smells like summer longing

 Image via L'Artisan Parfumeur

Two perfumes I'm itching to sniff:

•  L'Artisan Parfumeur's Séville à l’Aube: Inspired by "one of the most beautiful nights in [the] life," of popular perfume blogger and writer Denyse Beaulieu, the reviews of this fragrance, created by Bertrand Duchaufour, hit all my sweet spots: orange flower, beeswax, frankincense, jasmine, smoke, and benzoin. I am chomping at the bit for a whiff, veering precariously near full-bottle-sans-sniff territory.
• A Lab on Fire's What We Do in Paris is Secret: When Dan Rolleri, Katie Puckrik's perfume pen pal, calls a fragrance gorgeous, I sit up straight and order a sample.

I'm also wearing a bucketload of sunscreen.

What I'm wearing this week:

• Perennial humid-weather favorites Nuit de Tubereuse and Boyfriend. I understand the desire to wear sheer, citrusy perfumes in the summer, fragrances the color of celadon and the texture of cucumber seeds. I keep my robot rosewater in the fridge to satisfy this need for breeze. But my fragrance, when it's this muggy, needs to dig in and open up a bit wild. I can't be wearing something frothy or delicate to the swamp; it's got to be juicy and a bit animalic to hold its own on days and nights like these. 

 Dunham as Hannah Horvath on Girls. Summer smells and swells in this photo for sure. 

A stray smell from Lena Dunham's essay on first love in the latest issue of The New Yorker: 

"I don't think about it very often, but occasionally there's a smell--a whiff of cat, of stale air-conditioner, of a frozen, gluten-free pizza warming--that is so purely ours that I could resume being a woman who cries dolefully every fifteen minutes at some perceived slight."