It’s Friday and National Junk Food Day. (Birthdays: Robin Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Cat Stevens). Update: RIP Tony Bennett. Our community project for today: wear something beachy, or anything you think of as “a vacation in a bottle”. (This is a repeat from 2014).
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 Guerlain Terracotta Le Parfum to match the island beach shown above…
It’s full-on summer in my part of the world, and this Friday’s community project is “wear something beachy, or anything you think of as ‘a vacation in a bottle,'” so here I am with two reviews of fragrances that fit this description. As I noted around this time last year, I’m not much of a summer person, but I’m very fond of the sub-genre of beachy perfumes. Here are two I’ve been enjoying in recent weeks.
I bought a bottle of Sunspel Sea Moss at the legendary Liberty department store in London back in March, because I hadn’t been there in twenty years and the exchange rate was very much in my favor and I learned that Lyn Harris (formerly of Miller Harris, currently of Perfumer H) had created this fragrance. The fact that I’d never heard of Sunspel, an upscale British sportswear brand, didn’t really enter into the decision…
My neighborhood feels a little quieter on summer weekends, due to many residents’ migrations to and from the seashore. That’s not something I personally do, because there are certain things about summer beaches that really make me miserable: the crowds, the noise, the excessive sunlight. I love the beach, on my own terms: off-season, in fall or spring, under slightly cloudy skies.
Since I can’t always have the beach the way I like it, or I can’t actually get there when the conditions are most favorable, I’m partial to beach-themed perfumes that let me imagine an ideal seashore visit. Two new additions to my rotation of beachy perfumes are BDK Parfums Sel d’Argent and Carthusia A’mmare, marine fantasies with different olfactory moods…
I’ve been fascinated by seahorses since I was a child. Why? So many reasons. Their heads resemble the heads of teeny horses! They can hold onto things — seaweed, each other — with their prehensile tails! They are monogamous! The male seahorse carries his mate’s fertilized eggs in a pouch on his abdomen! I’ve never actually stopped to think about scents associated with seahorses, though — until now.
Seahorse is a unisex aquatic fragrance developed for Zoologist by perfumer Julien Rasquinet…
Earlier in this pandemic era, as I recall, multiple fashion/beauty magazines came out with similar listicles of the best scents to wear for imaginary travel, in the months of lockdown and pre-vaccine isolation. I liked the concept, but couldn’t help noticing a certain sameness about the selected perfumes and the locales they might conjure up: waves on a tropical beach…the flower fields of southern France…the sunlight and citrus trees of the Mediterranean.
For something more “off the beaten path,” in terms of scents and destinations, I’m personally turning to a handful of samples from Scent Trunk…