Libertine Vivienne Westwood 2000
1
The Days of Hair Shellac and Beehives
Long, long ago, when I was just a pint-sized child, my mother used to wear her hair in a "cinnamon twist" formation on top of her head. This was apparently the fashion at the time, so she'd go to the beauty parlor to get this fancy thing done to her hair over the course of several hours. I'm unsure still to this day how she managed to make it last through multiple days punctuated by nights of sleeping and, I presume, showers or baths, but she did. One thing is clear: she used a product which has nary touched my golden locks: the dreaded hairspray.
I sometimes receive nice-sized cannisters of hairspray along with the irresistible gwps which I have been lured into acquiring through making the minimum purchase at one of my frighteningly numerous online shopping emporia. But I never know what to do with them. I cannot imagine wanting my hair to stay in place in the way that hairspray is specifically designed to make it do. So I usually think about what to do with the cans but then don't really end up taking any action, since I don't know anyone else who uses this product either.
Sometimes people compare perfumes to hairspray, and it took some real digging into the deepest, darkest crevices of my olfactory memory bank to pinpoint exactly what it is that Vivienne Westwood LIBERTINE smells like to me: my mother's hairspray back in the day when she wore her hair piled up on her head in a cinnamon bun-meets-beehive sculpture of sorts. In The Holey [sic] Book, in her review of Guerlain IRIS GANACHE, TS identifies "what's wrong" with INSOLENCE as "hairspray and terror," which naturally raises the question why in the world it should have received five stars and been touted as a masterpiece. On the other hand, that apparent disparity is not any more inconsistent than many of the other comments vs. star allocations in "The Guide" (cough, cough).
To me, a perfume which smells like hairspray is quite far from a five-star masterpiece, and LIBERTINE is a fragrance that I expect to wear about as often as I reach for a can of hair shellac. I should add, however, that there is some development here. As it dries down, LIBERTINE begins to smell, more specifically, like burnt hairspray, as though someone decided to apply a hot curling iron to her hair to touch up a do that had already been liberally sprayed. Désolée.
I sometimes receive nice-sized cannisters of hairspray along with the irresistible gwps which I have been lured into acquiring through making the minimum purchase at one of my frighteningly numerous online shopping emporia. But I never know what to do with them. I cannot imagine wanting my hair to stay in place in the way that hairspray is specifically designed to make it do. So I usually think about what to do with the cans but then don't really end up taking any action, since I don't know anyone else who uses this product either.
Sometimes people compare perfumes to hairspray, and it took some real digging into the deepest, darkest crevices of my olfactory memory bank to pinpoint exactly what it is that Vivienne Westwood LIBERTINE smells like to me: my mother's hairspray back in the day when she wore her hair piled up on her head in a cinnamon bun-meets-beehive sculpture of sorts. In The Holey [sic] Book, in her review of Guerlain IRIS GANACHE, TS identifies "what's wrong" with INSOLENCE as "hairspray and terror," which naturally raises the question why in the world it should have received five stars and been touted as a masterpiece. On the other hand, that apparent disparity is not any more inconsistent than many of the other comments vs. star allocations in "The Guide" (cough, cough).
To me, a perfume which smells like hairspray is quite far from a five-star masterpiece, and LIBERTINE is a fragrance that I expect to wear about as often as I reach for a can of hair shellac. I should add, however, that there is some development here. As it dries down, LIBERTINE begins to smell, more specifically, like burnt hairspray, as though someone decided to apply a hot curling iron to her hair to touch up a do that had already been liberally sprayed. Désolée.