Ah, bread! Oh, bakeries! Unless a doctor tells me I’ll start to disintegrate — quickly — if I don’t stop eating white flour, I shall munch my way through many more loaves, rolls, cakes, and cookies in my lifetime. When I was a little boy I had strange ideas about bread. Though my live-in grandmother made fresh breads once, or sometimes twice, a day, I felt “homemade” bread was no better than a homemade belt (Jethro Bodine, anyone?) or a homemade pair of shoes (the horror!) I was a clueless little snob. As the rest of my family (and neighbors and friends) devoured my grandmother’s biscuits, I insisted on store-bought bread for my meals: a soft/doughy, sweet mess/mass called Sunbeam.

Serge Lutens’ new Jeux de Peau (“skin games”) was supposedly inspired by childhood scent-memories of warm, crusty breads at little Serge’s local boulangerie. Though I’m a bit tired of food-y scents at the moment, and associate most of them with winter (please, no more cocoa or tonka bean for awhile, perfumers), my nose was “open” to the possibilities of a bread fragrance…

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