Vanilla has the power to woo in desserts—particularly age-old classics like crème brûlée or homemade ice cream—but the same doesn’t necessarily hold true with fragrances. As a perfume note, it’s often simply too sweet, too cloying, too reminiscent of, well, baked goods to be worn on the skin. Diptyque’s latest olfactory creation is out to [...]

The New York subway is a daily reality for me, and while there are a few in-transit grooming rituals that I excuse—lip glossing and moisturizing hands, for instance—there are a few others that I’m simply not OK with. Topping this list is any kind of nail clipping or eyebrow tweezing (no, no, no, and never), [...]

Having attended my fair share of fragrance launches, I’ve become quite adept at perfumery jargon. “I can really smell the top notes,” I’ve been known to say with a tester in front of my nose. And after spritzing my pulse points, I usually offer something like this: “Oooh, it really evolves on the skin, doesn’t [...]

Perfume solids are having a moment as of late, and now Diptyque is getting in on the action. Your favorite scented candle purveyor and mine just launched its first foray into fragrance salves, churning out two different spreadable offerings this month. L’Ombre dans l’Eau features a green bouquet reminiscent of an English garden with notes [...]

To a true fragrance buff, spritzing one’s wrist with eau de cologne and lighting a few scented candles doesn’t constitute really knowing a perfume. Instead, the truly olfactorally obsessed go beyond these amateur trivialities to get to the heart of a fragrance, often tracing its ingredients to their sources and always staying on top of [...]