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On Another Note: Femme de Poppy Lipsticks (updated! with swatches)

14 Thursday Mar 2019

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Sometimes those pesky algorithms on retail websites actually serve their purpose. I was visiting the Barneys site to price a perfume that was on my mind, and the page made some further suggestions to me — including the “New” and “Exclusive to Barneys” Femme de Poppy lipsticks.

Barneys has no way of knowing that I’ve been a follower of Poppy King’s creative output since the 1990s (when she launched her original line of Poppy lipsticks: matte shades! colors named after the 7 Deadly Sins! art-inspired packaging!) through 2007, when she founded the Lipstick Queen brand, and beyond.

However, it apparently remembers that I’ve shopped for Lipstick Queen products, so it kindly (ha!) shared this news with me.

I clicked, and read a product description, and clicked again, and read a Barneys blog post about Femme de Poppy, and I smiled…

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Scratch ‘n’ Sniff: “Moodie” Stickers with a Perfume Theme (1983)

17 Monday Dec 2018

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Were scratch ‘n’ sniff stickers popular when you were in grade school?

They were certainly a craze at my school for a year or two, and I owned a small album where I carefully arranged my own collection of colorful aromatic decals. If these “Extravagant Moodies” had been available, I would have loved them…

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Screen Time: Perfume in Agatha Christie’s “Evil Under the Sun” (1981)

29 Thursday Nov 2018

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Maybe I’m just in a nostalgic mood these days—then again, when am I NOT in a nostalgic mood? A few weeks ago I wrote a short post about Brideshead Revisited and its wine-tasting scene. Now I’m thinking about the film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun.

Christie’s murdery-mystery novel Evil Under the Sun was published in 1941 and this film was released in 1981. It was directed by Guy Hamilton, with a screenplay by Anthony Shaffer, who also wrote two other Christie screen adaptations,  Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Death on the Nile (1978). Peter Ustinov played Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective who (as always) cracks the case.

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Henri Bendel: A Scented Salute (in 5 Parts)

03 Wednesday Oct 2018

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I’m still distressed by the news that Henri Bendel will be shut down in January 2019 by its owner, L Brands, due to low profits. Last week I took a look back at The Gilded Cage, Henri Bendel’s shop-within-a-shop for perfumes and cosmetics. Today I’ll share five memories of Bendel from my own scented timeline.

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A Look Back at Henri Bendel and “The Gilded Cage”

25 Tuesday Sep 2018

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Henri Bendel on West 57th Steet, via Geraldine Stutz Fellowship/Parsons School of Design

I’m still saddened by last week’s news that Henri Bendel—the flagship store on Fifth Avenue and its various satellites in other cities—will soon cease to exist. L Brands, Bendel’s corporate owner since 1985 (and the force behind Bath & Body Works, Victoria’s Secret, et al.) is closing down the brand due to its lack of profitability.

I could ramble incoherently for thousands of words about the ways that L Brands gradually dragged Bendel down into tacky irrelevance and ruined it for those of us who were lifelong shoppers (and I mean, lifelong—I probably visited the original Henri Bendel location in utero). Instead, I’ll share this gem of an article that The New York Times ran in 1960.

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Screen Time: “Endeavour” Follows His Nose (sorry!)

24 Tuesday Jul 2018

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I’ve been watching the various television series inspired by Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse mysteries since my late teens: the original BBC series starring John Thaw as Morse, then the spin-off series Inspector Lewis (about Morse’s younger assistant), and now Endeavour. This one is set in the late 1960s and offers a backstory (or origin story, if you want to think of it that way) for the mysterious Morse.

The latest episode of Endeavour to air in the United States, “Quartet” (Season 5, Ep. 5), is a tale of murder and espionage set in—where else?—Oxford, England. One of its subplots includes references to a fictional perfume brand called Fenix.

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Vanities: Iman’s favorite perfume and home fragrance

16 Monday Jul 2018

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Bowie and Iman in 1990 (Photo by Ron Galella)

To say that I’ve spent most of 2018 (to date) immersed in all things David Bowie would be an understatement.

That situation is about to change, but I can’t help writing one post here about Iman, the model and entrepreneur who was his wife from 1992 until his death in 2016. I could spend all day looking at photos of them together, but I’ll try to keep this post short and sweet and scent-related.

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