She took it in a very psychological vein. We talked a lot about places and things that I enjoy and are important to me – like sitting in a coffee shop in Istanbul with all the cats under the table. It was like she was trying to do a portrait of me in scent.
— From How We Met: Jane Birkin & Lyn Harris at The Independent. The scent, by the way, is Miller Harris L'Air de Rien.
About the author: Nina is our guest shopper for London. If you missed her review of the Perfume Diaries exhibit, you can find it here. She took all of the images for this article.
The Perfume Diaries season at Harrods is not just about the exhibition. Throughout September, there are a number of evening events featuring some of the people and processes involved in the production of perfume.
For me, the most exciting of these was ‘The House of Guerlain’ on 9 September, with Jean-Paul Guerlain himself, and current in-house parfumeur, Thierry Wasser. I went along with my friend and neighbour Stephanie, fizzing with excitement.
All of the events are first-come-first-seated, apart from this one, which was a very hard gig to get into. On the night, the exhibition area was packed, with guests being checked off carefully on a list and absolutely no interlopers allowed to gatecrash…
More limited edition collector fragrance bottles, with the usual disclaimers: in most of these cases, the juice is unchanged, just the bottle is “special” (or not, as the case may be), and some of these may not be available in the US.
From Thierry Mugler, a limited edition refillable bottle of Alien: “Leave it to Thierry Mugler to adorn his favorite Alien in a tracery of fabulous golden jewelry…”
If you read a few women’s fashion/beauty magazines per month, you’re probably familiar with the kind of feature in which a high-end item is paired with a more attainable, bargain-price item — “Splurge/Steal,” “Lust/Must,” and so on. Sometimes I consider using this device to recommend pairs of body products, except I don’t usually come across direct comparisons. These two body scrubs, however, do fall into a similar category. Both have citrus-floral scents and both are packaged in tubes (my strong preference for scrubs), but they’re sold in different markets at very different price levels.
Kings & Queens is a more widely-distributed spin-off line for Korres, the Greek skincare and makeup company. The Kings & Queens body products claim to be enhanced “with royal herbs,” and like the rest of the line, the Sultan of Granada Lemon Flower Body Scrub is “enriched with royal mix [sic] of pomegranate, blue lotus and malachite natural extracts.” These extracts happen to fall towards the end of the ingredients list, after the water and sodium laureth sulfate and plastic exfoliant beads, but that’s not really unusual for a product in this price range. Because the exfoliating particles are suspended in what amounts to a lightweight shower gel…
British floral designer Jane Packer will launch her debut fragrances in October; the five in the series were “each created to represent different moods and characters”…