From Imogen Owen, Gingerbread scented pencils: "The most luxurious scented pencil. ...these pencils are lovingly crafted by an 100 year old pencil factory. Made of cedarwood, they are fragranced with the smell of gingerbread and come in a gift-ready letterpress printed presentation box." On markdown, $10 for six at Cotton & Crete. (And you can check out all the other fragrances at the Imogen Owen website. I found this brand via Aedes, but they sold out before I had a chance to post.)
Happy Friday the 13th! It’s also National Violin Day and National Hot Cocoa Day. Birthdays: Mary Todd Lincoln, Emily Carr, Ella Baker, Dick Van Dyke, Jamie Foxx. Our community project for today: wear a fragrance with ginger, if you have one.
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 in my bestest ginger, Demeter Gingerale…
Undeniably, their perfumes are made and sold in a manner far different from a fragrance you might pick out at a department store or at Sephora.
Ffern, which Mr. Mears started in 2016, is a subscription service. A space on the ledger, as it’s called, costs $129 per season and signifies that you want a bottle from the next batch. From then on, you’ll get a new scent four times a year, as the seasons change.
— Read more in Would You Buy a Perfume You Had Never Smelled? at The New York Times.
Way back in January 2021, Kevin wrote that 2020 had been the year of overpriced, overhyped scents: “Never have I smelled so many $250, $350, $450 perfumes that reminded me of $10 scented candles.” Based on various online “gift guides” that have scrolled past my eyes lately, I can’t say that late 2024 is looking any different. I’m less and less impressed by arbitrarily high prices. Here at NST we’ve been saying “under $100 is the new ‘free'” since 2009; in that spirit, here are three fragrances I’ve encountered over the past year or so that live up to their descriptions, feel accessible to scent-curious shoppers and sell for less than $100 for a full-sized bottle.
First: I initially came across the Cra-yon fragrance line at the Liberty department store in London and made a mental note to find out more later. Cray-on started showing up in the United States soon after that trip, and I picked up a bottle of Art Life at a perfume swap event in New York. (Swap meet-ups are the Gen Z version of the early-2000s message-board swaps!) Cra-yon was “founded by Christine and Niclas Lydeen, French/Swedish fragrance pioneers” and comes across as a welcoming, upbeat brand that doesn’t take its own cool-kid vibes too seriously…
Prada Ambassador Karina makes gingerbread cookies, then below the jump, Maya Hawke makes hot chocolate, Kelvin Harrison Jr. makes mince pies, and Louis Partridge makes Panettone with custard cream.