Top 10 Summer Fragrances 2013

Posted by Erin on 7 June 2013 70 Comments

Having appropriated most American technologies, cultural tics and lifestyle choices, Canadians feel we know a lot about our neighbors (neighbours!¹) to the south and we tend to be quite sensitive about a perceived lack of knowledge on the other end. Canadian comedian Rick Mercer, a national hero of sorts, came to prominence with a series of television clips called Talking to Americans, where he poked gentle fun at this relationship by interviewing ordinary Americans on the street — in addition to people like George W. Bush², David Hasselhoff and a Harvard Professor of International Relations — and getting them to do silly things on camera: to congratulate Canucks on converting to a 24-hour clock (from a 20-hour one)³, to sign a petition trying to stop the planned polar bear slaughters in Toronto, or to sing along with a completely fabricated Canadian national anthem. Once, I had an encounter in Buffalo, NY that felt like a Mercer moment: I struck up a conversation with the gentleman beside me at the mall, who turned out to believe that Canadians did not experience summer. “But I live an hour or so away from here,” I kept explaining to him. “We have summer! We have the same climate as you do!” I could not convince him…

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5 perfumes: At the Discounters

Posted by Erin on 11 April 2013 86 Comments

Kenzo Ca Sent Beau Geoffrey Beene Grey Flannel

Before I collected fragrance, my “hobby” (read: single-minded fixation) was used books. When I first started buying perfume, my husband rather encouraged the interest, because he thought it might distract me from my bibliophilia: he was tired of hauling dozens of very heavy boxes full of my dusty, smelly, fragile purchases each time we moved, and besides, how much perfume could one bluestocking wife buy?¹ HA!

We still have many, many books about the apartment, including the out-of-print literary fiction and back issues of The Paris Review of those times. Reading the acknowledgements and writer interviews, I’ve noticed there are some authors so frequently mentioned as “underrated” that it’s a wonder how anyone manages to overlook them. Occasionally one will reach a critical mass of “underratedness” and then a clever publisher will reissue a handsome series of books from his or her back catalog, hopefully while the writer can still enjoy the attention and royalties. Just as I was starting this post², I found out one of my favorite authors, Evan S. Connell, died in January, in Santa Fe, New Mexico; if you know his work, you’ll join me in a moment of silence for a great literary stylist who long toiled in relative obscurity. Luckily, in recent years Connell had his revival and much of his fiction and non-fiction has been reissued, including a book I think would find an appreciative audience here, The Connoisseur. While I was delighted to see Connell recognized with glossy new editions, there are some books best encountered among the overflowing shelves and random piles of a good used bookstore, and The Connoisseur is one of them. Any fragrance nut will recognize the path to obsession charted by Connell’s recurring protagonist Karl Muhlbach: the chance find of a fascinating thingy, the curious way time and space collapse as the new interest is researched and money is spent, and the hungry and vaguely alarming welcome one is given by more experienced collectors…

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Top 10 Fall Fragrances 2012

Posted by Erin on 5 October 2012 154 Comments

gourds and a mushroom

I have been known to change my mind. Still, as far as my love of autumnal perfumes goes, it seems I am as constant as the northern star. I kept thinking of fragrances to include in this post and then realizing, blast, I’d already listed them the last time I covered fall favorites for Now Smell This in 2009. A few of the previous ten are my all-time, all-year darlings, but the fall always casts them in a particularly poignant and profound light for me. As October starts, I often think of lines from John Cheever: “and who, after all these centuries, can describe the fineness of an autumn day?” (via The Stories of John Cheever). He gives it a shot anyway:

The clear and searching sweep of sun on the lawns was like a climax of the year’s lights. Leaves were burning somewhere, and the smoke smelled, with all its ammoniac acidity, of beginnings. The boundless blue air was stretched over the zenith like the skin of a drum.

