Best of 2007
Friday, December 28th, 2007
Mrs. Meyer’s Geranium All Purpose Cleaner
Geranium has long been used in perfumery as an easy and cheap method to either boost or add a rose layer to a fragrance. I love that someone has returned to the concept and thought to use it in a household cleaner instead of the endless parade of lavenders, citruses, and pines. To the company’s credit, they didn’t even mess around with pretending it’s “rose”: They labeled its fragrance all proper. The minty rose of geranium emanating from the kitchen lends a homey, cozy feel to offset the visual sterility of scrubbed surfaces. If you’ve ever wondered why on earth you smell something “rosy” and “toothpastey” in a fragrance yet some reviewer insists on calling the combination “geranium,” then this single product may possibly reveal to you what they are specifying. I honestly think this may well be my favorite fragrance product of the year, since a minty rose kitchen is so much more pleasing to work in than a Formica-covered pine forest.
Okay, okay, so this is the second year I’ve mentioned these, but this is also the second year my pair still needs no sharpening. And I take terrible care of them. They’re thrown loose into a tray with scissors and nail stuff and etc… without the rubber tip protectors because those were lost in the first five minutes of ownership. If I make it to year three with no need of sharpening or replacement, I’m going to call these the best beauty implement ever. These tweezers are precise, culling out those weird stray fine hairs in my eyebrows (that grow due to only sheer maliciousness as far as I can tell) as well as yanking out my three billy goat hairs gruff that sprout in a tight coarse cluster on my chin (I hate them. So. Much. I feel a weird surge of satisfaction when I extract them. This is all possibly TMI, isn’t it? Getting older sucks.)
I asked my husband what his fave fragrance find of the year might be, just for giggles. He would prefer not to be a fragrance snob though alas! Turns out he’s not immune to osmosis from marriage to a perfume nut, after all. He unequivocally voiced his preference for L’Occitane’s Eau des Baux, and wished the company would make their men’s skin care line available in that scent beyond their regular Cade line (which he also likes.) It’s a woody-musky scent with a fruity, but not cloyingly sweet, and incense heart. Eau des Baux smells very nice on men, and I’d imagine it has more than a few female fans as well.
Givenchy’s small reintroduction to ten older and newer classic fragrances has been one of those little things that makes one feel like not all hope has been drowned in an ever widening sea of mediocre debuts (which total industry wide into the hundreds, sigh.) Small wonder that the current economic situation is not going so well in the perfumery business. However, it is nice to see this particular LVMH-run house embrace their quite chic heritage despite a constant fashion trope that the only way to stay relevant is to always be new. And it sure beats leaving some very lovely Givenchy perfumes to gather dust as if the house’s history was comprised of nothing but a series of old marketing agendas. (They were of course, that, too, but not just that.) Those fragrances are still great; they deserve to see the light of day no matter what the current fads are.
In what has turned out to be what I feel is a pretty lackluster year, Infusion d’Iris seems a conspicuous contender for the “perfume I’d most like to espy on others” in a crowded, and otherwise middling field of 2007 releases. I suspect if it’d been launched even a couple years ago it might have flown under the radar a bit, though who knows? I don’t personally have the chemistry needed carry this somewhat delicate fragrance off. However, of all the new launches this year, I think this is the one I’d be most delighted to discover became the surprise sleeper hit of the year. Because just how much sickeningly sweet vanillas and fruity-florals in the air can a person take from other folks’ sillage? Especially when standing in queue at the bank or when stuck on an elevator ride. God bless you wonderful iconoclasts who buck the “pink”ening trend in fragrance. You wear your greens and your flowers and your chypres without remorse, and for that I thank you. I suspect this year you were more likely to find happiness in a bottle of Infusion d’Iris than whatever the latest Eau de TMZ was.
I don’t know if this is new this year or just new to me, but either way, what a fun little discovery. Its composition carries green elements, such as found in Creation Mathias’ discontinued L’eau de Figue, a sprinkling of esters to lend a flowery feel just as they do in L’Artisan’s Premier Figuier Extreme, and a creamy hint of the warm woods found in Diptyque’s Philosykos… Which added together makes for a charming and fun fragrance in its own right, even if it’s not quite the equal to any of the aforementioned “figs.” However, Mediterranean Fig comes as part of a range of bath and body products and not just as an EDT, so you can still enjoy the scent without necessarily abandoning use of your other favorite fig fragrances.
Old Navy “Blue Alert” commercial
The best perfume ad of the year was not a perfume ad. The first few times I saw Old Navy’s “Blue Alert” commercial, I was sure it just ought to be a fragrance ad, but no. It’s a lovely cover of a Leonard Cohen song accompanying a blue jeans pitch. Dear advertising people behind this: If this is your soft sell behind cheap denim, I’m longing to see you tackle perfume. No snark here, I decided I really liked it. It didn’t make me want to buy jeans, as I’ve been less than impressed by the quality of Old Navy clothes, but your ad did make me pay attention. Repeatedly. Not many ads can suck you in to watch them more than once, let alone multiple times. The ad can be viewed via this link to Adweek (LINK.)
Bored Games
For his Life in Hell comic, Matt Groening (The Simpsons) creates an annual list of “forbidden words” that were annoying or overused or both during the course of the year. (Comic not available online, but a list of some previous years’ entries is cataloged here and there on other sites.) I figured it might be fun to do the same with perfume ad copy and PR releases.
As I looked over my badly scribbled list of words I realized this might have the makings of either a drinking game or a bingo card… Hey! Why not do both?
Every time you spot one of these words as you leaf through magazines or are online shopping, mark your card, then DRINK!
And the first person to achieve bingo within a single ad wins… Oh crap. You win a hangover. But buck up. Because the rest of us scanning multiple ads for a bingo victory will only wind up winning alcohol poisoning.
A New Year’s Wish
So, smell ya later 2007, and happy 2008 to everyone. May this coming year see fewer fragrance releases, the abasement of celeb fragrances from celebs we’ve never heard of as well as those we have, and a return to a time when one could count on fruit to stay in the produce bins and clean to stay in the shower.
Please visit my oh so lovely online colleagues for much more substansive and interesting lists at Aromascope :: Bois de Jasmin :: Now Smell This :: Perfume Posse :: Perfume Smellin’ Things ::