22 Thursday Aug 2019
Posted in Perfume Reviews
This week brought a new perfume launch from the niche house of Régime des Fleurs: Little Flower, a collaboration with actor and style icon Chloë Sevigny. The fragrance is inspired by the rose, Chloë’s favorite flower.
I’ve admired Chloë’s work — and her taste in fashion, design, and fragrance — since the 90s, and I’m a rose-perfume-lover, so I didn’t want to miss the launch event at Dover Street Market’s Manhattan location.
Here are a few of my photos from the event…
19 Monday Aug 2019
Posted in Perfume Reviews
Tags
blackbird perfumes, cartier, cherries, dawn spencer hurwitz, hilde soliani, lolita lempicka, perfume, tom ford
Once in a while someone asks me my opinion about Tom Ford fragrances. Let me try to summarize: I think some of them are excellent. I think some of them are boring. I think all of them are overpriced. And I won’t buy (or review) any of them anyway, because I choose to reject Tom Ford’s branding and marketing.
I’ve heard that Tom Ford Lost Cherry is worth trying, and I’ll get around to smelling it eventually, just for reference. In the meantime, I’d like to mention a few other cherry-inspired perfumes that are worth seeking out.
15 Thursday Aug 2019
Posted in Books and Scent
Tags
I’m currently rereading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (in order to fix it in my mind before the movie adaptation is released next month), and I just stopped to savor this sentence.
The novel’s narrator and protagonist, Theodore Decker, is learning about furniture restoration from a passionate expert in his workshop:
“After school, amidst the drowsy tick of the tall-case clocks, [Hobie] taught me the pore and luster of different woods, their colors, the ripple and gloss of tiger maple and the frothed grain of burled walnut, their weights in my hand and even their different scents — ‘sometimes, when you’re not sure what you have, it’s easiest just to take a sniff’ — spicy mahogany, dusty-smelling oak, black cherry with its characteristic tang and the flowery, amber-resin smell of rosewood.”
Donna Tartt is a secret (or not-so-secret?) scent-obsessive…
09 Friday Aug 2019
Posted in Perfume Reviews
My latest post on Now Smell This is a review of Portrayal, a fragrance for women by Amouage.
You can read it here.
29 Monday Jul 2019
Posted in Perfume Reviews
In honor of National Lipstick Day, here’s my favorite lipstick-inspired fragrance. It has been imitated by other brands but no one has improved upon this beauty. It was created for Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle by Ralf Schwieger in 2000 and its notes include grapefruit, violet, rose, iris, raspberry, vanilla and white musk.
17 Monday Jun 2019
Posted in Advertising and Scent
Tags
Gloria Vanderbilt, photographed by Horst P. Horst, 1966
Today we heard that Gloria Vanderbilt has died at the age of 95.
The headlines are interesting — since Vanderbilt lived such a long and kaleidescopic life, every one begins with a different signifier.
Socialite. Heiress. Fashion Icon. Artist. Actress. Anderson Cooper’s Mother. Writer. Designer. Jeans Queen…
13 Thursday Jun 2019
Posted in Books and Scent
Thanks to my friend A., who always makes excellent book recommendations, I’ve been reading Ali Smith’s cycle of seasonal novels—Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), and Spring (2019). (I just finished Winter and I’m waiting for a copy of Spring to become available at the public library!)
In Autumn, the character Daniel Gluck, a 101-year-old former songwriter who’s nearing death, drifts into a reverie or dream populated by loved ones from his century-plus on earth. His imagined company includes:
“…the painter, the one that turned him copiously down, well, that’s life, he can even smell the scent the painter wore, Oh! de London, bright, sweet, woody, when he first knew her, then she got older and more serious and it was Rive Gauche, he can smell it too.”
28 Tuesday May 2019
Posted in Books and Scent
Tags
Joan Didion (undated)
“I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.”
I just finished reading Joan Didion’s classic essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), which I’ve been meaning to read for ages and recently received in a Boxwalla subscription.
I noticed a few few smell-related references in one essay—“Goodbye to All That,” her 1968 reflection on loving and leaving New York City. Didion lived in New York from 1955, when she won a guest editorship at Mademoiselle, to 1963, at which point she moved back to her home state of California with her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne.
Here are those references, with added commentary of my own…
16 Thursday May 2019
Posted in Perfume Reviews
My latest post on Now Smell This is a review of Boxwalla’s new Perfumer Series project, featuring fragrances by Sigil Scents.
You can read it here.
Image via Boxwalla’s instagram.
