Being an indoor sort of person, I appreciate winter only inasmuch as I can glance out the frost-feathered windows and admire the perfect pillowed hummocks of snow I won’t have to shovel. (We rent.) To heartier types I leave the joys of those first cleansing breaths of cold air, the silvery light and quiet walks in forest wonderlands. I shall stay right here, thank you, with my double scotch, my copy of A Child’s Christmas in Wales and my winter fragrance favorites, dug from the back of the perfume closet.
Serge Lutens Arabie: Say you made a Christmas pudding from dates, sugared citrus peel, cardamom, bay, a spike of cumin and some exotic, thick liquor that tastes like flowers and looks like Mountain Dew. You’d have: a) Christmas pudding I’d actually eat; and b) something darn close to Arabie…
Perfume blog newbies often comment that some of the regulars have a language of their own, and indeed we even have our own dirty words, the f- and s-bombs: “fruit” and “sweet”. I must admit to being among the contingent that usually gives a snobbish shiver of repulsion when I read a note list that includes grape, litchi or coconut. Unfortunately, sales assistants flogging candy cocktails are attracted to my chubby cheeks, decade-old sweatshirts and general lack of bearing. I notice this most often in big city, higher-end department stores: salespeople ignored by the older, impeccably groomed customers going by zero in on me as being the only person in the area who could conceivably be within the age range for their fragrance. Since I was a child, I've had a particular fear of situations in which somebody is giving an embarrassing or futile speech and I am obliged to stand there, smiling politely. I feel this fear as a pain in my chest, as heartburn, while I stand there with my frozen grin, waving around a testing strip or ribbon sprayed with something that is attracting flying insects. 