on my favourites, to say nothing of the 'second string' scents that I own but like and wear far less. All the same, the thought of so many lovely things disappearing makes me very sad, and I will try to stock up on spare bottles of French Can Can, Narcisse Noir and Songes later in the year.

I expected so much more of this, having read all the rumours about it being intended to smell like a man's crotch (TMI: it didn't resemble any that I've got close to) or being deeply truffly and dirty. I did get a bit of something damp and fungal, a little truffly, but it was very well buried and nowhere near the truffle oils I cook with at home. However, this damp truffle note really saved it for me, turning it into something I might consider wearing, because without it the scent was a real Marbella/ Monaco affair: big, loud floral that really wants you to know how expensive it is, like a bag plastered in logos or sunglasses with a huge gold monogram on the arm. With the ylang ylang and jasmine content, it resembled Annick Goutal Songes just a little, but if Songes is a sultry tropical beauty, Black Orchid is a starlet at St Tropez. In its own way, Black Orchid is glamorous, and the truffle gave it substance, a little bit of beauty behind the sunglasses.

I have friends who would wear this perfectly, because they really rock the designer bags and sunglasses look. I don't think I could carry it off, though!

Well, the International Fragrance Association has finally stuck the last nail in the coffin of many great perfumes. I love oakmoss, and was distressed enough when that started getting pulled. Then IFRA got stuck into natural citrus oils. By 2010, thanks to regulation IFRA 43, an awful lot of things will have been changed.

Octavian at 1000 Fragrances (http://1000fragrances.blogspot.com/) has some great posts on this, plus a list of affected perfumes/ major houses. Caron, currently my favourite house as Guerlain seem mostly concerned with producing trend-chasing crap, looks like being completely borked. You know the voucher work got me for my birthday? The one I had trouble working out how to spend? I guess it, and a great wodge of cash, will be going on Caron...

My lovely workmates got me a voucher for Les Senteurs for my birthday. Usually I have a hard time deciding what to buy, but I think I'll go for something I've been craving awhile - Lorenzo Villoresi Teint de Neige is a possibility, as is Serge Lutens A La Nuit, but I think I may well opt for one of the Carons instead - Nuit de Noel or En Avion. Now the sterling to Euro exchange rate is so poor, all these things have become ridiculously expensive. Last year I ummed and ahed about whether to spend £120 on a bottle of Nuit de Noel parfum and decided not to - now the same bottle costs over £180. Erse. Since getting Habanita parfum, I've become a massive admirer of the greater depth you get in the stronger concentrations, but my budget is definitely EDP or weaker...

I live in a smallish town which has the advantage of being near a big wealthy city - the advantage of this is that we have some splendid charity shops where it's possible to buy good-quality secondhand clothes, books and other items at cheap prices. After Christmas I was walking to the butcher, past Oxfam, and spotted this in the window:

http://www.amazon.com/Scents-Time-Perfume-Ancient-Century/dp/0821226355

A book about perfume plus little bottles of scent, all for £4. (For some reason the one available from the Met's website doesn't come with the little bottles.) I thought about it for all of a minute, then went in and bought it. The lady running the shop said she'd just put it in the window. Avid charity shoppers will know that if you see something and like it, buy it there and then, because next week it will be gone!

I'm pretty reasonable on my history of 20th century Western perfumes, but the book contains information on all sorts of fragrances, where different elements came from and what was popular when. Reading Chaucer, I was struck by a line where a hero calls his sweetheart, 'my cardamom, my cinnamon'. Scented items and spices have always been shipped across the planet. I found it fascinating to read about how different cultures extracted perfumes and what they favoured. The book isn't particularly deep, but it's a good broad outline and has some beautiful pictures of historic vessels for perfumes.

The scents themselves represent different times and locations: orange blossom for the far East, sandalwood and jasmine combined for India, frankincense for Egypt and so on. They're fun to wear alone or in combination, and they're mostly very simple and don't last too long, which means I find them good to wear around the house or after a bath before bed. They give you a good idea of various notes, although I personally want something a little more complex for wearing most days. The only one I didn't like was 'Sportif', and sporty, aquatic fragrances have never been favourites of mine.

Anyway, if you see it cheap in a charity shop, go for it!

