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Serge Lutens Arabie is available at LuckyScent.com, Aedes.com, and BeautyHabit.com (as well as a number of high-end department stores), $120 for 50 ml.

Images: top photo of Nigella Lawson, plucked from Google Images; bottom photo of Serge Lutens Arabie bottle is from LuckyScent.com.

Posted by Suzanne Keller, 6/16/2008.  All rights reserved.
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WHAT I'M LOVIN' RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW...

A bunch of perfumes showing up at my doorstep.  After not ordering much of anything for several months, I recently went a little crazy.  I’ve got a bottle of Amouage Jubilation 25 winging its way to me from Lucky Scent and a bottle of Molinard Habanita coming from Imagination Perfumery.  Not to mention decants.  Have you hopped over to Fishbone Decants & Samples yet to load up on the goodies that Nancy is liquidating?  If not, what are you waiting for?  I recently bought decants of Serge Lutens Arabie and Tubereuse Criminelle, Olivier Durbano Black Tourmaline, S-Perfumes 100% Love {More}, and Parfumerie Generale Harmatan Noir.  Nancy’s customer service is impeccable, and she is a decanter who will be sorely missed.  Run, don’t walk, to her sale.  You’ll be happy you did!

Perfume parties.  Yes, that’s more or less the reason I do decanting.  I live in a university town that is wonderful in so many ways, but we don’t have much in terms of fragrance shopping, so I do perfume parties that are along the lines of the Tupperware parties of my mother’s day.  Only, perfume parties are much more fun—the women who have hosted and attended mine really seem to enjoy learning about and trying on fragrances, and I usually learn quite a bit from them, too—from observing their reactions to the perfumes, from their questions, and from shared conversation about perfumes that they have loved and I have never tried.  If you are a perfumista who already does decanting, who has more bottles of perfume than you can use up in one lifetime, and who lives in an area where the fragrance shopping is slim, I highly recommend throwing one.  Basically, the way mine works is like this: the party host provides the venue and the refreshments and invites the guests; I bring spray samples of all my perfumes, as well as scent strips, decant bottles (so the guests can see what size the decants come in), and order forms.  Usually I choose 10 to 14 fragrances that I talk about—describing what I know of the perfume’s history—the perfume house it came from, the perfumer who created it, the inspiration behind it—as well as a list of notes and my own feelings about the scent.  Then I spray a scent strip with the fragrance and we pass it around to smell the top notes—and later, after the presentation, we sniff the scent strips again for the heart and base notes.  After that, anyone who wants to try on fragrances can do so, and if they are interested in decants, I take their orders.  The host, of course, gets an upfront credit towards any decants for hosting the party.  If you’d like more details, send me an email—I’ll be happy to elaborate.  I just had a party this past weekend, which was so much fun (an older woman who attended had a wonderful nose, and upon smelling Sacrebleu said, “This reminds me of L’Heure Bleue from Guerlain!”)

Warm weather.  What you call hot and muggy, I call “yum!”  Almost all of my perfumes smell better in the heat of summer than in the dead chill of winter, probably because my skin stays warm and dewy—which is another reason I love this weather.  My skin plumps up from the humidity, making wrinkles disappear; the sun puts natural highlights in my hair (on top of the not-so-natural ones!); and though I don’t go in for deep tanning, I do like feeling the sun on my skin and the tawny glow of tan that I get on my walks each day.  Summer makes me feel pretty…no doubt because I’m happier all around.  Bliss is being able to drink my early-morning coffee outside on my lawn chair, when the dew is still on the grass, the birds are twittering overhead, and I’m barelegged and comfortable.

Edy’s Fruit Bars—the strawberry ones.  These aren’t your ordinary popsicles.  The Edy’s strawberry bars have generous pieces of whole fruit in them (not those icy strawberries like you find in ice cream, but fruit that is almost chewy, like the strawberries in jam).  They are saturated with juicy flavor and, best of all, only 80 calories a bar.  I prefer them over sorbet—they are much more satisfying—and who doesn’t love eating dessert on a stick?  No dishes—just a perfect portable dessert, the kind that makes you feel like a kid again.

