But for many women who came of age believing one's choice of Victoria's Secret body spray said a lot about your personality, having vanilla front-and-center as your signature is a non-starter. It suggests a certain youthfulness and unsophistication so acute that it's best found vaguely alluded to in a base note, if anywhere at all, lest people judge you at first sniff on the basis of smelling like angel food cake.
— Read more in Our Love-Hate Relationship With Vanilla, Explained at Allure.
I’ve never been a minimalist — not by nature, not by nurture. I’ll never live in an airy space with bare white walls or limit my clothing to a capsule wardrobe. My taste in perfume typically matches my taste in clothing and decor, leaning towards retro florals and cozy ambers. But in fragrance, at least, I’ll occasionally experiment to some extent.
In this spirit, I ordered a few samples from the Swedish-born, London-based indie perfumer Maya Njie, who founded her fragrance line in 2016. (It’s only recently become available in the United States, where I live.) Njie describes her olfactory aesthetic as “the spirit connected to the classic 1970s Scandinavian idyll, combined with the soul of her esoteric Gambian heritage.” That reference to Scandinavian 1970s style, plus the clean design of her perfume bottles and labels, made me expect minimalist perfumes…
You might have noticed the annual onslaught of rose-themed articles and posts in your social media feeds in the lead-up to Valentine’s Day. Well, I wear rose perfumes all year ’round, and I’m a bit of a cynic where Valentine’s Day is concerned, so this post is really business-as-usual for me! Les Parfums de Rosine was one of the first niche fragrance lines that I “studied” in the early 2000s and I still enjoy wearing my longtime Rosine favorites and exploring the house’s recent releases.
Rosine’s latest launch is a quartet called Les Extravagants that’s billed as a more “extreme” interpretation of rose’s many nuances…
The background: French niche line Comptoir Sud Pacifique released Vanille Banane in 2003. At that time, the brand had a bit of a cult following for their various vanilla + fruit blends, none of which I cared for (although I still wear two early Comptoir Sud Pacifique fragrances, Aqua Motu and L’Eau du Gouverneur). I doubt I even tried Vanille Banane. In due course it was discontinued, then in 2018 they brought it back…
I should have written this post weeks ago, when we had a brief period of glorious summer weather. Other than that, it’s been a rather odd summer, weather-wise, after a rather odd spring. At the moment, we’re having the usual heat and humidity you’d expect in August, but far more gray, gloomy days than usual for this time of year, and we seem to be on a daily thunderstorm schedule. But onward and upward: this is the last of my seasonal vanilla posts, since I’ve already done fall, winter and spring. As always, do chime in with your own picks in the comments!
Diptyque Eau Duelle: The vanilla martini top notes are perfect, and even though I don’t love the dry down (a quiet hum of tea and spice) quite as well, Eau Duelle would be my first choice for a vanilla that can take the heat of high summer…