I've been ill, and haven't wanted to wear much perfume. (I never want to drink tea when I'm ill either. Odd.) I picked up a Metropolitan Museum of Art History of Perfume book and sample set recently, which I will talk about in another post, and the simple scents in there and Demeter Fresh Ginger have been the things that appealed most. They're all uncomplicated, light fragrances.

This morning I looked at my set of bottles, finally in the mood for perfume again and picked out… Jolie Madame! I got my 100ml bottle at a deep discount, unsniffed but knowing many perfume fans rated it highly, and on my first sniff thought I had made a terrible mistake. Later French Can Can taught me to appreciate Jolie Madame's violet side, but I still found her leather too much to take. This morning, though, I wanted it all! I'm really enjoying wearing this in a way I never have before. Usually it jars in some way, and I notice it not in a 'ooh, nice waft of scent' way but in an 'OMG what's that!' fashion. Today, whenever I notice it, it's not intrusive or aggressive, it's just lovely.

I'm not sure whether this is a long-term change in tastes, although I have noticed myself going off ambery perfumes in recent months. I like them still, but most of them are too much. Perhaps I'm shifting towards the chypre and leather end of the spectrum. On the other hand, it could just be the tail end of the virus affecting my olfactory system and refusing to pick up the bits I find obtrusive. I'll try experimenting with Madame Rochas tomorrow.

At first glance, this was So Not Me. for one thing, the liquid was pink, and I'm not a naturally pink perfume person. Nonetheless, I tried it and it was a pleasant surprise. It starts off quite fesh, with a fruity quality. The notes say freesia and lychee, and I definitely get the freesia. I wouldn't say I smelled the fruity note and thought, 'oooh, lychee', it's more a non-specific fruity quality, but pleasant enough, although overall the initial effect is one of a superior air freshener rather than something you'd spray on a person.

Now the weird bit. I get a rosy sort of smell. I do have a funny thing where if I think of a scent, I can almost smell it and I've been craving rose lately so I may be somehow 'adding' rose to this. According to the card the tester vial came with, the middle notes are magnolia and jasmine.
Hmm. I love jasmine, and it's there but... rose. There's certainly not enough jasmine in this for me; I love Serge Lutens A La Nuit, which has been summed up as 'death by jasmine'. (My apologies to the blogger who said that, but I can't remember which one said it or I'd have attributed the quote!) Anyway, even if it doesn't contain rose, the heart to me has a quality of rosiness, with a sweet musky underpinning.

I like Lancome, who always seem to me a slightly underrated perfume house. When you think of big names who also get sold on the High Street, you think of Chanel, Dior, Givenchy, Estee Lauder but not Lancome. Lancome are the, 'Oh, yeah, I forgot about them' house. Perhaps it's because they haven't got too many really old classics within their current line-up; most of their pre-1970s scents have been discontinued, whereas other houses still have one or two iconic treasures in production, even if some of them (and I'm thinking of YOU, Miss Dior) have been horribly tweaked. Yet Tresor's one of the bestselling perfumes in the world, and all the Lancomes I've tried have been pretty, yet suitable for women as well as girls. Miracle's no exception.

I'm not fond of the ads for this one - Anne Hathaway is simply too girly and vulnerable looking to carry off a black strapless dress and ascent called Magnifique. This may sound bitchy, but she strikes me as more Estee Lauder Pleasures...

Anyway, Mum decided she wanted another bottle of Tresor for Christmas so I ended up at the Lancome counter, with tester bottles of Magnifique everywhere. Having sniffed the top to make sure it wasn't completely objectionable, I ignored the paper strips and went straight for skin. There's a bit of sweetness at the top, and a slightly watery/aquatic note as well as rosiness. I get a bit of saffron, but no cumin, and the whole lot dries down quite rapidly to a rose and musk combo. I like it much better in its later stages, once that initial sweetness has disappeared. Other people don't get the watery note, so I may be misdescribing something, but I certainly don't get the 'East-meets-West' thing that other bloggers have mentioned. It could be something in my skin.

I've been craving a rose scent lately, but this isn't it. It doesn't have the freshness I'm looking for, and if I want rose and saffron, I'll buy Ormonde Jayne's Ta'if, where the saffron is more strongly pronounced. That said, Magnifique is pretty nice, and I wouldn't object to receiving a bottle. It probably wouldn't get used up very quickly, but it would get used, and it's far better than one of this autumn's other big woody launches, Sensuous.

