Issey Miyake has launched new* limited edition holiday flankers for L’Eau d’Issey: L’Eau d’Issey Or Absolu / Gold Absolute and L’Eau d’Issey Pour Homme Or Absolu / Gold Absolute…
Harajuku Lovers Jingle G ~ new fragrance
Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku Lovers line will launch Jingle G, a new holiday-themed (there will be a ribbon so you can hang it from a tree) limited edition fragrance for women, in September. Jingle G follows recent limited edition fragrances G of the Sea and Super G…
Happy holidays!
We'll be back on Sunday or Monday.
Note: image is my mother's xmas cookies by timitalia at flickr; some rights reserved.
The Scent of Home, the Scent of Celebration ~ out of the bottle
I won’t be going home for the holidays this year. Work, distance, and the difficulties of holiday travel in a time of war and other strange weathers mean I’ll be in Texas while the rest of my family is up in Idaho. So I’ve been thinking about the smells of Christmas, and of home, of the North and the South, and the places where they come together, and the places where they don’t.
The most expected smells of Christmas — the ones most likely to appear in limited edition perfumes, soaps and candles — are the smells of a Northern winter festival. The cool scents of pine and peppermint (all those candy canes), hints of snow, crystalline air, tree-covered mountains and those Northern night skies that seem so much blacker, and whose stars seem so much sharper and brighter than any I see in the South. To combat the cold, there’s the scent of woodsmoke from the hearth, and the smells of all those precious things imported from Southern climes: spices — especially the woody warmth of cinnamon and nutmeg, the heat of dried ginger and the cool-hot prickle of clove; oranges, which smell and look so much like the sun should that they hardly need explaining; and cacao, in the form of chocolate eaten in the hand, or melted into rich hot milk.
It’s an appealing combination — so appealing that all sorts of people who don’t celebrate, or even understand Christmas enjoy it (in Japan, for example, Christmas has been translated into a kind of Alpine-fantasy Valentine’s day). But it may or may not be the smell of your winter holiday, or your home…
Etat Libre d’Orange Noel au Balcon ~ fragrance review
When I first heard about Noël au Balcon from Etat Libre d’Orange, it was being offered as a limited edition fragrance for the 2007 holiday season. I was disappointed that I wouldn’t have a chance to try it, since it was only available at Sephora in France. Fortunately, Noël au Balcon joined the permanent Etat Libre line-up about a year ago, and now that I’ve had a chance to wear it, the season seems right for a review. Noël au Balcon’s composition includes notes of tangerine, vanilla, honey, orange blossom, apricot, red pepper, patchouli, musk, cistus, cinnamon, nigella, and amber, and it was created by the perfumer Antoine Maisondieu (who has produced a number of fragrances for Etat Libre, including another of my favorites, the aldehydic peachy-floral Vraie Blonde).
Since we’re dealing with Etat Libre d’Orange, there is the requisite punning in the fragrance’s title and some racy imagery in its logo and its descriptive “story”; allusions to cleavage abound. The proverb “Noël au balcon, Pâques au tison” means that a warm Christmas — warm enough to spend on the balcony — will be followed by an unseasonably cool Easter (requiring “firebrands”). And the expression “avoir du monde au balcon,” or “the balcony is crowded,” is a reference to a shapely bosom…