Nail Day & the scents I took to Jersey

The perfect summer set.

I wanted something colorful and fun for this next set that would usher me into summer and Kim delivered. This is one of my all time favorites. Kim picked the colors and created these little works of art and it was fun to see the design come together. A friend mentioned how impressed he is with her eye for color combinations and I am too — how she makes all these wild colors and patterns feel so cohesive is pretty remarkable. She insisted on the black and white nail and I love how it sits with all this color. These nails are instant happy for me. They will appear in many photos while they’re on my fingers.

Even the thumbs are little masterpieces. She noticed how my thumbs are always in my perfume photos on IG holding bottles and made a point to make these thumbs pop.

I usually take photos on the street immediately after getting them done and I loved stumbling upon this wheat-pasted poster which made the perfect backdrop. This dude is as impressed with this set as I am.

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Scent Bar is a dream. I highly recommend going if you are in LA or NYC.

This LA Times article on Jay 305 and his obsession with fragrance came out almost a month ago but I didn’t get around to reading it until this week. In it, the writer, who is also friends with Jay, visits Scent Bar in LA and they spend hours nerding out on fragrances. There are so many great quotes that had me nodding along in agreement:

“There is an understanding between Jay and I that this is what one must do — talk about, think about, and smell perfume incessantly to understand it, and find something that is either in reflection of the person you are or the person you want to become.”

And this one which made me proud to be a part of this weird tribe of fragrance freaks:

“Fragrance people are a different breed — obsessive little freaks who are driven by their senses and fall in love with things that are invisible. The real heads can chop it up for hours about the construction of a perfume, the feelings and ideas that it can provoke. We’ve reached the point in our Scent Bar journey where Jay and I are talking a mile a minute, eyes rolling in the back of our heads every time we smell something special, darting from corner to corner. Nothing makes sense and everything is beautiful — flying high on the ecstasy of perfume.”

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And from my IG this week here’s a new fragrance I wasn’t looking for but was happy to add to my collection. It’s called Red Tea by Proad. I saw it sitting on some random shelf with a couple of other tea scents at ZGO. Someone had a tea moment and the bottles hadn’t been put back in their proper place. Curious, I huffed the Red Tea bottle and was hit with a refreshing wave of citrus notes that felt light and sparkly. There’s something a little jammy and floral and then it dries down to a light wood. It’s a great fragrance for warm summer months even though we don’t really have those in the Bay Area. And the price was reasonable.

Josh took an unboxing video and pulled these stills from it, which I like much better than watching myself talk on video.

I’m traveling this week and was excited to get some travel atomizers so I could take some of my collection with me. I got this idea after watching one of Emelia aka Professor Perfume’s TikToks when she shared what she was taking with her for her wedding in Italy. I was so excited to find out about these. Emelia has a sticker system but I just took photos so I could reference them in the unlikely event I don’t recognize the smells. I also brought Do Son by Diptyque but forgot to get a photo of that one. All white florals except

Alex Elle

’s Heal the Way by Snif which I have a review of coming soon and an interview with Alex.

Carnal Flower by Frederic Malle remains one of my all-time favorite fragrances. I can’t get over how much I love this one and I’m a little worried I’m going to fly through this bottle too quickly. She’s not cheap! I also love Ourside’s Nostalgia for the summer. I’ll take jasmine all year round but it’s especially perfect on hot sticky skin in the summer months.

Do you know of any great perfume shops I should visit while I’m in NJ this week? If so please share in the comments!

Small ya later friends.

xo