I don’t often think of Marie-Antoinette whenever I use orange blossom water, but perhaps I should. By the time the French queen was playing shepherdess in Versailles, the cultivation of bitter orange trees in France was a long standing tradition solely for the purpose of producing this perfumed liquid.  The aromatic distillation of fresh blossoms scented the linens of the nobility. It found its way into Marie Antoinette’s beauty preparations. It flavored madeleines, little French butter cakes that Marcel Proust immortalized in The Search for Lost Time. Relaxing with a cup of Café Blanc or Orange Blossom and Mint Lemonade is a luxury but thank heavens it’s no longer reserved for the royalty.

If you’ve never used floral waters, it might seem that they are best suited for pink girly desserts and incurable romantics. But while I admit to being a romantic, rose and orange blossom waters are remarkably versatile. A mere hint can give a familiar dish a new, haunting flavor, and you only need take a page from traditional cuisines–from Provence to Morocco, to see how diverse the use of floral waters can be. Once you start experimenting, I have no doubt that you’ll invent new recipes.

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Today we have our “Recommend Me a Perfume” post.  I would also love to hear from those who participated in previous rounds of recommendations to know what you’ve discovered and what you’ve enjoyed sampling from suggestions you’ve received.

How does it work:

1. Please post your requests or questions as comments here. You can also use this space to ask any fragrance related questions. To receive recommendations that are better tailored to your tastes, you can include details on what you like and don’t like, your signature perfumes, and your budget.

2. Then please check the thread to see if there are other requests you can answer. Your responses are really valuable for navigating the big and sometimes confusing world of perfume, so let’s help each other!

To make this thread easier to read, when you reply to someone, please click on the blue “reply” link under their comment.

Photography by Bois de Jasmin, sun-warmed hay

Most perfumery output today can be divided roughly into the children of Angel and the children of Light Blue: Angel, as in Thierry Mugler and Light Blue, as in Dolce & Gabbana. On the fringes of the Angel and Light Blue families, you have an ever popular white floral clan that once upon a time was sultry and dark like Hermès 24 Faubourg and is now pretty and coy in the manner of Juicy Couture and Elie Saab. Issey Miyake’s Pleats Please belongs with that group, even though it speaks with a Light Blue accent and also has Angel’s patchouli. It’s a cosmopolitan perfume counter citizen.

Pleats Please was created by Aurélien Guichard, the same perfumer who interpreted peach as a decadent dessert in Bond no 9 Chinatown and made lilac modern in Gucci Guilty. The opening is a mix of juicy apple and orange. Imagine chilling apples in the fridge near the freezer compartment and then taking a bite out of the icy, crunchy fruit.

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One of my favorite guilty pleasures is sitting down in front of the TV in the evening with a cup of cafe blanc and a jar of Santa Maria Novella Pasta di Mandorle. I sip my orange blossom scented drink and slowly rub the speckled brown cream into my hands, knowing that in the morning I will wake up to lily soft hands and shiny nails.

It’s a guilty pleasure, because at $50 for 1.6 oz, Pasta di Mandorle is the most expensive cream I own. When I look at the ingredient list–sweet almond oil, grape seed oil, egg yolk, virgin beeswax, and glycerin, I think that my grandmother’s home made version might just be  as good. For the price of a couple of jars of Pasta di Mandorle, I can pay for a trip to Ukraine from Belgium so I finally decided to make my own cream.

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For those who think that consumers can’t judge differences in quality or that most new launches today indeed smell alike:

“French women also express severe judgements on new launches, 41% considering the offer as excessive, with rather negative comments about the lack of originality of new fragrances. … Although they mobilize a massive share of advertising spending, only few launches succeed in reaching the top 100 sales.”

The Fragrance Foundation France released a new study on consumer preferences in France which shows some interesting results on how women buy perfume and what criteria they follow. To read the summary and see the graphs, please click here.

Photography by Bois de Jasmin, Hôtel de Ville in Paris.