Late (Again!) Links

No preamble. Down and dirty style.

• Fortnum & Mason has a superbly beautiful (and fittingly spendy) Rare Tea Wooden Advent Calendar. All I can say is “GIVE ME THAT FUDONG WHITE PEONY KING!!”
• Remember dying of dysentery on the Oregon Trail? Well, now it’s a computer game and you can be a yoga instructor.
• As a seltzer lover, I came to the right place.
• Just some photos of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the only celebrity couple that has ever mattered.
• Can we move my next raw materials exam to 9 pm?
• This might be my favorite HONY post ever. This man is the person I aspire to be. I’m ready to be illumined.
• I want this book.
• Sephora’s got a cool new campaign featuring its own employees.
• A quick video with Charlotte Olympia, she of the near-masterpiece footwear (plus bonus puppies!).
• Call me crazy, but I like What’s Happening Down There.
• Find someone who spits water on you the way Jon Stewart spits water on Stephen Colbert (and vice versa).
• Do you play that game where you imagine the stories of strangers you see? If so, this is the Instagram account for you.

Pre-Perfumista Fragrances

(Don’t Laught at Me)

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that one of my passions is for perfume.  To the extent that I hope to follow a career in flavor and fragrance chemistry.  This really got triggered sometime around 8th or 9th grade, when I bought what I think of as my first ‘perfumista’ fragrance- L’Air de Rien, by Miller Harris.  L’Air de Rien isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, as it combines musk, patchouli, vanilla, oaks, and orange blossom to get a scent that ultimately feels very sexy and ‘lived in’ (or like a cupcake in a stable, if you’re my mum).
Apparently in 2006, Jane Birkin commissioned Miller Harris to create a perfume smelling “a little of my brother’s hair, my father’s pipe, floor polish, empty chest of drawers, old forgotten houses.”
I’ve never smelled Jane Birkin’s brother’s hair, but I think MH was pretty much on target.
And then my interest in perfume really kicked into high gear in 10th grade, when I started swapping samples.

So that’s the not very necessary backstory, which was really more just an excuse to reminisce over the start of my long-enduring marriage to L’Air de Rien (sorry!).  But even if that’s really what I think of as the event that initiated me into perfumista-hood, that doesn’t mean I never wore perfume before hand. Because I did. And I’m not too proud to remember.