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Laurie Viera Rigler is our guest blogger during the week of May 12th. If you have any questions for her add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some brief information about Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict:

After nursing a broken engagement with Jane Austen novels and Absolut, Courtney Stone wakes up and finds herself not in her Los Angeles bedroom or even in her own body, but inside the bedchamber of a woman in Regency England. Who but an Austen addict like herself could concoct such a fantasy?

Not only is Courtney stuck in another woman's life, she is forced to pretend she actually is that woman; and despite knowing nothing about her, she manages to fool even the most astute observer. But not even her level of Austen mania has prepared Courtney for the chamber pots and filthy coaching inns of nineteenth-century England, let alone the realities of being a single woman who must fend off suffocating chaperones, condom-less seducers, and marriages of convenience.

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Here's how it went. We requested fresh samples, because perfumes are often reformulated, sometimes nightmarishly. We considered it abdication of duty to go on memory and old bottles. Most companies were happy to send—some, not. Many promised and never delivered. (Comme des Garçons, why?) Some were so rude I wanted to slap their parents. (DelRae Roth, were you having a bad hair year?) Anyone too French, too Italian, or too impervious to my particular charms was phoned by Luca. At the end, we took field trips to test ones we missed. In total, we reviewed about 1,500 scents, 300 more than promised, and we still get emails scolding, "You forgot ____!" (Send suggestions to mail@perfumestheguide.com.)

We both find luxury and exclusivity tawdry and tiresome, so we were gleefully immune to packaging and press releases, except in a few cases. (Mona di Orio called herself a "great beauty" and a "living Modigliani" on her own website where she boasted of being "Edmund" Roudnitska's student, and who were we to deny her the trouble she asked for?) We believe strongly in testing on paper first. Good scents can improve on skin, horrible scents never, and they don't wash off: not with soap, hot water, bleach, though I haven't tried fire or amputation. We put scents that passed the paper test on skin, smelled them over hours, argued across the table about what to call them, Winston Churchill or Amy Winehouse, neighborly or vicious, diva or wallflower, neurotic or sane, confused or coherent, delicious or disgusting, spills in the laundry aisle. Our position on skin chemistry is controversial, since we judge the perfumer's art, not whether you ate a hell of a lot of garlic last night, though no one should buy fragrances without personal testing. Yet, despite Luca smelling like a classic buttery European and me like an odorless East Asian, we noticed no tremendous differences in scent development, and we used the paper test as a control. Still, I hear some people sweat vinegar and have trouble.