Husband bought me my bottle of Ormonde Woman for Christmas last year, and we've been invited to Bond Night, when Bond Street is full of all sorts of Christmassy things - snow, carols and so on. I love Christmas, and would be up for it, but then I saw the sort of establishments that there are on Bond Street. Chanel. The Dorchester. Mikimoto. Suddenly, I decided I didn't want to go.

To be honest, even though I've been there a few times, I'm still nervous when I go to shop at Les Senteurs. 'This time,' I think, 'Will they see me looking in the window and think, "We're not letting someone like THAT in our shop"?' (This is, of course, completely ridiculous; the staff at LS have always been perfectly helpful.) But I go because I know my perfumes, know what I want and almost feel that I can justify being there with knowledge. I'd feel happy-ish going in Ormonde Jayne. I'd venture through the doors of Etro, if only because I want a bottle of Messe de Minuit, although in truth I'd feel happier shopping for it at Liberty because there's something democratic about a department store. But Chanel? Even if I had the money, I wouldn't go in. I'd be too damn scared.

I don't know why I have such a chip on my shoulder about these things. Given the credit crunch shops will be welcoming shoppers, even tubby, unfashionable ones in £10 hiking boots like yours truly.

Meh. I shall stick to shopping online. And if anyone's up for a bargain, Fragrance Direct has Ralph Lauren Pure Turquoise parfum down from just over £200 to around £30. It's not my sort of thing, but someone could pick up a dream in a bottle!

This was a free sample I got when I bought my bottle of Habanita. I got several men’s samples, which was very nice but a little baffling, given that my track record is for buying women’s fragrances. Perhaps Les Senteurs think I no longer need any more women’s scents. (WRONG! Well, sort of – I don’t need any more perfume, but I want it!) Anyway, having reached the point where I’m more concerned with what something smells like than whether it comes in a pink bottle or a blue one, I sprayed some on this morning.

LT Piver is an obscure brand, in the UK at least, but no more expensive than the sort of thing you’d buy in Boots, and Parfum d’Aventure is rather better than an awful lot of men’s and women’s fragrances in the ‘around £35’ bracket. There’s a good dose of pepper, cloves and cardamom over green notes of vetiver and spicy woods. It manages to be both spicy and fresh at the same time, and I can imagine wearing it as easily in winter and in summer.

All the tropical places I've been to have been stinky. They've been more colourful, noisier, hotter and smellier than the places I'm used to. (My husband says that to recreate the smell of Havana, you just need to pee in a bottle and leave it on a radiator.) You get used to it, like you get used to the noise and screaming midday sunlight. Parfum d'Aventure does not smell genuinely tropical. It smells of how chilly northern countries imagine warmer ones to be, packed with spices and unfamiliar plants. It's the smell of a  Boy's Own hero.

I may take this to Barbados to see how it wears in the heat!

I feel mean for saying this, especially as I got the sample for free, but this is my biggest disappointment of the year so far. Perhaps it's the fact that Tuberose Gardenia was so good, perhaps it's the fact that Sensuous is being aimed at slightly older women rather than the usual teens/early 20s demographic, but I expected much more from this.

To start with, it's sweet and sugary, with a tiny hint of citrus. The notes EL list include honey, but there's nothing of that dirty, slightly piddly smell honey has. Rather it's the slightly burned sugar of candyfloss. Underneath that are some nice woody notes, but on my skin they're virtually gone in an hour - and I'm testing the EDP. The first time I tried Sensuous, I wondered if the disappearing act was due to the skin creams I'd just put on, so today it's on 'dry' skin. I put it on just over an hour ago, and all that's left is the occasional waft of candyfloss. It could be that there's something in here that my nose just can't pick up, and as Parfumerie General Coze is another wood scent that did a disappearing trick on me that's possible. However, a workmate has said it's extremely faint, so it's not just me. (I love my workmates; they only look slightly astonished now when I thrust my wrist at them and demand, "Sniff this!") My workmate also thinks Sensuous is really nice, which just goes to show, it's all a matter of taste.

So, thumbs down from me, thumbs up from my workmate. It's not bad, just disappointing, but if you want an inoffensive perfume to wear to work, it'd do.

