Oddly enough, though I love both orientals and Serge Lutens fragrances on the whole, both of which I own a rather significant collection, I ...

When I first discovered The Body Shop I was a teenager. This also happened to be a time when the company was run by its founder, Anita Roddi...

Fumerie Turque (Turkish smoking salon) is one of the most majestic scents amidst the Serge Lutens impressive line-up of orientalise composit...

The newest fragrance by French niche brand Diptyque is called Oud Palao and is -you guessed it- inspired by the mega-trend that is oud. It a...

Poor Jon Hamm had to smoke 74 herbal cigarettes in the pilot of Mad Men alone, such is our modern shunning of smoking, even more so on scre...

Possibly the most "masculine" leaning of the otherwise aimed at both sexes new collection The Four Corners of the Earth, it being ...

The melancholic timbre of Billie Holiday's voice, the "black voice" behind the inspiration for Serge Lutens's latest Pari...

I sometimes wonder what would happen if the art of fragrance naming is asked to be, as the French would put it, en clair ―to speak in plain ...

As the cooler months draw to an end I have a faint pang of nostalgia on fragrances which will be rather difficult to bring out in the heat o...

Tabac Blond (1919) was the opening salve of the garçonnes’ raid on gentlemen’s dressing tables. Its name evokes the “blonde” tobacco wome...

O Marvel! a garden amidst the flames. My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian mo...

Comparing an uncompromisingly masculine fragrance such as Zino by Davidoff with a unisex offering from Chanel, daintely named ( Coromandel )...

Field Notes from Paris is the latest installment in the alphabetized line by San Francisco-based independent perfumer Ineke Rühland, a wood...

Appraising my impressions on the upcoming L'Artisan Havana Vanille (later changed to Vanille Absolument ) I can't help but think th...

When we had introduced Hilde Soliani and her niche line of perfumes to the English-speaking world, little did we know she would become somet...

"She curls up on the couch like a luxuriating cat, lights a cigarette with a vengeance": this is how I have always envisioned plea...

Perfume Shrine likes to look at new things and when a favourite brand branches out, here we are following the trail like a scenthound. Korre...