The winners of the draw...

...for the A.Tauer Une Rose Chyprée are Fernando and Ines!
Please email me using the Contact link (above, under the header) with your particulars so I can get those out to you in the mail soon!

Thanks everyone for your enthusiastic participation and stay tuned for the next one!

In the meantime for those anxious to get some Une Rose Chyprée, Luckyscent has started taking pre-orders here.

Sleep Scentsations Pillow Liners: a novel bed-scenting idea

Do you like to scent your bed? I know I do, usually spraying the sheets with a favourite fragrance. Sleep Scentsations Pillow Liners is a novel idea of instant gratification with minimum hassle: little scented liners that are placed under your pillow case to aromatize your pillow and your…dreams! The products were developed by two sisters in Texas:

“After many years as executives in the corporate world, sisters Lynne Sammons and Michelle Fitzwater often found themselves facing an extremely stressful environment. […]After spending what she swore would be her last sleepless night, Lynne and sister Michelle, along with a group of well-trusted associates, spent months researching the effects of essential oils and aromatherapy, as they’d heard that these natural alternatives served as a good method in inducing relaxation. They quickly discovered applications for aromatherapy were often quite cumbersome and costly, and did not bring out the subtle natural effect inherent in fragrance oils. Experimenting with different applications, they came upon an ideal method to enhance a great nights’ sleep; it was easy to use, could be personalized to their liking, and could be taken anywhere….thus Sleep Scentsations ™ was created”.

Or so the story goes.

Personally I would find the approach much more convincing if I hadn’t already heard of the adage of “discerning consumer who couldn’t find what they wanted, so they made their own X product” numerous times, from Donna Karan to Christy Turlington and Iman downwards. There is nothing wrong with having a good business idea, after all! Why not just say it? It even landed them a partnership with the American Hotel Register Company, the world's leading product distributors within the hospitality industry! And since the Wellness and Aromatherapy liners are contra-indicated on the site for pregnant women due to containing essential oils, I'm led to believe the rest do not. But let’s skip my minor gripe and focus on the product itself.

Basically it consists of thin, scented liners which adhere to your pillow (under the pillow-case) and emit their scent for a few days until it’s time to peel them off (they come off very easily, no trace). They’re indeed easy to use, although if you’re accustomed to silk pillowcases you might feel a bit of the screetch-scratch sound at first, but nothing too bad. One observation is that the liners themselves are manuactured in China, while the scent is produced in the US. (It seemed interesting to me). As to the scents, there’s something for every taste.

The categories and respective scents included in the Sleep Scentsations line are:
Aromatherapy: Bliss (mandarin and vanilla), Relaxing (lavender, bergamot, cedar)
Botanical: White Tea & Lily, Wild Flower (tobacco flower, white ginger lily & freesia)
Exotic: Ginger & Amber, Shanghai Nights (flowers & musks)
Fresh: Day at the Beach, Fresh Cut Grass
Sensual: My Boyfriend’s Shirt, Seduction (vanilla, mandarin, amber, honey)
Wellness: Cold RX (A therapeutic blend of essential oils formulated to stimulate relief of congestion, coughs and cold symptoms) and Snore RX (A therapeutic blend of essential oils formulated to suppress snoring)

The three individual liners sent to me to test included Day at the Beach (Fresh category), Ginger & Amber (Exotic category) and My Boyfriend’s Shirt (Sensual category).

From those Day at the Beach was easily my favourite, as it replicates the much sought-after suntan-lotion-effect, filtered by memory into evoking sandy dunes and oiled-up sexy bodies languorously sprawled under the sweltering sun. I admit despite my usually posher tastes, the whiff of a little creamy mandarin-ambery and tropical tiaré/jasmine smell catches my attention more often than not. Pairing it with reading Evil under the Sun, in which the indomitable Arlyna Stuart Marshall is exposing limps as brown as a salty-almond biscuit, is quite blissful.
Ginger Lily & Amber has a spicy and aqueous undertone beneath the soft, waxy and powdery floralcy which is pleasant, if not too memorable. Still, I expect that it would be quite pretty to many people, especially those who are fans of clean white florals and it makes for an inobtrusive prelude to sleep.
My Boyfriend’s Shirt is the least remarkable in the trio and the harshest in its aromatic fougère genre; if my boyfriend used comparable cologne, I guess he wouldn’t be my boyfriend! This is one that needs reworking in my opinion because it deduces from the impression left from the other two.

Sleep Scentsations Pillow Liners can be purchased online on the official site. One pack for a 30-day-supply costs $19.99.

Disclaimer: I was sent three individual liners as part of a PR giveaway.
Photo: Gisele Bundchen shot by Mario Testino for Vanity Fair.

Where I am fabulastically tagged....

The lovely K from Rose beyond the Thames (a wonderful blog, btw) tagged me and awarded me this fabulous award. So I have to play and expose myself yet again and again, haven't I? OK, I'll try and in the meantime award 5 more blogs with the "You're fabulous" tag.

The rules are:
1. You have to pass it (the award) on to 5 other fabulous blogs in a post.
2. You have to list 5 of your fabulous addictions in the post.
3. You must copy and paste the rules and the instructions below in the post.
Instructions: Include the person that gave you the award and link it back to them. When you post your five winners, make sure you link them as well. And don't forget to let your winners know they won an award from you by emailing them or leaving a comment on their blog.