One of my favourite perfume blogs is the Scented Salamander - that and Now Smell This are the two I read every day because they're good for news. Anyway, The Scented Salamander revealed that Boots has bought up a defunct British perfume house, Girard & Cie, and is resurrecting it and some of its historic fragrances, as well as introducing new ones. (http://www.mimifroufrou.com/scentedsalamander/2008/09/boots_resurrects_girard_perfum.html   Sorry, I can't do the linky thing!)

Like a lemming racing for the nearest cliff, I was out of the door as soon as the clock struck one. Lunchbreak sniffing ahoy! I'm wearing Mitsouko today, so couldn't try anything on my skin. Mitsouko does not play well with others. The two I was really interested in were Lysval and Bouquet d'Orient, the two reformulated-but-based-on-classic fragrances, and right now I'm testing them on fragrance strips.

There's something mature about Bouquet d'Orient. It has a richness and fullness that works best on ladies with some experience. It reminded me of Rochas Alchimie and Avon Rare Gold (which is not a negative comparison; I think Avon makes some great fragrances for its price range) in that it's quite sweet and ambery. It's got less ylang ylang and more powder than Rare Gold - a nod to history, perhaps - but all three have the same bergamot top and amber and vanilla base. I'd like to try this on skin to see how the powder and sweetness balance out. It would be interesting to compare it to the two fragrances I've mentioned, and also to Guerlain Shalimar. There's a fresh note - mimosa and orange blossom? - that Shalimar doesn't have, nut I can imagine this working for someone who finds Shalimar too dirty and Boucheron Trouble too sweet or simple.

Lysval I like a lot. I've really been getting into florals this year, and this is a beauty. On the paper strip it's mostly rose and spring flowers, so simultaneously flowery and fresh. The rose dominates a little, but not to the point of this being a rose perfume. I don't get sandalwood from it, but it may need skin's warmth to bring out the base. It doesn't require maturity in the way Bouquet d'Orient does, but I can't imagine a hip young thing wearing it. The sort of teenager who loves vintage dresses and old Penguin paperbacks would suit it perfectly.

You know, all this year I've been saving points on my Boots Advantage card. These perfumes may be the reason why! At under £20 for a 30ml bottle - a great size when you have a lot of perfumes already and don't need a giant bottle - they're good value. And I can get one for free on my card right now. I'd go for Lysval as I don't own anything similar, and Rare Gold and Alchimie already fill my vanilla-amber-ylang-orange blossom gap nicely.

I take it all back, I don't hate tuberose. I did find my dislike for tuberose scents odd given that I like the flowers, but things like Opium send me running. However, two scents that I've tried recently have made me reassess the flower.

First was Parfumerie Generale's Tuberose Couture. Now, there's a perfume house for everyone, and I think mine may be Caron. It's definitely not PG. Their fragrances are finely crafted, but I never quite warm to the ones I try. Tuberose Couture is no exception. It starts with almost a medicinal smell, which you do get hints of from the fresh flowers. It reminds me of Germolene. Later it blooms a little, but it never achieves the full fleshiness of tuberoses, either real or in other perfumes. Tuberose Couture is tuberose dieted half away, de-haired, hair straightened, with the latest It-bag under her arm. Beautiful, but somehow thin and unnatural. And after several hours it turns into BPAL. I like BPAL, but I suspect the average PG buyer would be horrified to think that after three hours their costly scent has ended up smelling like the drydown from one of BPAL's perfumes containing dragon's blood resin. (This was actually my favourite part of the perfume, but I'll buy myself some BPALs and enjoy the opening stages of the oils to get it, no need for Tuberose Couture.)

Estee Lauder Tuberose Gardenia... oh, evil redandfiery for sending me this beauty. It really is a superb blending of two lovely flowers. I adore gardenias - I have a small one in a pot, but if I had the money and space I'd plant a hedge of the things - and the way the fresh yet full gardenia mixes with the warm tuberose is just heavenly. It's as 'full' in the nose as Annick Goutal Songes, but whereas Songes speaks of the tropics, of hidden courtyards and Generalife-style gardens, Tuberose Gardenia is more northern. It's simple, but in the way that only very expensive things can be, like a string of perfect pearls or a cashmere jumper. It's eau de Grace Kelly. I love it.

So I don't hate tuberose in perfumes, but I'll probably still never like the tuberose ones of the 80s!