fruity

Perfume Chat Room, June 16
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Perfume Chat Room, June 16

Welcome to the weekly Perfume Chat Room, perfumistas! I envision this chat room as a weekly drop-in spot online, where readers may ask questions, suggest fragrances, tell others their SOTD, comment on new releases or old favorites, and respond to each other. The perennial theme is fragrance, but we can interpret that broadly. This is meant to be a kind space, so please try not to give or take offense, and let’s all agree to disagree when opinions differ. In fragrance as in life, your mileage may vary! YMMV.

Today is Friday, June 16, and we have a three-day weekend because of Juneteenth being celebrated on Monday as a holiday. Juneteenth, if you didn’t know, is a historically important date because June 19 was the date in 1865 on which the last remaining enslaved people in the United States were finally assured that the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued effective January 1, 1863, and they had been declared free by President Abraham Lincoln. Major General Gordon Granger, the Union officer in control of Galveston, Texas, issued an order confirming their emancipation on June 19, 1865. The date was long celebrated informally among African-American communities in Texas, then the custom spread during the Great Migration of the 20th century. It was made a federal holiday by President Biden in 2021. By the way, if you don’t know much about the Great Migration, I highly recommend the prize-winning book “The Warmth of Other Suns”, by historian and journalist Isabel Wilkerson.

I will be celebrating by spending the weekend continuing to weed, plant, and otherwise tidy my garden. My precious roses are blooming again, and one of them has decided to blossom in the middle of my Annabelle hydrangea. I love flowers! I’ve been wearing a new-to-me fragrance a lot lately; it is Miller Harris’ Coeur de Jardin, a chypre floral with several fruity notes in the opening. Very pretty! I would call it more “chypre lite” than fully chypre. Today, however, I was back in Bitter Peach by Tom Ford. What are you wearing or smelling these days?

Scent Sample Sunday: Le Jardin de Monsieur McGregor
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Scent Sample Sunday: Le Jardin de Monsieur McGregor

Given how much gardening is on my mind (and under my fingernails) these days, it seems fitting to write about one of 4160 Tuesday’s quirkier scents, Le Jardin de Monsieur McGregor. Yes, it is named for the antagonist gardener in the Peter Rabbit stories, and also in homage to Jean-Claude Ellena’s Jardin series of scents for Hermes (all of which I own and enjoy). Perfumer Sarah McCartney writes that it was created during one of her perfume-making workshops, with a focus on the aroma molecule Hedione, which creates an impression of freshness and floralcy, with notes of jasmine and greenness. The goal was for the class to create the scent of a cottage garden in the Lake District.

For those who may not know, the famous author and illustrator of the Peter Rabbit books and many others, Beatrix Potter, played a key role in preserving thousands of acres in the Lake District, including leaving 4000 acres of countryside and 14 farms she owned to the National Trust. She was, of course, a marvelous illustrator, but she was also a gifted botanist, naturalist, gardener, and farmer, and the plants in her illustrations for her children’s books are botanically accurate down to the last details. They include many of the plants mentioned in the notes and materials list for Le Jardin de Monsieur McGregor.

Mr. McGregor in his garden, by Beatrix Potter
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