I’m a city person: I feel total kinship with the poet Frank O’Hara when he says, “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.”1 With the exception of occasional family visits to non-metropolitan areas, I generally prefer to limit my pastoral experiences to art and fragrances that evoke the great outdoors…
Prada’s Miu Miu brand recently launched Miu Miu L’Eau Rosée, a flanker to 2015’s Miu Miu. Like its predecessor, this is a scent designed to express “the spirit of the Miu Miu girl,” packaged in the same “matelassé bottle” design (with new colors) and developed by the same perfumer, Daniela Andrier.
To begin: L’Eau Rosée is not a rose perfume. The name refers to the pink tint of the liquid inside that ridiculously chic bottle, just as L’Eau Bleue was literally blue…
Two weeks ago, I mused about chestnut perfumes. The topic must still be on my mind, because I just unearthed a vial of Aroma M Geisha Marron in a bag of samples on my desk and decided to give it another spin. Geisha Marron was originally released as an oil (in a roll-on bottle) in 2006, but Aroma M’s founder and perfumer, Maria McElroy, launched a new Eau de Parfum concentration in 2017.
Like its “sisters” in the Geisha collection, Marron is an interpretation of a color —in this case, brown…
Are you a fan of chestnuts? If so, was this an acquired taste for you? I’ve been a chestnut-lover for most of my life, only because roasted chestnuts figured prominently in two family traditions that took place during the holiday season. One: my grandmother and my mother and I would go together to see the Christmas windows of Manhattan’s department stores, and my grandmother would buy me a small paper bag of roasted chestnuts from a street vendor, to eat as we walked along. Two: my grandparents prepared roasted chestnuts as part of the dessert course on Thanksgiving and Christmas, roasting them in the oven after my grandfather had made a small X or cross on each one with the point of a knife (to prevent them from bursting).
These happy memories surrounding the chestnuts, not to mention the chewy, buttery enjoyment of the nuts themselves, would make me want to try any fragrance with a chestnut note. But why do so few perfumes try to capture this sensation…
I have to confess that I’m not really sure how to categorize this review. Once again, Lush — creator of powdered toothpaste and solid bath gel — has gotten very creative with its product formulations. Right now I’m mystified and charmed by its new “wash cards.” I happened across these clever little inventions when I was browsing the Lush website and noting the addition of several new perfumes. I was pondering my next opportunity to get to a Lush store to try them, and wondering whether my local Lush would even carry the full line, and then I noticed the wash cards and ordered a few.
So what are they? Each wash card is a flat rectangle, measuring about one inch by three inches, made from a mix of apple pulp and cellulose fibers…