hortus conclusus

Time to get a present for Dad, and if yours is anything like mine, that is a serious challenge. Most dads don’t want anything you can afford to get them (cars, computers, trips to exotic locales) so you usually flake out and go for the easy options (ties, food, drink, fragrance, books, gift certificates, etc.) Well, this is a fragrance blog, so I can help you with one of those categories. Here are my top ten picks for smells for Dad for this year. Some are pricey, some are cheap, some are in the middle. These are not only some of my favorite masculines, they are also all a little more unique than the ubiquitous Ralph Lauren Polo or Hugo Boss. You can also check out my guidelines for picking out perfumes for mom , but sometimes dads are a little harder to read, and give you less to work with. These are in no particularly significant order, by the way. These are not necessarily my favorite masculines of all time; they are just ones I think most men would not push away in disgust, and ...

I am getting ready for another round of academic interviews for professorships and have been plotting my fragrance strategy, and I figured other people would be interested in my quandary: what does a woman wear to an important job interview? She needs to feel empowered, subtly womanly, and happy, but she should obviously wear nothing that could put people off (so out goes one of my favorites, Samsara , which isn’t everyone’s), but what other criteria should she use to judge which fragrance would be best? Here is a list of criteria I came up with, but I’d be thrilled to get your input! the scent should be classic—nothing too unusual, exotic, or oddball, i.e. Chanel’s Cuir de Russie , not Thierry Mugler’s Angel.  the scent should skew masculine. Consider wearing a classic men’s cologne, like Guerlain Vetiver , Geo F. Trumper’s Royal Fern, or Caron Pour Homme. Although it is wrong that we still live in a sexist world, you might as well play the game an...

For my birthday yesterday I received a surprise present from my father; a bottle of one of those scents from my childhood that gets the wheels of my bittersweet memory turning. I don’t know what made my father decide to part with this bottle; it was a gift of a vintage bottle of Geo F. Trumper’s Wild Fern from one of the greatest bon vivants in my family of bon vivants, who sadly died of pancreatic cancer some years ago. I loved him, and miss him often, so anything that reminds me of him makes me somewhat sad—I feel like we lost him too soon. That said, I am very happy to have this bottle in my collection. It is precious to me. I remember the smell of this bottle, the gorgeousness of the green marbled tin, my surreptitious sniffs at the lid—this is probably the very bottle that made me fall in love with Fougeres—and perhaps with fragrance in general! It has a bitter citrus opening, deep anisic note, a definite greenness and a note of what might be bitter almond which quickl...