Review of five Maison Margiela perfume samplers

In my review of the LookFantastic Autumn Scent Edit, I commented that I couldn’t see the fuss around Maison Margiela’s Lazy Sunday Morning fragrance. On FeelUnique, the site where I have been getting perfume samplers for the last few months to share my thoughts on here, they conveniently had several other Maison Margiela fragrances as samplers. Thus, I thought this would be an opportune moment to see if my ‘meh’ response to Lazy Sunday Morning was an anomaly, or if this brand as a whole wasn’t to my taste. 

Review of five perfume samplers from FeelUnique – part 5

FeelUnique have lifted their moratorium on pick and mix samples, which means I can pick up where I left off and review more scents!!! I have to say, when lockdown began over a year ago, I would not have predicted my film blog pivoting to doing perfume reviews was going to be one of the side effects! 

For my most recent thoughts on FeelUnique hauls, click here.

10 Most Attractive Men in a 2019 Film

2018's list, in case you wanted to get a flavour for Emsy's taste in Hollywood hunks!

10. Lakeith Stanfield, Knives Out (new entrant)

Happiness is the same price as red bottoms.

In a happy sequel to me getting my Gal Gadot piercing, I passed the exam I sat in my September sitting. As I've developed a tendency to treat myself for exam passes (and the substantial toil I put myself through to pass them), I also got myself something for being successful this time. 

Except, whereas a cartilage piercing only costs £30, I levelled up substantially this time, with £495 Louboutins:

Those red soles ❤️

For my next exam pass, I won't be splurging on something quite as extravagant (I'll probably get another ear piercing!), but I just had to get these heels this time. 

I've heard Louboutins, or 'red bottoms', name-dropped in many of my favourite hip-hop or pop songs (whether it be from Iggy Azalea, Cardi B, J-Lo, Ariana Grande or Lizzo), so there's always been a cachet around them. 

My two personal favourite references to Loubies in music is Ariana Grande trilling 'happiness is the same price as red bottoms' in 7 Things, and Jennifer Lopez (who I will be rooting for to win Best Supporting Actress next year for her fierce performance in Hustlers)'s song Louboutins.

And now I finally have a pair of red bottoms to call my own. ❤️

Bar review: ADVENTURE BAR (Clapham High Street)

Having visited and reviewed the Adventure Bar in Covent Garden, I postulated whether the chain's venues outside of central London were better than the flagship one. The fact that DUSK (a terrific app that allows you have a free drink a night) featured Adventure Bar when I happened to be at Clapham Junction, meant I could put this hypothesis to the test.

A hug is just a hug, a sigh is just a sigh

Congratulations to France on winning the World Cup!

As I said before the tournament began, they were who I wanted to win, largely because they have the dishiest squad, but also because two of their starting XI, N’Golo Kanté (the happiest man ever) and Olivier Giroud, are Chelsea players, so Chelsea can claim 18.2% of the victory.

Part of me wanted France to win for vengeful Gone Girlish reasons: England football fans love to sing that intolerable ‘it’s coming home’ song, and it would put their backs up something awful seeing the trophy ‘come home’ to their Gallic neighbours, instead. 

And, as I’ve mentioned, I feel English football fans don’t deserve to be rewarded, given the no small part they play in normalising racism against my people. The BBC presenter Gary Lineker making excuses for Jamie Vardy’s usage of ‘Jap’ is a shining example of how racism against east Asians in this country is considered fair game.

But yes, congratulations to France! I’m delighted that Hugo Lloris, who has been toiling endlessly to no fruition at White Hart Lane, finally gets to experience glory!

My last World Cup-related blog that I will do before reverting to my status quo of pedantic BBFC blogs and throwing shade at restaurants, is ten adorable bromantic intra-club moments from the tournament this year. 

This World Cup has been absolutely immense, the Banter World Cup, if you will, featuring sensational goals (my personal favourite was Benjamin Chalamet’s one against Argentina), thrilling games, hilarious moments and memes and general WTF-ery arising from the use of VAR on margin calls. And I’ve loved every minute of it.

But my favourite thing about the World Cup, and all international football tournaments, for that matter, remains the lovely display of fraternity between footballers from the same team (but opposing countries) at the end of the game.

Remember, before the World Cup started, the thing I was most excited for was some manlove between Chelsea club-mates Gary Cahill and Eden Hazard. Did my expectation get fulfilled? Read on to see!

A disclaimer, that these are just ten bromances that involved players who I like.

Needless to say, there were a plenty more than just ten displays of intra-club fraternity throughout the World Cup, such as, for example, Sergio Ramos (the Spain and Real Madrid captain) hugging  his club-mate Cristiano Ronaldo (Portugal captain and general showboater) after Spain v Portugal in the group stages. But I don’t like either of them (the fact that I put both in my World Cup Ugly XI may be somewhat of a giveaway...), so I didn’t think it was worth chasing pictures of the moment, aha.

