Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab has launched a collection of 20+ fragrances inspired by Neil Gaiman’s novel, American Gods. (A television series based on the novel will debut on Starz later this month.) The proceeds from the fragrances will benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund…
Inspired by the free-spirited artists of the legendary Bloomsbury group—writers, philosophers and intellectuals, most notable among them Virginia Woolf—this collection of scents captures the intoxicating essence of an unconventional life in their legendary country house in the Bloomsbury area. Each bottle in the collection is hand painted. —Nordstrom
As we perfumistas know, inspirations for scents rarely translate into realistic representations: “This perfume is SO Virginia Woolf!” That’s fine…we can still enjoy the resulting perfume even if it’s not catty, depressed, inhibited, or a genius. But why can’t Nordstrom get the country house right in the PR above? The Bloomsbury area of metro London is NOT the country and the houses there associated with the Bloomsbury group are on Gordon Square. You have to travel 90 minutes outside London to see THE country house of the Bloomsbury set: Charleston farmhouse…
Jo Malone recently launched its springtime limited edition collection, The Bloomsbury Set. Once again, the collection has an appropriately English theme. These five fragrances — Blue Hyacinth, Garden Lilies, Leather & Artemisia, Tobacco & Mandarin and Whisky & Cedarwood — were reportedly inspired by the Bloomsbury Group and artist Vanessa Bell’s Charleston House in Sussex. I say “reportedly” because that information was shared in early press releases, although the Jo Malone website now only refers vaguely to “free spirited artists” living “an unconventional life in their legendary country house.”
Samples of Jo Malone’s limited editions are hard to come by, so this review is based on visit to a Jo Malone counter and a generous application of two fragrances that particularly interested me…
The SWINTON’s birthday* edition of the cold weather version of our summer reading poll: tell us about a great book to curl up with on a frosty winter night, and what fragrance we should wear while reading it.
Extra credit: scent Tilda Swinton, or one of her movie characters. No points shall be awarded for mentions of the obvious, Like This!
Bonus reading: Tilda Swinton’s 10 favorite books and her 2015 summer reading list…
Orwell is the most odoriferous English language writer I know. Norman Mailer would be second on the list, with passages such as this from An American Dream: “a deep smell came off Kelly, a hint of a big foul cat, carnal as the meat on a butcher’s block... With it all was that congregated odor of the wealthy, a mood within the nose of face powder, of perfumes which leave the turpentine of a witch’s curse, the taste of pennies in the mouth, a whiff of the tomb.”
— John Sutherland, the author of Orwell’s Nose: A Pathological Biography, is anosmic. He writes about the "much-needed solace" of reading about smells in A nose-blind reader's guide to the world's most pungent prose at The Telegraph.