Nail day & the first scent I ever fell for🪻

plus some links and recs!

This month’s set is a little more subdued than normal. I was feeling like I wanted some calm on my fingertips and had fallen for a set Kim had done on herself the last time I saw her. These are airbrushed! Base is a bright cobalt blue with a very light pink airbrushed over it that creates this glowing effect I love. She added a little sparkle and then I asked for some gems on my middle fingers, just cause. Video at the bottom of this post. I love these.

Read this

Jennifer got me the Atlas of Perfumed Botany for my birthday and I finally cracked it open last night and am enamored with it. Written by perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena it’s an atlas of many notes and scents used in perfume, with definitions of each and a little about his experience with them. His writing is beautiful and opinionated and I will be ordering his other books. I think I’ll start with The Diary of a Nose. Just started but I highly recommend Atlas of Perfumed Botany if you have any interest in scent at all.

Weird collab that I kind of love

I have a weird fascination with Erewhon — who doesn’t? So when Jennifer forwarded me the news of this collab between Vacation and Erewhon I was intrigued. My marketing brain loves this kind of thing, seeing which unlikely brands partner to try to sell shit and reach a new audience. And the whole Erewhon smoothie influencer marketing machine is just funny to me. So sure, why not have a fragrance brand partner with a silly overpriced grocery store for a smoothie collab? Someone in LA please try this and let us know if it tastes like suntan lotion and perfume.

Perfume News

Some weird and unfortunate news coming from the fragrance world this week. A new BBC documentary found children as young as five picking jasmine in an Egyptian village responsible for producing 75% of the country’s jasmine. L'Oréal and Estée Lauder are both implicated in this story.

Arabelle Sicardi

also published a post on the news that Fragrantica (the online source for so many fragheads) was pushing this new perfume created by the very corrupt Bolsonaro family. Read it here.

My gateway perfume

I have a post coming about how to get into perfume, something a lot of people have asked me since I started this project. Sometimes it starts with just one scent, a curiosity about a fragrance you smell or read about and then you just fall into a rabbit hole and come out the other end with a new obsession and not enough room for your growing collection. For my friend Jennifer it was Après L'ondée by Guerlain. For me it was Blocki’s For Walks.

There’s something about that first fragrance you really fall for, even if you outgrow it or your tastes change, it holds a special place in your collection and it floods you with a certain kind of feeling every time you spray it. My perfume addiction started at Tiger Lily in San Francisco (now Ministry of Scent). Antonia, the owner, was so generous with her time, she walked me around the store telling me about the different lines she carried and why she brought them in. Her knowledge of scent was mesmerizing to me. I was a novice and drawn to the stories each bottle held, the magnificent work that went into each and every one of those fragrances. It was mid-day in the middle of the week and the story was empty. The sun was streaming in, lighting up all the pretty bottles, like little orbs glowing, pulling me towards them. It was like being inside a jewelry box, there was a sacred hush, and I felt at peace in a weird way I had never felt before. 

The bottles were all $100 or more, pricey for me at the time so this was a very considered purchase. I knew I would be leaving with something. I still have a movie playing in my head of the moment we went to the Blocki bottles. Antonia told me about this heritage house, one of the original perfume houses in America, recently revived by a family member. I loved the history there, the desire to recreate something from so long ago. A forgotten time bottled up and revived. The bottles felt sacred. She lifted up For Walks and sprayed it on some paper, then on my skin. It was unlike anything I had smelled before. The violet notes hit my nose but I had no language in my brain to describe what I was smelling. There were woods and wet grass in there, fresh earth and just about to bloom buds on bright green stems, there was something slightly sticky and sweet and powdery but just as I smelled that note – poof then it was gone. Something in me cracked open. I remember her telling me this was a scent her sister cherished and that she wore it to special events and dinners. I pictured Antonia’s sister, someone I didn’t know and would likely never meet, wearing a silky purple dress with tiny black flowers on it, putting on her best jewelry, pulling up her dark hair, and then spritzing For Walks as a final touch to her outfit. I saw her in a fancy room waltzing around, almost floating above the crowd. I still see this movie in my head when I pick up my bottle of For Walks. The most sacred in my collection, my gateway to the world of perfume. I use it quite literally, spritzing it on before a walk through Golden Gate Park, or to the store, something to brighten up mundane errands. I rarely wear it to fancy occasions, or even to the office, I like keeping this one to myself. During the pandemic I would wear it often as a mood lifter. It just made me happy, transported me to another time and place. There will always be a place for For Walks in my collection, no matter how big it grows, it’s my gateway drug, my ticket into the wild world of fragrance. A memory of that sunny day in that perfect store when time stood still and I got my first real education on fragrance.

This weekend I organized my collection and added some little shelves to free up some space. I need some art to hang above it all. But also want to leave room for new shelves just in case I need to expand again.

You can also find me sharing my daily fragrances and other fun stuff on my DDD Instagram account. And let me know if anyone needs to be added to this list fragrance Substacks!

Smell you later friends.
xo