In chronological order…

Guess the Footballer: Hard

Finally, here are eight from The Times, plus an extra (rather awfully drawn, far too on the nose) one that I did.

The answers to yesterday's medium level puzzlers are at the end of this blog.

Enjoy!

1. 

Guess the Footballer: Medium

Continuing with the game I showed yesterday, here are the pictionaries which are a tad trickier! At the end, I'll provide the answers to the ones from yesterday!

1.

Guess the Footballer: Easy

So, England are out of the World Cup, getting beaten by a Croatia side who simply had more guile and experience than them.

As predicted, I am ambivalent about this loss, largely because my main draw for supporting England spent the majority of the tournament warming the bench (at least Gaz had Phil Jones to keep him company).

Also, I despise Jamie Vardy and will never quite forgive the British press (especially a certain football journalist who I used to be on quite good terms with #cryptic) for affording Vardy a free pass for racially abusing a Japanese man.

These same football journalists wrote mini-tomes about racism when Suarez and Terry did it. And to me, an east Asian, the silence from the hacks after Vardy’s choice word selection is a pretty clear sign that the British media don’t think racism against east Asians is problematic.

By not acting, the British press was complicit in the racism that I have suffered and continue to suffer.

That being said, there was a certain spark in the England side of the 2018 World Cup that was a joy to watch at times, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get swept up in the momentous occasion of us winning our first penalty shoot-out in an international tournament since 1996. There's also something to be said for seeing the country unify over a common cause, especially when the weather was so gorgeous too.

In the final, I’ll be supporting France, a decision that I'm not ashamed to admit that is largely driven by aesthetic reasons.

The 10 Most Handsome Footballers of the 2018 World Cup

Happy Hump Day!! 

Now that we're through to the quarter-final stage of the 2018 World Cup, I have officially seen all of the talent, shall we say, on display, to be able to have done enough research for who I think are the ten smokeshows of the tournament.

Thus, this is a thirst-heavy blog. Photos, gifs, and general swooning of some Adonises will be in abundance. It was quite a challenge to find variations of saying 'he's hot' over and over, but somehow, I managed it!

As with my choices for best and worst dressed at the 2018 Oscars, I'm not even going to pretend the list isn't heavily influenced by my personal opinion of the men in question (and club loyalties). I also have rather, niche, shall we say, taste in men - check out my list of hottest guys in the 2016 Euros.

10. Ruben Loftus-Cheek (England)

What a handsome man. His smile is like a gift from God, and he manages to balance appearing youthful with working a suave moustache.

If music be the food of love, play on

My captain didn't play in England's 2-1 win against Tunisia on Monday, and thus, I foresee myself spending much of this World Cup releasing an album, full of nothing but songs moaning about Gaz's lack of game time!

He may not be starting, but Cahill's presence in Russia means the British media are at least taking photos of him in Russian art galleries for me, so I can't whine too much.

10 Finest Fellas in a 2009 Film

Happy Hump Day! My picks for male babes of 2009. If you were wondering if I had a 'type', feel free to peruse my lists from previous years!

10. Michael Fassbender, Inglourious Basterds

10 Prettiest Ladies in a 2009 Film

My archives of eye candy lists by year are here, if you want to inspect my taste in guys and gals holistically!

10. Léa Seydoux, Inglourious Basterds 

09. Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air

A peach of a request.

The only thing this Movie Ratings Obsessive enjoys more than e-mailing the BBFC, is emailing the BBFC while picturing Timothée Chalamet, gorgeous star of Call Me By Your Name and set to become the third youngest man to receive a Best Actor Oscar nomination next Tuesday, at the age of 22, being intimate with a peach.

Restaurant review: LA TROMPETTE (Chiswick)

Pre-La Trompette, the closest I’ve come to dining at a restaurant with a Michelin star was at Chapter One in Orpington. Chapter One used to have a Michelin star, until it was stripped of it (bit of a kick in the teeth). So I was both excited and curious about my foray into experiencing how the other 1% do live!

Unsurprisingly, given the level of prestige surrounding La Trompette, the service is second to none. The moment our water jug was anywhere below a third full, it would be topped up, and the waiters were always offering us more bread (it was too delicious to turn down!). The bread, fresh from the oven, was complemented with deliciously salted butter. 

Everything about the venue was pristine, which meant it fitted in well in the salubrious part of Chiswick.

In part because the bar is so low for me, because I’m used to the attentiveness-levels of central London waiters that can most politely be described as ‘laconic’, and in part because I’m too self-conscious, but the elevated customer service in La Trompette made me a tad uncomfortable. But I don’t begrudge the waiters and waitresses that; they were doing their jobs exactly as they should have. This one’s on me.

