I can’t believe it’s been five years since my last Top Ten Spring Fragrances list, but yes, a look back confirms that fact. My tastes haven’t shifted much since then, yet I can somehow come up with plenty of new favorites. Of course, there are the fragrances that I consider part of my springtime “hall of fame”: Guerlain Apres l’Ondée and Chamade, Frederic Malle En Passant. These come into rotation every March or April, come rain or come shine (and lately, it’s been mostly rain). But, beyond these classics, I’m easily able to compile a list of other fragrances I’ve been wearing or will be wearing over the next month or two.
What to wear when the calendar says Spring, but the weather is still chilly and damp and dreary? I love to don Frederic Malle L’Eau d’Hiver during that indecisive kind of weather, perhaps because it walks a fine line between warm and cool, soft and crisp…
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Posted by Angela
on
25 January 2013
Over the years I’ve built a stable of favorite cold-weather fragrances and have only added and dropped off a few each year. To spare you a recap of perfumes I mention all the time, I’m grouping ten perfumes I like into ten winter-activity categories. I hope you’ll chime in with your own favorites, and be sure to check out more winter favorites at Bois de Jasmin :: Grain de Musc :: Perfume Posse :: Perfume Smellin’ Things.
Après-ski
This category is kind of a joke since I don’t know how to ski, and, frankly, the whole deal sounds like a good excuse for a broken collar bone. But après ski? Sign me up. When I picture après ski, I think of an early 1960s lodge in Gstaad — like the one in the Pink Panther movie — with women in sweaters and bulbous mink hats and men in turtlenecks and dark glasses. Everyone drinks from brandy snifters and speaks several languages. It’s glamorously ridiculous. Serge Lutens Santal de Mysore is my après-ski perfume choice. It’s boozy, woody, and warm, and would be a terrific accompaniment to a shoulder-high fireplace and a copy of Valley of the Dolls…
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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 Robin
on
6 July 2012
I am a summer person. My favorite thing about spring is that it’s almost summer, and my favorite thing about fall is that sometimes, the summer days linger on longer than expected. I have nothing good at all to say about winter. But we take turns writing the seasonal Top 10 posts for Now Smell This, and somehow it has worked out that I’ve only done the summer list twice, in 2005 and 2007. Either one of those lists1 would take me happily through a summer even now, all these years later, and truth be told, summer is when I wear the least perfume anyway.2 Many days, a light layer of scented lotion is enough fragrance for me, and there are many more days when (horrors!) I wear no fragrance at all.
For this year’s list, I’ve avoided repeats by emphasizing post-2007 fragrances. Most, but not all, of my choices are unisex, and I’ve included niche and mainstream and indie, cheap and not so cheap…
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Posted by Kevin
on
4 May 2012
Spring in the Pacific Northwest is a transitional season — there are chilly days and warm days, a dry day (or two), and then there’s…RAIN…all types of rain — sprinkles, showers, ‘horizontal’ umbrella-proof rain, deluges, sometimes all in the space of one exciting hour. What separates spring from fall, another season with multiple personalities, are the fragrant flowers that bloom in spring: plum and cherry; narcissus; wintersweet; scented azaleas, camellias and witch hazels; lilacs; daphnes; hyacinths; and my favorite — wallflowers. For my springtime perfume choices, I (mostly) skip spring flowers in a bottle — no perfume matches the aromas of real plants blooming all around me. My spring favorites, most of them new discoveries and, as yet, un-reviewed, are a varied lot.
Ah…the smell of gasoline on a warm afternoon! Histoires de Parfums Pétroleum reminds me of lawn mower fumes mingling with the scents of flowers and cut grass. It makes me drowsy (in a good way). And speaking of grass (and roots) I’ll add LesNez Turtle Vetiver Front to my spring favorites list; it’s a rich and warm vetiver that works in any season (like a “perfume-scarf,” it blunts the chill on cold days and, conversely, it accentuates the heat of a warm day when you want that “baking” feeling).
As one bakes, one sweats, and I’m one of those people who likes a hot-and-bothered-smelling perfume on occasion (we’re talking ‘clean’ sweat — grapefruit, vetiver, cedar — no overwhelming cumin). In this clean-dirty category, I’ll put Kinski (with its marijuana and vetiver notes) and the éminence grise of modern perspiration perfumery: Cartier Déclaration…
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