Cherries In The Snow

Does any man really understand you?

Patricia Clarkson looks lovely

It has the best name.

Considering it’s one of the bestselling lipsticks of all time and still in production today, I’d say it looked better on more than just two women.

Sylvia Plath wore this lipstick as well, according to biographer Elizabeth Winder

R4 I'd say you're wrong

I know a woman in her mid-twenties who wears it and it makes her look like she's in her mid-thirties

God, Marilyn's makeup was gorgeous.

How would one do lips for a warm-toned and rosy-cheeked but pale/autumnal dark blonde woman? Sort of like a Drew Barrymore complexion. I feel like this shade wouldn’t be ideal on such a face.

It isn't a youthful shade

R5 ymmv but I wouldn’t say Plath is a ringing endorsement fashion-wise...

She knew from shantung, r11.

Helen Lawson wore it into her 90s.

^ Fake news—her signature shade was Canned Mackerel by Max Factor.

It's no Cherries a la Mode.

Like patchouli, a lot of women discover it during their slut phase

It looks like it would bleed.

It really works best with pale skin on formal occasions

^ Yes, it's a very blue red.

Miss Revlon in Cherries a la Mode...

[quote]R8 God, Marilyn's makeup was gorgeous.

This is interesting:

Marilyn looks very contemporary in the OP, although you can see how beaten-up her hair is from all that bleaching.

Who knows you as you really are? Does he? Who knows the secret hopes that warm your heart? Who knows the dreams you dream, the words you've left unspoken? Who knows the black-lace thoughts you think while shopping in a gingham frock? Who knows you sometimes long to sleep in pure silk sheets? Who knows you'd love to meet a man who'd hold your hand and listen...while you say nothing at all? Who knows there was a morning when your orange juice sparkled like champagne? Who knows the secret, siren side of you that's female as a silken cat? Who else but Revlon understands you as you really are...a trifle shy, but oh-so-warm...and just a little reckless, deep inside...as strange and unexpected as cherries in the snow.

Keep your Cherries. Give me Fire & Ice!

R24 those quiz questions have me dead.

‘Do sables excite you, even on other women?’ had me going the most but on reading it more carefully it’s not a lesbian question is it?

‘Would you streak your hair platinum without first consulting your husband?’??? Thems really were different times I guess. Why as a woman would you consult or get permission from a man about anything like that?

Most normal people consult others before making a dramatic change to their appearance. It doesn't necessarily mean asking for someone else's permission, but more in the way of asking for feedback. A lot of people ask these sorts of questions out loud.

[italic] “I’ve always been interested in finding out what products my favorite dead icons used, as if I can access a part of their lost inner lives by slathering on Erno Laszlo’s Phormula 3-9 (one of Marilyn Monroe’s favorite creams) or spritzing myself with Fracas (Edie Sedgwick’s signature scent). Wearing Cherries in the Snow allowed me to experience a strange intimacy with a writer I admired, even more so than reading the very personal things Plath wrote about.”

R21 Wow, full drag. I think women can look beautiful in makeup at times, but seeing someone's face literally painted with so many creams and powders just makes me wonder how anyone could find that sensually appealing. It would be like making out with a painting.

Fracas was a great perfume. I don;t think it's available anymore in the US.

R29 wasn’t FRACAS an early victim of reformulation?

Marilyn also used Vaseline as a highlighter to make her skin glow, but it also supposedly caused her to grow a fine layer of facial hair.

R23 What kind of "black lace thoughts you think" are you referring to?

I opt for...Ultra Violet

Fracas underwent minor reformulation after Adrien Arpel/Alfin Inc. bought the rights to the Robert Piguet perfumes in the mid-'80s. Fashion Fragrances and Cosmetics bought the rights to the original formula in the late '90s, and it was reformulated again in the late 2000s to comply with the IFRA. Most fragrance mavens agree that neither reformulation had a detrimental impact, though. I have a bottle of the modern EDP, and one spray is plenty.

R31 eh? All women have peach fuzz naturally, I thought (though the trend these days is to dermaplane it off).

Fracas is a most inelegant name.

Why did Revlon always sell lipstick bundled in a trio set with nail lacquer and face powder? Did they just have too much stock to offload?

[quote] R4 I'd say you're wrong

Who can argue with airtight logic like that?

The Piguet fragrances are still very much available. In addition to the classics (Bandit, Baghari, Cravache, Fracas, and Futur), several new ones have been introduced in the last decade.

