hortus conclusus

Before I dig into this post, a quick reminder that my book and fragrance drawing and giveaway is still in full swing. don’t forget to enter your name here if you are interested! This review is probably about 5 years behind the times. Remember when cucumber notes were all the rage, in dish soaps, detergents, shampoos, and perfumes? It was a puzzling phenomenon then and I still don't understand it now. I remember one time I was cleaning up the kitchen and I reached for what looked like an ordinary, slightly old cucumber sitting on the counter, and, as I picked it up, I discovered to my great disgust that it was not solid at all. It had liquefied entirely inside—it was like those fairy tales where the heroine reaches for a perfect fruit from a magic tree, takes one bite, and discovers that it is crawling with maggots. It was disgusting, and the most disgusting part about it was that it smelled almost exactly like the standard-issue cucumber note that was all the rage at the ti...

Many authors use pe rfume as a novelistic shorthand for memories awakened in complete recall. A character smells something and it awakens deep memories, or takes him back in time. In Daphne du Maurier’s neo-gothic romance Rebecca , this motif takes a sinister turn. A youung girl marries a widower with an obscure, tragic past and moves to his ancestral estate . She soon discovers that the place is haunted by the presence of the memory of the previous wife, Rebecca.  This ‘haunting’ is mostly expressed through smell and fragrance. Azaleas, overpowering, overfeminine, unnaturally-abundant blooms which choke the manor of Manderley, become a symbol of the dead wife’s overpowering femininity. Rebecca even wore a perfume which smelled of azaleas. The hapless new wife discovers traces of perfume on Rebecca’s clothes, which have turned musty with age, she experiences the oppression of the obscure yet present past in the form  a choking fog that blights the landscape a...

SO, I was bumming around in Barnes and Noble last night waiting for my husband’s history class to come back from a 4-day tour of Civil War battlefields so we could get in the car and drive back home to be together for the first time in a little under two weeks, and I came upon an article in the June issue of Allure that irritated me a little—ok, a lot! (that was way too long a sentence, I know) In this brief article, the journalist writes [and I respond in parentheses] : At what point did we start wanting our perfume to conjure a poisonously scheming man-eater or an underwear-clad model? [ um, what? Haven’t perfumes always had something to do with sex, or at least with ‘allure’?] Apparently, perfumers have been asking themselves the same questions, [have they now…?] because this summer heralds the return of the pure floral scent [has it ever been away?]. “ These florals smell like nature, like a natural flower,” explains perfumer Frédéric Malle [in the first sentence that actua...