Suzanna: 65 posts

by Suzanna

Aedes de Venustas is the hip West Village fragrance boutique that since 1995 has been a Mecca for the connoisseur of niche perfumes.  The Aedes brand roster includes both the popular and the polarizing; there are scents that smell of flower stalls and scents that smell of olives and damp cobblestones.  The shop also carries bath and body products, home fragrance, and candles like the ultra-covetable Mizensir Sapin de Noël.

The boutique now has its own house fragrance, the eponymous Aedes de Venustas Signature eau de parfum authored by Bertrand Duchaufour, he of the upcoming L’Artisan Séville à l’aube and the nose behind the wildly creative Eau d’Italie Sienne l’Hiver and cult favorites Avignon and Kyoto for Comme des Garçons. Aedes de Venustas signature is Duchaufour’s second scent for the boutique; the first was released under the L’Artisan brand and has no relation to the new Signature scent.

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by Suzanna

Dawn Spencer Hurwitz is a Colorado-based niche perfumer with an extensive catalogue of scents. Exploring the DSH Perfumes site is a tantalizing affair that takes you down the boulevards of Paris, through ancient Egypt, and at present, through the fashion and perfume history of Yves St. Laurent.

DSH’s latest project is a collaboration with the Denver Art Museum on a set of fragrances (DSH calls them her “designs”) that complements a touring exhibition of Yves Saint Laurent’s fashion.  The exhibition is the first complete retrospective of YSL fashion. The museum is the only American stop on the touring schedule and DSH’s fragrant tributes are available for sale at the museum, at the DSH Essence Studio in Boulder, Colorado, or on her DSH Perfumes Web site.

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by Suzanna

Red lipstick is a force to be reckoned with.  No other lipstick color can be so right…and so wrong.  Pick the wrong red and your skin and teeth might take on an unbecoming yellowish hue.  Pick the right red and watch your face (and teeth) light up.

I started wearing red lipstick at the dawn of the blog age, around 2005.  It seems like ages ago now, but blogger swatches made it easy to see colors in various lights and understand how they might work for you.  Red lipstick made my makeup routine easy:  I wear it and little else.  Nothing should compete for attention with red.

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by Suzanna

In the early 1980s, the late Annick Goutal created two fragrances for her young daughters, Camille and Charlotte.  Ivy and honeysuckle inspired Camille’s scent (Eau de Camille, 1983) while Charlotte’s scent (Eau de Charlotte, 1982) described a young girl smitten by blackcurrant jam and cocoa. Despite the foodie nomenclature of the notes, Eau de Charlotte is not a gourmand scent. The blackcurrant and cocoa notes belie Charlotte’s true nature as a lily of the valley scent.

I discovered Charlotte, or she me, on a scent strip in a magazine. It smelled so different—this was the mid-nineties—to anything else I’d smelled until that time.  I was a Jean Patou Joy wearer, and Eau de Charlotte seemed less mainstream and more creative. I wore it through a couple of bottles before finding Gardenia Passion from the same Goutal line (by way of the incredible soap, but that’s another story!)

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By Suzanna

I live in a city that is high on football and low on perfume shopping.  Gator fans would likely not want things the other way around.  You cannot live in Gainesville, Florida and not participate, one way or another, in the football ubiquity.  As I discovered, however, with a bit of creativity you can live in Gainesville or other small towns and participate in the enjoyment of hard-to-find perfume.

I’m a small town perfumista.  This means that there are no boutiques or high-end stores at which to sample fragrance.  There’s no Barney’s or Luckyscent or even a top-shelf Sephora.  We didn’t have a Sephora until 2009, and when it arrived it proved to be one of the closely edited Sephora stores. We have small versions of big department stores.

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