Foreign films.  My husband and I routinely get together with a friend on Fridays for movie night, watching DVDs from the comfort of her patio room with its view of her incredibly beautiful garden.  Last week we watched Khyentse Norbu’s Travellers and Magicians—the 2003 award-winning film which was the first (and so far the only) feature-length film to be shot in its entirety in the kingdom of Bhutan. Travellers and Magicians is about a young government official who dreams of leaving his idyllic yet isolated village to seek out wealth and adventure in America—but as he hitchhikes his way to the town of Thimphu, where he hopes to secure a visa out of the country, he meets a number of fellow travelers, including a storytelling Buddhist monk, who exert a push-and-pull tug on his conscience about his decision to leave.  The film can be seen as a metaphor for Bhutan itself—the conflicting desires of a country that is aiming to keep its incredibly beautiful landscape and its unique culture pristine and unspoiled, while at the same time wanting to participate in aspects of the global community that would bring it out of it’s self-imposed state of isolation.

But among the best foreign films I’ve ever seen was the one I went to last night.  A friend invited me to go see The Counterfeiters, an Austrian/German film about a small band of Jewish concentration-camp prisoners whose skills in their former lives as printers, typographers, artists—or, in the case of the leading character, a “professional counterfeiter”—led the Nazi’s to install them in a print shop at the concentration camp, where they were forced to produce massive amounts of fake foreign money that the Germans planned to use to win World War II (first, by destabilizing England’s economy with a flood of counterfeit Bank of England currency—in other words, massive inflation).  This select group of prisoners get much better accommodations and treatment than any other prisoners; and since most of them have been culled from other camps, such as Auschwitz, where they have come close to death, they are deeply aware that their survival hinges on producing the fake money.  Yet their only way to fight back against the Nazis is to try and sabotage the counterfeiting effort, which will surely cost them their lives.  This film is another lens through which we view the unthinkable horrors of the Holocaust—and as hard as it is to look through that lens, we must continue to do it.  The Counterfeiters has a faster pace than most foreign films and is stunning in every regard.  It won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.  If you haven’t seen it already, please check it out.

So that's what I'm lovin' right here, right now.  What about you?  I hope to be back early next week with a post on my latest love, Arabie (yes, Arabie, believe it or not).  Until then, have a great weekend!

Images: Brown paper package tied up with string from Flick'r, originally uploaded by Jonathan W; movie poster of The Counterfeiters from Channel4.com.

Posted by Suzanne Keller, 6/13/2008.
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MY HEART HAS SKIPPED A BEAT…

…hopscotched over spring and landed squarely in summer, thanks to the warm weather that seems to have finally arrived for an extended stay.  It is difficult to sit and write about perfume when all you want to do is spend every free minute outdoors.  I found I lacked the focus this week to write a proper perfume post, so instead decided to reflect upon my favorite outdoor smells that make up the perfume of my life in summer.  There are the obvious ones: the sweet fragrance of the mock orange bush that the honeybees love; the scent of dandelions, freshly mowed lawns, and pine bark mulch; the smell of steaks on the grill on a sunny day, and the smell of unearthed earthworms after a heavy rain; the very distinct odor of marigolds, as I remove spent blooms, and tomato vines that release their aromatic oils at the slightest touch as I brush past them in their pots that sit on my back stoop.

And then, there are the scents most people don’t think about, but which so many of us love without even realizing it.  At the top of that list, for me, is the community swimming pool.  I love everything about it: the smell of chlorine that hangs in the air; the Coppertone suntan lotion that continues its reign as the preferred brand of American mothers, if not for themselves, then for their children, on whose impatient little bodies they slather it like butter on toast; the vending machine snack foods—little bags of potato chips and Fritos that open with a gentle poof, volleying their deliciously salty smell into the humid air, and all of them issuing forth at the same time, like a series of firecrackers, as groups of shivering kids wait out the Adult Swim on their towels.  The good clean smell of my own towel as I return to it after my dip, and the paperback novel that also waits for me, its damp pages having absorbed the smell of sunscreen into its musty folds of cheap paper and ink.