That ammoniac acidity has always given me pause — ammonia is alkaline, isn’t it? — but the sky and the sun and the lawns are all perfectly right. And then, using his characteristic contrast of the ecstatic and the everyday, he deflates that golden description with: “It was the day to canvass for infectious hepatitis.” Well, of course it was! For autumn is not only the season of reflection and melancholy, a time to moon about in cable-knit sweaters through the mists of the dying year. It is also a practical season, a time to make school lunches and Halloween costumes, to bustle along the sidewalks through gusty breezes on charitable errands. As Cheever wrote, beginnings are in the air.

So okay, you say… begin already, please! As I rounded up the usual suspects three years ago, the following list includes some of my favorite newer scents. (Surely my “Best of 2012” picks will be predictable enough to excuse a spoiler.) There are a few of my old standbys that got missed last time, too…

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5 perfumes: Mimosa

Posted by Erin on 16 December 2011 64 Comments

yellow mimosa

I have always liked mimosa in fragrances. Rather, I should clarify: I have always liked Acacia farnesiana (cassie) and/or scents with heliotropin. The term “mimosa” is a bit of a moving target, even in botany, as there are about 400 species or cultivars of plants under this genus, mostly with pink or mauve flowers, in addition to many other shrubs or trees that produce poofy, cartoonish blossoms and were historically lumped in under the name by the public — silk tree being an example. The sweet, warm, powdery smell we encounter in perfumery, with its facets of almond, honey, violet, craft paste and fresh cucumber, comes from distillation of the soft, feathery yellow petal clusters of the acacia species that most of us in the West know as mimosa flowers. One of my most vivid and happy memories of visits to France is the bushels of mimosa branches tossed out during “La Bataille de Fleurs” or flower parade during the Carnaval de Nice, which winds its way along what must be one of the world’s most beautiful thoroughfares, the Promenade des Anglais.

For all its cheerful straight-forwardness, mimosa appears to be a hard note to use in perfume. There are very few credible soliflores and many mainstream fragrances with a strong mimosa presence come off as airheaded and shampoo-like. With the IFRA restrictions on heliotropin, it has become even more difficult, if not impossible, to base a fragrance around the flower. Looking to include perfumes with some availability in this list, I found that almost all the mimosa fragrances I’d enjoyed at the beginning of my perfume education in the mid-noughties were discontinued or reformulated. Caron Farnesiana, long the great classic of mimosa perfumes, has gone through so many versions that it is hard to keep track of them all…

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5 Perfumes: Bittersweet Bay

Posted by Erin on 17 November 2011 57 Comments

bay leaf

When the topic of past lives comes up, what time period do you picture yourself inhabiting? For some reason, I always regress to a city in the Middle Ages. No other era or geographical location ever comes to mind. Perhaps I was an inn-keeper, goutishly solid and pink-cheeked and wary. If gender and physical talents are passed through the centuries, then I could have been a wet nurse. If they are not, then maybe I was a monastic scribe and illuminator. (My handwriting is awful.) It is strange to feel so connected to the sights and sounds of medieval Europe. I don’t actually believe in reincarnation. I think my visions come from the more recent past, from pop culture references about the dark ages like The Lion in Winter and The Name of the Rose. What the books and movies are notably short on, however, is odors.

Most of us think of this time period as smelling pretty ripe: burning garbage, sewage in the ditches and rivers, halitosis, mildew everywhere, the sick and dead of the Bubonic plague years, all those buckets of fermented urine that alchemists were supposed to be distilling into gold, etc. But years of reading foodie articles on panforte, mead and sweetmeats have perfumed my personal medieval fairy tales with honey and almond milk, dates and chestnuts and raw milk cheese, fruit jellies and poached pears with long pepper. Most particularly at this turn of the seasons, I start to dream of the scent of mulling spices. As the cold sets in, there is something instantly cheering and sustaining in the thought of hot mulled wine or cider. And for me, no simmering pot of either would be complete without a bay leaf…

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