The food was far more ornately made and lovingly crafted than Theo Randall, another restaurant of comparable price to La Trompette. For my main, I had the loin of Cornish cod, gnocchetti, chanterelles, cavolo nero and hazelnut pesto.

Bathing the cod in foam was an inspired touch; it meant the seafood felt more textured, despite not actually having much fat on it. My only gripe was that the portion was too small, but people who can afford to dine at places like La Trompette on the regular will understand that it’s the quality of the cuisine, not the quantity. And the quality of the fish was spectacular; succulent, and brimming with flavour. The fact that there was so little of it made me cherish the meal more!

Despite it not being cheap, I can definitely understand the ‘You get what you pay for’ adage about La Trompette, which I most certainly did not feel about Ladurée and Theo Randall, two other expensive London restaurants which charged handsome prices for ugly food. If you feel like treating yourself, you could do much worse than this Michelin starred venue.

Grade: A-

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For more of my restaurant reviews, click here.

Restaurant review: GILGAMESH (Camden)

Gilgamesh advertises itself as a pan-Asian restaurant, bar and nightclub. I visited it with my brother using a LivingSocial deal that I had bought for £34. The deal entitled us to afternoon tea and free-flowing Prosecco for two hours. I personally tend to find LivingSocial deals more honourable than Groupon ones, and the 'unlimited Prosecco for 2 hours' part of the deal appealed to me.

Product reviews: BOX OF SIX MACARONS (Ladurée) and POSH PROFITEROLES (Marks and Spencer)

"Not really your kind of place, is it?"

10 Fittest Ladies in Film, 2013.

I had a lot of fun screencap-and-gif-searching for this blog post! The top four, of which three women are in joint second place, has the highest calibre of beautiful women since I started posting this list!

10. Marine Vacth,  Jeune et Jolie 

Restaurant review: TRUC VERT (Mayfair)

Bungled away down one of the hectic Oxford Circus sidestreets is French restaurant Truc Vert. I went last November using a LivingSocial deal but amazingly, it bucked the trend set by their rival deal site, Groupon, in that dining at Truc Vert was actually a positive experience!

Truc Vert has elegant European-style furnishings but graciously, unlike Hawksmoor, say, isn’t so over-ornate that the decorations feel ominous.

For starters, we ordered:

A few bits of BBFC geekery when I was doing Christmas shopping yesterday.

From the DVD boxset of the final season of The Good Wife. A bit on the descriptive side!

From American Horror Story: Hotel's boxset. Notice the distinction between 'sexual violence' (i.e., rape) and 'sexualised violence' (the conflation of violence and sexual images, e.g. a stabbing during a sex scene).

Not gonna lie, reading this tells me I'm right in my convictions never to watch an episode of this scabrous show!

This is from How to Get Away with Murder. I was quite taken aback by this; all I know about this show is that Viola Davis is in it, and she is typically excellent. I was not expecting it to be an 18 cert! A quick glance over the American TV rating (TV-14), tells me that this might be the BBFC being weirdly strict.

Two other TV shows that I've noticed are TV-14 in the States and 18 over here are The 100 and Scandal. A telltale sign that a show is aiming for the TV-14 market when you're watching is extensive sexual dialogue and maybe even steamy sex scenes featuring nudity, but not once does anyone say the f-word (this also applies to many a TV-14 show that have gotten 15 over here, such as the aforementioned The Good Wife). 

I find it amusing that you can put quite a lot of adult content in a TV-14 and get away with it, but once you say 'f_ck', that's when you cross the line into TV-MA...

From Gotham's boxset. Again, I was just amused because of the juxtaposition of those four disparate classification issues.

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Whilst the BBFC are playing hard to get with regards to their rating of Elle, for which Isabelle Huppert is gaining Oscar buzz (I know I haven't seen it yet but I really hope she wins!), their Irish counterparts aren't so coy, and have released it with an 18. Given that the two awards bodies more often than not align, I'm guessing that this will be my second 2016 release that I've seen of an 18 cert! I've been very lax with watching 2016 releases of this rating; the only other has been The Neon Demon.

By the by, I noticed in HMV yesterday that on the occasions when the BBFC and IFCO don't agree on a film, they just bung the British rating on the front (otherwise, they put both, side-by-side):

Eddie the Eagle is a 12 in Ireland and A Hologram for a King is 15 in Ireland. I think this precaution is sensible; you wouldn't want to confuse buyers!

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Finally, I have no intention of watching this, but, nice wall mural for Assassin's Creed:

This same wall has also hosted Star Trek art in the past as well!

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I adore BBFC geekery. My entire compendium of BBFC posts is here, check it!