I have spent much of this morning searching in vain for my decant of Tan Giudicelli Annam, and have come to the conclusion that I need a new storage system for my perfume.

Annam, for anyone who has never tried it, was a wonderful fragrance from designer Tan Giudicelli, who launched his own fashion label in 1984. It was created by perfumer Benoit Lapouza, and smelled like a creamy-milky rice pudding, lightly spiced, with floral & woody undertones. It was a gourmand scent, but not overly sweet, and it had a kind of Asian feel in keeping with Giudicelli's background (he was born in Indochina). It was very reasonably priced at ccb-paris, but was discontinued some time ago.

It has long been one of my favorite comfort fragrances, the sort of thing you could throw on when you were over-tired and didn't want to have to think too hard.

Some fragrances, like Coty Chypre, ought to stay in production just for historical reasons. Others, like Deneuve, ought to stay in production because so many people loved them. Annam was probably never very widely known, and I can't claim that it has any significance in the history of perfume, but I wish it hadn't been discontinued.

So, anyway, I can't find it. All of my decants are in a series of wooden boxes with lids. This was fine when I had about 30 decants, but now that I have over 100, it is a horrible system. I can't see the labels without pulling the bottles out to examine them, and my memory is not what it used to be so I can't always remember which box to look in to begin with. I would love to hear how others are dealing with their decants.

My fragrance samples are in a series of plastic drawer units like the one shown at left. This has also turned out to be a mess. The drawers are a good size, which I thought would be perfect since they would hold a lot of samples, but actually that just means that I have to dig for 5 minutes through a drawer to find the sample I'm looking for. Usually I end up just dumping the whole drawer on the floor to make it easier. I have a feeling that what I need to do is go to Sears and look for a bigger unit with smaller drawers, like the sort of thing that people use to store nuts & bolts.

Please comment if you have any storage suggestions, laments about discontinued fragrances, or if you'd just like to add a few Friday complaints of your own.