Goutal's new hand balms: Garden ("...a walk in an English garden; the freshness of the flowers blends with the tangy scent of berries and blackcurrant"), Italian ("... a refreshing, energetic and tender fragrance inspired by the hills of Italy") and Oriental (...the scent of the desert of the Orient, a warm wind over the dunes"). £26 each for 40 ml at Harvey Nichols in the UK.
Yes, please. These little hand lotion tubes always get me. And they sound lovely.
Same — they are always so cute. I have way too much hand cream.
I mean, of course I want them, too. But…£26 for 40 mL?! Nah….
Does anyone else think it’s downright weird that the fragrance industry still uses the word “Oriental”? I feel like they are last group of people to give it up. There must be something else we could call that kind of fragrance. It’s straight from the western imagination of 1920, which seems awfully outdated.
Agreed. Is there any company that classifies those kinds of scents differently? It sounds very…colonial, to be polite, but off the top of my head I can’t think of anything better.
I’m not sure if there are companies out there that call that class of fragrance something else, honestly. It’s been such accepted industry jargon for so long. Oddly, it doesn’t communicate much to the casual perfume users that end up creating blockbusters. Yet I see the name in ad copy all the time.
Agree, although do think “Baume Mains d’Orient” is perhaps not as bad. “Of the Orient” does not have the same connotation to me, anyway, as “Oriental”. Then again, I am not a French speaker.
Either way, the packaging includes both languages.
The word is also used to designate at least two cat breeds, the Oriental Shorthair (like a Siamese without the contrasting color points) and the Oriental Longhair.
Me, me! I had a discussion with a fellow NSTer on a non-NST site about racism in perfume a couple years ago. It was very interesting and a bit disturbing.
Yes, fully agree! Thanks for giving us all something to think about, Desirae.