I suppose we all have our own forms of snobbery. For me, I either want something to be lushly, genuinely luxurious or to be blatantly cheap. Give me either the baguette-cut emerald in a one-of-a-kind setting, or the sparkling 1950s necklace in aqua plastic. It’s the real thing or a showy fake. Nothing in between. Alas, L’Occitane falls in between.

As I’m rediscovering the world of the mall, I see that every store is its own focus-grouped world. The Betsey Johnson store is all pink mini skirts and nineteen-year olds. The Chicos store is loose, putty-colored cotton and menopausal women. The Godiva store displays in its window what they deem to be sumptuous: a tray of flavorless Driscoll strawberries dunked in chocolate. The Apple store, packed with customers, is a clean white laboratory of sales.

L’Occitane’s gig is that it’s a French country pharmacy full of European products replete with natural essences possibly gathered by Provençal peasants at dawn. Instead of Bath and Body Works’ generic plastic containers, a L’Occitane product comes in a vaguely nineteenth-century glass bottle with a paper label. Some are classy glass cubes, others are rectangular with the shape of a plant molded into the bottle, and still others have tactile ridges running down them. They feel good to hold and imagine on your dresser. But they’re pretending to be something that they aren’t, and that bothers me…

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