Levanter...Soivohle Meerschaum

By Marina Do you like Coelho, in particular The Alchemist? I don't really know what I feel about the book. On the one hand it touches that spot in ones soul which still believes that we live in a mythical world... on the other, it seems full of cliches. I wasn't taken in by the concept of personal mission, nor do I believe that when you want something, the universe will conspire to give it to you...But for some reason, ever since reading the book, I was fascinated by levanter, a strong easterly wind from the Mediterranean. Fascinated by the word itself and by the idea of the wind blowing off of Africa...There is something in the sound of it that gives me the worst case of wanderlust. Ever since I started reading The Alchemist a couple of months ago, I was looking for a scent that would evoke levanter for me. "In the distant land the boy came from, they called it the levanter, because they believed that it brought with it the sands of the desert, and the screams of the Moorish wars." Would it smell of the heat of desert? How does a desert smell? How to translate the violence and the wildness and the wilderness in a fragrance? I feel I found an approximation of what I imagine the smell of levanter to be like in Liz Zorn's Meerschaum. It smells minerally, earthy, untamed, it makes me think of the sand so hot it would burn your feet, of dark stones, dark secrets, dark thoughts and dark passions, of fierce determination...and yet of letting go and wandering off in search of...well, maybe of a treasure or maybe just of something new. With notes of spices, moss, tobacco and leather, it seems it would be heavy, but it is not...all these aromas are there, but as if smelled from a distance, carried from a faraway land by that very wind. Maybe not everybody has a mission...or maybe for some of us the mission IS wandering, following the wind...Like another talented creator of mythical worlds wrote, "not all those who wander are lost". Available at lizzornperfumes.com, $80.00-$220.00.

Liz Zorn Sinti

By Tom If you had asked me a few years ago I would have sworn up and down that I didn't like perfume oils or "natural" perfumes. I would have protested on a stack of Bibles (or perhaps better for me, a stack of Cooks Illustrateds) that they aren't well made as regular scents and make snarky remarks about "natural". As in "snake venom's natural, honey" Of course, then I started running into people who actually make natural perfumes and perfume oils. Like Roxana Villa or Alexis Karl (whose scents I will be reviewing soon) or Vero Kern or Liz Zorn. I'll be ordering my words for dinner, thanks. Sauteed with butter and garlic and a side of crow.. Marina loved her Grand Canyon, which reads as right up my Stetson, but roses? Sinti is written of on her website as her most popular rose, and I can see why. It is rose, but not the rose in an English garden or the vase of cabbage roses in the library- not that there's anything wrong with that. Galbanum, clary sage and citrus at first mask, then buttress the gorgeous wild-smelling Moroccan rose. These roses smell as if no-one had ever tended them, that they've gone back to some earlier, hardier breed, more deeply scented. It stays wonderfully close to the skin in that "lean in and smell me baby" that makes one want to, well, lean in and smell. While gorgeous on a woman, the sagey-galbanum part of it keeps it butch enough that a guy could pull it off easily as well. I can't wait to sample some of the rest of these; I have to apologize to the person who sent me the sample, I can't remember who did! Liz Zorn's perfumes are available at her website