Sweet Milk for the Soul. Perfume Review

Gale warning hail warning Sky sifts high drifts Finding bright blinding white Snowball snowfall Moonscape snowscape Frostbite dost bite Rococo swirls hot cocoa curls Icy glove spicy love Huddle in cuddle in Rock salt clocks halt. Blizzard by Barbara Reiher-Meyers This winter has been formidable. Blizzard after nor'easter after snowpocalypse put me in dire need of comfort. Nesting with the family in a snowed in house is the best kind, especially when one has a warm, cuddly little person to snuggle with...(Although that little one is partly what made this winter so challenging. A blizzard has nothing on a helpless baby in terms of causing havoc.)... A good book comes as a fairly close second on the scale of comfort (Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale suits my mood perfectly). As far as comfort perfumes go, goodness knows I have many. From armor-like green ones to serenity-now incense ones to good old-fashioned vanillas. But I wanted something else, something softer than soft, not too sweet but still delicious, something milky...I've done a post on milk in perfume before, and not much has changed since then in terms of the number of properly-milky fragrances to choose from. It's same old, same old and a little too sweet Matin Calin, Lann-Ael with just a tad too much apple and...well, that's it really. This year, Jo Malone added one more to this short list. Sweet Milk, the charming little number from the Tea Collection came just in time to satisfy my craving, and let me tell you, it hit the spot. As Goldilocks would say, it was Just Right. Very delicate, silky-smooth, soft as a feather, moderately sweet...I was apprehensive about anise, a note I am not comfortable with ordinarily, but it works well here. The piquancy of it blends right into the lactonic fluffiness, making the scent not as monotone as it could have been without it. Food-wise, I would liken Sweet Milk to a very, very thin rice pudding, spiced by a tiny pinch of anise. Mmmm.... Do not expect from this very straightforward blend it a new word in perfumery. It is a simple pleasure, and those are such exactly because they seem familiar. It is also not a powerhouse of a fragrance, but in this case I appreciate and prefer subtlety. A strong perfume of this nature, a seemingly one-note, gourmand kind, becomes bothersome after a while, too cloying, too samey. The sheer quality of Sweet Milk therefore was one of its pluses for me. Overall I think that to do a gourmand with a light hand is quite an achievement and, compared to, for example, Guerlain's Elixirs Charnel by the same perfumer, showcases the versatility of the talent of Christine Nagel, the author of Sweet Milk. So what comforted you this winter? Any particularly cuddly fragrances that you discovered? Read any good books lately? Do tell! Available along with other four scents in this limited edition collection, wherever Jo Malone is sold, $55 for 30ml...and for once I wish it came in a 200ml bottle. Image, my own.

Got Milk?

They say that familiarity breeds contempt. It also breeds content. There is nothing more comforting than a scent you remember from childhood; the momentary calm that comes over me when I smell the vanillic aroma of a sweet pie baking is a knee-jerk reaction. Immediately I am transported back to my mother’s kitchen, feeling safe and having not a care in the world. Even more comforting than vanilla? The smell of milk. I don’t want to drink it, I just want to smell it…There is something irresistibly primal in the coziness and attractiveness of the fragrance of slightly warmed up milk. Subconscious parallels to being breastfed, cuddled, coddled and absolutely safe? Maybe. Psychobiologists say that newborns are instinctively attracted to the odor of human milk and display much less distress during a painful procedure while smelling their mother’s lait. So maybe I am just a big baby. Various types of fragrances have a lactic undertone; I smell hints of milk in vanillas (Vanille Aoud comes to mind), chocolate perfumes (Musc Maori), heliotrope-heavy scents (Farnesiana) and even, sometimes, fig fragrances (Premier Figuier, my little one’s current favorite, smells of milk on her…or maybe it’s just her). Three perfumes come to mind as being properly milky. Comtoir Sud Pacifique’s Matin Calin is the sweetest and most unrestrained in its sweet cuddlesomeness. There is nothing more comforting that its saccharine, vanillic, milky aroma. In small doses. An overdose of Matin Calin is an equivalent of maternal love that goes overboard in its intensity, smothering not snuggling with its passionate affection. The gentler Lann-Ael by Lostmarch, which blends milk with cereals and apples, expresses its maternal instinct less gregariously. It is calm and softly spoken, it caresses delicately, and doesn’t overwhelm with the overabundance of adoration. The ideal mother, one might say. Less obviously milky and thus less maternal is the 21 by Costume National. Blending milk with saffron, cumin, pepper, woods and a whole bunch of stuff (21 notes, supposedly, in total), this is the most complex of the three. The kind of mother who’d ask you to call her by her first name. Still, the milky aspect is very obvious to me and for that I adore 21 and find it as comforting as it is hip. Got more milk…perfumes? Do share! Happy Mother’s Day! PS. You can create your own milk mustache on gotmilk.com.