summer perfumes: 36 posts

L’Artisan Parfumeur is bringing back two perfumes as limited editions this summer. Ananas Fizz (originally created by Anne Flipo in 2004) and Côte d’Amour (by Céline Ellena in 2009) will join the collection in May.

Ananas Fizz is “a celebration of summer and of the Victoria pineapple, typical of the French Reunion Island, in the Indian Ocean.” It’s a blend of citrus, lychee, and pineapple, with a twist of frangipani and vanilla. A light fragrance, it’s designed to be used liberally, as a cologne.

Côte d’Amour is “like a voluptuous, caressing marine breeze,” a fragrance  inspired by a stroll along the coast in Loire-Atlantique, in the West of France. It includes notes of dune flower, cypress, pine, wet woods, marine and salty notes.

100ml Eau de Toilette will retail for £55/70€. Via press release

Un Jour d’Été (A Summer Day) is the newest release from Keiko Mecheri, the prolific Los Angeles-based line whose powdery Loukhoum became a huge cult hit a decade ago.  Mecheri calls Un Jour d’Été a hesperidic fragrance, “an escape in the South of France, on the beaches of St. Tropez.”  This summer day revolves around coconut, a note that Mecheri handles well enough to evade the black, oily flatness and plasticity that a coconut note can impart.  This is done primarily through macerating the coconut in citrus and by evoking European tanning lotions through the use of monoi (tiare seeped in coconut oil).

Although perhaps not intentional, a patchouli base reads as brown and leathery. Here is where a definite image is called to mind—those overly bronzed beach bodies under a relentless sun that used to be part of escapist fantasy but that now just seem imprudent.

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What do you bring back from your travels? What are your favorite souvenirs to pick up on your vacations? If you’re planning a vacation this summer, what perfume are you packing along?

Since I’ve just moved, I haven’t accrued any vacation time, but I’m making up for it by setting aside time to explore my new country. And while I still get bouts of intense homesickness, I’m slowly finding things to enjoy here. The ease of travel is one of them, and in the past couple of month we’ve taken lots of car trips. Every time we visit some new place, I try to bring something back.

My favorite souvenir is anything that can give me sensory enjoyment long after I return from the trip–perfume, food, books, beautiful fabrics, and of course, photos. I have a growing collection of honeys from different places. My spice collection can almost rival my perfume wardrobe. Each morning as I take out a jar of orange blossom honey I bought in California (yes, I actually packed my Californian honey with me!) or reach for a whiff of sandalwood oil I found in India, it’s like a little memento of my adventures.

Photography by Bois de Jasmin

Suzanna on tomato leaf as a perfume note.

Among the smells of summer (suntan lotion, beach rose, vanilla ice cream, jasmine, hot asphalt, and blackberries, to name a few), none is more redolent to me of that golden season than is the scent of tomato leaves. The leaf’s smell transports me to the end of summer, to the dog days where the heat shimmers and the dust in the road rises and seems to hang in the sultry air.  It is then that the season’s tomatoes, fat and bulging globes of red fruit, release their scent in what always seems to me an impromptu act of fragrant pleasure.

The smell of the tomato leaf is precise and yet is impossible to nail down with any accuracy; as with a geranium leaf there is a green/acidic vegetal smell and a nearness to turpentine or pine, plus a hint of almost-acrid dust or chalk resin.  The smell is sharp and suspenseful—one can tell the state of ripeness of the fruit, or so it seems, from the high pitch of this aroma.  Its particular odor is due to an aromachemical of a type that also causes the smell from the geranium leaf.

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One evening my husband and I strolled through the Beguinage in Leuven, a university town in the Flemish part of Belgium. Beguinages (or begijnhofs as they are called in Dutch) were medieval lay sisterhoods in which women led lives of piety and charity without taking permanent vows. At best, the Catholic church had an ambivalent attitude towards the beguines. Women weren’t supposed to have this much freedom or to exist independently from male control. The sisterhoods were prosecuted and labeled as heretics, but despite all of this they maintained their order. Belgium had the highest number of beguinages in the world, and about 30 remain today (albeit non-functioning). If the desire to live free from men counts, then the beguines might very well represent the earliest form of the women’s movement.

Although today Leuven’s Beguinage is a UNESCO heritage site housing university students and faculty, there is an aura of serenity pervading its narrow streets. The setting sun tints the grey cobblestones a rich gold and plays on the still water in the canals. The swallows paint delicate arabesques over the sky, making me strain my neck as I admire their graceful spins. The red geraniums spilling out of the window boxes give off their dusty metallic scent, and each tiny streets ends in a small secret garden awash in roses and privet. The beguines may have vanished, but their oasis of quiet beauty remains. Continue reading →