“Is this going to give me herpes?”
I need more elegance than that. With perfume, you spritz the fancy cardstock, give it a limp-wristed shake, like it’s a Polaroid picture you already know you look great in, and voilà! A new scent to delight or disgust you.
In fashion, if you try on a pair of jeans that look bad, you blame yourself.
In fragrance, if you try a perfume that stinks, you move on.
And boy do I move. I require a very patient salesperson, because if I get in my head that I want a jasmine scent, I will need to smell every perfume with a jasmine note in creation before I can decide.
Only the best contenders get valuable real estate on my skin. I tell myself I will pick the top two and put one on each wrist. But then I discover another great scent, so I have to find a new spot, maybe my left inner-elbow. And before I know it, I need a map of my body labeled like a butcher’s chart to remember what I put where.
I know I’ve walked out of the fragrance department looking like I’m smelling my armpit, but really I’m revisiting the perfume I tested on my right shoulder cap.
But I can’t hang out in a fragrance department all day, can I?
I asked and they said no.
So I had to find a new outlet for my insatiable curiosity. And where does one go for insatiable curiosity?
The Internet.
That’s where I discovered Fragrantica.com, a website for maniacs.
It’s a self-described “perfume encyclopedia” of mind-boggling dimension. It details forty thousand perfumes with over six hundred thousand reviews written by nearly half a million registered users from around the world.
In addition to user reviews, it also has industry news, blog posts, reference material, discussion forums, and something called “fragrant horoscopes.”
The webpage itself is cluttered, the interface looks like it hasn’t been updated in years, and the discussion forum still uses that AOL chat room font.
And I love it. I can kill hours on that site.
If I type “Fra-” into my web browser, it immediately suggests Fragrantica.
Mind you, my own name and website URL begin “Fra-” but my browser knows it’s a distant second.
Fragrantica has eclipsed Francesca.
Of course I registered and made a profile on it. I’m FrancescaInFiore, “Francesca in Bloom” in Italian.
I know, it’s so dorky, but it’s hardly the worst. Scanning the usernames, there are a lot of puns, like “Neckromancer,” and a few questionable choices like, “Smelly Finger.”
I had to make a profile so I could leave my own reviews and fill out my virtual-fragrance wardrobe. That way other users can see what I have and what I like. We can make recommendations to each other. Some users even arrange perfume swaps.
But I’m not ready to meet these people in real life.
Primarily, I use it to scout out new scents at home. I can search by fragrance note, or brand, or parfumier, or any category you can imagine. When I find a perfume I’m curious about, I can read its official Fragrantica profile, see the rating it gets from users about what season they wear it in, what time of day, longevity, etc, and, finally, I pore over all the reviews of what it’s like.
If it sounds good enough to try in person, I click the “for test” button and it’s instantly added to my personal “for test” list in my profile page—very handy the next time I go to the fragrance department.
And so we’ve come full circle.
Get the coffee bean sniff-palate cleanser, because I’m going to be here for a while.
Pasta Impasse
Lisa
You know how on Facebook, people say their relationship is complicated?
Well, my relationship just got complicated.
I’m talking about my relationship with pasta.
Let me take you back in time to the dark ages, when we didn’t even use the word pasta.
Back then, we called it spaghetti.
And growing up in a household of The Flying Scottolines, we had spaghetti every night for dinner.
I’m not even kidding.
I have mentioned this before but it bears repeating.
We thought spaghetti was what you had for dinner.
Sometimes we had it with meatballs, sometimes with chicken, but always spaghetti. You would think this got boring, but it never did. All my friends wanted to come to our house for dinner.
Why?
Because we had spaghetti.
On holidays we had ravioli or gnocchi, but even then, we still served it with spaghetti.
Yes, we had carbohydrates with a side of carbohydrates.
And we were as happy as clams.
Spaghetti with clams.
So naturally, I grew up loving spaghetti, and it’s still the food I crave. I would eat it every night if my jeans would permit.
My sweatpants are fine with it, however.
Then, in the evolution of spaghetti history, everybody started calling it pasta, which enabled restaurants to charge three dollars more.
At about the same time, I started reading about how you should eat whole-wheat pasta because it was made of healthier ingredients.
Like it didn’t have semolina.
Until then I didn’t know that regular pasta was made of semolina, which sounds like a last name.
Meet Lisa Semolina, author and dog-lover.
But I read that whole-wheat spaghetti was better for you because it had more protein. I compared, and on the box, it said that regular spaghetti had seven grams of protein, but whole-wheat pasta has eight grams of protein.
You might not think that one gram makes a difference, but I never underestimate the power of one.
Not only literally.
Literally, it takes me three years to lose a single pound, so I don’t take one for granted.
So I made the switch to whole-wheat spaghetti and I told myself that it tasted the same.
It didn’t, but I lived with it.
I completely replaced my semolina-laden spaghetti with whole-wheat spaghetti and drowned it in tomato sauce.
Or gravy, to those of you who speak the language.
The language being South Philly.
I went happily/unhappily on my way, eating whole-wheat pasta until I saw a different type of pasta that was supposed to be even healthier, called Protein Plus.
Plus is definitely good, right?
Protein Plus pasta seems to be somewhere between whole-wheat pasta and regular pasta, and it has ten grams of protein.
Wow!
That’s three more grams than seven—proof that I can subtract.
Or add.
Or get suckered in by anything.
So I bought the Protein Plus pasta, drowned that in sauce/gravy, and kept telling myself how much fun I was having.
Until I came across a new kind of pasta that was made from chickpeas, and it had thirteen grams of protein.
In other words, I hit the protein jackpot!
For a long time, I subbed that in, burying it in gravy and also mozzarella.
Obviously, we’re abandoning the calorie count. I needed the mozzarella to smother the taste, which I never needed with regular pasta, which tastes awesome all by itself.
So I have more protein but also more carbs and fat.