What caps off the perfect summer perfume?  It can be as simple a luxury as the cold beer that I drink with my husband on the porch after supper, the yeasty, fermented scent that tickles my nose as we twist the caps off the bottles.  More often than not, it is a late afternoon or evening trip to the softball field to watch my nieces, the girls of summer, play their sport.  Dust from the road, dust from the softball diamond—a smell that has no name but which is nevertheless present.  The mouthwatering aroma of french fries and hamburgers wafting from the concession stand.  The warm smell of people in a crowd around the bleachers, making me feel not so alone in the world.  The tangy sweat of girls who run and throw and hit hard, mixing with the girly fragrance of their coconut-scented hair that I smell for only a fleeting second when they let me hug them after the game has ended, and the sun that leaves its scent on their ponytails, too—a lightly musky scent, like ambergris, that affixes all of the other perfumes of life to them; that amplifies those other perfumes like a generous lover.

Yes, the sun is like ambergris: it expands and deepens and changes everything that it touches.  Too much can be devastating, but in the right doses, it is the very essence of completion.

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What scents make up the perfume of your life in summer?  If you’d like to comment, please leave me a message in my guestbook.  (Unfortunately, my guestbook doesn’t have formatting that allows for line breaks/paragraphing—sorry!  But, umm, please don’t let that stop you!)

Posted by Suzanne Keller, 6/6/2008.  All rights reserved.
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PORTRAIT OF A LADY

(A lot about my grandmother; a little about Molinard Habanita)

I’ve been looking at photographs taken of my grandmother when she was a young woman and wondering what perfume, if any, she might have worn at the time.  Her name was Rebecca, she was born in 1902, and judging by the photographs, she was a stylish young lady, with her fur capes and collars.  Raised in the small town of Dauphin, Pennsylvania, in her twenties she enjoyed a career as a legal secretary at a law firm in nearby Harrisburg—and I say “enjoyed” in the literal sense, as my father once told me that her love of being a career girl greatly vexed her mother, my great grandmother, who thought she ought to be more practiced in the skills of home economics—particularly cooking and baking.  Apparently, she did not mind vexing her mother in this regard, as she never did learn to cook more than a few simple dishes: beef vegetable soup, chicken salad sandwiches and creamed chicken on toast being the three that I remember as her mainstays.  (“She’s an excellent cook!” I once pointed out to my father.  “She makes the best vegetable soup on earth.”  To which he replied, “Yes, but when it’s the only dish in one’s repertoire, it should be the best.”)   As for baking, she ignored that aspect of the culinary arts completely; while her mother, whom we called "Nana," turned out ginger cookies so whispery thin they would melt on your tongue like snowflakes, my grandmother used her oven for storage—of pots and pans she accumulated but rarely used.  Not that it mattered to me or my sisters, because she always kept a bag of Hershey chocolate bars (not the miniatures, but the full-size bars, with almonds) in her purse, and with none of the typical parental concerns as to what time of day it was and whether it was too close to supper, would turn to us with a twinkle in her eye and inquire, “Are you in the mood for a treat?”

Having been born around the turn of the century, my grandmother enjoyed her twenties during the twenties—the roaring 1920s—and this might explain why she took her sweet time settling down.  My father once told me that she loved the excitement of Prohibition—its parties and speakeasies with their hush-hush exuberance and live jazz—and I remember her describing to me how the liquor for those parties would arrive with a secret knock on the basement door, which she used to tap out for me with staccato flair.  No wonder then that she married relatively late, for a woman of her time period, and bore the first of her two children just before turning thirty and the second one in the month after she turned thirty-eight.  She married well—my grandfather, who had started life in the immigrant town of Steelton, Pennsylvania, had ascended to a distinguished position as superintendent of The Telegraph Press, a then-prominent publishing firm that circulated a daily newspaper known as the Harrisburg Telegraph.  But when he died of a heart attack in 1945, she was left a widow with a teenage daughter and a five-year-old son.

