Patricia: 29 posts

Amber perfumes are some of the most popular choices for cool weather, and today Patricia explores various options, from light to dark, from simple to complex.

Ambers are crowd pleasers, the Golden Retrievers of the perfume world, ready to encompass you with a warm, furry greeting and a wag of the metaphorical tail. Granted, some are easier to love than others, and there is always someone who would rather not, but generally speaking the amber aims to please. Here are some of my favorites.

Amber for Beginners

My “starter” amber fragrance was the easy-to-wear L’Eau Ambrée by Prada.  With mandarin, rose, and jasmine to sweeten the way, I happily wore it until the patchouli drydown started to grate on me. I graduated to the warm and beautiful L’Ambre des Merveilles by Hermès, and its sweet caramel vanilla seems perfect for the cooler months. It reminds me of Prada Candy, but I much prefer its greater complexity. Every September I reach for the stunning starry bottle turned on its side.

Continue reading →

Patricia mentions 10 lilac fragrances to brighten up these cold spring days.

Throw open the windows of your dwelling and breathe in the fresh air, roll down the car windows, take a walk around the block, read a nature poem by Mary Oliver, and move the orientals and ambers you’ve been living in to the back of the closet. Spring is finally here! And spring always makes me think of flowers, my favorite of which is the heavily scented lilac. Lilacs, a member of the olive family were first introduced to Europe at the end of the 16^th century by the Ottomans and came to the American colonies in the 18^th century. Since the blooming season is but a short few weeks in late spring, I’ve been on a quest to find the perfect, most realistic lilac fragrance to wear during the long 50 weeks without them. There are a number of lilac fragrances of varying price points to choose from, but whether all of them transport me to a lilac garden is another question. Below are my 10 mini-reviews:

Continue reading →

While perfume is a personal pleasure, its sillage means that our fragrance choices are sometimes influenced by the preferences of others–our family, friends, school or office colleagues. What if your perfume selection has to take into account your horse’s tastes? Patricia reports.

Layering two different perfumes is a fun way to play with fragrance and create a new scented experience. I find it interesting, and in principle, I should have accumulated an array of favorite combinations, but I confess that I haven’t made much foray into it. You see, my universal layer most days is not another perfume, but the smell of my horse. I’m an avid rider and go to the barn as often as I can manage to spend time with my boy. And although I love the smell of horses, the forty-minute ride home in an enclosed car can get a little ripe with a mixture of pungent horse sweat, the fecal smell of manure, sour urine notes, and the dry green of hay bales. And that is where perfume comes in.

Without really thinking about it, I’ve collected many horse-friendly scents over the years. Chanel Cristalle is not only lovely on its own, but blends beautifully with barnyard smells and seems to be appreciated by equine noses as well. Other favorites are L’Artisan Parfumeur Séville à l’aube (the slightly dirty quality of white flowers works well with the rich animalic background of the horse barn) and I wore it on the car trip home from the barn for months on end when it was first released in 2012.

Continue reading →

Are you feeling under the weather? Pat explores a range of scented cures. (Bois de Jasmin will be back to its regular schedule on March 6th, Friday.)

It might start with a slight headache, or a small case of the sniffles, or just feeling somewhat unbalanced, then it progresses to general malaise and aching limbs. Time to face up to it, you’re sick, and you might as well cancel everything planned for the next three days to a week. Your best friends will be a cup of hot tea, a box of tissues, and a warm comforter on the sofa. Perfume won’t even be on your radar.

But what about when you start to recover and take an interest in life again? Just as you wouldn’t attempt a three-course meal before starting with a bowl of hot chicken soup, you won’t want to go right back to wearing a heavy application of your vintage Mitsouko. Transition fragrances are in order, and here are some of my favorites.

Continue reading →

Corralling those pesky perfumes, or my attempts at organization is how Patricia described to me her idea for this article. As you will see, she was being modest, and her organization method is impressive. 

First, let’s get this out of the way. I have a lot of perfume. But, if you are reading this, chances are you have a fair amount yourself and struggle, as I do, with containing it all. The first stages of perfume collection don’t pose a problem. A few bottles here, a few samples there are easy to keep track of. However, once the collection swells (I swear, those dab samples in their neat little plastic bags multiply like rabbits!), some form of organization is necessary if you want to find anything in under an hour. The following is my method, which has evolved over the years by trial and error and is not meant in any way to be a guide or “how-to.”

Housing. My collection, large as it is, lives in three different locations: a tall, narrow cabinet in the bathroom, a shelf below my bedside table, and my dresser tabletop. (Newly obtained samples, of course, can be found floating here and there throughout the house.) None of these locations is ideal for perfume, which likes dark, cool places, but I don’t want to keep my perfume locked away in a special refrigerator, and for the most part I either never had or didn’t keep the original boxes. I make some effort at limiting direct light, but that‘s about it.

Continue reading →