hortus conclusus

I chatted with my friend José last night about scent; His seven year old daughter, he says, spends hours and hours in the bathroom, ‘making perfume’. I told him the next time they came over for dinner we could smell perfume together and talk about their compostion. He says she is very interested in chemistry; the parents are both extremely talented scientists—maybe she could become a parfumier ; ) Then Jose and I got to talking about his memories with cologne. He says Shalimar and Tribú remind him of old lovers. Chanel no. 5 is his mother. His father, a wealthy and powerful Mexican artist and politician, is YSL . He himself wears Lacoste . His wife wears nothing. My dear friend Julie, 7 ½ months pregnant, wandered around the party smelling amazingly exotic, yet intensely familiar; It took me awhile to figure out that she was wearing Sensuous , one of my very favorites. It smelled fabulous on her, and it was a very cool experience to smell it on someone else besides me—I’ve almos...

Well. I ended up wearing Creed Spring Flowers to the baby shower, and I’m glad I chose that because the shower was full of baby talk and baby paraphernalia, but it was a gorgeous, powerfully bright early spring day. If I had worn something more powdery, I might have risked feeling overwhelmed by the atmosphere of almost suffocating maternal energy and babyish juvenilia. The Spring flowers kept me centered, reminding me that it was finally Spring and that this was all part of a vast phase of rebirth that all the people in the Northern Hemisphere were sharing right now. Spring Flowers isn’t my favorite white floral, but its elegant simplicity was a perfect choice for the luncheon, and its joyous and unapologetically feminine bouquet made me feel just as feminine as the other guests, but just in a different way.

So, if you are a girl, and are anything like me, you have a passion for anything 19th c. novel-ly. Scott, Dickens, the Bronte Sisters, and of course the immortal Miss Austen have been your friends and playmates since you were but a wee slip of a girl. You long for an age of refinement and courtship--or at least enjoy fantasizing about it. You buy tickets in the first week for anything period, and keep up with the BBC's output of historical dramas and classics. But you have tired of the clichéd girls' movie night fare of Pride and Prejudice--even though you, like every other red-blooded female in the Western world, do enjoy mooning over Colin Firth from time to time, and have lapped up even the most silly riffs on the Georgian Romance Theme, like the BBC's ridiculous but pleasurable Lost in Austen . Luckily, there exists a solution to this quandary of movie ennui: you can satisfy your desire to slip into another time, immerse yourself in the minutia of domestic life, and i...