Italian niche line Santa Maria Novella has introduced Cala Rossa (red cove), a new fragrance inspired by Capraia, one of the 7 islands in the Tuscan Archipelago…
Holiday fragrance gifts 2013, part 3
Our series of holiday gift posts continues with home fragrance of all kinds, from candles to sachets. If you missed them, check out Part 1: scented body products and Part 2: travel sizes & coffrets.
More shopping ideas: check out Perfume Posse’s recommendations for indie fragrance gifts.
To repeat what I said last year, maybe some year, Diptyque’s holiday candles will look so dull that we’ll leave them out, but that year has (still) not yet arrived. This year’s limited editions include Pine Bark (“A clean, woody, smoky fragrance that combines pine and cedar with hinoki, the Japanese cypress.”), Orange Chai (“A mellow but not sweet accord of orange, quince and a mixture of Indian spices.”) and Indian Incense (“A mysterious, deep fragrance, dark and floral. Rose and carnation are balanced with incense and myrrh.”), with designs by Tsé & Tsé. $68 each (190g), or $32 for a mini candle (70g), at Diptyque….
Santa Maria Novella Ginestra ~ fragrance review
I’ve been having nightmares recently — images of haunted, ancient buildings, scary-looking storytellers with harsh words and amazing powers, “gifts” that are full of trickery and cruel irony invade my thoughts throughout the night. To combat this nighttime onslaught, I’ve been forcing myself to have happy daydreams. Some of my best daydreams involve travel: places I’ve visited and been enchanted by. One such place is southern Italy and a wonderful vacation spent in the area stretching from Naples to Paestum. Apart from the fragrant foods of Campania — ripe San Marzano tomatoes “baking” in the sunshine, limoncello, mozzarella di bufala, pizzas cooking in wood-burning ovens, cinnamon-scented sfogliatella — I remember one afternoon spent at Pompeii, where the air was scented with a combination of sweet smoke (from Vesuvius?) and flowers. For once, the flowers outdid the smoke…because the flowers were ginestra (Genista juncea).
Ginestra (also known as broom) is part of a big plant family — the legume (Fabaceae) group. As I was searching online, trying to figure out the type of broom I smelled at Pompeii, I saw the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi was inspired by broom to write his poem The Ginestra, or The Flower of the Wilderness…
Santa Maria Novella Alba di Seoul ~ (not) new fragrance
Late last year, Italian niche line Santa Maria Novella launched Alba di Seoul, a new unisex fragrance…
Top 10 Spring Fragrances 2012
Spring in the Pacific Northwest is a transitional season — there are chilly days and warm days, a dry day (or two), and then there’s…RAIN…all types of rain — sprinkles, showers, ‘horizontal’ umbrella-proof rain, deluges, sometimes all in the space of one exciting hour. What separates spring from fall, another season with multiple personalities, are the fragrant flowers that bloom in spring: plum and cherry; narcissus; wintersweet; scented azaleas, camellias and witch hazels; lilacs; daphnes; hyacinths; and my favorite — wallflowers. For my springtime perfume choices, I (mostly) skip spring flowers in a bottle — no perfume matches the aromas of real plants blooming all around me. My spring favorites, most of them new discoveries and, as yet, un-reviewed, are a varied lot.
Ah…the smell of gasoline on a warm afternoon! Histoires de Parfums Pétroleum reminds me of lawn mower fumes mingling with the scents of flowers and cut grass. It makes me drowsy (in a good way). And speaking of grass (and roots) I’ll add LesNez Turtle Vetiver Front to my spring favorites list; it’s a rich and warm vetiver that works in any season (like a “perfume-scarf,” it blunts the chill on cold days and, conversely, it accentuates the heat of a warm day when you want that “baking” feeling).
As one bakes, one sweats, and I’m one of those people who likes a hot-and-bothered-smelling perfume on occasion (we’re talking ‘clean’ sweat — grapefruit, vetiver, cedar — no overwhelming cumin). In this clean-dirty category, I’ll put Kinski (with its marijuana and vetiver notes) and the éminence grise of modern perspiration perfumery: Cartier Déclaration…