Posted by Kevin
on
25 January 2012
I own way too many perfumes. A good portion of my “collection” these days is made up of summery, citrus colognes. Here in the chilly, damp Pacific Northwest, and especially after a mega-snowstorm like we experienced last week, I am entering a ‘danger zone’ (a time period when I am REALLY susceptible to buying light, bright citrus-packed fragrances, perfumes that remind me of summer or my years living in Southern California). Who cares that I already own enough sparkling lemon-orange-lime-bergamot-grapefruit-kumquat scents to last a decade; isn’t there room for one, or two, more?
Enter Tauer Perfumes Cologne du Maghreb, an all-natural fragrance, that includes notes of bergamot and lemon essential oils, neroli oil, orange blossom, Moroccan cedar wood, cistus ladaniferus, rosemary, lavender, rose and clary sage. I like every fragrance note listed for Cologne du Maghreb and expected to enjoy the perfume, too.
When first applied, Cologne du Maghreb produces a dusky, dark, “art-studio” aroma…
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Posted by Alyssa
on
17 January 2012
Surely the fact that peak citrus season falls smack in the middle of winter is a sign the cosmos is not entirely without mercy. Just when we’ve thrown away our holiday trappings, the supermarkets brim with flashes of color. Even the humblest corner bodega has good oranges right now. My amazing local grocery store is having its annual citrus festival, and the produce section is crammed with so many exotic varieties that I brought my camera with me on my last shopping trip.
The fruit was piled high in fragrant chaos — pale chartreuse pomelos the size of melons nestled alongside orange-red kishu tangerines no bigger than a kiss. White, pink, red and yellow grapefruits kept company with a dozen different varieties of oranges, including sour Seville oranges begging to be roasted with duck, and blood oranges with their deep maroon flesh and Cara Cara oranges that are supposed to taste of raspberries but tasted, to me, exactly like a sweet-sour Pixie Stick. Not only were there kumquats (and I ask you, is there a more adorable fruit than the kumquat?) there were limequats and mandarinquats (which I keep wanting to call manquats, though I can see why they didn’t). There were real live bergamots, round as cue balls, and wrinkled, deflated yuzus, both of them smelling — when I dragged a nail across their peels — twice as heavenly as all the teas and candies and perfumes that feature them…
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Posted by Robin
on
8 December 2011
Azemour Les Orangers is the latest from French niche line Parfum d’Empire. It’s meant as a tribute to the city of Azemmour in Morocco and the surrounding region, where founder Marc-Antoine Corticchiato reportedly spent time at his family’s orange groves as a child. As a back-story, that’s relatively tame for a brand that has already brought us scents inspired by the Ottoman empire and Napoléon Bonaparte, among others, but with the never-ending onslaught of new niche brands with ever more obscure (and pretentious) inspirations, I’m tired of back-story anyway.
Azemour Les Orangers is a fresh chypre, a real, honest-to-goodness fresh chypre, with plenty of citrus and that mossy, nearly-musty undertone that you either adore or detest.1 If, like me, you adore it, then Azemour will be like greeting an old friend that you haven’t seen in some time and feared you might never meet again…
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As I write this post, the temperature in New York City is 102 degrees. In weather like this, we’ll all be bathing more often than usual, so we might as well make the best of it and try out some new body products, right? I’ve been taking advantage of these two-shower days to test a few things from Poetry, a small company that encourages the “Intimate Ritual” of bathing.
Poetry’s bath-and-body line is available in two fragrance blends; I’ve been using samples of products scented with Verse 1, “a versatile citrus fragrance with notes of sandalwood and jasmine.” (The other fragrance is Verse 2, “a potent scent of mint and balsam needle with a hint of grapefruit.”) Verse 1 is strongly citrus, with intense, sunny notes of bergamot and lemon and a smooth woodsy base that suggests cedar as well as sandalwood. I don’t really notice the jasmine, but that’s fine, because the citrus-wood pairing has a cleansing, almost purifying effect on my mind as well as my body. It makes me feel more alert, and purged of all heat-related discomfort, at least for a little while…
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Posted by Jessica
on
18 September 2010
If you read a few women’s fashion/beauty magazines per month, you’re probably familiar with the kind of feature in which a high-end item is paired with a more attainable, bargain-price item — “Splurge/Steal,” “Lust/Must,” and so on. Sometimes I consider using this device to recommend pairs of body products, except I don’t usually come across direct comparisons. These two body scrubs, however, do fall into a similar category. Both have citrus-floral scents and both are packaged in tubes (my strong preference for scrubs), but they’re sold in different markets at very different price levels.
Kings & Queens is a more widely-distributed spin-off line for Korres, the Greek skincare and makeup company. The Kings & Queens body products claim to be enhanced “with royal herbs,” and like the rest of the line, the Sultan of Granada Lemon Flower Body Scrub is “enriched with royal mix [sic] of pomegranate, blue lotus and malachite natural extracts.” These extracts happen to fall towards the end of the ingredients list, after the water and sodium laureth sulfate and plastic exfoliant beads, but that’s not really unusual for a product in this price range. Because the exfoliating particles are suspended in what amounts to a lightweight shower gel…
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