|
Gels Like Teen Spirit
Demeter Fragrances
By Daryn Guarino
My bottles of Demeter Fragrances’ Dirt and Grass (two
different scents), arrived in common plastic bottles that
respected shower shelf space and were shower-dropping safe.
A quick inspection revealed a clear, thinner than dish detergent
liquid that smelled faintly of soap. I fired up my shower
and slid into work. The lather was full of big, light bubbles
that gave off clouds of amazing smells.
Dirt managed to capture the aromas of varying types of soil with
astounding accuracy. I could smell mossy peat, rich loam, wet
clay, fresh sod, and a variety of others in the pervasive and
expanding aroma.
I summoned my wife to the shower to smell me,
but she refused (she rarely agrees to
smell me these days).
Grass smelled like soapy grass. When I closed my eyes, I could swear that I was standing naked and wet in a field of fresh cut
grass. The scent sent me on a run through the grassy
fields of my youth as waves of nostalgia swept over me.
I remembered being thirteen
years old and holding my sister down as I packed her mouth with
as much dirt and grass as I could fit. Or when I was seventeen
and my Father dumped a half-acre of grass clippings into my Ford
Pinto (the rotting grass smell really made my senior prom
extra-special)!
Or when I was twenty-two and I woke up
injured and upside-down in a mound of hotly decomposing,
bug-infested, grass-based compost after my drunken friends
rolled my unconscious body into a drainage culvert as a joke
(ha, ha, ha, it was a very funny joke, so funny that I spent
three days in the hospital recovering from it, ha, ha, ha. Ahhh,
such good times with former friends that I eventually tracked
down and destroyed).
The big bubbles were really mild and only did a so-so job of
cleaning me up. The lather weakened very quickly and I was
forced to reapply the wimpy stuff to my "SkrubMaster of Manly
Destruction". Reapply? I had to reapply?! A required
reapplication is a major failure in my book and earns serious
demerits. Bad soap, no biscuit, bad soap!
Despite
its billowing and nigh-intoxicating scent, little of it remained
on me after the shower. My skin was not dried, but I can’t say
that it was any moister. The boring labels promised nothing and
listed no ingredients worth mentioning.
They turned out to be
merely fabulously scented, generic soaps in generic bottles with
generic labels (a couple of generic, greeting card sentiments
adorn the very plain labels), but none of this generic action
translated to a lower price!
The scents are really terrific and maybe they are worth buying,
once, just to smell them in action. They would make much better
gifts because, other than the interesting scents, they are too
expensive for so average a product ($14.50 for 8oz).
Wisely, Demeter Fragrances offers more than twenty-four scents,
including Angel Food, Bamboo, Coriander Tea, Crème Brulee,
Dandelion, Dirt, Earl Grey Tea, Fig Leaf, Gin & Tonic, Gingerale,
Golden Delicious, Grapefruit Tea, Grass, Holy Smoke, Holy Water,
Honey, Honeysuckle, Leather, Orange Juice, Pruning Shears, Rain,
Snow, Steam Room, Sugar Cookie, and Tomato.
I am sure that
they all work as well and smell as fantastic. A smart holiday
shopper will recognize this as two-dozen easy, but still unique
and personal, gifts. Find Demeter at
FashionPlanet.com.
[next] |
|