The May girl

A guide to fleeting moments and skin scents

I have abandoned my search for truth and am now looking for a good fantasy

Hi!!! Happy May!!! I’ve missed you!!! Hope you’ve been doing well!!!

April wasn’t a very good month for me, and it seems like I’m not the only one who feels that way…. so I’m hoping May feels a little sweeter, for all of us.

Here’s my very brief May guide.

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May scents

I will tell you about this month’s fragrance picks without mentioning any notes because sometimes the vibes matter most.

1. A skin scent that actually smells like skin:

Fleur de Peau by Diptyque is the ultimate skin scent to me. This is very specific but it makes me think of Summer’s heart shaped birthmark in (500) Days of Summer. It’s gentle and inoffensive, like fleeting conversations with strangers that lead to absolutely nothing.

I met a girl from Oregon once, at a music festival. She asked if she could sit next to me so I unfolded the towel beneath me to make room for the both of us. I asked her about Portland and after roughly telling me how she feels about it she revealed she doesn’t live there. She interrupted me as I was asking about her actual hometown. “How did you get this?” she asked as she traced her fingers over the bruise on my arm. I noticed her staring at it way before she brought it up, I guess she was hesitant to ask but ultimately curiosity took over, it tends to do that sometimes. I pulled my sleeve down in an attempt to cover the bruise and shyly told her about my softball games. In return she rolled up her jeans to reveal both her knees scraped, she told me a kind of embarrassing story about a recent track meet. I never circled back to my question about her hometown, and she never asked about mine either. She probably assumed I was a local since the first thing I asked her was if she had to travel to be there. We seemingly had nothing in common apart from the fact that we were wearing the same high top converse. But there was no pressure to find any common ground. We never even asked each other’s names. We just sat there and spoke. Small talk, but not as a way to fill uncomfortable silence or as a means to get to know each other in any way. It was small talk solely for the sake of entertaining each other while we waited. Small talk instead of draining the battery on our phones probably. It was pleasant of course, light hearted, harmless, safe, just like Fleur de Peau.

2. A skin scent if you think of yourself more as a porcelain doll than a human girl:

Iris porcelana by Ex nihilo is absolute magic to me. It’s as if somebody bottled up the J’ai demandé à la lune music video by Ghostly Kisses.

It smells like a girl who bathes in milk and flower petals and writes down her dreams first thing in the morning so she doesn’t forget about all the weird details. It’s someone you meet for the first time and you immediately fantasize about walking around in their mind and seeing the world through their eyes. It’s a very comfortable and snuggly scent, and although those are usually associated with warmth this is completely cold. It is delicate and precious like a dewy spring morning before the sun has time to warm up the air. A little ghostly, otherwordly, like a guardian angel. Drifting and floating and fading away.

3. Not a skin scent:

Explicite by Ex nihilo, hedonistic dream girl. This scent feels absolutely self indulgent, like a lack of impulse control. It’s the feeling of wanting to take a bite out of something that’s not edible. It’s flushed cheeks and sweaty palms and grass stained dresses. Cheap strawberry wine on hot summer nights. Very girly scent but there’s a moodiness to it that makes it more interesting.

It’s the smell of the girl who dies first in the story and even after she’s gone everything is somehow still about her. Her absence is in some ways much louder than her presence, she’s wide eyed and inevitably tragic. She lives on as a Polaroid in someone’s wallet, a ghost in someone’s childhood bedroom, bittersweet memories haunting whoever loved her most (think Alaska young, Jackie Taylor, Laura Palmer).

4. Notes I’ve been enjoying and fragrances I’ve been eyeing:

Mimosa and tonka bean:

Not your baby by Phlur sounds like my ideal warm weather fragrance, I haven’t tried it in person yet and I am too scared to blind buy. Maybe ordering a travel size wouldn’t be so bad…

Willows by Regime des Fleurs is unfortunately discontinued, sorry, but I dream of it regardless. Hopefully they bring this back some day. If anybody knows where I can order a decant please tell me in the comments.

Chamomile:

Green vanille by Regime des Fleurs is described on their website as complicated and a bit wild. I love an unexpected vanilla so I’ve been dreaming of this since it came out.

Aurner by Aesop caught my attention because I love a spicy floral. Also struggling to stop myself from blind buying this.

In dreams and fairy tales by Source is just one of many Source fragrances in my wishlist. Everything they do just sounds so dreamy, I hope I get to try some their stuff soon.

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A list before I go

I saw people making these lists of things they like right now on twitter and I wanted to make one of my own.

I’m not sure who originated this but yuuiichive was the first person I saw doing this so credits to them.

I might start including these in my monthly posts now, just for fun.

I like:

Magnolia trees

Candlelit rooms

Ghost stories

Lychee iced tea

Porcelain dolls

Hummingbirds

Dorothy’s ruby red shoes

Thunderstorms

Foggy fields at dawn

The smell of smoke that lingers in my hair and clothes after sitting around a bonfire

Warm fragrances

Moonlight on my pillows

Pointelle dresses

Foggy fields at dawn

Lavender scented fabric softener

Being bored

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Yes this was mostly fragrance talk, I just didn’t have much of anything else to share today.

I hope you enjoyed! Feel free to leave a list with your favorite things right now in the comments, I would love to read them.

See you next month xxx