Patricia on perfume and poetry.

For me poetry first meant the limericks and nursery rhymes in The Golden Treasury of Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer and containing lovely illustrations by Joan Walsh Anglund. The pages of this book became dog-eared and torn over the years, and the cover finally fell off. Once I could read, I graduated to the longer poems within, such as “The Highwayman” and “Paul Revere’s Ride.” But it wasn’t until high school, when I was introduced to a wider range of poetry, especially modern verse, that I felt the power of poetry to take one on an incredible journey within the space of only a few verses. As a teenager, the poems of e e cummings were early favorites, and I still have a copy of Poems 1923-1954, my name written on the flyleaf in loopy handwriting I hardly recognize.

The Book of Scented Things: 100 Contemporary Poems About Perfume, edited by Jehanne Dubrow and Lindsay Lusby, is a collection of one hundred original poems about fragrance written by American poets. These poets were sent perfume vials, all different and carefully chosen by the editors, and asked to “…write a poem that engages with or responds to the fragrance that we have sent you.” The editors go into detailed explanation of the book’s inception in the Introduction, and Alyssa Harad, author of Coming to My Senses, provides her thoughts on scent and literature in a well-written Preface. A very useful Contributors’ and Matchmaking Notes section appears at the end of the book and gives biographical information on each poet as well as the name of the assigned perfume.

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Summer ends the same way for me. It seems that only yesterday I made vacation plans, unearthed a swimming suit from a pile of winter clothes and bought an extra bottle of sunscreen. And then I wake up at the end of August and see that the local stationery store is advertising “start of school” sales and tall lindens lining the avenues in the city are slowly changing from green to gold. If I could hit a pause button for a moment, I would, if only to capture this languid, golden sensation of late summer days. But everything rushes forward inexorably, and the most I can do is reach for bottled summer fantasies, such as Parfums de Nicolaï Musc Monoi.

Monoi (also called tiare) is a tropical blossom that smells creamy and intensely sweet. It’s macerated in coconut oil to capture its heady perfume, and the scented oil is used on skin and hair. If you’ve ever seen a fragrance or body product advertised as having a tropical fragrance, then this monoi-coconut combination is something you’ve already encountered. In France, summer scent often means sweet orange blossom, such as L’Oreal’s classical Ambre Solaire sunscreen, and in Musc Monoi, perfumer Patricia de Nicolaï weaves both Mediterranean and tropical inspirations.

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Perfumer Christophe Laudamiel, a creator of company DreamAir is launching a project to track scent preferences around the world. It consists of a map defined by aromas, and you can contribute yours as well. In order to do so, please go to DreamAir website and add descriptions for what you are currently smelling. Be sure to indicate your location too.

Once a good amount of data is available, you will be able to click on a country and “see the represented scent families as pie charts, for what locals and people visiting are smelling,” say the creators.

Brussels smells like mineral dust, wet wood, vanilla waffles and crushed leaves. What about your town?

Photography by Bois de Jasmin, the infamous Manneken Pis.

Scents that capture everything green are my obsession. Don’t give me a pale whisper of crushed stems or a hint of young leaf;  that’s not enough. I want the dazzling, overwhelming, explosive experience that you feel at the height of springtime when everything smells green and heady–the buds dripping with honey, blades of grass pushing through the asphalt, leaves unfurling from their sticky casings with violent force. Green is life, and I want to feel this verdant rush.

But I’m in the minority. As Coty, Balmain and scores of other houses quickly discovered after launching their violently green perfumes, from Coty Chypre to Balmain Vent Vert, most people don’t want that much force. Green can be exciting, but it can also be raspy, sharp, challenging. Green accents are essential for many compositions, but strong green fragrances are rare. Which is why initially Parfum d’Empire Corsica Furiosa seems like such a welcome divergence.

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Elisa on stress and the gourmand ways to fight it.

I suspect there are those among you who, on an especially rough day, derive comfort from an elegant classic like Chanel No. 19 – perhaps because your mother wore it, or perhaps because the orris, vetiver, and galbanum are cool like a hand on a fevered head. I can claim no such level of sophistication. My comfort scents are the equivalent of crème brûlée, which is to say, sugar and fat: perfume as mouthfeel.

I was recently in one of those moods, what Holly Golightly would call “the mean reds,” when such a palliative is called for, and my mind immediately went to Hanae Mori. The original Hanae Mori for women, sometimes known as “Butterfly” due to the bottle design, is a first-generation gourmand. Created by Bernard Ellena in 1995, just three years after Angel, Hanae Mori borrowed the apparently new idea of layering fruit over caramel, but skipped the massively pungent patchouli note that made Angel so shocking. Butterfly, instead, was content to be pretty.

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