Posted by Kevin
on
9 January 2013
I grew up in Virginia, and all the summers of my childhood, I smelled the intoxicating scent of gardenias wafting through our home. My grandmother planted gardenia bushes close to the house: north, south, east and west. At night, when the windows were open, I could smell the heavy aroma of gardenias in almost every room, upstairs and down. Even the “industrial-strength” metal fan I always had blowing at full speed in my direction (an excellent mosquito deterrent) could not disperse the smell of gardenia. Since leaving home, I’ve always had gardenia plants wherever I’ve lived: in balmy L.A. and here in the Pacific Northwest. In Seattle, I have my gardenias in pots I can move — in summer I can bring them under my bedroom window, in winter they can be rushed into the garage when a cold spell hits town. Let’s call me a Gardenian.
I was excited to try Arquiste Boutonnière no. 7…
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Posted by Robin
on
7 October 2012
Niche line Arquiste will launch Boutonniere no. 7, a new green floral…
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Posted by Erin
on
5 October 2012
I have been known to change my mind. Still, as far as my love of autumnal perfumes goes, it seems I am as constant as the northern star. I kept thinking of fragrances to include in this post and then realizing, blast, I’d already listed them the last time I covered fall favorites for Now Smell This in 2009. A few of the previous ten are my all-time, all-year darlings, but the fall always casts them in a particularly poignant and profound light for me. As October starts, I often think of lines from John Cheever: “and who, after all these centuries, can describe the fineness of an autumn day?” (via The Stories of John Cheever). He gives it a shot anyway:
The clear and searching sweep of sun on the lawns was like a climax of the year’s lights. Leaves were burning somewhere, and the smoke smelled, with all its ammoniac acidity, of beginnings. The boundless blue air was stretched over the zenith like the skin of a drum.
That ammoniac acidity has always given me pause — ammonia is alkaline, isn’t it? — but the sky and the sun and the lawns are all perfectly right. And then, using his characteristic contrast of the ecstatic and the everyday, he deflates that golden description with: “It was the day to canvass for infectious hepatitis.” Well, of course it was! For autumn is not only the season of reflection and melancholy, a time to moon about in cable-knit sweaters through the mists of the dying year. It is also a practical season, a time to make school lunches and Halloween costumes, to bustle along the sidewalks through gusty breezes on charitable errands. As Cheever wrote, beginnings are in the air.
So okay, you say… begin already, please! As I rounded up the usual suspects three years ago, the following list includes some of my favorite newer scents. (Surely my “Best of 2012″ picks will be predictable enough to excuse a spoiler.) There are a few of my old standbys that got missed last time, too…
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Posted by Jessica
on
10 February 2012
I’ll confess: I had little interest in trying the Arquiste line when it was first announced. Another day, another high-priced niche line with exclusive distribution, historical-geographical references, and minimalist bottles; right? But my curiosity was piqued by Kevin’s review of Flor y Canto and Anima Dulcis, so I sniffed one or two selections during a visit to Barneys; and then I noticed that the newest addition to the line, Aleksandr, was a tribute to the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. I have fond memories of reading and re-reading Pushkin’s verse-novel Eugene Onegin at one point in my overly prolonged years of education, so I needed to give this fragrance a closer look.
Aleksandr was developed with perfumer Yann Vasnier and includes notes of neroli, violet leaf, fir balsam, Russian leather, and ambrette. It is designed to tell the story of the last day of Pushkin’s life, when the famed writer was mortally wounded in a duel in 1837. The neroli and violet are meant to evoke the hero’s morning toilette, the leather to refer to his gloves and boots, and the fir balsam to evoke the winter landscape around St. Petersburg. I occasionally get irritable when I see literary or cultural references haphazardly grafted onto a fragrance that doesn’t deliver on its promise (can you recall any recent example?), but in Aleksandr’s case, the story is seamlessly joined to the scent…
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Posted by Kevin
on
11 January 2012
The perfume line Arquiste is the brainchild of Mexican architect/designer Carlos Huber (a k a Nate Berkus’s boyfriend); the name “Arquiste” represents the ideas (ideals?) of “architecture,” “history” and “art” and the perfumes in the collection reference historical moments, from the meeting of Louis XIV of France and María Teresa of Spain in 1660 (the fragrances Fleur de Louis and Infanta en Flor) to Alexander Pushkin’s death-by-dueling in 1837 (Aleksandr).
I decided to tackle the two ‘Mexican’ fragrances in the line first, because Mexico and I go way back (and have always had a happy relationship)…
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