Vanilla: 43 posts

These past few days I’ve been waking up to cold, foggy mornings, and the idea of getting dressed and going outside seemed unpleasant. Just on Monday, I was tempted to break off my engagements and stay at home, wrapped in a warm sweater. As I made up my face and sipped coffee in a hurry, I imagined how good it would feel to make a cup of tea and jump back into bed with a favorite book. The best I could do before I braved the cool air was to spray on something redolent of summer.

And summer has been on my mind a lot, an Italian summer in particular. After a couple of work related trips to Italy, where the fall hasn’t even started, I came back to Belgium in love and yearning for the sun. Italy was the first place I visited abroad, and as I lived with an Italian host family as a student, it was my first immersion into another culture. My warm and generous host mom taught me to cook, to wear red and to tie my hair into a neat bun. But as work and family obligations piled up, my trips to Italy became fewer and fewer, until 10 years lapsed since my last visit.  Returning Italy reignited our love affair. Even Italian, which I thought to be long displaced by French, has resurfaced in my head. So these days I save money for my next visit, read Cesare Pavese, bake biscotti and track half way across town to my favorite Italian deli to buy some prosciutto, dry cured ham.  But the best way for me to get a dose of the Italian sun is through perfumes.

As I drew up my list, I realized that the fragrances  I selected were not just reminiscent of an Italian summer, they were perfect for cold and rainy days. If you’re longing for some sunshine or just want to something beautiful and uplifting, I hope that you will enjoy my choices.
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The idea of a love potion can be traced back to antiquity, and excavations at Roman and Greek sites reveal various artifacts that were used to charm, sway and spellbind. Today we still yearn for a potion that would make us more beautiful, more alluring. So, Dsquared2, a fashion house often described as having “va-va-voom sex appeal,” decided to cater to our ‘earnings’ and offer its own version of a love filter. Potion for Woman is the feminine counterpart to last year’s Potion for Men, and is described as seductive and sultry.

The disconnect between the promise and the execution is evident in the crass marketing image. Who on earth decided that this visual conveys anything sexy or alluring? When I’m not distracted by the hairy arm in the foreground, I’m baffled by the drunken look on the model’s face. She looks more like a victim than a temptress.

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“Flowers can have a dark enchantment,” says Tom Ford of his new Jardin Noir series. “When you showcase their darker and less innocent aspects, flowers can become so thrilling and beautiful, they could almost ruin you. That was the sensation I was after.”* For a flower from a collection called Jardin Noir, Lys Fume upon first impression is not all that dark. For a perfume named “Fume”, which I take to mean “smoked lily” in French, the smoke is quite subtle.

But even if Tom Ford is after the “film noir” glamour goddesses in theory only, Lys Fume is an enjoyable fragrance. Real lilies smell intensely indolic–of ink and moth balls–and while perfumers Rodrigo Flores-Roux and Shyamala Maisondieu  tone down the animalic components, they didn’t shy away from exploring some surprising twists to create this blossom.

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Scarves are my favorite accessories. I love the way the sheer organza feels on my shoulders in the summer. The warm heft of a thick, cable-knit wool feels comforting on blistering cold days in the winter. My work uniform of jeans and black sweater can be easily spiced up with a piece of silk in cobalt blue or the Russian style tasseled square in red.  In an overlap with my sartorial wardrobe, I have a whole category of fragrances I categorize as my “scarf” perfumes. They usually stay close to the skin and have a warm, smoky drydown. To smell them on me, you would have to lean in close, and I love the intimate aura they create.

One such warm and smoky contender has been Diptyque Volutes, which I’ve been testing over the past couple of weeks. Volutes in French means swirls, as in swirls of smoke, and as Volutes unfolds gently on skin and wraps me in its warm embrace, it indeed makes me think of sweet cherry scented tobacco. The story behind Volutes is of the transatlantic journeys one of Diptyque’s original founders, Yves Coueslant, used to make as a child, crossing from Marseille to Saigon and back. The vision of the “elegant ladies leaning on the ship’s rail smoking their Khedive cigarettes” inspired this languid perfume. These ladies must also have worn Shalimar, because this Guerlain classic was my immediate association with Volutes.

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Perfume names can be tricky. Noir leads you to imagine something glamorous and wickedly mysterious. You read Sport on the perfume bottle and before you even smell the top notes, you anticipate sharp citrus and lavender. Based on the name Etat Libre d’Orange Bijou Romantique, which in French means “a romantic jewel,” you’d expect something suitable for women who love kittens and wear far too much pink. I can almost hear Emily Howard from Little Britain saying, “It’s a lady’s perfume, and I’m a lady, you see.”

Now, as a woman who loves kittens—and really, who doesn’t!—and has enough pink accessories to dress up the whole city of Brussels, I don’t mind frilly and girly perfumes. But it’s not fair to call Bijou Romantique a frou-frou fragrance. It has a dose of retro charm thanks to its delicately powdered iris and jasmine, but the earthy vetiver and peppery bergamot give it an elegant austerity. Take a deeper inhale, and you suddenly realize that it’s a sibling of Shalimar, one of Guerlain’s crown jewels and the grandest of grand parfums.

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