I’ve definitely front-loaded my vacations this year. With gratitude, this is the third year in a row we’ve been able to make a trip to London, England to see old friends (last week). We also embarked on some new (and revisited) sniffing.

Matiere Premiere

On our way to lunch with friends, I made it a point to stop by the new Matiere Premiere boutique in Covent Garden, as it showcases raw materials alongside their namesake perfumes. I let them give me the standard tour, which started with Vanilla Powder eau de parfum followed by the extrait. The latter is deeper and richer, strengthened by tonka bean absolute, which we got to smell along with the vanilla absolute and palo santo oil. While the apothecary-style bottles added gravitas to the overall design of the store, smelling these gorgeous raw materials diluted at 10% in ethanol directly from them wasn’t ideal as the scent of alcohol interfered slightly.

Other guests entered, and as I didn’t want to be late for lunch, I excused us. Didn’t get a photo, unfortunately, but do recommend a visit.

Liberty

After lunch, the group of us trekked to Liberty as one of our friends had suggested seeing the balloon installation there. Turned out that had been replaced with a giant pink coffee cup for Beauty Pie, a skin cream brand. We wandered the floors and when we got to the perfume counters, my friend’s handsome and very articulate three-year-old son wanted to smell everything! His stroller happened to be parked beside Trudon, and he asked for each bottle in turn. I took over spray duty and showed him at least four different fragrances on the custom-designed blotters. Médie, with its strong top note of grapefruit, he dismissed as “smells like poo-poo” (not to worry, it’s a lovely citrus), but he spent a lot of time with his nose on Mystique, with notes of leather, saffron, papyrus, oud, and other woods. I got the scoop from him:

“I smell… a car.” (That must be the leather!)

“I smell… fire!” (It is a bit smoky. He’s perceptive.)

“I smell… tyrannosaurus rex!” (I immediately thought of the Zoologist perfume of the same name, and could make that connection. I asked him where he’d smelled a T. rex and he told me it was at the Natural History Museum. Color me irrevocably impressed.)

“I smell… lollipop!” (At this point I still believed him and was, frankly, awed by his ability to discern notes.)

“I smell… all of these things in a ginormous cup!” he declared. Eventually, his observations devolved to “poo-poo” again, but he kept sniffing the blotter. My heart swelled with pride. I shall check back on the development of this budding perfumist with expensive taste!

Boots Fragrance

This unexpected curated perfumery (imagine a dedicated CVS perfumery in the United States and you might know what I mean) is a bit out of the way, located in the large shopping complex Broadgate Central, but it was sort of on the way to my other (avant-garde clothing focused) destinations in East London, and worth the exploration. It’s a clean, minimalist space featuring big luxury as well as smaller niche brands.

Here, I got to sniff most perfumes from the British brand Ostens for the first time, and bought a discovery set. The customer service was impeccable. They left me alone to smell everything to my heart’s content, and when I wanted to purchase, they asked if I liked one that I’d tried in particular. I chose Impression Cedarwood Heart (the rose wasn’t available to test), and they sprayed a small gift canvas bag with it before packaging everything beautifully in a nice paper bag tied with a bow.

It was also my first opportunity to smell Eris Parfums creations. I gravitated most to Delta of Venus, which reminded me of green fig—I didn’t quite get the (in)famous guava note, but also did not wear it on skin to experience the development over time.

We came across this rose garden in Golden Square in Soho, a gift to London from Bulgarian Londoners.

Marc-Antoine Barrois

I’d been wanting to see this inverted rabbit in the Piccadilly Arcade boutique ever since I first heard about it, and finally, there we were.

I was peeking in the window, a bit intimidated, when the friendly and very professional sales associate opened the door and invited us in. When asked what kinds of perfumes I preferred, at a temporary loss for words I replied that I liked Encelade better than Ganymede, which led to my being invited to revisit Aldebaran (…yes, I skipped a few steps). This was a better move than I would have imagined, because not only was it presented on a specially designed blotter in the shape of a tree, the milky tuberose spiced with paprika and warmed with tonka bean later scented our hotel room for several days just diffusing from the paper.

When I mentioned that I was more drawn to rose than white florals, the sales associate lit up and said she had a surprise for me. Opening a hidden cupboard in the wall, she explained that B87.135 was a Harrods exclusive, but being a flagship store, they had it as well. This opens heavily with saffron, but the polarizing note is accompanied by pink pepper, myrrh, rose, tobacco, and settles into a warm amber heat-dried in desert sand.

I also wanted to explore the clothing, and we were taken downstairs to be introduced to a line of white shirts, each with a different thoughtful design detail. The signature of Marc-Antoine Barrois the couturier is three mother-of-pearl buttons or cuff links signifying past, present, and future.

4160Tuesdays

A trip to London these years wouldn’t be complete for me without a visit to the 4160Tuesdays studio in Hammersmith, and this year was no exception. Perfumer Sarah McCartney graciously gave me a sneak preview sniff of most of the nearly-finished work-in-progress Blaze of Glory collection, and I found These Are the Good Days most intriguing and complex, but won’t spoil the surprise for those who have pre-ordered without this advantage. I will just say that several days later, the blotter was even more addictive with a woody and apricotty drydown (to my nose) that I feel could be a perfume in its own right.

My serendipitous new love on this visit was Graceland eau de parfum, which was created for the Elvis Evolution immersive experience that is no more. I find it to be the most comforting, enveloping soft white musk on a blotter, and anticipate my 50-mL bottle purchase acquisition to be a lovely bedtime fragrance as well as a dose of calm during the day.

On to the next chapter of adventure, of which more anon.