Deal at b-glowing: Spend $75 or more, get a free Tokyo Milk Woman with Music soap using coupon code MUSIC, good though 1/26. New items include Love & Toast fragrances.
Deal at beautyencounter: take 10% off with coupon code MLK834, good through the end of the day.
Deal at kiehls: get free shipping on orders of $30 or more with coupon code NEWYEAR, good through 1/24.
Sasha Varon is a new brand debuting this month with Soulgasm:
Soulgasm, is the new luxe parfum from Sasha Varon. Heaven Sent, Hellbent…
Amy, who comments here as alltheprettythings, wants our help finding a new perfume. She’s got lots of favorites already, but she gets bored easily and would like to find another. It should be something she can wear anywhere, in any season. She can spend up to $200, and she is in New York twice a week — not far from Aedes! — so her access to perfume stores is excellent.
Here is what Amy wants us to know about her:
My personality: raised to be a Lady (Brit Mum), so am very proper in manners and decorum but am a 38-year old small business owner secret-wild-child with a love for vintage clothing, dancing, laughter, all sorts of music, breaking rules, smashing glasses in joy and anger, impulsive, creative…
In general, I feel ambivalent about Kiehl’s and its products. The company has managed to sustain an impressive degree of its old-New-York, neighborhood-apothecary image (“Since 1851”) despite having been acquired by L’Oreal in 2000. Since then, however, its ever-expanding product range has started to seem diffuse and inconsistent, and the products themselves are often over-priced and not nearly as nature-based as they sometimes claim to be. Still, I keep going back for Kiehl’s Coriander-scented body products; I’ve been hooked on this fragrance for over five years, and I haven’t found anything to replace it.
Kiehl’s Gently Exfoliating Body Scrub is a relatively recent addition to the line, but it’s one of the newer products that I enjoy; it’s conveniently packaged in a flip-top tube, and it has a lightly-foaming formula with small exfoliating particles that feel pleasantly scrubby, but not scratchy. The Deluxe Hand & Body Lotion with Aloe Vera & Oatmeal is actually fairly lightweight, so if you have seriously dry skin, you’ll need something more concentrated. Both products are packed with the sorts of ingredients that I normally try to avoid when possible: sulfates and plastics in the scrub, silicones and parabens in the lotion, many mysterious multi-syllabic chemicals in both…
The original Hotel Costes fragrance, once called Costes but now presumably Costes No. 1 to distinguish it from their newer eponymous scent, was something of a cult favorite, although I don’t hear about it so often these days — is anyone out there still wearing it? At any rate, it was done by perfumer Olivia Giacobetti and was based on the hotel’s signature room fragrance.1 Giacobetti also did their new fragrance, Costes No. 2, which was reportedly “inspired by the Hotel’s signature rose bouquets and the recently opened rose florist shop”2 (the notes: benzoin, cinnamon, Turkish rose, geranium, orange blossom, and gaiac wood).
If you’re after a boatload of roses, though, be warned that you won’t find it here. Costes No. 2 is, first of all, a very quiet scent…