Fracas is one of the perfumes formulated in the 1940s for Robert PPiguet by the great perfumer Germaine Cellier. Famously, and unlike other perfumers, she came up with her perfumes by using the ultra-complex bases in the Piguet facotry and adding other notes to them; when the original company filded, they lost most of the bases, and they are very hard to reformulate (in some cases next to impossible) because they had so many notes in them. So when the line was re-created they ahd to hrie perfuemrs ot make their best guesses based on chemical testing as to what she had originally used.

Then in 2009 the International Fragrance Assocation (IFRA) changed all the rules about how much you could use certain notes in perfumes, and so most houses stopped using oakmoss (one of the most common elements in perfumes pre-regulations) and had to reformulate them. This was okay for Fracas, which does not use a lot of oakmoss, but disastrous for many other perfumes, including some Cellier invented for Piguet including Bandit (THE classic lesbian perfume) and Cravache. In recent years they've figured out how to do a very fine oakmoss substitute that fools most people's noses, so things are looking betteragain.

Other notes that got either banned or had to be drastically minimized include ambergris (made from whale vomit), castoreum (made from material expressed from the glands in beaver's butts), and civet (made from material expressed from the glands in the butts of civet cats).

r39: almost all of those have been dratsically re-formulated and stripped down to their bare skeletons.

I'm surprised no one mentioned the popular drag queen shade. Franks and beans.

Bandit and Fracas are fantastic. I've never tried the others, but apparently Baghari is a totally different fragrance from the original.

R34 Old Fragrance Whore coming through with the facts! J’adore💕

OT but I have a question re. vintage fragrance— do you happen to know of a contemporary cognate fragrance for Prince Matchabelli’s Cachet (a grassy leathery spicy carnal aldehyde-musk from the early 70s, with oakmoss & orris). The perfume gets namechecked in one of my favourite crazy cult novels from the 1970s, and I’ve always wanted to smell a bit like it to transport me to the world of the text and bring me closer to it.

I've never tried Cachet, but the perfume reviews at Fragrantica include comparisons to other scents. For Cachet they list the original Miss Dior, Salvador Dalî Parfum de Toilette, Jovan Woman, Lauder for Men, and a modern niche scent called Night Train, among others.

I didn't realize this was a famous lipstick. In high school we had a Miss Homelycoming drag pageant for a pep-rally, and I was one of the guys chosen. I remember I wore this lipstick, I liked the name and it was vibrant. I wanted to look slutty, and I did. One of the football players was like, "Dude, if I didn't know you were a guy I'd ask you out." I was closeted but I really wanted to say, "don't let that stop you, bro."

If you're going to wear make-up...𝙬𝙚𝙖𝙧 make-up.

The perfume no two women can share

Why did Oakmoss have to be recreated? Is it rare or endangered?

The IFRA (the fragrance regulatory agency) classifies it as an allergen. There are independent perfumers who still use it and other banned ingredients such as civet.

Kiss and Make-Up

Still around 50+ years later

LIPSTICK

"Happy....Birthday....To......YOU!"

R9 Mulberry? Mahogany brown? Dusty rose? Coral? A peachy nude?

Orange Sherbet?

I don’t think Julia Roberts’ coloring would look good with a blue-red lipstick like Cherries

[quote] Why did Oakmoss have to be recreated? Is it rare or endangered?

Neither. Some people (who are a tiny fraction of the world's population--far less than 1%) are allergic to contact with it, so they decided it's better to be safe than sorry.

According to makeup guru/historian Lisa Eldridge, Marilyn's favorite lipstick was Guerlain's Rouge Diabolique. It's not made anymore, but Rouge Insolence is a close dupe.

[quote] Still around 50+ years later

As are a great many things, some of them awful.

Is the oxymoron of the name deliberate marketing? Or is it some sort of arcane reference from an Oriental story?

R57 A Low Vera says what?

Perfect for a post-pandemic pick-me-up

Carmen Dell'Orefice could pull it off.

"It really works best with pale skin on formal occasions"

Not necessarily, some dark-skinned women look great with vivid red lipsticks. Here's Lupita Nyong'o in a blue-red lipstick.

A vivid blue-red would be an extreme look on a white woman, more suitable for dressing up than for work, but Lupita could wear this as an everyday shade.

Blue red looks good on those with cool undertones. A pale woman could have warm undertones and look terrible in that shade. Lupita has cool undertones so blue reds work on her.

I’m loathe to rock the boat on this, but truthfully I wouldn’t call Cherries in the Snow any kind of a true red. It has much more pink in it - almost magenta.

But carry on.

Cherries in the Snow is the color of my front door. I love it.