Quercia Marina

Today is another grey day, complete with rain, so I decided to wear something powerful today that will stimulate my imagination. Acqua di Parma's Quercia Marina seems to be the ticket. I love the salty masculinity of this juice. It is powerful, yet well-constructed. I smell cedar, of course, lots of it, and a bunch of bitter herbs, violet, and maybe some vetiver. I bet my dad would love this one. I love it too. I intend to get a full bottle (soon, because it's apparently discontinued) and wear it on days I want to be powerful and send masculine signals. Definitely a contender for the 'job interview' category. I wonder why this was discontinued. I guess it smells too natural for the power-hungry business dudes this is probably supposed to appeal to. They are probably wearing Hugo Boss!

I love how Italian this smells too. I am starting to identify a specifically Italian aesthetic in perfumery--a tendency towards more tonic, herbal smells, less sexy than the France, but also, perhaps, more gorgeously historical. I mean, stretching back into the past of cologne, before modern perfumery was around, even before Napoleon bathed in cologne water. I get the sense of a deep history of perfume chemists in a Santa Maria Novella or an Acqua di Parma, of a tradesman dropping off bespoke bottles of a certain formulation at the back entrance of Lorenzo di Medici's mistress' townhouse before trudging back along the filthy Florentine streets to get back to his apothecary.