It’s May Day, so everybody ought to be wearing lily of the valley — I’m spending the day with my dear old friend Diorissimo, and happily, I still have lily of the valley blooming in my yard. But today I’m reviewing two (not lily of the valley) recent releases: Estée Lauder Bronze Goddess Capri and Jo Malone Plum Blossom…
Estée Lauder touts Aliage as the first fragrance for sports. One sniff, and my guess is hockey and motocross aren’t the sports Ms. Lauder envisioned. A round of bridge or maybe an hour in the cutting garden are more like it. Nonetheless, Aliage is fresh, tart, and clean — the perfect accompaniment to tennis whites.
Aliage hit the market in 1972 when a bevy of delicious green chypres graced department store shelves. Yves Saint Laurent Y, Givenchy III, and old-timers Carven Ma Griffe and Balmain Vent Vert jostled for the attention of the woman looking for unfussy modern elegance. Aliage stands apart in its G-rated playfulness…
This winter has been an unpredictable one, so far, in the Mid-Atlantic region: no snow, mild temperatures, weirdly fluctuating humidity. It happens to suit my current state of mind: for me, the year opened on several notes of personal and professional disappointment, when nothing turned out quite as I expected it to.
However, wearing (and writing about!) perfume is always a reassurance to me. And over the past week or two, the temperature has finally dropped (and stayed low); we even received a light (if fleeting) layer of snow one night. Maybe something, even if it’s just the weather, will get back on track. Here, then, is my highly subjective list of ten fragrances that have been keeping me company during this season.
In the past I’ve thought of Guerlain Après l’Ondée as a springtime fragrance, but this year I realized that it’s also a good fit for where-is-winter days that alternate between chilly rain and pale sunlight…
Estee Lauder will launch Bronze Goddess Capri, a limited edition variation on their yearly summer fragrance, Bronze Goddess. Both are due out in February…
When the topic of past lives comes up, what time period do you picture yourself inhabiting? For some reason, I always regress to a city in the Middle Ages. No other era or geographical location ever comes to mind. Perhaps I was an inn-keeper, goutishly solid and pink-cheeked and wary. If gender and physical talents are passed through the centuries, then I could have been a wet nurse. If they are not, then maybe I was a monastic scribe and illuminator. (My handwriting is awful.) It is strange to feel so connected to the sights and sounds of medieval Europe. I don’t actually believe in reincarnation. I think my visions come from the more recent past, from pop culture references about the dark ages like The Lion in Winter and The Name of the Rose. What the books and movies are notably short on, however, is odors.
Most of us think of this time period as smelling pretty ripe: burning garbage, sewage in the ditches and rivers, halitosis, mildew everywhere, the sick and dead of the Bubonic plague years, all those buckets of fermented urine that alchemists were supposed to be distilling into gold, etc. But years of reading foodie articles on panforte, mead and sweetmeats have perfumed my personal medieval fairy tales with honey and almond milk, dates and chestnuts and raw milk cheese, fruit jellies and poached pears with long pepper. Most particularly at this turn of the seasons, I start to dream of the scent of mulling spices. As the cold sets in, there is something instantly cheering and sustaining in the thought of hot mulled wine or cider. And for me, no simmering pot of either would be complete without a bay leaf…