Comme des Garçons has launched Black Pepper, a new fragrance…
Top 10 Summer Fragrances 2016
I didn’t realize how much I missed summer bugs (animals, not diseases) till I left Virginia as a teenager. Living on Manhattan, then Los Angeles and now Seattle doesn’t compare to the South when it comes to insect life. My childhood summers were filled with the sounds of crickets and cicadas. Butterflies put on a non-stop show in the flower gardens. Nighttime was when my grandmother and I would sit on the front porch (swatting mosquitoes, one bug I do NOT love) and watch the fireflies as we took in the heady scent of gardenias — whose white blossoms also lit up the darkness. I’d love to see a grasshopper or praying mantis, a big black-and-yellow garden spider shimmering in the sun, or a dragonfly flitting about my yard.
Here in Seattle I do get to see some beautiful moths, living their brief moments on earth holding fast to my deck screens or circling a light bulb. Tiny spiders are everywhere, inside and out, and I would never think to kill one — they work so long and hard to live and make a living. Right now in Seattle it’s the season for ten-lined June beetles (a type of scarab beetle); my cats (to my chagrin) love to chase, torment and kill June beetles, who, as they fight for their lives, raise up their antlers (yes, antlers) and make puffing sounds to ward off attacks. Here’s to bugs! (AND summer perfumes!)
Coqui Coqui Rosas Secas ~ This wonderful rose perfume smells of dried rosebuds mixing with a fresh rose bouquet; there’s also a pinch of tobacco leaf. Rosas Secas is a great rose perfume for men…
5 perfumes: vetiver fragrances for summer
I did a year of incense and a year of iris,1 and now as promised, I’m starting in on a year of vetiver.2 Today, five great vetiver choices for summer. Two of my own favorite vetivers for hot weather — Kenzo Air and Paul Smith Story — have been discontinued long enough now that they’re rather hard to find, but if you happen across bottles of either and you’re a vetiver fan, do snap them up! (And then if you don’t like them, send them to me.) And as always, do add your own favorites in the comments…
So I have one and a half left
Comme Des Garçons Rose, which they discontinued, was my fragrance for I don’t know how many years. I went on eBay and I called a bunch of stores and bought as many bottles as I could. So I have one and a half left. But, I have my friends’ perfume called Regime De Fleurs, so I’m slowly going to go through and test. But I’m so associated with Rose. I wish I had saved all of the bottles. I probably could have a whole wall, some art piece. I had so many.
— Some of you hoarders will recognize the sentiment, yes? That's actress Chloë Sevigny, quoted in This is 40: Chloë Sevigny on Her Hair and Aging in Hollywood at W Magazine. (Other fragrances mentioned in the article include Lanvin Arpège and Old Spice.) Hat tip to @NouveauCheap at Twitter!
Grace by Grace Coddington ~ fragrance review
Way back in 2009, my friend A. and I went to see “The September Issue,” a documentary film about Vogue magazine and its influential (and infamous) editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour. If you’d grabbed me on the way out of the theater and asked me to review the film in one line, I’d have said, “Go for Anna, but stay for Grace.” Grace Coddington, creative director of Vogue, was the movie’s surprise star — she impressed us with her imagination and her commitment to her work and she reminded us why we’re bewitched and inspired by fashion despite ourselves.
Coddington (now Vogue’s Creative Director at Large) has just collaborated with Comme des Garçons on a fragrance called Grace by Grace Coddington. This scent was inspired by Coddington’s “love of English roses”…