Costes!

By Marina Does it happen to you once in a while that you stumble upon a perfume you smelled a while back, and go, what was I thinking? how come don't I own a vat of this gorgeousness?! This is what I cried out when I smelled Costes the other day. Why did I forget that it was so beautiful?! With all those spices, cloves, pepper and bay leaves on the smoldering yet trademark-Giacobetti-transparent woody background, it smells like the most stylish, most modern potpourri you'd ever own. The lavender note in the top makes it smell cool, in both meanings of the word. And yet...there is something ancient, age-less, mysteriously deep in its rose paired with incense...It is centering, it is contemplative, it is Ecclesiastic. It, for the third time this week, makes me quote Pablo Neruda: Ode To the Smell of Wood  Late, with the stars open in the cold I open the door. The sea galloped in the night. Like a hand from the dark house came the intense aroma of firewood in the pile. The aroma was visible as if the tree were alive. As if it still breathed. Visible like a garment. Visible like a broken branch. I walked into the house surrounded by that balsam-flavored darkenss. Outside the points in the sky sparkled like magnetic stones and the smell of the wood touched my heart like some fingers, like jasmine, like certain memories. It wasn't the sharp smell of the pines, no, it wasn't the break in the skin of the eucalyptus, neither was it the green perfumes of the grapevine stalk, but something more secret, because that fragrance only one only one time existed, and there, of all I have seen in the world in my own house at night, next to the winter sea, was waiting for me the smell of the deepest rose, the heart cut from the earth, something that invaded me like a wave breaking loose from time and it lost itself in me when I opened the door of the night. Available at Luckyscent, $80.00-$170.00.