First, a quick video for the new Pharrell Williams Girl fragrance.
Below the jump, a “custom, interactive installation at the Westfield Mall in Stratford, London” for the Girl album (the song is Marilyn Monroe).
5 perfumes: incense fragrances for fall
In late July, I picked 5 great incense fragrances for summer wear. Now that we’ve got a decent chill in the air here on the East Coast, it’s time for the fall version. As always, do add your own picks in the comments!
L’Artisan Parfumeur Timbuktu ~ A number of people mentioned Timbuktu in the comments to my summer incense post, and I know some people feel Timbuktu really blooms in the heat. Some other people (including me) find Timbuktu a bit much in hot and humid weather. Whatever season you prefer, it’s a distinctive fragrance that smells as much like dirt and old paper and spices (with a touch of sour mango) as it does like incense…
Comme des Garcons + Pharrell Williams Girl ~ fragrance review
Regular readers can probably already guess that I was barely aware of Pharrell Williams’ existence before he announced his debut fragrance with Comme des Garçons, Girl — he’s not the first celebrity that entered my radar via perfume, and he won’t be the last. In the interest of research, I did listen to a couple of songs while writing this review (Happy got stuck in my head for several hours, thank you) but other than that, I still know little enough. He’s won some Grammys, and everyone but me knows who he is.
With any luck, Happy will not be an ongoing earworm, but Girl will almost certainly take my vote for celebrity fragrance of the year. Of course, it hasn’t all that much competition in that category, and perspective does matter. If you adore Pharrell Williams but have never tried anything from the Comme des Garçons brand or the perfumer (Antoine Lie), Girl might be a surprise, and if the reviews on Sephora are to be believed, it may or may not be a good surprise. If you’re a big fan of celebrity perfumes and want something a little more sophisticated than the usual fare on offer — and you don’t mind paying more — Girl could be just what you’ve been waiting for. If you’re a perfumista and a longtime Comme des Garçons fan, Girl might strike you, as it did me, as hardly the best they can do, but an awful lot better than it might have been…
Top 10 Fall Fragrances 2014
We pick the dates for the seasonal top 10 posts far in advance, and sometimes that works out fine. This year, it feels odd to be writing about fall so early — we’ve had strange weather the past few months, so while it stopped feeling like a proper summer here sometime in late July, it still doesn’t feel anything like fall. Here are ten fragrances I might wear if it did feel like fall, or that you could wear if there’s already a chill in the air where you are. Do add your own fall favorites in the comments!
CB I Hate Perfume Burning Leaves: The perfect way to get into the mood for fall even if the weather won’t cooperate, and extra-nice if you live in a place (as I do) where all the leaves get composted (as they should be) instead of burned (I do miss the smell). The last time I wrote the Top 10 of Fall was back in 2008, and I included Burning Leaves on that post too. Some things never change…
Bunch o’ fragrance ads 2014, part 5
A slideshow round up of new fragrance advertising, print and digital, plus a few older ads (28 slides in all) — most of these are for fragrances recently released in stores or just about to be released…