Happy Friday, and happy International Day of Acceptance! Our community project for today: wear one of your “top 10 of winter” fragrances (unless it’s summer where you are, in which case wear one of your “top 10 of summer” scents).
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 wearing Fendi Theorema, which has carried me through more than one bad winter…
It’s January, and this morning we had our first snow-related school delay — it must be time for the winter vetiver list (I’ve already covered summer and fall). For all of these lists, the line between the seasons is perhaps a bit arbitrary and/or personal, but in general, today’s selections are heavier variations on the theme. If you are a woman who sometimes finds vetiver too masculine to wear, you might want to stick with the summer recommendations, or come back for the spring list. And as always, do add your own picks in the comments!
Maître Parfumeur et Gantier Route du Vétiver: Arguably the granddaddy of them all; when I reviewed it, I called it “the wild beast of vetiver fragrances”…
A light dusting of snow on the ground this morning reminded me that yes, we’re deep in mid-winter. If you love iris, this is when you can wear the richest and darkest irises in your collection. I’ve picked my five favorites for cold weather, and do add your own in the comments! And if you missed them, do see my list of iris picks for summer and iris picks for fall. The spring post is coming up in April, and then I’ll move on to a year of vetiver…
I am on record, here and elsewhere, as hating winter. The forecast for this weekend — snow, snow, and then more snow — just adds insult to injury. I’ve mostly managed to avoid the winter rotation in our seasonal Top 10 lists, but I did get stuck with it back in 2011, and reviewing that list, yes, I could easily go through the winter with just those 10 (and I am convinced I could make it through any winter with just Fendi Theorema, if I had to).
To avoid repetition with my 2011 list and the winter lists we’ve done since, I decided to come up with a cold-weather wardrobe based solely on newer fragrances…and then once I’d decided on my 10, I realized, too late, that this post is essentially an abridged and annotated version of the Best of 2015. So much for good intentions. If you have some new ideas for winter, do comment! And do check out the lists at Bois de Jasmin, Grain de Musc and The Non-Blonde…
While I am almost impervious to cold, I hate the inconvenience of winter. Imagine the shock-and-awe factor of a blizzard before the urban industrial era. People must have looked out into the eerie silence of a storm, a thick, blank curtain of white dampening even the wind’s whistle, and prayed to their higher being for safety and survival.1 Now, I get a snow alert on my phone and think: “Blast! If this causes me fifteen minutes of delay on the commute, I’m going to lose it!” I know, #ModernWorldProblems. In fact, after an ice storm that darkened Toronto into the new year for 2014, we’ve been lucky enough to avoid most of the chaos this winter. My condolences to Buffalo, Chicago, Boston and those on the East coast in Canada and the US.
The upside to darkness and inclement weather is the time I have inside to prepare an assault on two high peaks: the book pile and Mount Sample. Generally, I wear whatever fragrance I feel like at any time of year, but almost all perfumes conjure a particular season for me and the ones that evoke winter probably get less of my air time than most, merely for practical reasons. (Who will wear Guerlain Attrape-Coeur on a warm day in May? Not I.) My personal strategy for combating winter, then, is to dig out those under-loved warming, rich and sweet scents. But I do empathize with those who use the opposite approach, the denial method…