Top 10 Summer Fragrances 2018

Posted by Erin on 8 June 2018 26 Comments

I have never done one of the spit-or-scrape genealogical tests, but I have always suspected that my family has secret Nordic or Baltic blood, as both my brothers are enthusiastic enough about outdoor swimming that they’ll do it in early May or October… in Canada. While I hesitate to frolic in 50F waves, I do sport sandals until snow accumulates, drink Arnold Palmers in January and I’m the only non-menopausal female in my XX-dominated workplace who enjoys our arctic air-conditioning. In a similar fashion, I wear citrus colognes all year. When it is my turn to list summer fragrances around here, I remind myself that normal people generally turn to crisp, refreshing eaux only when the temperature rises. Having exhausted my stable of favored classic colognes in previous posts, though, I thought that this time I’d highlight some atypical choices. Please bear with me. I did test these on myself in the heat, but YMMV…

Read the rest of this article »

Top 10 Fall Fragrances 2017

Posted by Erin on 22 September 2017 57 Comments

Where I live, it is the first day of autumn, and this year, September is the new August: after a wet and confusingly mild vacation season¹, we look likely to celebrate a glorious Indian Summer. I have always loved the early fall, so I’m tempted, each time I select the autumnal Top 10 at Now Smell This, to stack it with all my favorite chypres, floral ambers and woody orientals. This time, to avoid boring you with repetition, I’ve chosen fragrances released in the last two to three years. I can’t promise there will be any less oakmoss than usual, but I do think I’m fruitier and more craft distilled today…

Read the rest of this article »

5 perfumes: Best of the 1970s

Posted by Erin on 21 April 2017 87 Comments

The Halstonettes, with Halston

One of the few movies I like more every time I see it is Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. I did not come of age in Texas in the summer of 1976; indeed, I am Canadian and was a teenager when the comedy released in 1993, 17 years later. But it is a movie that proves that late adolescence is often the same country. In one of the many drunken sociological conversations that pepper both this stage of life and the wandering film, bubbly free-thinker Cynthia Dunn lays out her “‘every other decade’ theory”: “The 50s were boring. The 60s rocked. The 70s, my God, they obviously suck. So maybe the 80s will be, like, radical.” The moment is memorable because Linklater allows himself so few superior jokes on his characters. As anybody who grew up then knows, the 80s were not radical. Even the cultural “cool kids” of the 80s, like Elvis Costello in his Buddy Holly glasses and David Byrne in his ever-growing suit, seemed to have a parodic, critical air about their work, like they knew they were producing their best stuff in an Arnoldian Epoch of Concentration.

Meanwhile, the 70s were often remembered as the era of Saturday Night Fever, a silly, narcissistic ‘Me decade’ of disco and embarrassing jumpsuits…

Read the rest of this article »

5 perfumes: Indie Greens

Posted by Erin on 25 November 2016 39 Comments

ferns

Once, when I was shopping at a perfume discounter, the owner brought me a fragrance and said: “You’ll like this. You’re a throwback.” I was taken aback. Was I? And was it so obvious? The suggested scent was a crisp green one, with the bite of galbanum, and I did like it, very much. I moved down the counter and snuffed the dusty tester, a bit embarrassed, while the owner helped a new customer pick out a bottle of Armani Code for women.

Pickings for the bitter green fiend are rather slim at department stores at present. Counter sales assistants will tell you that such scents are now old-fashioned and do not sell well. I imagine those last crisp green floral buyers, stately and melancholy as they have always been, at home with their Lauren Hutton cheekbones and maybe the accouterments of WASP style mentioned in Angela’s Estée Lauder Private Collection review: boat sneakers, gin martinis in iced silver carafes and small, strangely dignified dogs. (Of course, I still buy these perfumes and I am short, roundish and never to be found in tennis whites, alas. I would like a schnauzer, though.) Shopping at the mall these days, one worries that such green fragrances will go extinct, like the serious hats men used to wear in Cheever short stories. As with many holes in the market bemoaned by the fragrance obsessed, however, indie perfumers have leaped in to fill the galbanum gap…

Read the rest of this article »

Top 10 Spring Fragrances 2016

Posted by Erin on 29 April 2016 101 Comments

tulip in snow

I am vocal about disliking spring. Where I live, there are always a few days in late February that feel like an elaborate set-up from Punk’d. Like newborn babes, they come: the office mates, friendly neighbors, the recently retired. They peer up into the warming blue and wonder aloud, trying to remember which way a hapless groundhog waddled weeks ago. Please don’t take spring’s bait. This year it snowed in April in the colder areas of Europe and North America and fans and news writers seemed to blame poor departed Prince. Let’s face it, in Minneapolis anyway, it usually snows in April. And snow can be the least of our worries. I am a fan of heterogeneity — I like mixed drinks and mixed company, for example — but few phrases freeze the heart faster than that euphemism “mixed precipitation”. Spring also brings wind, rain, seasonal allergies and skies the color of dead fish. Yes, the vernal months provoke a rare ire in me.

And yet, looking over my April 2011 Top 10 and Robin’s post from last year on pretty spring florals, I’ve realized I have little cause to be so sour while wearing some of my favorite fragrances. Clutching roots and branches may grow from stony rubbish, as Eliot wrote, but I have hyacinth, lily-of-the-valley, magnolia, violets and iris to console me until mid-May…

Read the rest of this article »

Older articles »