So what about my ~euphemistically called fabulous~ addictions?

1.Cinematic Fixation: You all expected me to say perfume, huh? Well, no; that's a given! I am hereby confessing to visual pleasures (you might have guessed if you're following this blog). It especially focuses on David Cronenberg (ever since Videodrome and The Dead Zone; please watch that Poe recital again), David Lynch (ever since Eraserhead, The Elephant Man and Twin Peaks), Vincent Pryce (a fellow historian! how kewl!!) and Charlotte Rampling (can anyone resist the sexiest actress alive?)
Last night History of Violence was on. Guess what I was watching for the 5th time with one sleepy eye open.

2.Jewellery. No, I'm not a material girl and I don't need sugar daddies, I can get my own thank you very much (although S.O. has been quite generous). But the flutter of a decent jewel does make my heart skip a beat from time to time. This is only a part of my collection(click pic to enlarge; if interested I shall post more later), but they're current favourites. I want a Gavello ring with a skull in pink gold and small brilliants next!

3.Air-conditionning. This is even costlier than the above ultimately (darn electricity company!), but I simply can't envision summer or summer sleep without the trusted humming of my A/C unit. Please dear God, don't let failures happen.

4.Sour cherry drink by Epsa (a traditional Greek brand). My cheap indulgence, a summer staple and simply a-m-a-z-i-n-g!. Less than a euro a bottle and it has the most refreshing sour-sweet taste evah! I could drink it by the galon which is what I often do.

5.Reading. I can't help it and it sounds nerdy or pretentious, but everything within access must be devoured be it high art or lowly pulp-fiction pamphletes (I like those for balcony reading along with crosswords puzzles!). Books are friends. And we don't choose them, they choose us!

I am passing the baton to 5 more blogs (the choice was very difficult!), not strictly perfume, which fully deserve the "you're fabulous" award:

Les Tuilleries by AlbertCan: A dear friend on ethernet, but most importantly a sensitive and talented individual who writes on the arts and scents with gusto and genuine sophistication. His clips of classical music have me sorting out for the headphones, even when I should be frantically answering my mails before class.

Tea, sympathy and perfume by M: Her beautifully eclectic blog is dedicated to all flights of fancy possible through common themes in art, as well as notes of her self-smithed poetry which is elegant and thoughtful. And joy of joys, the occasional Barbie sighting brings it full circle!

Under the Cupola by L: Studying in Florence would have been my second choice, had I not succeeded into entering the preciously-difficult-to-accept-you and precariously mine-strewn National & Kapodistrian University of Athens. L is following that Florence course, finishing up her PhD while perusing rosette windows, drinking Chianti (I assume) and making discoveries in the wake of scent along the way including Calvados-inspired essences. If blogs can also present a slice of life, hers is a full-plate.

Perfume de Rosa Negra by Chris: Chris does the impossible; she tries to inject visibility to the unknown Brasil and South American perfume scene and she does it bilingually and with great skill. Reading her venue opens the vista to different cultural associations.

Fashion Tribes: Because a historian needs to dress well too and because getting inspired by Minoan wasp-waists is all very well (wish I had a wasp waist too!) I follow a couple of fashion and design blogs. Fashion tribes is compact, aesthetically easy on the eye and sweetly to the point.

Photos © by Perfume Shrine

Chanel news...yet again

It's final and official! What we have been discussing on Perfume Shrine for quite some time is finally a fact: All 12 of Les Exclusifs will be on Chanel.com (the US site) very soon! And for a limited time only (May 16th-May 24th), you can receive a deluxe sample of either Bois des Iles (code 0509BOIS ) or Cuir de Russie (code 0509CUIR) with your 85$ purchase on Chanel.com!

For all you Guerlainomaniacs and some fact-checking

There is a tribute to Guerlain vis their 180 years of history (we talked about Chanel's 100th anniversary the other day), posted in Vanity Fair, in which Naomi Kaplan takes us through the history of the house with beautiful photos to illustrate the heritage.
You can read the article on Vanity Fair online.

Myself I was a little critical upon reading, catching a bit of dubious detail here and there: Mitsouko "a pleasantly simple fragrance, with woody base notes and a peachy top note" really doesn't begin to describe it, for me at least. Do you find Mitsouko pleasantly simple, regardless of whether you hate it or love it? On top of that the Tortue re-issue bottle pictured was actually holding Parfum des Champs Elysées, an old start-of-20th-century violet-ionone leathery fragrance, and not Mitsouko. I do like the inclusion of this tidbit from Jean Paul Guerlain on Mitsouko Fleur de Lotus: “Mitsouko is really a masterpiece,” says Jean-Paul. “I did not want to betray my grandfather’s, so I added a freshness to the scent with spices and white musk to give a modernity to it without changing the original scent.”

Also if I am not too mistaken, Eau de Shalimar is not this spring's launch (after all we had reviewed it back in September 2008!), but this spring it was merely granted a special limited edition bottle as we discussed here. The bottle design of L'Heure Bleue is only reminiscent in shape to La Petite Robe Noire and one might be confused by the phraseology used which suggests the design and hue were crossovers, especially since everything seems to be perpetuated on the Net and gains credence through repetition. Not to sound too harsh or anything...

Related reading on Perfume Shrine: the Guerlain series.