In honor of my recent return from what was probably my last beach vacation of the summer, today I am wearing Aqua Motu by Comptoir Sud Pacifique. Aqua Motu was originally released under the name Motu in 1992, and I believe the fragrance was reformulated when it was renamed. The notes for the current version are helychrisum, marine notes, lily of the valley, warm sand, and kelp.

I have never been a big fan of marine fragrances, but I adore Aqua Motu. It smells absolutely nothing like the mid-Atlantic beach where I now spend my summer vacations, and truth be told, it probably doesn’t really smell like an actual beach anywhere. All the same, in a way that I can’t exactly explain, it is an almost perfect, filtered-by-memory olfactory snapshot of the beach in La Jolla where I used to live…

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