Happy (Go Green!) Friday and happy National Relaxation Day! Birthdays: Sir Walter Scott, E. Nesbit, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Julia Child, Oscar Peterson, Jimmy Webb. Our community project for today: wear a green fragrance. Thanks go to Dawn for the suggestion!
What fragrance did you pick? As always, do chime in with your scent of the day even if you’re not participating in the community project.
I’m still out of town, and still green-free in my usual DIY lotion with sweet orange and ylang oils…
The author and cultural critic Fran Lebowitz once said, “To put it rather bluntly, I am not the type who wants to go back to the land; I am the type who wants to go back to the hotel.” I share this preference (and many others) with Ms. Lebowitz, and yet every now and then, I do enjoy a walk in the woods…as long as I can easily stroll back to the subway or the bed-and-breakfast when I’m done communing with nature. And if that mood strikes when I’m home in my city dwelling, I can always pick up a perfume that evokes the wild wonder of the forest for a quick hit of arboreal fantasy.
Eau de Jane was released in 2019 and was developed by perfumer Roger Howell…
It’s Friday and there are 3 more days until spring! Birthdays: Penelope Lively, William Gibson, Nat King Cole, Alexander McQueen. Of course, it’s also Saint Patrick’s Day! Our community project: wear green for St Patrick’s Day. (This is a repeat, probably many times over.)
What fragrance did you pick? As always, do chime in with your scent of the day even if you’re not participating in the community project.
I’m in L’Artisan Parfumeur Jacinthe des Bois: green + hyacinth. My bottle is elderly but still kicking…
Longtime readers here at Now Smell This will be familiar with the idea of the purgatory basket. It doesn’t have to be a basket, strictly speaking: it could also be a bowl or box or drawer, any container that holds an assortment of samples we try, think about, and decide to reassess later. The delay might just be a matter of mood or season or, in my case, a busy calendar that distracts me from my usual sampling efforts.
I recently revisited four releases from 2021 (and one older fragrance) and realized that they all had some kind of “green” theme in common — gardens, vines, mosses. In addition to my usual rotation of L’Ombre dans l’eau and tart rhubarb-y scents, I might be branching out (hah) a bit this summer.
To start: I recently read Muriel Barbery’s A Single Rose, and its descriptions of Kyoto’s Zen gardens sent me hunting for the vial of Le Jardin Retrouvé Mousse Arashiyama (image below) that I’d stashed away for later reappraisal…
We recently marked the winter solstice in my part of the world, and I’m so relieved that we’re now slowly edging towards the “longer” days and milder temperatures of spring. I’m already extracting as much sensory value as possible from every brief outdoor errand, despite the grayness, the wind, and the ongoing threat of Covid-19: sniffing the air in local parks when I’m alone and can remove my mask, turning my face to catch a ray of winter sun, taking close visual note of evergreen trees and any lingering greenery in my neighborhood.
I’ve reread a few favorite works of children’s literature over the past year, including two that employ secluded, leafy spaces as symbols of renewal and transformation. One is Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), in which a pair of lonely children observe the arrival of springtime in a long-forgotten garden…