Here are a few more companies donating proceeds in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. If you missed part 1, you can find it here.
A Perfume Organic is donating 20% of all October purchases to Susan G Komen For The Cure…
Donna Karan Pure DKNY ~ perfume review
Donna Karan’s new Pure DKNY fragrance is reportedly built around a “drop of vanilla in water” — and not just any drop of vanilla, mind you, but a drop of vanilla ethically sourced from a women’s agriculture project in Uganda; as part of a collaborative project with CARE, “nearly 1,000 women [in Uganda] will gain new business skills”.1 The packaging is recyclable, and the outer box uses low-VOC inks on certified forest paper. All of that environmental and humanitarian goodness, hopefully, will help the end consumer to relax and enjoy their purchase: Pure DKNY notes that in today’s fast-paced world, “you need a moment of calm, to find beauty in living simply”.
The “calm” and “living simply” evoked by Pure DKNY, mind you, is a very modern sort of “calm” and “living simply” — the opening smells entirely synthetic, and recalls any number of FRESH FRESH FRESH fragrances of the past 10+ years. I believe Donna Karan is calling Pure DKNY a floral, but Michael Edwards classifies it as a fresh water and that’s a better fit…
Donna Karan Cashmere Mist Liquid Nude ~ new perfume
Donna Karan will launch Cashmere Mist Liquid Nude, a new flanker to 1994’s Cashmere Mist fragrance for women, in July:
Donna Karan’s Cashmere Mist Liquid Nude eau de parfum spray: a fragrance to seduce the senses…
5 Perfumes for: Wearing to Bed
When I was pregnant with my daughter, my husband and I attended prenatal classes. Discussing strategies for birthing pains, the instructor asked us to practice visualizing our so-called “happy place”, the location in each of our lives that felt the most comforting, peaceful and self-affirming. She suggested mentally escaping the delivery to a favorite beach, a summer cottage or a honeymoon hotel in Europe. My husband frowned at me sternly. “Are you visualizing being in bed?” My guilty look confirmed this. “Not helpful. You’re going to be in a bed,” he said, shaking his head, “and it won’t be restful.” I try to make a point of acknowledging the occasions when he is right, and boy, he was spot-on that time.
Luckily, no labor, viral illness or bout of the vivid nightmares to which I am prone has ever lastingly tainted the experience of my bed for me. It seems only natural to perfume that place of refuge, my land of dreams. Sometimes, close friends or relatives ask why I bother spritzing or dabbing scent on at night, just before I fall as insensible as a stone. It is hard to describe to someone who is not a fragrance fanatic the secret joy of waking in the wee hours, when the world is black and hushed, to snuffle at your wrist. Or the feeling of well-being that comes over you on a sun-washed weekend morning when you wake up under a gently-scented duvet…
Donna Karan Iris ~ perfume review
Iris is the first new fragrance to join the Donna Karan Collection, which up until now was made up entirely of relaunches from the line’s back catalog. The Collection scents are all done up in opaque black glass; the packaging is handsome if rather functional looking (see below) and the bottles have a nice heft. They’re in limited distribution, making this a sort of niche-from-mainstream kind of line along the lines of the Chanel Les Exclusifs or the Armani Privés, although the prices are more reasonable than that perhaps implies.
On paper, Donna Karan Iris smells at first mostly of iris — not the rooty, bold, turnips-just-pulled-from-the-earth sort of iris à la Serge Lutens Iris Silver Mist, but the buttery-soft sort of iris that you get in Chanel’s 28 La Pausa, albeit without that elusive Chanel touch that makes so many of the Les Exclusifs fragrances smell like money. Later, Iris takes on a more floral character…