Free shipping & Gift Draw at Neela Vermeire Creations

Good news for those who love the Neela Vermeire Creations line. Here is the news snippet I was informed of.

"To celebrate March and International Women's Day next week,
we are offering free shipping only within the EU until the 15th of March and you have a chance to win one of our special numbered amethyst bottle of Mohur Extrait (50 ml) when you purchase any 60 ml EDP flacon."

You know what to do...

www.neelavermeire.com

Guerlain: The liquidation of heritage

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Succumbing to celebrity culture has never been the Guerlain way.
Guerlain does not follow the Guerlain way anymore. Time to let that sink in.

Dame Perfumery New Musk Oil: fragrance review

There are as many types of musk as there are flowers in the field. Musk has diverged from a single ingredient to a pleiad of genres within a scent group. Although most divide musks roughly into either the "clean" or "dirty" camp, depending on whether they replicate respectively laundry detergent ingredients or the nether region gland secretions of a small animal, it is possible to profit of both worlds.

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New Musk Oil belongs to the first camp, yet, without embracing any characteristic of the second, it manages to eschew the clinical sterility that some of its compatriots share. It's clean to the degree that a freshly washed apricot fruit is clean enough to eat. But that does not detract from the fact that it's a succulent, living thing in the palm of your hand, and that you can feel the palpitations of your own heart settle down as you consume it in abandoned pleasure. New Musk Oil is like that; it possesses an unusual fruity quality about it, under the primness of the more standard lily of the valley that's par for the course within this genre of clean musky scents, which recalls an apricot flavor. In fact I'd venture that it shares DNA with another lightly apricot-tinged fragrance in the line, namely Soliflore Osmanthus (osmanthus is a tree with small apricot-smelling blossoms). Makes sense.

Considering that the sensuous application of an oil to one's skin uses touch as the cornerstone of predisposing for the "my skin but better" effect, and that New Musc Oil shares the exact same formula with the alcohol-based New Musk Man cologne, I'd say that with this pretty and lasting oil from Dame Perfumery Scottsdale has won the hearts of women. Not only in the capacity of being attracted to the man who wears the scent, but in the capacity of claiming the oil as their very own.

Like the best out there it looks wholesome but holds a treasure of nuance inside. 

Diptyque Philosykos: fragrance review

For reasons not very difficult to parse Diptyque's Philosykos is one of my favorite summer perfumes and any time I want to be eased into a warm weather reverie that comes replete with siestas under a generously shady tree and the smell of its dusty foliage and warm, solidly dependable bark, I reach out my hand for it. The idea of spraying Philosykos on one's self is of course synonymous with the elation conferred upon thee on a hot summer's day. But one trip to rainy Ulm, Germany, convinced me of the unsung merits of Diptyque's iconic fragrance at times of melancholy as well.

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Right when the weather was gloomy over the muddy Danube, when the downcast skies of lead threatened with more rain and more desperation of the particular kind that an endless Sunday afternoon cooped up in a small room spells out, I reached in my handbag for olfactory solace. Restricted from airport travel regulations my stash regretably had to remain back home: frustration! But a couple of trusty solids had piggybacked themselves, stacked upon each other. Among them Philosykos, the lover of figs.

And lo and behold, an ordinary yet scenic scenery, like that in mount Pelion which inspired it, unfolded beneath my eyes upon it melting on my wrists. A stone-built cottage with grey-taupe stone roof tiles shimmering in the scorching August sun. A tiny cistern with a bucket going down for watering and the cicadas singing incessantly in the still of noon. The sweetish mix of dust, earth, milky coconut odour off the barks, crackling and oozing fragrant resin, and two small children running down the slope to the boardwalk towards the sea. "Wait for me Alexander! Just wait!"

It's home away from home.

L'Occitane en Province Fleurs de Cerisier (Cherry Blossom): fragrance review

Nothing could be further apart than the vivacious, gregarious ways of the Greeks and the orderly, over-refined ways of the Japanese celebrating "sakura", the ephemeral beauty of the blossoming cherry trees. And yet, in the transience of "we live only once", I can find all the inherent melancholy of Greek philosophy.
Life is transcient. It slips through the fingers like sand on an empty shore sometime in late September when the days draw shorter and the chill rises off the sea at dusk.

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Cherry blossom fragrances therefore greet me with the conundrum of transient joy over fruitful outcome. I picked this jammy-smelling scent by L'Occitane because it encapsulates disparate elements of the delight in the ephemeral: a touch of rain, a hint of apples and melons to come, peppery jolt in the air, the lingering aftertaste of cherry jam when the jar has been emptied...

Like Henry Miller said "the scent of playing [with a particular part of the female anatomy] on one's fingers is all the more beautiful after the fact because it carries the memory of the finished fact". I am paraphrasing. But you get my point.