Yosh Ginger Ciao & U4EAHH!, Landscape Lavender Hydrosol

Hello Smell-o!

I'm back from my honeymoon on the Barbary Coast. I've been very naughty, playing hooky from blogging, but my friend Ambrose has been blogging like a fiend in Matt Drudge drag over at bravo.tv (while physically stationed around 16th and Guerrero) so I'll consider her blogging for the both of us. But here at last is a little about the local flora and fauna.



Dave and I were in SF to check our our friends Julia and Caitlin's art show at Rare Device. You can see more pictures of the show at Apartment Therapy (where these lovely pics are from) and at Grace's blog design*sponge. San Francisco is full of these cute boutiques selling lovely stuff for the home, crafts, essential oils and art.

Another one of these cute shoppes is CandyStore on 16th street, where they carry the Yosh line. Like the crafts on display the scents are sweet but clever, with notes that seem to pop up unexpectedly. U4EAHH! has this very charming quality with cucumbers, pears and leaves poking their heads out throughout the day. Ginger Ciao is a delicious gourmande Thai Curry scent that I hadn't fully appreciated before. It uses black coconut instead of musk as the base, and combined with ginger and basil it has the same edible quality I adore in Frederic Malle's Carnal Flower. It's the distillation of a vacationer's vision of tropical sexy.


Musically I would say that the scents and crafts has the spirit of The Hidden Cameras - hand crafted refinement, glowing like a precious opal.



Landscape makes a line of hydrosols as well as essential oils and they are truly fantastic. I'd never encountered hydrosols before, but they are the aqueous/hydrophilic portion of the fractional distillation - the skim milk to the heavy cream essential oils if you will. To me it was like finally hearing the left channel of a favorite album I'd been listening to on my old stereo that only had a right speaker. The lavender hydrosol is soft and sweet with predominantly honey, hay and vanilla notes, and plays beautifully with the astringent qualities of the essential oil.


But what was the ultimate scent of the trip? Well, the Muir Woods win hands down. Walking through the forest, surrounded by redwoods and mosses is heart-stopping. One of the great side effects of using eucalyptus leaves to stop erosion is the pervasive mint breeze that floats through the whole bay area. I think I may finally have a better understanding of the California aesthetic of perfumery, where life always has this beautiful crystalline top note.

It's too hard to write about the sublime, so all I can say is that vacation was awesome. And 'Brose taught me a new song!

Yo, my dick attacks without warnin'.
Your dick's been blogging all mornin'.