I came into my grandmother’s life in 1962, so naturally, the woman I knew bore little resemblance to the stylish, jazz loving, slightly rebellious and independent girl I just described.  The grandmother I knew was a quiet, soft-spoken woman who lived alone in a big double-house, both sides of it absolutely adrift in clutter, who didn’t own a car and whose passion for the modern world had largely been replaced by a passion for gardening.  Kind and loving, with a lively wit and an infectious giggle, she loved the entertainments of her grandchildren and thrilled in our games of make-believe.  Grandma existed on a steady diet of cigarettes, strong black coffee, and horribly medicinal throat lozenges; she indulged her grandchildren with junk food and meals taken, like indoor picnics, in odd nooks and out-of-the-way places of her house.  When I was eight or so, I went to stay with her for a week, and because she knew I loved to read, she set up a card table, a coffee pot and toaster on the landing between the upper and lower part of her staircase, where there was a built-in bookcase, a slender panel of window and just enough space for the two of us to sit and have breakfast—to pore over Life and Look magazines and talk about books.  And when you are young person being treated with the kind of respect typically accorded adults—yet not expected to act in the formal and stuffy manner of adults—well, it makes you feel cherished in a way that you never forget.

In her sixties, she traded style for comfort; she wore a simple uniform of a cotton shift dress, a sweater, and white Keds sneakers.  Most days she puttered in her flower garden, which was in the style of an English cottage garden, more rustic than formal.  She favored foliage over big blooms, and was fascinated in experimenting with angel-wing begonias, May apples (which reminded her of fairy umbrellas), and bamboo.  Her garden had winding pathways, pockets of woodsy shade, and was contained by a stone wall, giving it a sense of deep privacy.  At its furthest reach, where a swinging gate opened into a back alley, there was a small chimney and hearth that had been built into its back corner.  She told me that gypsies used to camp out there in the “early days,” and though I doubted whether this was true, her face took on such a misty, far-away look whenever she talked about the gypsies, their lively music and dancing, that neither could I convince myself she was telling me a fib.

My grandmother died in 1980, when I was a freshman in college, and in the time I knew her, she never wore perfume.  After years of constant smoking, I’m not sure she would have been able to smell perfume.  But when I look at photos of her younger self and see this stylish woman, I can’t help thinking that she might have worn fragrance at an earlier time, and the dreamer in me wants to assign one to her anyway.  So I spent a day thinking about and wearing Coty Chypre, which came out in 1917, but other than its greener qualities, nothing about it seemed reminiscent of her.  Then I hit upon my sample of Molinard Habanita (the edt concentration) and found my answer: this scent not only personifies the young woman she once was, but in a very real sense it smells like the grandmother I knew.

Habanita was created in 1921, not as a perfume, but a fragrance to scent cigarettes.  By 1924, its popularity led the company to create Habanita perfume.  It is a fragrance that opens with a punch of piquant tobacco, a smell similar to the tobacco- leaf wrappers of a cigar.  Not long after that, fruity notes emerge, giving it a slightly cherry’d effect, as if the cigar has been wetted by a quick dip into a glass of wine or kirsch before being lit.  The scent stays smoky, with a pinch of sweet-and-sourness to it, for about 20 minutes, and while the tobacco never goes completely away, it eventually succumbs to the most ladylike underpinnings of delicate flowers and talcum powder that I’ve ever had the pleasure to smell.  Thin tendrils of tobacco smoke spiraling around powdery flowers like smoke rings: that is the drydown of Habanita, and indeed it is similar to what my grandmother smelled like.  Despite the fact that she smoked like a chimney, she didn’t have the acrid smell that so many smokers do: when I leaned in close to hug her, I could smell her treasured Pears soap and the talcum powder she applied daily with a big pink puff.  Her skin always smelled clean and soft, and her love of throat lozenges and gargles gave her breath a slightly mentholated quality (not that there is a menthol quality to Habanita—there isn’t).

I’m sure many fans of Habanita find it sexy and would not like to hear its name associated with anything that smacks of “grandmother.”   For me, however, Habanita is not sexy in the way that the edgier Caron Tabac Blonde is sexy; what it does represent—to my nose, anyway—is an old-fashioned, roaring-’20s sense of glamour that is high-spirited and flirty while still maintaining a sense of decorum—a politesse and innocence, if you will.  The woman or man who wears Habanita might be independent, free-thinking or even a little eccentric, like my grandmother, but in the end, she or he heeds a code of honor that is in-born.